Curation

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 13 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 third State of CDR report landed alongside a fresh batch of buyer signals this week, and the contrast is doing most of the analytical work: institutional demand is finally arriving in Asia and from public procurement, while the technology side keeps getting reminded it’s behind schedule. Add a quietly telling headcount snapshot of the entire pure-play industry and a CO2 shipping deal that suggests Northern Lights’ logistics tail is real, and the week reads less like a single story and more like a maturity check across the value chain. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 21 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 signal sits at the intersection of policy retrenchment and methodological maturation: U.S. disclosure rules are being unwound just as Europe and Asia tighten market plumbing, and the science community is sharpening the question of what “permanent” actually buys you. Two large buyer deals also landed, both shaped less by climate ambition than by procurement strategy and portfolio engineering. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 15 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 signal isn’t a single megadeal — it’s the slow consolidation of plumbing. Microsoft re-entered the buyer narrative just as Europe’s Buyers’ Club inched toward operational status and Singapore-plus-World-Bank stood up new Article 6 infrastructure. Meanwhile, a Nature paper put a serious crack in the integrity story underpinning US forest offsets, a reminder that the integrity layer is still load-bearing for everything being built on top. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 20 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 connective tissue is infrastructure quietly being rebuilt around CDR — Frontier and Cascade Climate setting de facto methodology standards, Canada and the EU bolting compliance scaffolding into place, and the AI-data-center narrative hardening from talking point into actual capital allocation logic. Underneath that, a bankruptcy and a bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) warning paper offer useful counterweights to the build-out story. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 18 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: capital and policy scaffolding for CDR is wobbling at the same time the workforce and demand-side data show how thin the actual production base is. BP is exiting UK CCS, Microsoft is reportedly pulling back, EU banks want carbon credit use curtailed — and meanwhile only ~9,500 people work at pure-play CDR firms globally. The picks below trace where the supports are buckling and where buyers and regulators are still moving. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 48 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 most useful signal came from a five-year scorecard on whether durable CDR has lived up to its 2021 promises — and the answer, predictably, is “uneven.” Around it, mineralization quietly emerged as the pathway with the most institutional momentum (Frontier, Carbon Direct, Arca, a new Quebec hub), while buyer-side activity continued to broaden beyond DAC into biochar and enhanced rock weathering (ERW) portfolios. Meanwhile Europe is sending mixed signals on carbon markets: Germany retiring allowances, IEEFA pushing back on power-sector CCS, and the EU inching toward letting international removals back in. ...