The Carbon Removal Show

In the final episode of our CDR Buyers Deep Dive, Tom and Emily ask what needs to change if carbon removal buying is going to move from early adopters to something much bigger. What would make buying easier, less risky, more attractive, and more scalable? And what happens when the market’s biggest buyer suddenly causes a wobble? In this episode: 🔎 Trust Me, I’m Infrastructure: Buyers need confidence that what they’re buying is real, durable, verified and defensible. We hear why standards, MRV, insurance, registries and credible intermediaries are much more than just boring plumbing. 🧾 Making CDR Make Sense: It’s not enough for the system to be robust. It also has to make sense to people who don’t spend all day reading carbon removal procurement documents for fun. (No shame to those who do.) 🛡️ Risky Business: We explore how insurance can help unlock finance, reassure buyers and support developers before things go wrong. Reminder: we’re all on the same team here. 📣 Tell Better Stories, Please: We’ve all heard it. Carbon removal often gets explained in climate science language. But CFOs, procurement teams and senior leadership may just need a different story. 🏗️ The Supply Problem: Even if more buyers arrive, there still need to be enough projects to buy from. We learn why early capital, patient funding and policy signals are essential if supply is going to grow. And grow it must. 🧊 The Microsoft Wobble: With reports (and some viral LinkedIn posts) that Microsoft has paused new CDR purchases, we unpack what this means. Is it a market crisis, or a reminder that Microsoft’s buying behaviour was always highly unusual? 👥 Featuring Guest insights from: Leila Toplic (formerly of Carbonfuture)Bee Hui Yeh (Patch)Ibrahim Sarwar (Artio)Caroline Corbett-Thompson (Wise)Adam Fraser (Terraset)Alexander Farsan (Klarna)Tank Chen (CDR.fyi)Ben Wynn (Glad) Hosts: Tom Previte and Emily Swaddle Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks Podcast Coordinator: Ellie Morris

In the first part of our buyers deep dive, Tom and Emily start with a deceptively simple question: why is anyone buying carbon removal at all? In a market with no universal mandate, high prices, and a dash of reputational risk, the real surprise is not that buying is hard. It’s that any company manages to do it in the first place. In this episode: 💸 Why Buying CDR Can Look Completely Irrational: From a CFO’s perspective, carbon removal can look expensive, risky, hard to explain, and suspiciously like something that arrived in their inbox before the budget meeting. So what gets a purchase over the line? 🌱 Belief, Conviction, and Backing the Market Early: For some buyers, the motivation starts with a simple premise: carbon removal will be necessary, so the industry needs support now. 🏢 From Climate Values to Corporate Strategy: Conviction matters, but no market scales on vibes alone. We explore how CDR gets translated from ‘the planet needs this’ into something that can survive contact with a spreadsheet and at least one sceptical colleague from finance. ⏳ Buying Early as a Competitive Advantage: What if carbon removal is not just a climate gesture, but a strategic hedge? We unpack the argument that early buyers are not simply purchasing tonnes for today, but locking in future relationships, terms, and access to supply before the market tightens. ⚖️ Responsibility, Risk, and the Long-Term Licence to Operate: As climate regulation evolves, investors pay closer attention, and supply chain pressures grow, will carbon removal start to look less like a nice-to-have and more like part of how some businesses are preparing for the future? 🔀 Putting It All Together: No one wakes up one morning, points at a carbon removal contract, and says: yes, this alone will save the quarter. This episode traces the messy mix of motives that gets a purchase over the line. 👥 Featuring Guest insights from: Alexander Farsan (Klarna)Adam Fraser (Terraset)Caroline Corbett-Thompson (Wise)Paolo Piffaretti (ClimeFi)Leila Toplic (formerly of Carbonfuture) Hosts: Tom Previte and Emily Swaddle Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks

