Captains-Log

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique, in the critic’s own words “One buyer at 93% of demand is a market failure, not a market. Microsoft’s 80% cut proves it. Public procurement across methods, like reverse auctions with delivery contracts, would fund learning curves.” That was my read on Bluesky this week (@captaindrawdown on Bluesky), and it is the sharpest version of the structural critique now aimed at voluntary CDR. Strip away the tonnage headlines and the argument is simple: a market with one dominant buyer is not a market. It is a concentration risk with a sustainability report attached. ...

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 Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) is being sold as one of the most measurable, durable removal pathways in the CDR toolkit. Buyers pay a premium precisely because grinding basalt onto soil is supposed to leave a traceable inorganic carbon signal. A newly published four-year German pot trial found no such signal above measurement noise. If the longest continuous field test can’t detect the carbon that Isometric, Puro, and Frontier Climate protocols are certifying, the case for paying on modeled tonnes deserves a hard second look. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Where should the next corporate mitigation dollar go? Into a tonne of carbon removal priced by an open market, or into a coal-mine methane vent that could be plugged tomorrow at a profit? Two European advocates writing this month give directly opposite answers, and the answer your procurement team picks will be encoded in whichever standard you sign onto. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. On November 12, Tim Jesper Suhrhoff posted a chart that ought to change how enhanced weathering buyers read the literature. His finding: peer-reviewed terrestrial enhanced weathering papers are doubling every 2.8 years. Preprints are doubling every 1.3 years. “Enhanced weathering publications are growing exponentially. For peer-reviewed terrestrial EW papers, the estimated doubling time is ~2.8 years (R² = 0.92). Outside formal peer review, growth is even faster: ~1.3 years,” he wrote (@climatejesper.bsky.social). Enhanced weathering (ERW) is the CDR pathway that spreads crushed silicate rock on land to accelerate the natural reaction between minerals and CO2. The science underneath it is now moving faster than the review system that certifies it. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The policy at one glance Isometric certified Standard v2.0 last week, and it is already the rulebook that new biochar and mineralization protocols are being written against. Not a draft. Not a consultation. The live version. It binds any project that wants to issue credits on the Isometric registry, and it tightens three things that decide operator economics: counterfactual biomass fate, leakage accounting, and durability evidence. See Isometric’s own certification notice for the pathway list. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three policy fronts moved this week, and together they expose CDR’s real regulatory risk. Switzerland bound companies to interim removal volumes. The Science Based Targets initiative opened comments on its Net Zero Standard 2.0. And a rural revolt against CO2 pipelines in the US and Canada got loud enough that Carbon Brief flagged it as the read of the week. Read together, the fight has shifted. It is no longer whether removals count. It is whether demand-side rules will force buyers to procure tonnes before the physical infrastructure to deliver them is socially permitted. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. This week’s deal flow forms a map, not a technology chart. Five numbers from five jurisdictions show that where a project sits, and under which regulator, is now the primary determinant of whether it finances. The pathway matters less than the postcode. 1.77 million credits. Rwanda authorized Econetix to market up to 1.77M CORSIA-eligible credits under Article 6, per Biochar Today’s reporting on the ICAO letter. This is a government-issued letter of authorization sized for compliance aviation demand. Article 6 supply is being minted at the host-country level, and Rwanda moved first at this volume. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Microsoft signed a long-term offtake with CREW Carbon this week, buying durable removal credits from a startup that captures CO2 at municipal wastewater treatment plants. The deal, reported by Carbon Herald, matters less for the tonnage and more for what it says about hyperscaler procurement logic. CREW has now raised over $35M in equity while booking more than $40M in signed offtakes across 10 utility deployments, according to The Carbon Curve. That ratio inverts the DAC pattern, where equity dwarfs contracted revenue for years. It suggests a specific thesis is taking hold among the biggest CDR buyers: pay for tonnes that come off infrastructure someone else already built and operates. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Puro.earth’s annual CORC issuance jumped more than 60% from 2024 to 2025, and its retirement buyer base is now 4.7x what it was in 2020. That growth curve replaces the prior mental model of durable-CDR registries as pilot-phase venues serving a handful of anchor buyers. Puro.earth was, until recently, essentially a Microsoft-and-friends venue for engineered removals. The 4.7x buyer expansion says the roster has broadened materially, and the 60% issuance jump says supply is keeping pace with demand rather than lagging it. ...

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 Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) has spent 2025 and early 2026 winning offtakes on a story about co-benefits: spread crushed silicate rock on farmland, farmers get liming and micronutrients, buyers get durable CDR. This week a CDRXIV preprint from Olagaray, Lambert and Thorlakson argues the co-benefit ledger has been kept with one column missing. Nickel, chromium and cobalt from basalt and dunite feedstocks accumulate in soils on the same timescales as the carbonate formation buyers are paying for, and most methodologies treat that accumulation as a compliance checkbox rather than a dose-response variable. If you are buying ERW tonnes in 2026, this is your critique to steel-man. ...