We won't achieve gigatonne carbon removal

Hi there,

Hope you’re having a nice week. Today, Keep Cool casts its gaze at a topic it hasn’t touched in some time, namely carbon removal. I was excited to co-author this piece with my friend Paul Gambill, the former CEO of Nori and now writer and advisor at Inevitable & Obvious.

The topic? Well, the subject line wasn’t upbeat, but the goal is. Our goal is to reorient what stakeholders in the carbon removal ecosystem prioritize to proverbially ‘right the ship.’ All feedback and input is always most welcome.

DEEP DIVE

Here's the hard truth: We're not going to achieve gigatonne-scale carbon removal, at least not on our current trajectory. The reason isn't technology, funding, or MRV—it's that we've lost sight of the main objective.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has often emphasized that pathways to limit global warming to 1.5°C require billions of tons of carbon removal because even with rapid emissions reductions (which, mind you, aren’t happening), residual carbon dioxide buildup will linger in the atmosphere for centuries.

The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) outlines that we need to scale carbon removal to 10 billion tonnes per year by 2050. That would mean we should be on track for 285 million tonnes per year by 2030. Those are the core goals and milestones: Scale carbon removal capacity massively and quickly. 2050 is only 25 years away; 2030 is a stone's throw into the future. Meanwhile, current global carbon removal deliveries are in the order of hundreds of thousands, nowhere close to billions. Gigatonne carbon removal implies step changes of many orders of magnitude. If we succeed in scaling to 10 billion tonnes of annual throughput by 2050 per this RMI S-curve, then we’d cumulatively remove about 100 billion tonnes by then. That’s equal in weight to a herd of roughly 20 billion African elephants.

To understand why we're failing to scale carbon removal, we need to examine what our current systems are actually designed to do—not what we claim they're designed to do (as per Stafford Beer's famous engineering axiom: "The purpose of a system is what it does.")

So, let’s ask ourselves, what is our current carbon removal system actually doing?

Right now, much of the existing carbon removal industry is set up to produce painstakingly verified credits of permanently stored carbon for a handful of tech companies. It's not scaling to gigatonnes. It's not making a meaningful dent in atmospheric carbon dioxide. What it does is optimize for corporate sustainability departments' ability to claim precise offsets with minimal reputational risk.

Look at the buyer landscape. For all the talk about carbon removal "markets," there's essentially one major buyer, Microsoft, which represents over 60% of all carbon removal purchases. Then, there are a few distant runners-up (Frontier, with 5%, and Google, with 4%).

Meanwhile, there are now more than 500 carbon removal startups! Beyond venture dollars for early-stage rounds, who's going to pick up their million-dollar offtake contracts once they get to Series A stages and beyond? Microsoft and the other big tech companies can't do it all.

Goal alignment is the first step

The first step in resetting the system would be realigning priorities. For example, we might ask every player in the carbon removal space the following question: Do you agree we need to remove 10 billion tonnes per year by 2050? And consequently, do you agree we need to remove 285 million tonnes annually by 2030?

This isn't just an academic exercise. These targets create a framework for evaluating every decision, investment, and policy. If any party isn't aligned with these goals, we need to have a different conversation first.

Many leaders in carbon removal reveal their priorities through actions, not words. While publicly supporting ambitious targets, they simultaneously advocate for standards and funding models that inherently limit scale. Their decision-making processes consistently prioritize credit quality over the quantity of carbon removed. 

The misalignment between our stated goals and actual system design becomes more apparent when we consider this thought experiment: If you deliberately wanted to prevent gigatonne-scale carbon removal, what would you do?

What would you do if you DIDN'T want to achieve gigatonne removal?

If you wanted to ensure we never reach gigatonne-scale carbon removal, you might do something like this:

1. Create a monopsony, i.e., a market dominated by one or a few buyers: Make the entire ecosystem dependent on Microsoft, Google, and Frontier. Force startups to compete for the same limited pool of corporate buyers. Design a system where changes to a single company's priorities could disrupt the entire market.