In this second instalment of our miniseries on public perceptions of carbon removal, Tom and Emily dig into the roots of scepticism: where the hostility comes from, which fears are justified, and where misinformation takes hold. This episode explores why trust is hard-won - and so critical to get right. In this episode: 🧠 Fearing the New: From 19th-century electricity panics to GMOs and vaccines, we explore why novel technologies attract suspicion - and why CDR is no exception. 🌿 Nature, Identity, and Emotional Attachments: Public discomfort with “engineered” climate solutions isn’t irrational - it’s rooted in deep cultural and ecological values. We explore how biodiversity, land use, farming livelihoods, and spiritual relationships to place shape perceptions far more than technical risk assessments. 🏭 The Long Fossil Fuel Shadow: Why do so many people see carbon removal as Big Oil’s loophole? The team unpacks the long legacy of CCS, the role of energy majors in early DAC investments, and the powerful idea that “polluters should pay” - even though implementation is still murky. 📉 Moral Hazard, Greenwashing… or Misunderstanding?: Does buying or investing in CDR slow actual emissions cuts? The team pick apart the numbers, the caveats, and the narratives that refuse to die. 🌊 St Ives - When CDR Hits the Shoreline: We learn about a project that spiralled amid distrust and poor communication, and that illustrates why transparency and timing matter more than any technical spec sheet. 💬 The Myths We Tell Ourselves: Gigaton fantasies, $100-per-tonne illusions, and over-confidence that the “best technology” will eventually win. Which internal industry narratives are warping expectations, eroding credibility, and setting up the industry for disappointment? Learn More 🔗 Explore the St Ives community campaign - Read resources, statements and updates from the local activists who opposed the marine alkalinity trial in Cornwall. 🔬 Dive into the CO₂RE research on the St Ives case - A detailed review of what happened, why public trust broke down, and what the trial reveals about the social dimensions of marine CDR. 👥 Featuring Guest insights from: Ingrid Sundvor (Carbon Balance Initiative)Dr. Elspeth Spence (Cardiff University)Dr. Rob Bellamy (University of Manchester)Sebastian Manhart (Carbonfuture) Hosts: Tom Previte and Emily Swaddle Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks

We are hosting an event! Together with Coalition Member Supercritical and the FLN: GGR Future Leaders Network, we bring you… The Carbon Removal Chat Room: Ask Us Anything Supercritical HQ, London 6pm Wednesday 19th November Sign up here: https://luma.com/0ii0lsis We’ve created this event for newbies to CDR, first-timers and anyone who has carbon removal questions they want answered. We’ll be joined by Expert Guests from across the industry ready to share their knowledge and experience. Bring your questions and your CDR-curious friends! We'll bring the experts, the snacks, and the answers! See you there!

In the second of our three-part deep dive, we plunge into the murky, acronym-rich depths of carbon removal policy across the UN, the EU, the US and beyond - and we promise to come up for air, eventually. In this episode: 🧠 Acronyms and Initialisms Aplenty: Consider yourselves warned. This episode contains more letters than a game of Scrabble. Don't worry, it'll be quacking... sorry, cracking. 🌐 The UN – Going Global: We finally (finally!) get to grips with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement - the big hope for creating a global, compliance-grade carbon market. So, does it deserve its place as the darling of the CDR community? 🧱 The EU – Slow and Steady Wins The Race: We dissect Europe’s tripartite climate framework, learn what the CRCF stands for, and ponder the possibility of removals entering the ETS by 2031 (yes, we said 2031… pace yourselves.) 💵 The US – Land of the Free… Tax Credits: While the EU leans into regulation, the US has chosen financial incentives to scale engineered CDR… for now. (Content advisory: information likely to be outdated within minutes.) 🌏 Zooming Out: Switzerland is quietly blazing a trail. Japan is scaling up a national carbon market. India is laying the foundations. There’s a lot going on out there, if you’re willing to look. 🧩 Policy vs Reality: We explore how the right policy for the right place might be the secret to scaling CDR globally - and why no single blueprint might work for everyone. 👥 Featuring: Guest insights from Sebastian Manhart (Carbonfuture)Eve Tamme (Climate Principles)Elisabeth Harding (Negative Emissions Platform)Varsha Ramesh Walsh (Offstream)Shilpika Gautam (Opna)Sylvain Delerce (Carbon Gap) Hosts Emily Swaddle and Tom PreviteProducer Ben Weaver-Hincks

