About this episode

The episode discusses the interaction between science and engineering in carbon dioxide removal and the commercial pressures affecting project certification.

I wrote two pieces for Rainbow earlier this year. The first argued that carbon markets need field engineers, not just scientists. Erica Dorr, Rainbow's head of science, read it and pushed back: the binary was too clean, the caricatures too neat. I wrote a response piece about her work as a scientist applying her knowledge in carbon dioxide removal. Today I brought both subjects of those essays onto the show to hash it out together. What is science and what is engineering? It sounds like a question from your first week of college, but in carbon removal it maps directly onto how registries set requirements, how projects get certified, how you balance rigor with feasibility, and ultimately whether the whole system holds together or collapses under its own weight. Erica and Samara Vantil, one of Rainbow's environmental engineers on the certification team, walked me through how these two disciplines actually interact on a daily basis at a working carbon registry. The conversation went somewhere I didn't expect. The real tension isn't between science and engineering at all. Those two are closer to each other than either is to the commercial side. The actual friction lives between the…

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