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 the EU Buyers Club's rebrand as the EU Buyers Coalition and the ambition to use it as a test ground for a future ETS purchasing facility.
Rodica joins to reflect on the summit's turnout before turning to what worries her about the post-2030 landscape. She notes that the ETS covers only 40 percent of EU emissions, leaving the other 60 percent an open question, and argues that the EU's ten year policy cycles push carbon removal thinking toward short term wins. She also calls for stronger guardrails, given that the CRCF was designed for the voluntary market rather than a compliance scheme.
The episode closes with Eve and Sebastian's own summary of the day: a recurring tension over whether standards should match across governance levels, the unresolved gap between national inventories and CRCF issued credits, and Achim Steiner's warning that carbon removal remains concentrated in too few countries, buyers, and technologies.
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