Podcast-Take

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 01 Se. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/what-is-really-happening-to-dac-hubs-with-grant-faber TL;DR Only ~2.5% of the original $3.5B DAC Hubs budget has been disbursed; contract negotiation ate most of the Biden term before terminations froze things. $1B of hub funding was reprogrammed by Congress to nuclear; ~$1.3B sits unobligated but not rescinded — dormant, not dead. DOE admitted in court that project terminations were chosen on political basis; cancellations skewed toward blue-headquartered primes even when projects sat in red states. Both TA3 megahubs (Project Cypress, South Texas) survived the retention list — Grant credits BIL/IRA’s deliberate red-district geography strategy. Grant’s speculative but useful scenario: unspent CDR appropriations pile up, and 2029 brings a sudden multi-billion-dollar “we’re back” moment. Take with salt. Grant Faber — former DAC Hubs program manager at DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, now Head of Standards at Absolute Climate — joins Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart on The CDR Policy Scoop to walk through his recent Substack article mapping the actual state of the US DAC Hubs program. This is the most granular public accounting of what survived, what got killed, and what’s still sitting in an account somewhere. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 25 Au. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.com/p/10-hype-and-a-gold-rush-followed TL;DR Anonymous submission argues carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is living out a textbook boom-bust: 2022-2024 gold rush, now contraction. Not novel, but fairly stated. Frames CDR as commodity-like and therefore structurally cyclical, with hoped-for upward trendline. Reasonable analogy, understates policy-driven demand fragility. Prescription: counter-cyclical discipline at the individual/company level — conservative in booms, patient in busts. Sensible but generic. Kenyon’s own gloss: blaming “macro conditions” explains everything and nothing; entrepreneurs are supposed to trim sails. Useful pushback. Bonus tangent: Stripe’s Collisons reportedly calling “singularity” internally — Kenyon wonders what that means for CDR buyers. Speculative but worth noting. Ross Kenyon’s Climate Workers Anonymous #10 runs a single anonymous submission on the CDR business cycle: how a 2022-2024 hype phase drove overexpansion, and how the current contraction is the predictable other side of that same coin. Kenyon reads the submission, then layers on his own commentary about founders using “macro conditions” as a catch-all excuse and about what a nearer-than-expected AI capability jump might mean for CDR buyer behavior. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Wed, 26 Au. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/canadas-next-industrial-play-what TL;DR Miniseries opener framing carbon removal as a layer on Canada’s $1T industrial buildout ahead of Carney’s September investment summit — useful political framing. Jim Mann (UNDO) claims enhanced rock weathering on farmland accelerates natural weathering “50 to 100,000 times” — the upper bound feels rhetorical, but the mechanism is standard. UNDO’s model: give crushed silicate to farmers free, cover transport and spreading, keep all carbon revenue. Farmer-adoption pragmatism, not revenue-sharing idealism. Mann’s claim: Canada’s 100–300 Mt/yr residual removal need “could all be done with enhanced rock weathering.” Overstated, but the feedstock-plus-farmland argument is real. CFA’s Brody Berrigan on why adoption stalls: farmers are business owners first, extension services have been gutted since the ’90s, neighbor-to-neighbor is the real diffusion channel. Na’im Merchant kicks off a Carbon Curve miniseries on embedding durable carbon dioxide removal into Canadian industrial projects, timed to Prime Minister Carney’s September 14-15 investment summit. Episode here. Episode one pairs UNDO founder Jim Mann on enhanced rock weathering economics with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture’s Brody Berrigan on what it actually takes to get Prairie farmers to say yes. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Sun, 23 Au. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/what-does-cdr-actually-cost-in-europe-with-hansjorg-lerchenm TL;DR Commission’s ETS review cost forecasts for durable CDR trace to just four sources (McKinsey 2023, Ramboll Ecologic 2025, NEGEM 2023, CDR.fyi 2023) — thinner foundation than the policy weight implies. Bio-CCS low-cost anchor of €172/t leans on €165/t of assumed energy revenue and calibration against an unverifiable 2022 Drax conference remark. Overstated confidence. direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) range comes entirely from a black-box McKinsey report; no inspectable assumptions on energy, T&S, or learning rate. Useful flag. Biochar low bound (€37–66/t) reflects Global South artisanal systems; Hansjörg says European scalable price is €175–200/t. First-time-cited industry number worth having. Practical asks: modelers should use current CDR.fyi data, be transparent about assumptions, and suppliers should submit transaction data. Signal-dense. Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart host Eadbhard Pernot (Carbon Management Europe) and Hansjörg Lerchenmüller (Biochar Europe) to stress-test the cost assumptions behind the European Commission’s July 2026 ETS review impact assessment. The episode walks through bio-CCS, DACCS, and biochar carbon removal cost curves line by line — where the numbers actually come from, and where they fall apart. ...