2. Prioritize perfect verification over scale: Deprioritize approaches that rely on modeling or statistical estimates, even if they use conservative, rigorous methodologies and offer significant scale.

3. Obsess over 1,000-year permanence: Ignore solutions that could store billions of tonnes for decades in favor of enshrining "permanent" carbon storage as the gold standard. Design a market that values 1 ton sequestered for 1,000 years over 100 tonnes for 20.

4. Create impossible additionality requirements: Penalize solutions that become commercially viable. Deprioritize nature-based solutions because they struggle with additionality. Pigeonhole carbon removal developers into financial dependence on carbon credits alone.

5. Keep prices prohibitively high: Ensure carbon removal remains a luxury only tech giants can afford. Focus on “premium” credits rather than volume scaling. Maintain a market where only the most expensive approaches survive.

Sound familiar? It should—because it's what we're doing. Let’s dissect a few examples.

The MRV trap

One prominent example pulls directly from #2 above. The current carbon removal industry overemphasizes perfect measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV). This is a symptom of misalignment with the goal of gigatonne-scale carbon removal and a product of who the “system” is designed for, i.e., the large corporates focused on accountability towards net zero targets and mitigating reputational risk.

To be clear, MRV is an absolutely necessary component of serious carbon removal efforts. Without them, we have no way to distinguish effective solutions from ineffective ones, no way to improve and iterate on methods over time, and no way to help governments, corporate buyers, and even the general public build confidence and trust in the climate impact of our investments. The issue isn't that MRV is wrong—it's that our current system has created a hierarchy where the most easily measurable and verifiable approaches receive funding and attention, regardless of their scaling potential. This creates a catch-22 for many promising carbon removal approaches:

Enhanced weathering? Difficult to directly measure carbon sequestration without relying on models, despite potential for adding conservative buffers.

Ocean alkalinity enhancement? We can measure initial alkalinity changes but must rely on models to estimate actual carbon impact across vast, complex ocean systems.

Marine biomass sinking? Tracking particles to the ocean floor would be prohibitively expensive at scale.

Meanwhile, direct air capture (DAC) has attracted far more capital across venture capital (shown below) and practically all other (and, mind you, larger) private and public sector capital stack sources than other carbon removal pathways. That’s even as it’s highly unclear whether it can scale and it certainly doesn’t offer the “co-benefits” other approaches do.

This focus on perfect measurement creates a dangerous paradox: we end up measuring tiny amounts of carbon removal with great precision while failing to remove the vast quantities the atmosphere actually needs. It's like meticulously counting individual droplets while ignoring the flood. A better approach would balance measurement rigor with scaling potential—accepting some modeling uncertainty where needed, particularly for approaches that could deliver orders of magnitude more removal than our current methods.

The permanence trap: Perfect is the enemy of good

Beyond measurement precision, there's another tension stalling scale: Our current obsession with permanence over scale. Today’s market rewards carbon removal approaches that promise to keep carbon locked away for 1000+ years more than methods that could remove larger quantities but might keep the carbon sequestered out of the atmosphere for shorter timeframes.

This myopic focus on permanence also stems from corporate buyer’s priorities. Companies prefer to permanently "offset" their emissions with a one-time purchase versus needing to renew purchases more frequently or worry about reputational risk associated with projects that may be less “durable.” What's lost is the atmospheric reality. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere keep increasing, and we're facing additional climate tipping points that could release even more greenhouse gases from natural ecosystems than human-caused emissions. Removing carbon now should matter more than ensuring it’s sequestered until 2125 or longer.

It makes sense that corporations pursue "like for like" and want to offset fossil fuel emissions with carbon removals that store carbon for equivalent timeframes. But this approach reveals the fundamental limitation of the industry we've built. While corporations focus on perfect accounting equivalence, we're losing the race against time to prevent coral reefs from dying off and ice sheets from melting. We're optimizing for accounting certainty while ecosystems collapse.

