The Carbon Removal Scoop

In this episode of The Carbon Removal Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with James Screen, who until recently led the team designing carbon removal policy at the UK's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. A year after the Scoop covered Alan Whitehead's independent review of greenhouse gas removals, James explains what the government's response actually is: not a grand strategy, but a staging post that sets out the UK's direction of travel and leaves the hardest questions for the Carbon Budget 7 delivery plan.

James is candid in sharing his personal views about...

In this quarterly catch up, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart swap the guest chair for each other and look back at three busy months in carbon removal policy, with a few disagreements along the way.

They start with the EU ETS review and the joint statement from Europe's five CDR associations, which Sebastian helped coordinate. He shares some of the background scoop on where the associations lined up and where they didn't, from biochar and the link to the Carbon Removal Certification Framework to whether international credits belong in the ETS at all. Eve draws on...

In this episode of The Carbon Removal Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Chi-ming Peng, Taiwan's Minister of Environment, shortly after he set a target that put Taiwan on the carbon removal map: one million tons of biochar carbon removal by 2030. A meteorologist and entrepreneur before he entered government, Minister Peng explains where the target came from, starting with a simple question to his team about who was responsible for biochar, and the discovery that nobody had yet submitted a carbon credit methodology for it.

The pressure behind the target is hard to...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Emma Wiesner, Renew Europe's shadow rapporteur on the EU ETS review, as she finalises her amendments to the Commission's proposal to bring carbon removals into the EU Emissions Trading System. Emma is an energy systems engineer who sits on the European Parliament's ENVI and ITRE committees and substitutes in AGRI committee. She pushed for a market for negative emissions in the last ETS revision, and says seeing it finally proposed gave her goosebumps.

Her biggest ask is that the Commission...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart record live from Brussels across two days at Carbon Gap's first Carbon Removal Policy Summit, sitting down partway through with Rodica Avornic, Policy Director at Carbon Gap and one of the summit's organisers.

Eve and Sebastian open by previewing a programme built around four levels of governance: international, EU, national, and local. They come away most struck by Carbon Gap's own contributions, a policy levers library cataloguing more than 165 tools and a forthcoming book, The Foundations of Carbon Removal. They also dig into...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Dr. Peter Liese, the German MEP steering Parliament's response to the Commission's July 2026 proposal to revise the EU ETS, and the show's first sitting MEP guest. Liese kept the pen on the file just days earlier, when the ENVI committee rejected a bid to remove him as rapporteur, and this conversation lands in the window before his own draft report becomes public on 11 September, two days after this episode releases.

Liese argues Parliament should go further than the Commission's text...

Grant Faber, Head of Standards at Absolute Climate, joins Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart. Grant previously served as Director Capture Hubs program manager at the Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, and the conversation picks up on the widely circulated article he published mapping out exactly where the US DAC Hubs program stands today.

Grant walks through why disbursement has stalled at roughly two and a half percent of the original three and a half billion dollars in funding. Much of the delay traces back to the lengthy contract negotiation process that...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart dig into the cost assumptions behind the European Commission's EU Emissions Trading System review proposal, a month after the impact assessment first set out what BioCCS, DACCS, and biochar carbon removal are actually expected to cost between now and 2040. Sebastian has spent the past weeks tracing where those numbers come from, and brings in Hansjorg Lerchenmuller, Chairman of Biochar Europe, and Eadbhard Pernot, Executive Director of Carbon Management Europe, to stress test the modelling against real project economics.

The picture that emerges is...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Lisa DeMarco to unpack the legal machinery behind Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. A letter of authorization is an enforceable contract by which a host government permits a project to export a piece of its own climate progress. Lisa explains that it only counts as genuine under Article 6 if it conforms exactly to the minimum requirements set out in Article 6.2 or 6.4. She warns that letters of approval, acknowledgement, or no objection are routinely confused in the market, and points listeners to the model...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme are joined by Mel Murphy, an independent geochemistry consultant, and Dirk Paessler, founder and CEO of Carbon Drawdown Initiative and Vice President of the Negative Emissions Platform, for a very special episode on how anyone actually knows enhanced rock weathering is working.

Mel explains the two dominant measurement approaches, solid phase and aqueous pore water, and why they often tell different stories about the same field. Dirk brings the view from Carbon Drawdown Initiative's own experiments: a field trial with no measurable signal...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Dr. Injy Johnstone, Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Net Zero Lab, to unpack her new report, What Are Residual Emissions, which tries to bring clarity to one of climate policy's most used and least defined terms.

