The CDR Policy Scoop

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 miss. Taiwan sits at the centre of the global AI supply chain, and its semiconductor giants will need carbon credits at a scale that expensive engineered removals cannot yet supply. With a carbon fee already in place and an emissions trading system on the way, Minister Peng makes the case that biochar is the pathway Taiwan can move on now, and explains why he is looking so closely at Europe's CRCF, the Buyers' Club and the EU ETS.Eve and Sebastian press him on the hard parts. Where will the feedstock come from, given five million tons of agricultural waste a year that mostly heads to incinerators? Why is importing more such a tough sell, with public resistance and the Basel Convention in the way? And how does a country that cannot attend COP as a party still plan to trade carbon credits under Article 6.2, with Paraguay first in line?They close on the next six to twelve months: the machines, the money, and the methodology still to be locked down before Taiwan's number can move from ambition to actual credits. Whether biochar becomes part of Taiwan's answer to a semiconductor industry's carbon problem, or another target that outruns the paperwork, is the question worth watching from here.LINKSEve Tamme: LinkedIn and WebsiteSebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and WebsiteMinister Chi-ming Peng: LinkedIn and FacebookMinistry of Environment, TaiwanTaiwan and Paraguay sign MOU on carbon credit cooperation under the Paris Agreement

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 should not be the only buyer. Emma wants ETS installations to be able to buy removals directly instead of allowances, with those purchases counted within the overall 250 megaton cap, creating a business to business market she argues would be far more dynamic than waiting on a central purchasing facility. Eve and Sebastian test the idea against Peter Liese's scepticism, the cost gap between removals and EU allowances, and whether every installation should get the same access.On quality, Emma is firm: the CRCF separated permanent from temporary removals for a reason, and the ETS should build on it. Biochar is not ready today, she says, though the door should stay open. On international credits she is openly reluctant, pointing to Sweden's e-scooters in Ghana as a cautionary tale and making a moral case for Europe doing its homework at home.The conversation closes on what should happen to unused CDR allowances, when purchasing should start, and the childhood landfill visit that sparked Emma's passion for combined heat and power and BECCS.LINKSEve Tamme: LinkedIn and WebsiteSebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and WebsiteEmma Wiesner: LinkedIn and European Parliament profileEU ETS revision proposal MEP Peter Liese: the Rapporteur's take on removals in the EU ETS

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.LINKSEve Tamme: LinkedIn and WebsiteSebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and WebsiteRodica Avornic: LinkedIn Carbon Gap: Policy Levers Library Carbon Gap: Foundations of Carbon Removal. A practical reference for policy, markets and implementationEve Tamme and Paul Zakkour: Will the Carbon Removal Certification Framework count in the race to climate neutrality?

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 on almost every count. He wants no ceiling on how many removals the scheme can buy, reasoning that if costs keep falling the way they did for solar, an artificial cap makes little sense, and he wants biochar added alongside the currently eligible DACCS and BECCS, likely capped near a fifth of the volume so most support still flows to the two technologies already in the text.On the price gap flagged by third party estimates, including one suggesting scaling removals could cost tens of billions of euros more than the Commission expects, Liese's answer is to add more allowances rather than let the target slip, and he is candid that a falling carbon price driven by cheap removals would be something to celebrate, not fear. He previews sharper numbers for the linear reduction factor than the Commission proposed, and sets out why he backs an indirect route for international credits while pushing for more predictability than the current review clause offers.He closes on the bigger picture: once the policy scaffolding is in place, he wants the market and the engineers to do the rest, confident that carbon removals can follow the same cost curve that made solar the cheapest form of electricity. With his own report due within days, this is the clearest picture yet of where Parliament's negotiating position is headed. LINKSEve Tamme: LinkedIn and WebsiteSebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and WebsitePeter Liese: European Parliament profile and Website EU ETS revision proposal, European Commission, July 2026

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 follows every award announcement: milestones, budgets, environmental compliance, and cybersecurity plans all have to be finalized before a dollar moves, a process that consumed nearly his entire tenure at DOE before the change in administration froze everything.The conversation turns candid on the terminations that followed. Grant explains why the cancellations fell disproportionately along party lines, and reveals that DOE itself admitted in court that projects were chosen for termination on a purely political basis. He also recounts his own experience of being caught up in the so called Valentine's Day massacre, locked out of his systems weeks after the inauguration.Grant closes by breaking down what remains: a billion dollars reprogrammed to nuclear funding and one point three billion still sitting unobligated, and offers his sharpest advice for policymakers elsewhere, move quickly, build coalitions across the political spectrum, and design funding to land in every state, not just the ones that already agree with you.Links:Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and WebsiteSebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and WebsiteGrant Faber: LinkedInAbsolute Climate The Status of DOE's $3.5 Billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs ProgramDOE Alumni NetworkGrant's directory, A list of every direct air capture company in the world Grant's directory, A list of every carbon dioxide removal company in the world: USA Spending, the federal spending database referenced for DAC Hubs obligation and outlay data:

