Captains-Log

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. When the same week delivers two carbon-credit financing announcements that both claim to “unlock” the market, the question is whether they’re solving the same problem. They aren’t. One is trying to manufacture supply that doesn’t exist yet. The other is trying to smooth payment on supply that already does. That asymmetry tells you a lot about where CDR finance is going. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Earlier this month, Jim Mann sat on a panel at the UK House of Lords Climate Policy Forum and argued for where the UK should aim its climate effort. UNDO’s own account framed it plainly: their founder “joined a panel on where the UK should focus its efforts in climate” (@undocarbon on LinkedIn). That seat matters. CDR founders rarely get one. Mann took it not to talk lab results, but to make the policy case for enhanced rock weathering at national scale. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why this matters now Germany’s biggest listed companies are buying carbon credits at industrial scale, but if you try to figure out what they bought, most disclosures fall apart in your hands. A fresh audit by Senken and Sylvera of the DAX40 found that the majority of firms publish no project name, no vintage, no registry, and no pathway. That is the gap between a “net zero” press release and something an auditor can actually verify. And it lands just as Brussels is fighting over whether international credits belong inside the EU’s 2040 climate target at all. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story Microsoft just signed for 557,000 tonnes of biochar carbon removal from Varaha, an Indian developer working with smallholder farmers across Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra. The contract, reported this week, is the largest biochar offtake on record. It is larger than every North American and European biochar deal combined to date. And it lands in a country that has no national CDR registry, no compliance carbon market for removals, and no central-government framework for classifying or exporting durable removal credits. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Four European CDR modeling papers hit arXiv in a single week, and read together they expose an uncomfortable truth: the headline cost numbers for direct air capture and CO2 removal portfolios are governed less by chemistry or geology than by undisclosed assumptions about future carbon prices. Those assumptions diverge by an order of magnitude across teams, and almost none of the papers treat the divergence as the headline variable. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The pattern this week is sharp. Public balance sheets are moving into capture infrastructure faster than private capital is willing to underwrite it. BP wants out of UK clusters. Berlin and Brussels are writing the largest decarbonization cheques in European history. The counterparty stack for durable CDR is being rebuilt in real time. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Microsoft is reportedly negotiating away its 24/7 carbon-free electricity pledge while New York waters down its climate statute. The voluntary buyer model that built durable CDR’s offtake pipeline is showing strain in the same week. Here is what people watching the seams said. “Voluntary measures were never gonna get us where we need to be on emissions. But the fact that data center growth has made it corporate-ly/socially acceptable for a big tech company with ambitious climate goals to abandon them seems like a really bad sign.” ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. CarbonPlan published a finding on Tuesday that should reset how every buyer, registry, and supplier in enhanced rock weathering thinks about their MRV stack. In How surface roughness scaling can mislead enhanced weathering predictions, the team shows that a mistaken surface area equation used in some widely circulated ERW (enhanced rock weathering) models can inflate predicted carbon removal by up to two orders of magnitude. That is a 100x overstatement. It lands in the same week Mombak issued the first Isometric-verified ERW credits, Boeing expanded its ERW offtake position, and Brazil moved the pathway into sovereign compliance market discussions. The timing is brutal, and that is exactly why it matters. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three contracts crossed three different borders this past week, and together they tell a story the tonnage debate keeps missing. CDR’s binding constraint is no longer chemistry or capture cost. It is the legal pipework for moving and storing CO2 across boundaries that were never designed to be crossed. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers from the past week. Together they sketch a market where buyers are writing bigger checks than ever, while the people, electrons, and dollars-per-ton math underneath those checks remain stubbornly thin. The demand side is sprinting. The supply side is still putting on its shoes. 20,000 tonnes. Boeing’s new portfolio purchase through Supercritical, sourced from biochar and enhanced rock weathering, is among the largest aviation-linked durable CDR offtakes inked for 2026. The signal matters as much as the volume: ERW (enhanced rock weathering, where crushed silicate rock pulls CO2 out of the air as it weathers) is now considered procurement-grade alongside biochar. That is a credibility milestone we flagged when Mombak generated the first Isometric-verified ERW credits. ...