In this episode of The Carbon Removal Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Danny Cullenward, Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, on his second visit to the Scoop. The conversation grew out of a remark Danny made at Carbon Gap's Carbon Removal Policy Summit in Brussels in September, and it lands on an issue the carbon removal community has barely started to absorb: how the Greenhouse Gas Protocol will count the carbon in forests. Danny, who resigned from the Protocol's Independent Standards Board over the dispute, argues the stakes reach far beyond forestry.
At the centre are two competing proposals. Scientists on the technical working group backed activity-based accounting, which compares a harvest with what would have happened without it, much as voluntary market forest methodologies do. Industry voices backed the managed land proxy, borrowed from how countries report to the UN climate convention, which Danny says would let companies book removals for almost any wood harvest. He walks through how averaging across a whole sourcing region can turn felling trees in Poland into a carbon removal on paper, and why he thinks the proposal's extra safeguards change very little.
Eve and Sebastian also press on the process behind the fight, and on where things stand now. No decision has been made: the Protocol's request for information on forest carbon accounting is open until 1 February 2027, while an ISO standard that Danny says implements the industry approach in all but name has already been approved, and the two bodies are working to harmonise their standards. With mandatory disclosure in California and the EU leaning on the Protocol, whatever gets decided will not stay voluntary for long.
They close on what this means for anyone producing durable removals. Tune in to hear why Danny calls this an existential risk for the carbon removal industry, and who he thinks needs to speak up before the comment window closes.