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 CDR sector is panicking about losing credit buyers. Meanwhile, the most resilient carbon removal companies don’t need them, because they’re selling concrete, pavement, and insulation. This is the split that matters right now. While the voluntary carbon market wobbles and major buyers hit pause, a parallel track of CDR is quietly embedding itself into physical products that people already purchase for reasons that have nothing to do with climate guilt. It is happening across biochar, mineralization, and CO₂ utilization at the same time. And it changes the economics of carbon removal in ways the credit-obsessed conversation is missing. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR sector is panicking about losing its biggest patron. But the infrastructure to make that patron optional is being built right now, in parallel, and mostly being ignored. Microsoft has paused new carbon removal purchases. The reaction across the CDR community has been swift and anxious. As James Temple put it: “MSFT is the carbon removal market, so if this is anything more than a brief pause, it’s a v. big deal & v. bad news for an already shaky sector.” He’s right. Microsoft’s outsized role as buyer, signal-sender, and de facto market-maker means this pause sends shockwaves far beyond Redmond. Dirk Paessler noted that the CDR community immediately treated the news as an industry-wide crisis. Even Biochar Today flagged the Microsoft story, which is telling. Biochar has arguably the strongest standalone economics of any CDR pathway. If even that community feels the need to sound the alarm over a single corporate buyer stepping back, it reveals just how deeply the voluntary patronage model has colonized CDR’s collective psychology. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR industry doesn’t have a demand problem. It has a customer concentration problem. And Microsoft just made that painfully clear. Robinson Meyer broke the news this week: Microsoft Is Pausing Carbon Removal Purchases, with the tech giant accounting for more than 90% of industry volume last year. Read that number again. More than ninety percent. When one buyer represents that much of your total market, you don’t have a market. You have a dependency. James Temple put it plainly: “MSFT is the carbon removal market, so if this is anything more than a brief pause, it’s a v. big deal & v. bad news for an already shaky sector.” - James Temple (@jtemple.bsky.social) ...