Johnstone explains why, more than a decade after the term entered use, there is still no shared definition. The IPCC modeling community that coined it works from different inputs than a corporate net zero team, and the timeline question, today's technology versus...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart follow up on their interview with Mette Quinn to hash out their own read of Brussels' proposal to fold carbon removals into the EU ETS, and they don't agree on much. Is this really a "compliance market," or a purchasing programme that happens to sit on the ETS cap? Eve and Sebastian take opposing sides, and the answer matters more than semantics: it shapes how the whole mechanism should be judged.

The cost assumptions get the roughest treatment. Sebastian has spent the past...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Mette Quinn, Deputy Director for Carbon Markets and Clean Mobility at the European Commission, days after Brussels published its proposal to fold carbon removals into the EU Emissions Trading System. 

Quinn confirms the number the sector has been debating since Friday: a commitment to buy 250 million tons of permanent, domestically produced removals through BioCCS and direct air capture, funded by auctioning matching allowances plus a top up reserve, with a review clause for 2034 if the volumes do not materialize.

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart sits down solo with Vikrum Aiyer, Head of Global Energy and Policy and Climate Policy and External Affairs at Heirloom, to trace the last eighteen months of US carbon removal policy. It starts with a survival story: Heirloom and partner Climeworks were awarded roughly 600 million dollars for a Louisiana direct air capture hub under the bipartisan infrastructure law, funding that looked shaky the moment the Trump administration began reviewing Biden era spending. Vikrum explains how a coalition of economic development groups, workforce organizations, and elected officials kept the project...

In this episode, Eve Tamme digs into contracted durability with Luke Pritchard, Director at Beyond Alliance, a coalition of major carbon dioxide removal buyers.

Last month, Beyond Alliance published a white paper with RMI and the American Forest Foundation, developed with input from both engineered and nature based CDR developers, setting out what contracted durability could look like and how it fits into the wider policy landscape.

The conversation opens on why durability has stayed unresolved for so long. Luke explains that setting the threshold too low leaves open questions about who holds...

In this episode, Eve Tamme sits down with Carbon Gap’s ETS experts, Francesca Battesby and Louis Uzor ahead of the European Commission’s ETS proposal, expected on 17 July. CDR is about to gain access to the world’s biggest compliance market for carbon, and this conversation lays out what is actually at stake.

The discussion opens on the integration model: a public authority managing CDR procurement, or covered entities acting on their own. Francesca and Louis explain why a public authority could bring mandate and long term credibility, and they unpack the open question of credit...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme sit down for their second quarterly, unscripted catch-up of the year, working through what is actually moving in CDR policy right now with no guest in the mix, just two co-hosts comparing notes.

The conversation opens on the member state CDR targets expected by the end of the year and why a patchwork of twenty seven national targets could be a net positive for the sector, forcing a wider range of technologies and approaches into play rather than funneling everyone toward the EU...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme are joined by Kaya Axelsson, Research and Policy Fellow at Oxford Net Zero, just days after what she describes as the most anticipated Monday of her year: June 22, when both the ISO Net Zero Standard and the SBTi Corporate Net Zero Standard launched at London Climate Action Week. Kaya spent three years inside both standard-setting processes, and the conversation captures what this convergence moment actually means for companies, for carbon markets, and for carbon removal.

The episode opens on what Kaya calls the...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart sits down with Delia Meth-Cohn, Co-founder of Rethinking Removals, who has been part of the ISO Net Zero Aligned Organization Standard working group from its very first meeting, two years ago.

The conversation opens on why Delia got involved, recruited by the British Standards Institute to make sure removals expertise was in the room from the start. She explains what makes ISO structurally different from SBTi: where SBTi is a voluntary framework for leading, self-selecting companies, ISO is built to be globally applicable, rooted in national...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart sits down with Dr. Ruth Dagan, Senior Partner and Head of Environment & Climate Change at Herzog Law, and Co-Chair of the IETA Legal Working Group, to cover two legal challenges that are quietly suppressing corporate demand for carbon credits.

The first is litigation risk. Since 2022, climate washing claims have increased by seventy percent globally, with around 160 cases on the books and fifty-four relating specifically to carbon credit offsets. Apple's carbon neutral Watch campaign was lost in Germany and only tentatively won in the US. The upshot...

