CDR

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 11 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 throughline is credibility infrastructure: German regulators pulling credits from Chinese projects, a long-running CDR newsletter reassessing its own cadence, and researchers modeling what a real CO2 transport backbone would need to look like. Deal flow continued in the background, but the more interesting signal is around what gets counted, trusted, and physically moved. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 18 Au. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.com/p/9-it-feels-like-theres-nobody-to TL;DR Anonymous submission from a CDR (carbon dioxide removal) operator saying their company is growing fine while peers struggle — a rare “we’re okay” voice in a bruised market. Submitter’s real complaint: large incumbents going silent instead of continuing to build publicly at smaller scale, making bad sentiment self-fulfilling. Fair critique. Format is anonymous, unverified single-submission — no numbers, no company names, no verifiable claims. Signal is emotional, not analytical. Ross Kenyon’s framing (“corporeal man at the feast for ghosts”) is evocative but this is a ~10-minute mood piece, not reporting. Skip if you want data. Worth 10 minutes if you want a read on morale inside CDR right now. Episode link. Ross Kenyon (of Reversing Climate Change) runs Climate Workers Anonymous, a Substack/podcast collecting unverified anonymous submissions from people working in climate. Episode #9 is one submission, read aloud with brief commentary: a CDR operator saying their company is doing well, feels awkward saying so, and wishes their struggling peers would keep building in public instead of going dark. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Mon, 17 Au. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/article-6-letters-of-authorisation-explained-with-lisa-demar TL;DR A letter of authorisation (LoA) under Article 6 is a legally enforceable contract against the sovereign — not paperwork. Useful reframing for developers who treat it as admin. Letters of approval, acknowledgement, and no objection are NOT LoAs. Only documents conforming to Article 6.2/6.4 minimum requirements count. Market confusion here is rampant. KOKO’s collapse in Kenya hinged on two ministries each denying authority to issue the LoA. Concrete cautionary tale for LoA counterparty diligence. Since Jan 2025, ~35 projects authorised, ~100 Mt max volume — versus EU 2040 demand potentially in the hundreds of millions. Supply gap is real. No retroactive revocation of units post-first-transfer (COP29 clarification), but entity-level revocation for fraud/breach is being reserved — and should be. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme host Lisa DeMarco (Resilient LLP) for a 30-minute legal deep dive on Article 6 letters of authorisation: what they actually bind, how they fail, and why the pipeline of authorised credits is running well behind projected demand. If you’re a durable CDR developer pursuing Article 6 sales — or a buyer trying to understand what you’re actually buying — this is one of the more precise explainers I’ve heard. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Ground Cover, originally published Wed, 19 Au. Listen: https://player.whooshkaa.com/shows/ground-cover TL;DR Biochar as durable carbon removal on-farm: 1 tonne biomass → ~1/3 biochar, 2/3 syngas. Useful mass-balance framing rarely stated so plainly. Guest cites ~2.7 tCO₂e sequestered per tonne of biochar (80% carbon). Standard figure, worth internalizing. Claim: biochar is currently the largest deployed carbon sequestration method. Defensible on delivered durable tonnes today, but worth checking against CDR.fyi. Own-farm data: soil carbon doubled in top 100mm over 10 years including through the 2019-20 drought. Anecdotal, single site, no control — treat as directional. Economics hinge on monetizing the syngas, not the char. This is the real CDR-relevant insight. Australian ag podcast Ground Cover (host Pippa Jones) interviews John Winter, a chemical engineer turned Glen Innes cattle producer and inventor behind SEATA Group’s pyrolysis pilot. The episode is pitched at farmers, but there’s enough on unit economics and durability accounting to make it worth 45 minutes for a CDR practitioner working on biomass pathways. ...

MRV: The Load-Bearing Wall of a CDR Credit Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) is the set of procedures a carbon dioxide removal (CDR) project uses to answer three questions: how much CO₂ was actually removed from the atmosphere, how durably it will stay out, and how confident anyone can be in those numbers. It is the load-bearing wall between a project and a saleable credit. If MRV is weak, the credit is uninsurable and, increasingly, unsellable to serious buyers; if MRV is over-engineered, it eats margin that early-stage projects don’t have. Every argument about CDR quality — additionality, durability, leakage, uncertainty deductions — is ultimately an MRV argument. ...

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. ...