Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 17 Se. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/Which-story-is-carbon-dioxide-removal-actually-in-w-Rudy-Krehbiel-of-EcoEngineers-e3ovfja

TL;DR

  • Krehbiel argues CDR is still at the innovator stage, not in a hype-cycle trough — useful reframing if you buy his diffusion-curve lens.
  • Numbers cited: <50Mt contracted, ~2Mt delivered, Microsoft ~78% of disclosed volume, median non-Microsoft biochar purchase <100t. Consistent with public CDR.fyi data.
  • Core argument: CDR is a public good with diffuse, delayed, non-excludable benefits — venture-scale expectations may be the wrong operating system for building it. Worth chewing on.
  • Three-layer de-risking frame (financial / buyer / societal) is the most portable takeaway for operators.
  • Long detour into Whig-theory-of-history, AfD, and Charlie Kaufman films — signal-to-ramble ratio is not great. Skim-friendly.

Ross Kenyon hosts EcoEngineers’ Rudy Krehbiel for a meandering two-hour conversation about which narratives the CDR industry is unconsciously operating inside — diffusion curves, Moore’s Law analogies, compliance-market inevitability — and which ones will not survive contact with 2026 politics. Episode link. It is more meta than technical, but Krehbiel earns his airtime.

The load-bearing claim: we keep comparing CDR adoption to solar, EVs, and batteries, and the analogy breaks the moment you apply the counterfactual. “If climate change didn’t exist, would anybody still buy this stuff?” Solar, EVs, batteries — yes. A tonne of removed CO₂ — no. That reframes CDR as a public good with all the standard funding pathologies: diffuse benefits, intergenerational payoff, non-excludability. Krehbiel’s follow-through is that venture-scale expectations imported from cleantech may be actively distorting what founders optimize for — cost curves, tonnes contracted, deployment capacity — at the expense of the slower work of building societal legitimacy. His summary: “we might be optimizing for some of this stuff a bit prematurely in a way that causes us to maybe skip over some of the necessary work.” Whether you agree depends on how much you trust the market to eventually route around the public-goods problem via compliance regimes.

The second useful frame is the three risk layers a CDR founder actually faces: financial de-risking (to raise), buyer de-risking (to sell to a Fortune 100 legal team), and societal de-risking (to keep the license to operate at gigatonne scale). These are related but not the same, and most operators only have bandwidth for the first two. His concern — that visible technical progress (better MRV, better methodologies, more verification) reads to outsiders as chaotic disagreement and erodes rather than builds confidence — is genuinely uncomfortable, and worth sitting with. He wants convergence, not manufactured consensus.

Where it gets shakier: Kenyon spends a long stretch worrying that European compliance demand — the implicit exit for a lot of current CDR business plans — evaporates if AfD and National Rally-style parties keep winning. That is a real risk and under-discussed in CDR circles, but the conversation stays at the level of vibes rather than pulling in, say, what a rollback of German procurement would actually mean for buyers already committed through Frontier or the Microsoft portfolio. The CDR.fyi numbers Krehbiel cites — 78% Microsoft concentration, <2Mt delivered — are exactly the concentration risk the compliance-market thesis was supposed to solve.

Useful for: strategy and policy people at CDR suppliers, buyers, or registries who want a well-articulated version of the “we are building this on the wrong operating system” argument. Skip if you want technical depth on pathways or MRV — this is a narrative-level