Synthesis

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1.7-1.8°C is the peak warming now implied by the lowest-overshoot pathways in UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2026. The prior reference point was 1.6°C Joeri Rogelj, a contributor to the report, puts the shift plainly: “The new lowest-overshoot pathways imply peak warming around 1.7–1.8°C instead of 1.6°C previously” (@joerirogelj.bsky.social on Bluesky). He adds that the 2035 emissions gap shrank only because the benchmark got worse. Earlier 1.5°C pathways are no longer reachable, so the best available case now climbs higher before it can come back down. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Biochar is the pathway delivering most of the durable carbon removal credit market, according to this explainer on openlibrary.substack.com. That market share is why this week’s operator news matters: a first credit issuance from crop residue, a seven-year offtake for up to 14,000 tonnes, a $72 million bank note tied to a single plant, and a draft standard from one certifier proposing continuous monitoring of kiln output. These are four separate items, not one chain of dependency. Read together, they show what running a biochar operation now involves beyond the kiln. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Sweden has written one cheque for SEK 9.3 billion, roughly $1 billion, to three named companies for durable tonnes. Brussels has a proposal on the table that would route EU allowance revenue toward the same kind of tonnes, but the terms are still being amended. Both answer the same question: who pays for permanent carbon removal in Europe? The comparison shows which answer is bankable today and which one is still a draft. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The smallest carbon removal number this week is 1,049. The largest is 350,000,000. Both describe real places, and most of the gap between them is the difference between a model and a registry. Place decides the feedstock and the storage rock, but it also decides, for now, which stage of the pipeline a number has reached. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Katharine Hayhoe’s notes for Hollywood this week fit in three lines: “Scientists sound the alarm. Nobody listens. Disaster strikes.” She posted that summary of the standard climate movie plot (@katharinehayhoe.com on Bluesky), identified herself as a climate scientist, and said she had notes, including a new ending for Don’t Look Up. Hayhoe did not write about carbon removal. The comparison that follows is mine. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique: a standard soil model ran up to twofold ahead of eleven years of measurement An organic olive grove in Spain kept eleven years of soil carbon records, and when the research team compared those measurements against the RothC model, the model overestimated sequestration rates by “up to twofold,” according to the write-up at bioengineer.org. The same summary singles out biochar as the most problematic case. That is the critic’s claim in its own words: a model widely used in carbon accounting can run at double the real rate. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. One figure, two ledgers. Carbon-removal advocates say Canada could attract $8 billion in investment if its projects could sell credits abroad, per an analysis in Canada’s National Observer. The same analysis asks the question that decides whether that money is cheap or expensive for Canada: who gets the climate gains? Under the Paris Agreement’s rules for internationally transferred credits (Article 6), a tonne sold to another country is generally a tonne the seller stops counting toward its own target. So the $8 billion and Canada’s own climate claim draw on the same tonnes. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast: country-level cases will move before a binding London rule does My forecast is that between now and April 2027, marine CDR governance will advance more through national cases built by individual practitioners than through a binding decision from the parties to the London Convention and Protocol. The parties met this month and, as the Columbia Climate Law Blog reports, debated marine CDR governance under an agenda item on marine geoengineering including ocean fertilization. Debate is the operative word. Meanwhile South African engineer Caitlin Wale, founder of Kinjani and a Senior Fellow in the Ocean Visions GEOS fellowship, is building a case for South African leadership in marine CDR through SAILOR, an initiative that convenes scientists, industry, policymakers and communities. She holds no government mandate. She is making an argument. My claim is that arguments like hers, turned into national processes, will decide where ocean experiments proceed over the next six months, because treaty text moves slowly and the people writing it are still assessing the question. This is my reading of the sequence, not a reported fact. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Norway’s projected average net carbon uptake from its land sector to 2100 is now about 5 MtCO2 a year. The 2019 projection for the same quantity was about 20 MtCO2 a year. Glen Peters (@glenpeters.bsky.social on Bluesky) set the 2019 and 2026 projections side by side, and the expected sink shrank by three-quarters, roughly 15 Mt a year of removal that national carbon accounting could pencil in seven years ago and cannot now. His summary: “Successive projections of Norwegian Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) emissions lead to smaller net uptake… These are big changes, with big policy implications.” LULUCF is the inventory category for land use, land-use change and forestry. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The consensus is that durable carbon removal is demand-limited. Buyers, advocates, and most market commentary repeat it. Kevin Lee Caster (@kevinleecaster.bsky.social on Bluesky) puts it in one line: “Millions of tonnes of Carbon Dioxide Removal are being purchased. Millions more tonnes of CDR need to be purchased in order to help the industry grow to the scale necessary.” More tonnes bought, more plants built. That is the model. ...