Priority

Amazon’s vetted carbon credit service crossed the Atlantic this week, opening to UK companies with net-zero targets and Scope 1, 2, and 3 reporting in place. The interesting part is not the geography. It is what the portfolio reveals about how the world’s largest corporate buyer thinks about quality, and what it quietly signals about the rest of the voluntary market. The skeptic’s read on “rigorously vetted” Amazon’s pitch leans hard on a single claim: “only a small fraction of credits in the voluntary carbon market meet Amazon’s quality standards.” That is a remarkable statement from a company that is also selling those credits to other buyers. It is both a marketing line and an indictment of the market Amazon is now intermediating in. The portfolio on offer in the UK is worth scrutinising on its own terms. It includes five categories: jurisdictional REDD+ in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana (reducing tropical deforestation at the government-policy level rather than project-by-project), native reforestation, DAC, superpollutant abatement (old refrigerant destruction and rice methane), and lower-carbon fuel insets including renewable diesel for shipping. Notice what is missing. No enhanced rock weathering. No biochar. No ocean alkalinity enhancement. No BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage). No marine CDR of any kind. Amazon’s “high quality” filter, as expressed in this UK launch, points toward avoided deforestation, trees, one engineered removal pathway (DAC), and supply-chain insets. That is a narrower bet than what Frontier Climate, Microsoft, or Google have signalled through their own purchasing. ...

Most social-media advice was written for general B2B marketers. I wanted to know whether any of it actually held up in carbon removal, so last week I pulled together a small study. I scraped the engagement numbers on roughly 900 posts: every recent post from the 25 most-watched carbon-removal company pages on LinkedIn, plus the last few months from the highest-engagement climate voices on X and Bluesky. The list included Climeworks, Heirloom Carbon, Frontier Climate, Mati Carbon, Isometric, Cascade Climate, CDR.fyi, and 18 others on the company side, plus Stefan Rahmstorf, Hannah Ritchie, Johan Rockström, Damian Carrington, Simon Evans, Zeke Hausfather and the rest of the visible climate-science cohort on the personal-account side. ...

Cascade Climate just launched the Bedrock Initiative, a coordinated research program designed to cut measurement costs for enhanced rock weathering (ERW) from today’s roughly $200 per ton and generate the standardized field data the method needs to enter compliance carbon markets. The program is backed by Frontier, Google, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Grantham Foundation, King Philanthropies, the Kissick Family Foundation, and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Why this matters ERW, which involves spreading crushed silicate rock on farmland so it reacts with CO2 and locks carbon away as bicarbonate, is one of the cheaper durable carbon removal pathways on paper. But the field has a credibility problem. Measurement, reporting, and verification (measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV), the process of proving how much carbon was actually removed) costs are high, and most published field data comes from one-off trials that are hard to compare. Without standardized evidence across many soils and climates, ERW cannot enter compliance markets or count toward national climate commitments. Bedrock is an attempt to fix that with a single coordinated push rather than a patchwork of competing supplier studies. ...

Microsoft has paused all new carbon removal credit purchases, with no public timeline for resumption. According to a Substack analysis by MAATTR, the company that represented roughly 90% of all carbon removal credit buying globally, and contracted more than 72 million tonnes over three years, told its CDR partners about the pause two weeks before the post was written. The official line from a spokesperson was the corporate non-answer: “We continually review and assess our carbon removal portfolio along with market conditions.” ...