Guest: Robert Höglund, writer of Marginal Carbon, climate strategist at Milkywire, and co-founder of CDI FYI

The Science Based Targets initiative has released its long-awaited Net Zero Standard, and Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme wasted no time pulling Robert Höglund, climate strategist at Milkywire, and co-founder of CDR.FYI back onto the show to work through what it actually means for CDR.

The three begin with a verdict: mostly neutral. Better than the previous draft, some of the more damaging provisions are gone, but the standard falls short of what the CD...

Recorded live at the Negative Emissions Platform (NEP) event in June 2026, this fireside chat brings Sebastian Manhart together with Oliver Geden for a rapid-fire sweep through the state of CDR policy. 

Oliver Geden is Head of the Research Cluster on Climate and Energy Policy at SWP (the German Institute for International and Security Affairs), Vice Chair of IPCC Working Group Three, and a member of the executive team of the State of CDR Report. He co-authored Chapter Five on policy in the report's third edition, published the week this conversation was recorded.

Together t...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme dig into the highly anticipated third edition of the State of CDR Report.

At 300 pages and 75-plus authors, this edition is the most comprehensive mapping of the CDR landscape to date. Sebastian and Eve don't attempt to walk through the headlines they go deeper, pulling out the findings that stood out, challenged assumptions, or raised new questions.

The conversation opens on vocabulary: the report's case for retiring "natural versus technological" in favour of "conventional versus novel", and why that framing m...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme welcome back Asger Strange Olesen, Global Head of Climate and Biodiversity at the International Woodland Company and Independent Member of the EU Carbon Removal Expert Group.

The conversation opens on where the carbon farming side of the CRCF stands relative to the momentum building around permanent removals. Asger explains why carbon credits are the wrong tool for the majority of European farmland that stays in production, and why the CRCF review's emerging concept of performance certificates may finally offer a workable alternative. One...

Recorded on the ground at the first annual CRCF Days in Brussels, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart spent the day inside Day One on permanent carbon removals  and caught up throughout the day to give you a front-row view of how it unfolded.

The episode follows the arc of the day to tackle the central question: does the EU Buyers' Club have the momentum, the money, and the buyers to actually deliver? Eve and Sebastian arrive with different expectations and leave with a revealing disagreement. Surprisingly, Eve is more bullish than usual and Sebastian is more m...

The European Commission just published a draft implementing act on CBAM and it quietly opens the door to international carbon credits counting toward carbon border liabilities. The rules are still being written, but the direction of travel is clear.

Co-hosts Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme pulled our favourite CBAM expert, Dan Maleski back in for a rapid-fire debrief the day after publication. They wanted to get the Scoop on what's actually in the act, what's still missing, and what does it mean in practice for companies, governments, and CDR?

The conversation unpacks the 10...

Recorded on May 6th at Zurich's first-ever Climate Week, this is a different kind of episode. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme spent the day inside a series of Swiss government-hosted events on international CDR pilot transfers and brought the microphones with them.

The Switzerland-Norway and Switzerland-Sweden pilots are quietly doing something that almost no one else is: actually testing the full Article 6 machinery for durable CDR transfers, end to end, with real private sector partners at the table. The question is what that process is revealing: about what works, what doesn't, and how far the rest...

Who should hold permanence liability, for how long, and how? 

In this episode of the CDR Policy Scoop, Eve and Sebastian speak with Natalia Dorfman has spent the last four years building Kita into the carbon market's leading insurance specialist. She make the case that the market is finally ready to move beyond buffer pools, and that the tools to do it already exist.

Natalia draws a sharp distinction between short and long-term liability windows, explains why buffers were a necessary starting point but were never designed for perpetuity, and lays out why s...

This is a different kind of episode.

Gabrielle Walker. You probably know her as a scientist, author, science communicator, co-founder of CUR8 and Rethinking Removals. She has spent three decades at the intersection of climate science and storytelling. Too much to confine to a 30 minute episode.

Introducing our new series, Digging Deep, we kick off our special long-form conversation where Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme have the privilege to go beyond the usual format to go deeper into the person. How Gabrielle thinks, her lived experiences, and how it has shaped her work...

CDR Policy Scoop is back with our next SHOWDOWN, this time on one of the hottest fault lines in carbon markets: should voluntary offsetting require corresponding adjustments?

As Article 6 implementation moves forward, the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) faces a pivotal question: are corresponding adjustments NECESSARY for integrity, or OVERKILL, creating a constraint that could choke much‑needed finance for mitigation and removals?

