CDR library

🌡️ The world’s leaders just reaffirmed their commitment to 1.5 degrees of global warming. With less than 6 years of carbon budgets left, this feels like a lofty goal to many. Even 2 degrees feels out of reach given current trajectories. Broadly speaking, humanity has three options to prevent climate catastrophe: 1️⃣ Reduce emissions 2️⃣ Remove emissions 3️⃣ Global cooling interventions 🏭 Before the 2018 IPCC 1.5°C report, most people and governments thought we could just re

😎 The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies today published a paper I co-authored with Raphaël Cario. (And yes: this is different from last week’s Oxford University paper on Global South CDR industrialisation - I know, we are on a roll!). The core message? 📣 Biochar carbon removal (BCR) is the most deployment-ready, lowest-risk durable CDR option available today and should be among the first options integrated into the EU and UK ETS. 🇪🇺 As a reminder: the European Commissi

👎 Let’s start with the bad news: Multilateral climate policy is failing us. 🪵 Yet again, a COP has been unable to deliver what we need most: a clear commitment to phase out of fossil fuels. To add insult to injury, a COP hosted in the Amazon also failed to propose a deforestation roadmap. ⚠️ This is inexcusable. It’s not aligned with science. And the world deserves better. 🏃 Yesterday, as I went on my angry post-COP run, I listened to (the very appropriately titled) Outrag

⛰️ The latest example: Patagonia, just published one of the most transparent, self-critical sustainability reports in the corporate world. They immediately got dragged across social media, including by several climate influencers on my feed. 😡 This is a pattern I keep seeing (including in CDR). Every time a company actually tries to change its industry, we tear it down. Meanwhile, the 99% doing absolutely nothing are left *untouched*. But if the companies leading the transit

🤩 This is the biggest research project I’ve ever worked on: months of work with the TIDE Centre, University of Oxford, together with my brilliant co-author Raphaël Cario , culminating in a 60-page analysis on the Global South’s overlooked industrialisation opportunity. 📈 The headline: if scaled with the right policies, durable CDR could create 3 to 9.5 million jobs and $180-600 billion in annual economic value across the Global South by 2050. 🚀 Holding >70% of global bioma

🤷 Yesterday, I asked you whether we should have a COP at all. Is all this massive effort - and the associated emissions - even worth it? The community seems split, which isn’t surprising. 🎯 I personally believe that COPs have an important role to play, and that it will take years of hard work to position CDR where it needs to be: as a horizontal, essential building block across climate targets and initiatives at large. 🤩 So did we make any progress on this front during COP

🌐 Here’s something most people do not know about me: I have never been to a COP. Nor do I plan to. 🤔 Why? I have a simple litmus test for my business travel: Will the event go ahead the same even if I do not attend? 👎 Clearly it will make no difference whether I am one of 50,000 people in attendance at COP30 or not. So I pass. 🤳 COPs have come under heavy - IMO justified - criticism. Every year, this mass gathering leads to around 100,000t-150,000t of CO2 emissions. And i

📈 Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen job seeker traffic across all the CDRjobs channels more than double: from 300-400 individuals to almost 800 per week, hitting an all time high since we started tracking. So why are we seeing this trend and why now? Couple of hypothesis: ✅ Carbon removal is becoming better known - see some of my recent posts for proof ✅ People are increasingly looking to switch careers into more meaningful, climate work ✅ The CDR job market stays strong a