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 one of a forecast built on remarkably thin foundations. All the Commission's numbers trace back to just four sources, and because the medium scenario is simply an average of a low and a high estimate, a single shaky assumption can drag the whole range off course. For BioCCS, that means a low cost calibrated against an unverifiable 2022 conference remark and a transport and storage figure of just 38 euros a ton that barely holds up against real infrastructure costs. DACCS fares little better, with the entire range resting on a single McKinsey report whose underlying assumptions were never published.Biochar gets the most detailed correction. Hansjorg lays out where the European industry actually stands, more than 235 plants and a real scalable price closer to 175 to 200 euros a ton, well above what the Commission's own modelling implies. The conversation closes on a shared plea: better data, more transparency about assumptions, and more developers willing to submit real transaction numbers before the next round of forecasts gets built.Links:Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and WebsiteSebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and WebsiteHansjorg Lerchenmuller: LinkedInEadbhard Pernot: LinkedIn and Carbon Management Europe Sebastian Manharts’ Why the BioCCS costs in the ETS proposal simply don't add up McKinsey’s Carbon removals: How to scale a new gigaton industryEuropean Biochar Market Report, 5th editionCDR.fyi

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 LOA forms she helped develop with the World Bank.The conversation turns to the KOKO cookstove project in Kenya, where two government entities each argued they lacked the authority to issue the LOA, leaving no party accountable when the project collapsed. Lisa breaks down the three part diligence host governments should complete before signing an LOA: confirming which branch of the state actually holds authority, checking the export will not take the country off track from its NDC, and reviewing domestic constitutional questions around trading natural resources.Lisa and the hosts also dig into revocation, distinguishing between a government's right to revoke a bad actor's authorization and the far more consequential question of retroactively cancelling units that have already changed hands, something she compares to printing a dollar bill and tearing it up. On corresponding adjustments, she lays out exactly when they are legally required by law and when not. However, even when projects don’t require corresponding adjustment, arranging a letter of acknowledgement from the government is crucial.They close by sizing up the market: roughly thirty five Article 6 projects have been authorized since the start of 2025, worth about one hundred million credits combined, against a European Union that alone could need hundreds of millions of credits by 2040.LINKSEve Tamme: LinkedIn and WebsiteSebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and WebsiteLisa DeMarco: LinkedIn and Resilient LLPWorld Bank: Letter of Authorization and Acknowledgement (incl templates)IETA Article 6 Project DirectoryParis Agreement Article 6 Implementation Partnership

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, buried buckets that still show nothing after 1400 days, and a greenhouse programme now running hundreds of soil and rock combinations. The pattern that keeps surfacing is that results depend on the specific rock, soil, and method used.That uncertainty has not stopped the market. Over 20,000 credits have been certified across Brazil, the US, and India, even as Vera has declined to build a methodology, citing immature science. Mel unpacks Carbon Plan's critique of credits from the US company Lithos, where an implied dissolution rate came out roughly ten times higher than a new peer reviewed estimate, and how registries like Isometric are adjusting requirements accordingly.The conversation closes on cost. Measurement now eats up 56 percent of enhanced rock weathering's budget, the highest share of any removal method. Dirk and Mel discuss whether machine learning trained on greenhouse data and satellite based field mapping can bring that down, and why neither will commit to a timeline for readiness under something like the EU ETS.Show notes:Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and WebsiteSebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and WebsiteMel Murphy: LinkedInDirk Paessler: LinkedIn and Carbon Drawdown InitiativeQuestions about Lithos’ first ERW credit issuanceAn Ecosystem of Carbon Dioxide Removal Reviews – Part 3: Enhanced WeatheringMRV Proxies for EW? A Guided Tour Through Our Data From Our Two-Year Greenhouse ExperimentPortfolio Spotlight: AEROC — Giving Enhanced Rock Weathering Its EyesWhere does the CO₂-removal potential of enhanced weathering actually go?

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 a 2050 horizon, changes the answer. She also draws a distinction the sector often blurs: hard to abate describes a technological limit, while residual emissions is a broader, more normative category shaped by choices about demand reduction and regulation.The conversation turns practical as Johnstone breaks residual emissions into near, medium and long term buckets that corporates and governments can plan against. Sebastian presses on the middle bucket, where overly optimistic assumptions about future technology can quietly reduce carbon removal investment today. Johnstone and Eve also test the new SBTi and ISO standards released since the report's publication.They close on equity: who decides an industry keeps its social license to keep emitting, and who absorbs the trade offs within a finite carbon budget. Johnstone argues these normative choices are already being made, whether admitted or not, and surfacing them is the first step toward distributing that cost fairly.Links:Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and WebsiteSebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and WebsiteInjy Johnstone: LinkedIn "What Are Residual Emissions” Report