Let's be straightforward about permanence: We absolutely should continue developing, refining, and scaling technologies that offer long-term carbon storage. Permanence matters significantly in the overall carbon removal equation. The problem lies in the false dichotomy we've created where only perfect, 1,000+ year storage solutions receive funding at the expense of more scalable approaches that may not offer such permanence. Surely we could create a more balanced portfolio that embraces both immediate action and long-term solutions.

The additionality trap: Today's solutions, tomorrow's problems

The third major barrier to scale lies in how standards bodies—which corporate buyers look to for guidance and ‘stamps of approval’ when they sign off on carbon credits they purchase—think about "additionality." Additionality (or, more specifically, financial additionality) in carbon removal contexts refers to the requirement that projects wouldn't happen without carbon credit revenue.

Additionality does matter for many reasons; at the most basic, or, shall we say, “baseline” level, it’s a measure of how much carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere relative to a ‘baseline’ starting point. That’s undeniably important. But then there’s also financial additionality, i.e., the notion that a project is additional (and meets quality standards) only if it happened because of the revenue generated by selling carbon credits.

This creates bizarre catch-22s:

• Yet another trap: CDR companies that sell credits considered “additional” today could get trapped if they depend on carbon credit revenue. Why? Once they become profitable, they might not technically be considered “additional” anymore, effectively punishing success by removing their revenue stream just as they become capable of scaling. For example, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), one of several prominent carbon offset industry trade groups, specifies:

• Natural carbon sinks are often excluded. Soil carbon and forests represent massive carbon sinks. Restoring and expanding them could offer significantly more carbon removal scale. However, soil carbon struggles with additionality tests because farmers often have other motivations for improving soil health beyond carbon credit revenue. Yet almost everyone working in carbon removal would agree we need both nature-based solutions and engineered solutions (as well as hybrids) to scale the industry.

• Continuous innovation is penalized: As soon as any removal approach becomes financially viable without credits, it risks losing its "additionality," creating perverse incentives against achieving more scale and commercial viability.

This highlights another corporate accounting concept that makes no sense from an atmospheric perspective. If our goal is reducing atmospheric CO2, why would we care whether a solution is "additional" or not? We should celebrate methods that become financially self-sustaining rather than disqualifying them from the market.

Tl;dr → The additionality trap forces projects to remain financially dependent on carbon credits forever. It's like saying we should only fund renewable energy if it's not commercially viable on its own—the opposite of what we should aim for!

Separate problems need separate solutions

The MRV, permanence, and additionality traps all stem from one central mistake: We've conflated two different problems:

1. Corporate emissions reductions: Companies need to figure out how to reduce their own emissions to as close to zero as possible.

2. Planetary carbon removal: We need to pull massive volumes of historical carbon out of the atmosphere, regardless of who emitted it.

By trying to solve these distinct challenges with a single system of "offsets," we've created a market that serves neither purpose well.

As planetary project managers for Operation Reverse Climate Change, we would create two separate systems:

1. Mandatory emissions reductions: Similar to how we eliminated lead from gasoline, governments would mandate businesses reduce GHG emissions by X% yearly until approaching zero, ideally also in fashions that align with their supply chains and emissions sources. But we’d ultimately let market forces and innovation determine precisely how they accomplish those reductions.

2. Actually scale carbon removal: Focus on methods to get all sorts of entities contributing toward carbon removal in ways that create new value, wholly disconnected from "offsetting" or corporate carbon accounting.

This isn't about switching from voluntary to compliance markets. It's about rethinking the relationship between emissions reductions and carbon removal. They're different problems that require different approaches, incentives, and metrics for success. Given current political dynamics around the world, it’s unlikely we will see mandatory emissions reductions anytime soon. Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop us as an industry from scaling removal in earnest.

