Captains-Log

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story in one paragraph A new paper in Communications Sustainability, part of the Nature portfolio, proposes throwing out the way the carbon market sorts its products. Instead of labeling credits as avoidance, reduction, or removal, the authors argue projects should be classified by the physical carbon-cycle mechanism they act on: preventing a flux of CO2, protecting an existing carbon pool, or enlarging a pool (Mechanism-based framework enables consistent assessment of carbon offsetting projects). That sounds like taxonomy housekeeping. It is not. It is a rubric that would let corporate buyers judge every credit by what it physically does to the carbon cycle, something the old three-bucket system has never delivered. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers this week trace the same shape: CDR operators are retreating from headline tonnage promises and digging into narrow positions they can actually defend. The capital is going to certification rails, embedded products, and the power layer underneath removal. The gigatonne talk is getting quieter, and the invoices are getting more specific. ...

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. On 17 July, the European Commission publishes its review of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), Europe’s carbon market. The publication was just delayed by two days, a small signal of how contested the drafting still is. This single document will determine whether Europe’s new carbon removal certification framework becomes a source of real, bankable demand for CDR, or remains a labeling scheme with no buyer of last resort. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Mat Meredith went on the Raw Green podcast this week and framed his whole industry’s problem in five words. His team’s promo put it plainly: he sat down “for a wide-ranging conversation on enhanced rock weathering (ERW) and what it actually takes to prove carbon removal works” (@undocarbon on LinkedIn). Not what it takes to deploy. Not what it takes to fund. What it takes to prove. That word choice is the whole strategy, and the strategy has a postal code: Kingston, Ontario. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1,200 tonnes. That is the total volume of greenhouse gas allowances that cleared on the debut trading day of Vietnam’s first national carbon exchange, which opened Monday. A single mid-sized coal unit emits that much in under two hours. The number to hold it against is $8.5 billion. That is what Abatable’s new report estimates as Southeast Asia’s CORSIA credit opportunity through 2035. CORSIA is the international aviation sector’s carbon offsetting scheme, and Abatable models Vietnam as a headline supplier within it. Run the math and day-one exchange volume works out to roughly 0.0004% of the annual tonnage that thesis requires. The gap between the marketed opportunity and the venue meant to clear it is not a rounding error. It is the whole story. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three carbon capture and storage (CCS) announcements landed this week, and together they answer a question the industry has been dodging. The variable that decides whether a project survives is no longer capture cost or reservoir geology. It’s who sits on the cap table. Projects with a sovereign or a First Nation holding equity moved forward. Projects built on private balance sheets alone died. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The policy at one glance. Alberta’s TIER system, short for Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction, is the province’s carbon pricing regime for large industrial emitters. According to reporting from Carbon Herald, a new federal-Alberta agreement weakens the effective TIER price trajectory and loosens compliance obligations, and the change lands squarely on a $400 million Strathcona carbon capture facility whose investment case assumed a rising compliance price. The rules bind Alberta’s industrial emitters. They bite the moment a project’s revenue model, built on yesterday’s price curve, meets today’s revision. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The demand-side pessimists are fighting the last war on carbon removal The consensus. Ask a well-informed climate person why CDR isn’t scaling and you’ll get some version of what Dan Miller (@danmiller999 on Bluesky) posted this week: “CDR does exist but isn’t scaling because no one wants to pay for it. ‘We’ll make future generations pay for it.’ is our attitude so we can party harder now.” David Ho (@davidho on Bluesky) sharpens the same knife when he calls CDR “nonexistent.” This is not a fringe view. It is the dominant frame in academic climate circles heading into 2026: buyers won’t pay, tonnes don’t arrive, the whole edifice is vibes. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast Within the next 180 days, at least one major CDR registry will either publish a methodology amendment addressing humidity-swing and water-managed DAC sorbents, or issue an explicit deferral notice acknowledging the gap. The forcing function is a new arXiv preprint, Vacuum Moisture Swing Direct Air Capture: A Low-Thermal, Water-Managed Pathway, which reframes the binding constraint of air capture from regeneration heat to water activity. Current DAC accounting frameworks, including Isometric DAC Protocol v1.3, were engineered around thermal or electrical regeneration energy. They do not separately quantify or audit water as a parasitic load or as a lifecycle input. That mismatch is now visible, and the first non-thermal sorbent project seeking issuance will surface it. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique, in the critic’s own words “Smart Art,” wrote veteran energy journalist Peter Fairley (@peter.fairley.ca on Bluesky) this week, flagging ProPublica and Drilled’s False Promises investigation. The package’s operator-level charge is sharp: real capture installations chronically miss their design capture rates, and the industry papers over the gap with nameplate figures in press releases. ...