Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 21 candidate stories considered, 6-9 picked. Each link carries our 1-2 sentence take so you don’t have to click everything to know what’s there.
The week’s signal sits at the intersection of policy retrenchment and methodological maturation: U.S. disclosure rules are being unwound just as Europe and Asia tighten market plumbing, and the science community is sharpening the question of what “permanent” actually buys you. Two large buyer deals also landed, both shaped less by climate ambition than by procurement strategy and portfolio engineering.
Buyer side moves
- OneStopESG — Stockholm Becomes World’s Fifth Largest Buyer of Permanent Carbon Removals with 750,000 Tonne Deal — A municipality, not a corporate, taking the #5 permanent-removal buyer slot via 50ktpa from Stockholm Exergi’s bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) facility is a reminder that public procurement (Microsoft aside) is doing more heavy lifting in this market than the corporate net-zero narrative suggests.
- OneStopESG — Lufthansa Group Expands Climate Portfolio to 14 Projects with 20% Share of Permanent CO2 Removal — Notable mainly as a benchmark: 20% durable share in an aviation portfolio is above where most corporates sit but well below the ~80% by 2030 trajectory implied by SBTi’s draft guidance, so expect this number to keep climbing under disclosure pressure.
Policy and market design
- Carbon Herald — SEC Moves To Eliminate Biden-Era Climate Disclosure Requirements — The rule was already in legal limbo, but formal withdrawal pushes U.S. CDR buyers further into a regime where CSRD and California SB 253 set the de facto floor — meaning disclosure pressure on CDR procurement migrates jurisdictions rather than disappears.
- CarbonMeld — Why the EU Carbon Rally May Be About Market Design, Not Just Higher Prices — Useful read for anyone modelling EU compliance-market pull for removals: the argument is that MSR tightening and UK-EU linkage are doing the structural work, which would imply the price floor is stickier than recent volatility suggests.
- Carbon Gap — Poland has significant carbon removal potential but urgently needs policy and infrastructure to match — Poland matters because it’s the EU’s largest unresolved coal-region CDR question; the report quantifies BECCS and mineralization potential against an almost complete absence of CO₂ transport infrastructure east of Germany.
Science sharpening the definitions
- Nature — Temporary carbon dioxide removal to offset short-lived climate forcers — The paper makes the case that temporary CDR (the ~2 GtCO₂/yr of land-based removal we already do) should be matched against short-lived forcers like methane rather than CO₂ — a framing that, if it lands in policy, would meaningfully redraw the “durable vs. nature-based” boundary war.
- Dr Tom Harris (Substack) — The Carbon Dioxide Removal implications of the new CMIP7 future emission scenarios — First serious read of what the IPCC’s new scenario set means for CDR volumes; worth the time if you’ve been quoting SSP-era numbers in investor decks that are now a modelling generation out of date.
- Latitude Media — The direct air capture debate is missing the point — Reframes the DAC-vs-abatement argument as a hazardous-waste economics problem rather than a tech bake-off; a cleaner rhetorical frame than most DAC defenders are currently using.
The dominant signal: the market is being shaped more by rulebooks (EU ETS design, ASEAN linkage, SEC withdrawal) than by new tonnes. Conspicuously absent this week — no major DAC capacity announcements, no new offtake from the hyperscalers, and remarkably little on measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) despite three separate methodology fights ongoing in the background.