Synthesis

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1,000×. That is the gap between durable carbon removal we are actually delivering today and what the median IPCC 2°C scenario quietly assumes we will be removing each year by 2050. The prior reference point most CDR boosters cite is purchases, not deliveries. CDR.fyi’s Q1 2026 market update puts cumulative durable purchases near 10 Mt and calls Q1 the largest quarter on record. That framing flatters the sector. Switch the denominator to tonnes physically delivered and verified, and the annual run rate sits under 1 Mt/yr. IPCC scenarios consistent with 2°C require 5 to 10 GtCO₂/yr by 2050. One million versus five to ten billion. Three orders of magnitude on the delivery line, four on the cumulative line. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three biochar papers landed this week that, read together, expose a fork in the road the credit market is pretending isn’t there. Pyrolysis temperature, not feedstock or region, is becoming the variable that decides what biochar actually is: a durability-first carbon sink, or a functional soil and industrial input. You cannot have both at full strength, and current credit methodologies price them as if you can. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast Within 90 days, at least three more durable-CDR suppliers will announce “industry-integrated” deployments. By that I mean CDR equipment bolted onto an existing industrial host site - wastewater plant, data center, refinery, cement kiln, fermentation tank - rather than a greenfield capture plant on bare ground. The reason is operational: the host already has permits, power, a CO2-bearing stream or a heat sink, and often a balance sheet willing to share capital costs. That cuts the time from term sheet to delivered tonne, which is what buyers and public funders now score on. The Q1 2026 Durable CDR Market Update makes the metric shift explicit: deliveries, not announcements. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique, plainly stated “CDR governance gaps in treaty frameworks let credit substitution happen without consent or liability.” That is the spine of a recent legal analysis in CDR Approaches: Friends or Foes? on Völkerrechtsblog. Translated out of treaty language: today’s rules let a buyer in one jurisdiction discharge a climate obligation by paying for a ton stored in another, and the people who host the storage often had no seat at the table. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The consensus: Canada is the new CDR frontrunner Carbon Removal Canada spent the week telling anyone who would listen that the country is home to the world’s first surficial mineralization hub, with the potential to “catalyze billions in economic activity.” The industry body, federal agencies, and a chorus of developers working ultramafic mine tailings in British Columbia and Quebec all share the same line: Canadian geology plus Canadian permitting plus Canadian grids equals global CDR leadership. Frontier buyers nod along. So do the trade press. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. When the same week delivers two carbon-credit financing announcements that both claim to “unlock” the market, the question is whether they’re solving the same problem. They aren’t. One is trying to manufacture supply that doesn’t exist yet. The other is trying to smooth payment on supply that already does. That asymmetry tells you a lot about where CDR finance is going. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Earlier this month, Jim Mann sat on a panel at the UK House of Lords Climate Policy Forum and argued for where the UK should aim its climate effort. UNDO’s own account framed it plainly: their founder “joined a panel on where the UK should focus its efforts in climate” (@undocarbon on LinkedIn). That seat matters. CDR founders rarely get one. Mann took it not to talk lab results, but to make the policy case for enhanced rock weathering at national scale. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why this matters now Germany’s biggest listed companies are buying carbon credits at industrial scale, but if you try to figure out what they bought, most disclosures fall apart in your hands. A fresh audit by Senken and Sylvera of the DAX40 found that the majority of firms publish no project name, no vintage, no registry, and no pathway. That is the gap between a “net zero” press release and something an auditor can actually verify. And it lands just as Brussels is fighting over whether international credits belong inside the EU’s 2040 climate target at all. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story Microsoft just signed for 557,000 tonnes of biochar carbon removal from Varaha, an Indian developer working with smallholder farmers across Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra. The contract, reported this week, is the largest biochar offtake on record. It is larger than every North American and European biochar deal combined to date. And it lands in a country that has no national CDR registry, no compliance carbon market for removals, and no central-government framework for classifying or exporting durable removal credits. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Four European CDR modeling papers hit arXiv in a single week, and read together they expose an uncomfortable truth: the headline cost numbers for direct air capture and CO2 removal portfolios are governed less by chemistry or geology than by undisclosed assumptions about future carbon prices. Those assumptions diverge by an order of magnitude across teams, and almost none of the papers treat the divergence as the headline variable. ...