Scaled carbon removal needs creative funding approaches that go beyond traditional offsetting. For example, imagine a rideshare app where, at the end of your trip, a sponsor plays an ad and pays to remove more than the carbon from your ride. The rider gets a carbon-negative trip, the sponsor gets targeted advertising, and the rideshare company facilitates this at no additional cost. This creates new value while removing carbon, rather than treating removal purely as another corporate expense. These kinds of multi-stakeholder solutions could unlock much more scaling potential than the current offsetting model.

This separation also addresses the core underlying tensions we've identified: MRV can be appropriately rigorous for corporate emissions reduction while allowing more pragmatic approaches for planetary-scale removal. Permanence requirements can be tailored to each distinct purpose rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach. And the additionality paradox disappears if removal is valued for its atmospheric impact rather than its accounting function.

Focus on the right metric

For years, Paul has been saying that we should focus on the atmospheric carbon ppm number as the most important metric. Then, run the industry on a simple loop:

while (co2ppm > 350) {

    removeCarbon();

}

*In non-programmer speak: “If atmospheric carbon concentration is greater than 350 ppm, then continue removing carbon.”

Implementing this approach means rethinking how we fund and incentivize carbon removal. Rather than treating it as an offset commodity, we could structure it more like infrastructure development or public utilities, i.e., essential services that continue indefinitely, funded through dedicated mechanisms (which still could be private and market-driven) rather than ad-hoc voluntary corporate offset purchases.

This simplicity acknowledges a key reality: Human-initiated carbon removal needs to be a centuries-long activity from here on out because humans won’t bring GHG emissions to absolute zero anytime soon. There is no future state (at least not for hundreds or thousands of years into the future) where we can say, "Yep, all done." We're going to have to remove carbon for longer than our lifetimes to balance the budget and pay down debt.

The ppm focus cuts through the permanence vs. scale debate. When removal is viewed as an inherently ongoing activity, a solution that stores carbon for decades rather than centuries is valuable if it can be deployed at a massive scale now. The goal isn't perfect accounting; it's atmospheric impact. We need to buy time, and focusing on satisfying corporate accounting requirements is solving the wrong problem.

We don't have easy answers for reshaping the carbon removal industry. However, the effort starts with asking different questions and reweighing key priorities. Instead of agonizing over questions like "How can we verify every molecule removed?" we could ask, "How can we remove as many molecules as possible with reasonable confidence and moderate permanence?"

From there, our prescriptions if we were to go “magic wand” mode would likely include:

1. Starting with the right goal: 10 billion tonnes by 2050 means 285 million by 2030—every decision should be evaluated against this scale target.

2. Separate emissions reduction from carbon removal: Create distinct systems with different incentives, metrics, and funding mechanisms.

3. Embrace scale over perfection: Align on and even advocate for acceptable levels of uncertainty in MRV to unblock carbon removal pathways that offer significant scale.

4. Get more creative financially: Invent new funding structures that make carbon removal a value generator rather than a cost. Consider the sponsor-funded carbon-negative rides example we presented previously or other multi-stakeholder approaches that create shared benefits. Break free from the "offset as expense" mindset.

5. Make atmospheric impact the most critical metric: Focus on ppm reduction rather than corporate claims or accounting precision.

6. Value time as much as durability: Recognize that large-scale removal now has more climate impact than perfect permanence later.

Our current system—built to serve the needs of a handful of tech companies—is structurally incapable of achieving gigatonne-scale removal. If we truly want to reverse climate change, we must create markets, policies, and funding mechanisms explicitly designed to achieve our scale targets, not just to make corporate carbon accounting easier.

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to respond to this directly with any comments, additional thoughts, or especially rebuttals! 

To read more from Paul, check out his Substack, "Inevitable & Obvious." He explores the challenges of category creation, governance, and building organizations that protect vision through growth. He also offers insights on founding startups, creating markets, and navigating the complex intersection of climate tech, crypto, and organizational design.

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Take care, 

– Paul & Nick