There's a clear rule that corresponding adjustments are required for CORSIA compliance and when credits count toward another country’s NDC, but should that same bar apply when companies use credits for...

Noah Deich is back. When he last joined the show in February 2025, the US DOE had just gutted its CDR programmes. This time, he returns to debrief on a very different project: his attempt to build a government-led advanced market commitment for carbon removal, modelled on the GAVI Vaccine Alliance in global health.

He spoke to around two dozen governments. The outcome wasn't what he hoped for, but his diagnosis of why is sharper than you might expect, and it points to a fundamental gap that no country has yet closed.

Noah draws...

In this episode, co-hosts Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme are joined by Dr Andrew Lenton, Director of CSIRO's CarbonLock Future Science Platform, to discuss Australia's newly published CDR roadmap and its first novel CDR workforce report.

Andrew walks through what it took to build a credible national roadmap and why the coalition of partners, including Google as the sole private sector contributor, may matter as much as the findings themselves. He covers the technologies that surprised him most and what Australia's unique geography means for the CDR opportunity.

The conversation turns to early...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, co-hosts Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme sit down for their unscripted quarterly catch-up to discuss what's top of mind in CDR policy.

They open on the EU CBAM and the question of whether Article 6 credits could satisfy CBAM liabilities. They cut through social media hype to examine what has actually been decided, and whether this logic undermines the mechanism's original purpose of incentivising domestic carbon pricing.

The conversation turns to the EU's broader reliance on international credits, including the 5% allowance under the 2040 target. Eve walks...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme are joined by Hannah Bebbington Valori, Head of Deployment at Frontier, the advanced market commitment backed by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, McKinsey, and Meta that has become one of the largest and most experienced buyers of carbon removal in the world.

The conversation opens with Frontier's newly redesigned innovation program, which this year expands beyond pre-purchases to include R&D grants and more flexible check sizes. Hannah explains that roughly 60% of the R&D gaps Frontier identified at launch in 2022 have already been worked...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme are joined by Harry Smith, Principal Consultant at Aether and former Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia, where he completed his PhD on the policy and governance of carbon dioxide removal.

The conversation explores what national long-term low-emission development strategies actually say about carbon removal, and how much of it should concern us. Harry draws on his doctoral research, which analysed long-term strategies across 71 countries, to explain why these documents are often optional, outdated...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme are joined by Maureen Walsh, Executive Director of the US Biochar Coalition (USBC), to discuss how biochar has quietly built one of the most resilient policy positions of any CDR technology in the United States.

Recorded amid tariff pressures, farm bill limbo, and a Washington reshaped by the second Trump administration, the conversation gets straight to the question: is this political moment different? Maureen's answer is yes, but biochar is finding opportunities others aren't, by refusing to be defined as a climate technology.<...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme is joined by Canadian Senator Colin Deacon from Nova Scotia. Senator Deacon is a former entrepreneur, who has been a driving force behind what may be the most comprehensive government study on marine carbon dioxide removal undertaken by any national legislature to date.

The conversation centres on the landmark report published by Canada's Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans in February 2026, which examined marine CDR - particularly ocean alkalinity enhancement - and put forward nine clear, actionable recommendations. Senator Deacon explains what drew the committee...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme are joined by Jennifer Wilcox, Presidential Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Recorded amid major policy shifts in Washington, the conversation explores what has changed - and what has not - for carbon management and carbon removal in the United States. Jennifer reflects on her time at the DOE during the Biden administration, including the reorientation of federal funding toward...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme are joined by Robert Höglund, Manager of the Milkywire Climate Transformation Fund and co-founder of CDR.fyi, to unpack a new way of thinking about corporate net-zero targets.

Recorded in early February, the conversation explores Robert’s proposal for conditional net-zero targets - a framework that distinguishes between emissions companies can realistically control and those that depend on broader systemic change. The discussion examines why today’s net-zero paradigm often obscures these realities, particularly for hard-to-abate sectors, and how this lack of clari...

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme are joined by Josh Becker, California State Senator representing Silicon Valley, to discuss the future of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) policy in California.

Recorded live on Presidents’ Day, the conversation explores how California quantified its carbon removal needs - 7 million tons by 2030 and 75 million tons by 2045 - and what it will actually take to deliver on those targets.

The episode dives into the legislative history of SB 308 (Carbon Dioxide Removal Market Development Act) and subsequent efforts to establish quality standards fo...