Welcome back to The Carbon Removal Show! We’re kicking off Season 4 with a view from the top - checking in on the state of the carbon removal industry here in the dizzying heights of 2025. In this episode: 🌍 Where are we now? Durable CDR purchases hit 8 million tonnes in 2024 (a 78% bump from 2023), but 64% of that was Microsoft flexing. Deliveries? Still catching up – and most of it’s biochar. 📉 Caveats, ahoy: Sales are booming, but actual removals are still lagging. The buyer pool is basically a tech giant party. 🚨 Bubble watch: Are we living in a beautifully optimistic carbon bubble? Is it about to pop? Will Tom’s optimism hat survive the bubble bath? We explore industry hype vs. hard truths, including the risks of undelivered credits and startup casualties. 📊 The vibe check: Emily’s on an emotional rollercoaster. Tom is backing the CDR horse. Ben’s beard is greyer. Collectively, we’re cautiously hopeful. 🛠️ What needs to happen?: Scaling isn’t just tech - it’s finance, policy, public understanding, and clear comms. We need to get the message out of the bubble and into the next layer of the onion. (Just… not into Emily’s bubble bath. Please.) 🚗 A history lesson you didn’t know you needed: Did you know the best-selling car in 1897 was electric? We could’ve been 100 years ahead… but markets are messy. 👥 Featuring: Guest insights from Robert Höglund and Sebastian ManhartHosts Emily Swaddle and Tom PreviteProducer Ben Weaver-Hincks 🔗 Links & Resources: CDR.fyi – The go-to source for up-to-date data on carbon removal purchases, deliveries, and market trends.CDRjobs – A live job board dedicated to carbon removal opportunities."Public perception of carbon dioxide removal technologies in the United States and the United Kingdom" – Emily Cox, Elspeth Spence and Nick Pidgeon, Nature Climate Change, 2020This episode of Freakonomics Radio, all about the history of electric vehicles. 🎧 Featured Podcasts & Voices Grounded: A Climate Startup Journey – Hosted by Tom Previte - a climate startup podcast for fans of this show.CDR Policy Scoop – Hosted by Sebastian Manhart & Eve Tamme - deep dives into CDR policy.Milkywire – Robert Höglund's organization supporting impactful climate and CDR initiatives.

With scaling up in mind, this episode dives into an innovative concept that could help the industry take big steps forward. Tom and Emily are joined by Jonny Gilson from Carbonaires and Professor Niall Mac Dowell from Imperial College London to discuss Carbonaires’ ideas for the future of the voluntary carbon market. Big thanks to Carbonaires for supporting this episode. To learn more about The Carbon Removal Show, including further reading and all our sources, head to thecarbonremovalshow.com. And thanks to Cofruition for consulting on and producing the show.

