The carbon removal market is ignoring three pathways with billion-ton-per-year potential because they can't be verified yet.
Direct air capture gets all the oxygen in the room. Machines pull CO2 from the air, inject it underground. The science works. The verification works. Cost is $400 to $1,000 per ton. Procurement teams love it because it's auditable.
But DAC has the smallest theoretical ceiling of any major removal pathway.
Bioenergy with carbon storage. Grow biomass, burn it for energy, capture the CO2, sequester it underground. The IPCC's 1.5°C scenarios rely heavily on this. Real deployment is nowhere near model projections.
Enhanced rock weathering. Spread crushed silicate rock on agricultural land. CO2 reacts with the rock in soil moisture and mineralizes into stable carbonate. The geology is planetary in scale. Verification is the bottleneck.
Ocean alkalinity enhancement. Add alkaline material to seawater so the ocean pulls more CO2 from the atmosphere. Largest theoretical capacity of any pathway. Also the hardest to measure.
The market isn't ignoring these pathways because they don't work. It's ignoring them because carbon markets require proof, and proof requires measurement infrastructure that doesn't exist at scale yet.
That's not a science problem. It's a data infrastructure problem.
And data infrastructure problems are solvable.
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Climate change isn’t future tense. 🌍
Crops are failing, cities are flooding, and wildfires are becoming the norm.
Yet adaptation remains drastically underfunded. Mercy Corps Ventures’ Timothy Rann breaks this down on the @VCo2 podcast. 👇
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@IOHK_Charles Maui here again. @MalamaProject making waves here in Hawaii and beyond. Would be a good time to pay attention. Bringing Cardano to players who otherwise would never have known. And here’s a picture of one of my pigs.
@IOHK_Charles checking in from Maui here. We are building a RWA project for Hawaii and beyond on Cardano here. I am a pig farmer in Haiku who has been a part of the Cardano community since 2020. Check out https://t.co/fSKLacJIj1
@MikeBenzCyber Europe is already realizing that this administration wouldn’t honor the NATO agreement anyway. The US has benefited from the world order since WWII, which we have taken for granted. Isolationism will ultimately harm us in ways we are not prepared for.
@Acyn Every judge who is elected to their position is entitled to their thoughts, opinions, and judgements. They hold the third, equal branch of government. The president does not supersede the judiciary, nor should he. The system of checks and balances exists for good reason
@sandrajaniga@krassenstein This comment highlights scientific illiteracy. The scientific process requires testing all possible variables in the search for “truth”. This requires one to be “woke”. If a scientist isn’t “woke”, they likely aren’t doing science.