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. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Fri, 07 Au. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/411-Why-I-love-Poppy-Russell-of-Counteract-VCs-CDR-analysis-e3n3erb TL;DR Counteract’s Poppy Russell walks through her fund’s thesis: diversify by pathway, geography, business model — favor “catalytic” IP and new-pathway enablers. Bearish on ocean CDR: back-of-envelope claim that partnering with all existing water-moving infrastructure caps direct ocean capture at ~7–10 Mt/yr. Worth pressure-testing. Bullish on industrial integration — Venterra (carbonated cement from gypsum + potassium sulfate fertilizer co-product) is her poster child. Cautious on EU Emissions Trading Scheme absorbing the 250 Mt removals allocation given the price gap and recent decarbonization-pace delays. Realistic. Notes a sharp drop-off in pre-seed CDR company formation; new founders increasingly avoid CDR-first positioning. Ross Kenyon interviews Poppy Russell, Research Manager at Counteract, the London-based CDR-focused venture fund. The episode is a wide tour of her investment lens — pathway diversification, “catalytic” IP, industrial tie-ins — with candid bullish/bearish takes on ocean CDR, enhanced weathering, EU compliance demand, and where pre-seed founders are (and aren’t) going. Listen to the episode here. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Sun, 09 Au. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/is-enhanced-rock-weathering-ready-for-scale-with-dirk-paessl TL;DR Solid-phase and aqueous-phase MRV on the same plot can disagree by orders of magnitude — tons vs kilos of CDR. Not a rounding error. Carbon Drawdown Initiative’s 300-litre buckets have shown zero enhanced-weathering signal after 1,400 days on Furt soil. Publishing the null result matters. ~20,000 credits certified across three geographies via three different solid-phase methods, while Verra declines to write a methodology. That gap is the story. Carbon Plan’s Lithos critique implies ~8.3 tCO₂/ha/yr vs a new Suhrhoff et al. median of ~0.8. 10× is not a discount factor, it’s a different claim. Dirk won’t name a year for ETS-readiness. Mel won’t either. Take that seriously. Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart host Dirk Paessler (Carbon Drawdown Initiative) and geochemist Mel Murphy for a deep-dive on whether enhanced rock weathering (ERW) measurement is anywhere near the rigour policy frameworks like the EU Emissions Trading System or the Carbon Removal Certification Framework will demand. The episode runs long by the show’s standards and earns it. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 04 Au. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.com/p/7-i-should-have-used-my-retirement TL;DR Anonymous submissions podcast; three short letters from CDR workers read aloud. Total runtime under 5 minutes. Submission 1: venture capital’s 10-year return horizon doesn’t fit hard-tech durable carbon dioxide removal timelines. Familiar critique, stated cleanly. Submission 2: pushback on the “novel CDR steals from proven climate tech” framing — argues voluntary markets are doing exactly what they’re supposed to. Submission 3: a supplier who cleared every methodology hurdle since 2021 and can’t sell credits on the spot market. Bitter, and worth hearing. Not analysis, not reporting — it’s a vibes check on practitioner morale in mid-2026. Useful as a temperature reading, not as data. Ross Kenyon’s Climate Workers Anonymous is a curated read-aloud of anonymous, unverified submissions from people working in climate. Episode 7 pulls three that all land on the same nerve: the mismatch between what CDR practitioners were told the market would do and what it’s actually doing in 2026. Under five minutes, no guest, no debate — just the letters. ...