Season 3 continues and the team remains focused on scaling up. The question today: has it been done before? The task ahead is huge and can sometimes feel insurmountable. In order to deliver what scientists say is needed, the carbon removal industry must go from the young seedling emerging market we know today to a great complex ecosystem - and time is against us. Has this level of growth ever been seen before? In today’s episode, Tom and Emily go hunting for reassuring precedents and inspirational analogies. Every global industry that we now take for granted was once a young seedling too. How do those industries compare to CDR? What can we learn from their development? And will looking at their histories help us feel more prepared for the future? In this episode, we listen back to brief clips from Sophie Purdom, co-founder of CTVC, and Dr Steve Smith, executive director of CO2RE. We first heard from them in season 1 episode 1 and season 2 episode 2 respectively. To learn more about The Carbon Removal Show, including further reading and all our sources, head to thecarbonremovalshow.com. And thanks to Cofruition for consulting on and producing the show. Resources and further reading Analogies and ecoraps for more carbon removal - https://medium.com/nori-carbon-removal/analogies-and-ecoraps-for-more-carbon-removal-3f4e8d92d1b4 Explaining the Exponential Growth of Renewable Energy - https://www.wri.org/insights/growth-renewable-energy-sector-explained Developments in wind power - https://post.parliament.uk/research-briefings/post-pn-0602/ The Hole: How Ronnie and Maggie Saved the World - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2JzOlRff08&t=1s Back from the brink: how the world rapidly sealed a deal to save the ozone layer - https://rapidtransition.org/stories/back-from-the-brink-how-the-world-rapidly-sealed-a-deal-to-save-the-ozone-layer/ Learning from Success: Lessons in Science and Diplomacy from the Montreal Protocol - https://www.sciencediplomacy.org/article/2020/learning-success-lessons-in-science-and-diplomacy-montreal-protocol Should carbon removal be treated as waste management? Lessons from the cultural history of waste - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2020.0010#d1e755 Is the UK’s waste infrastructure ready for a circular economy - https://rrfw.org.uk/2018/01/08/is-the-uks-waste-infrastructure-ready-for-a-circular-economy/ Shifting the Direct Air Capture Paradigm - https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/solving-direct-air-carbon-capture-challenge How have COVID-19 vaccines been developed so fast - https://www.immunology.org/public-information/vaccine-resources/covid-19/covid-19-vaccine-infographics/speed-of-development A Guide to Global COVID-19 Vaccine Efforts - https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/guide-global-covid-19-vaccine-efforts How COVID‐19 vaccine supply chains emerged in the midst of a pandemic - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8447169/ How did we develop a COVID-19 vaccine so quickly? - https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-did-we-develop-a-covid-19-vaccine-so-quickly Smart phones: https://blog.textedly.com/smartphone-history-when-were-smartphones-invented https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2011/07/11/overview-of-smartphone-adoption/ https://www.pcmag.com/archive/smartphone-adoption-rate-fastest-in-tech-history-301990 https://www.govtech.com/products/how-smartphones-revolutionized-society-in-less-than-a-decade.html https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-many-people-have-smartphones https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world Streaming continues to overtake TV - https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2023/05/16/streaming-continues-to-overtake-tv/ The rise of social media - https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media

The world’s coastal areas are some of the most at risk places on earth when it comes to climate change, but could they potentially be some of the most valuable places for creating solutions too? It’s time for part two in our mini-series on Oceans and... it's the Season two finale! As we established in last week’s episode, oceans are now becoming a much bigger part of the climate conversation and are a huge site of interest for carbon removal innovation. In this episode Tom and Emily will be taking a deeper look at some of the most exciting coastal-based solutions that are popping up. They’ll be putting another biomass-based solution into focus – mangroves; they’ll be discussing The Blue Carbon Challenge, a program launched by Friends of Ocean Action to find viable solutions in blue carbon; and they’ll be looking at an interesting ocean-based take on rock weathering - an entirely different context to what we’ve looked at in previous episodes! A note from our fact-checking corner: midway through this episode we discuss the relative rates of carbon sequestration of mangrove forests vs. the tropical forests you may be more familiar with. For the sake of clarity, we wanted to say here that mangroves store more carbon per year than the forests we mention on a per hectare basis. Forests still come out on top in absolute terms – not to take anything away from the magnificent role of mangroves A huge thanks to our guests: Ronald Tardiff, Pillar Lead at Friends of Ocean Action Kelly Erhart, President & Co-Founder at Vesta To learn more about The Carbon Removal Show, including further reading and all our sources, head to restored.cc. Thanks to Patch for sponsoring the podcast. And thanks to Cofruition for consulting on and producing the show.

