Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 14 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 through-line this week is a demand-side wobble meeting a conceptual reckoning: Microsoft’s pullback lands at the same time researchers and commentators are picking apart how removals should count against emissions in the first place. Meanwhile, the supply side keeps announcing pilots and offtakes as if nothing had changed.
Buyer signals
- Seattle Times: Microsoft cuts purchases of carbon removals by 80% amid AI push. The largest single buyer in the voluntary CDR market is on track for its first annual retreat since 2020, and the stated reason (AI-driven load growth) suggests the pullback is structural rather than a procurement timing artifact.
- Carbon Herald: Indian Company Ground Up Secures A Pre-Purchase Agreement With remove. Notable less for the size than the geography: an Indian biochar supplier routed through an accelerator vehicle is a data point on how non-US/EU CDR supply is finding buyers.
Accounting and definitions
- Marginal Carbon: Retire the concept of residual emissions. The argument: “residual emissions” is a rhetorical fudge that lets planners defer the binary question of whether removals are a legitimate climate solution or a lock-in risk.
- Research Square: Accounting for non-equivalence of carbon emissions and removals in meeting national net zero emissions targets in the United Kingdom. Broad, Hofbauer, Butnar and co-authors examine how the non-equivalence between a tonne emitted and a tonne removed should be reflected in UK net-zero accounting.
- Nature Climate Change: Empirical insights into residual emissions in urban net-zero targets. Across the municipal strategies surveyed, residual emissions total 61.4 MtCO2e (median 0.8 tCO2e per capita), with cities planning to cover them via land-based removals, credits (40%), and permanent removals (32%).
- Carbon Based Commentary: The rise of environmental attribute certificates. A useful primer on why EACs are being pulled off the shelf again as the instrument of choice for low-carbon process deployment, adjacent territory to how removal claims get unbundled and traded.
Supply-side moves
- Carbon Herald: Holcim UAE And 44.01 Launch Cement Carbon Capture & Mineralization Pilot. Billed as the UAE’s first continuous, live-condition capture-plus-mineralization project at a cement plant, pairing a hard-to-abate emitter with peridotite-based storage in one site.
- Carbon Herald: Summit Carbon Solutions Hit With $6.6M Supplier Lawsuit Amid Pipeline Delays. Not CDR, but the Midwest CCS pipeline saga is the closest analogue for how transport-and-storage build-out actually goes when permitting slips, and unpaid-supplier litigation is an early distress signal.
Research
- CDRXIV: Significant yield benefits from basalt soil amendments in the Southeastern US. Milliken et al. report measurable crop yield gains from basalt applications in Southeastern US fields, adding an agronomic co-benefit datapoint to the enhanced weathering case.
The dominant signal is that the biggest voluntary buyer is scaling back at the same moment several independent authors are questioning the accounting logic that underwrites voluntary demand. Conspicuously absent: any major new DAC offtake or delivery milestone to counterweight the Microsoft news.