It's not only big names like Microsoft who are addressing their impact on the climate crisis, there are lots of smaller organisations appearing on carbon removal buyer lists too! This week's episode puts a spotlight on Aledade, a US healthcare services organisation with an interesting philosophy and strategy behind their carbon removal purchases. We speak to Will Palmisano, Head of Aledade's climate committee, to learn more about their carbon removal mission, how they’re going about it and what their work can teach us about how companies of all sizes can get involved in carbon removal in a meaningful way. Thanks to Aledade for sponsoring the episode and for sharing their story. Please note that since the recording of this episode the stats quoted from CDR.fyi have been significantly superseded. Visit CDR.fyi for the most up to date statistics. To learn more about The Carbon Removal Show, including further reading and all our sources, head to restored.cc. Thanks to Patch for sponsoring the podcast. And thanks to Cofruition for consulting on and producing the show.

All the excitement of recording the previous two episodes in Iceland left us with one puzzling question. How would we practice what we preach and offset the carbon we emitted by flying there? We set our researcher Henry on the case, and got in touch with the show's sponsors, Patch, in order to work out the best way forward. Thanks to our guests: Henry Irvine, Researcher on The Carbon Removal ShowAriel Hayward, Sustainability Lead at Patch Note: This is not a sponsored episode. While Patch sponsor the podcast, their inclusion on this episode is purely informative. Find us on LinkedIn and Twitter @RestoredCC. To learn more about The Carbon Removal Show, including further reading and all our sources, head to restored.cc. Thanks to Cofruition for consulting on and producing the show.

Tickets? Booked. Microphone? Packed. Passport..? This week we're off to Reykjavik to take part in Iceland Innovation Week's climate conference Ok, bye. The event's name refers to the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change, Ok-jökull and it was a chance for us to check in with some of the businesses and policymakers turning this isolated North Atlantic island into a world leader in carbon removal projects. Thanks to this week's guests: Edda Konráðsdóttir, Co-Founder at Iceland Innovation WeekMelkorka Sigríður Magnúsdóttir, Co-founder and director of Iceland Innovation WeekJarþrúður Ásmundsdóttir, Head of Innovation & Technology at Business IcelandDirk Nuber, Managing Director at ClimeworksMarty Odlin, CEO at Running TideSeth Bannon, Founding Partner at Fifty YearsSalka Sigurðardóttir, Negotiator for Cop26 PresidencyTinna Hallgrímsdóttir, Chairperson at Icelandic Youth Environmentalist Association To learn more about The Carbon Removal Show, including further reading and all our sources, head to restored.cc. Thanks to Patch for sponsoring the podcast. And thanks to Cofruition for consulting on and producing the show.

Today we’re at the UK Greenhouse Gas Removal Event, a gathering of researchers, policy makers and businesses, to discuss the state of carbon removal in the UK today. CO2RE, the greenhouse gas removal hub led by Oxford University and the hosts of the event, were kind enough to ask us to host a pair of panels across the two day conference. We caught up with friends old and new to bring you the latest expert insight on the current state of carbon removal in the country we call home. Thanks to this episode's guests: Philippa Westbury, Stakeholder Manager at CO2REGeorge Hope, Communications Manager at CO2RESteve Smith, Director of CO2REEmily Cox, Research Associate at Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of OxfordNavraj Singh Ghaleigh, Senior Lecturer in Climate Law at University of EdinburghEmma Keller, Head of Sustainability at Nestle UK&IrelandSanna O'Connor-Morberg, Former Carbon Dioxide Removal Lead at Energy Transitions CommissionLaith Whitwham, Senior Policy Officer, Industrial Decarbonisation at Aldersgate GroupRuth Herbert, CEO Carbon Capture and Storage AssociationJudith Thornton, Aberystwyth UniversityLiz Bowles, OFC Director and Associate Director of Farming and Land Use at The Soil Association Thanks to CO2RE for inviting us along. You can find them at co2re.org. You can find the full Green Shoots panel, excerpts of which are included in this episode, here. To learn more about The Carbon Removal Show, including further reading and all our sources, head to restored.cc. Thanks to Patch for sponsoring the podcast. And thanks to Cofruition for consulting on and producing the show.