NY Climate Week was strong as ever this year. My main takeaway from the week of running around (what felt like) the entirety of Manhattan was that the carbon removal ecosystem is quite resilient, in spite of real challenges. The longer term picture about where removal heads from here is murky at best for me, but I came away realizing that murkiness is ok for the indefinite future. Enough people get that carbon removal is a critical industry for our future that doesn’t exist yet but should, and are willing and able to support it even when it doesn’t fit neatly into more salient near term themes that are dominating conversation on climate in the run up to the midterms — like affordability, AI/data centers, and beyond.
Takeaway 1: the carbon removal ecosystem is quite resilient
At a glance, the prospects for carbon removal in the U.S. look, well, not great:
The Administration has held back billions in funding for carbon removal at DOE, lumping the field in with renewable energy as part of the purported “green new scam.”
The largest corporate voluntary credit buyer has announced that they are pausing new purchases without clear plans to resume. The rise of data centers has upended all the largest buyers’ sustainability strategies, casting removal to the margins as companies scramble to find as many firm electrons — clean only if expedient — as they can.
Philanthropy cut back funding for removals globally by around 50% in 2025 compared to 2024. Even in 2024, the roughly $100M in grantmaking for “novel” removal efforts like direct air capture, biomass carbon removal, enhanced rock weathering, and marine carbon removal only represented a tiny fraction of the overall $6B in climate philanthropy, leaving civil society stretched particularly thin to support analysis, policy advocacy, and communications to support the growth of the field globally.
Yet the carbon removal field is adapting and marching forward:
The House just passed a carbon removal bill. Yes, the U.S. House under Republican Speaker Mike Johnson voted to unanimously pass the EMRTAI bill that included $100M in authorization for enhanced rock weathering funding tied to critical minerals production. It’s not DAC Hubs-scale funding, but it is amazing progress given the hostility overall to climate from the majority party today, and shows the opportunity for “industrial integration” to move the field forward in geographies where “carbon markets” will not.
Leading carbon removal companies are pivoting business models to find revenues for early commercialization in fossil fuel use cases aligned with the current political and economic moment. Spiritus announced a pivot from saline storage of CO2 to enhanced oil recovery, which I’ve written about in the past as a reasonable thing to do. Arbor is using cheap natural gas instead of biomass with its carbon capture process. Absolute Climate and Isometric are expanding into environmental attribute certificates — think Renewable Energy Credits for low-carbon commodities including power but also cement, steel, etc. As of this week, Carbon Direct is now Relae [sic] where they focus on decarbonization more broadly. I think it is great that these companies are finding non-carbon removal business models to commercialize given that the alternative is they would otherwise go out of business. They will be able to pivot back to carbon removal more quickly in the future.
Sure, U.S. bonds are creeping into uncomfortably high yield territory… but that’s not stopping leading carbon removal companies from accessing debt capital. Vaulted Deep announced a new $35M debt financing vehicle with Italian Bank Mediobanca, showing capital is there for companies with bankable offtakes in hand.
NGO, industry, and academic leaders showed up in force at carbon removal events like ones hosted by Carbon Removal Alliance and Carbon180. Appearances by climate leaders like Senator Schatz reaffirming support from DC for the field were very encouraging.
Takeaway 2: the path forward for removal in the mid- to long-term is murky at best.
The carbon removal community has a great near-term plan: (1) expand the admittedly-limited voluntary carbon market, (2) lean on European ETS integration and subsidization of early commercial carbon removal demonstrations to anchor the field until the next climate-forward U.S. Administration, (3) pilot “industrial integrations” in the U.S. to advance projects without talking about climate too directly, and (4) build capacity in high potential supply countries like India, Kenya, and Brazil so the field can scale when international finance can flow again.
But everyone involved in the field sees this plan as a “bridge” to scale. No one at NYCW seemed to have a strong hypothesis about how we can:
Sustain ETS prices at $150+/t level in OECD countries to support removals in the face of affordability + far right politics.
Create $100Bs in demand from OECD countries to support carbon removal supply scale up in emerging economies, especially as the current U.S. administration upends the (admitted sclerotic) international development finance architecture.
Find the fiscal space to support $10Bs in annual government innovation and commercialization funding for removals in the U.S. in a durable way for the coming decades. Trump will be gone eventually, but the politics that gave rise to his prominence seems unlikely to fade.
And beyond…
Takeaway 3: But is this even a problem worth worrying about?
Only slightly. The proverbial bridge to a sustainable carbon removal industry of the future is short. Unless governments step in with some type of support for removals at scale in the not-too-distant future, we risk a vicious cycle of companies pulling funding, leading to cascading bankruptcies at developers and then more negative press that leads to further funding cuts.
But everyone that is working on climate increasingly understands this. The UNEP overshoot report is about as unequivocal as it gets. Which really means something coming from an organization like UNEP that has been one of the most consistently conservative (re: skeptical) organizations on removals over the past decade.
Even as the Democrats turn to a theory of climate policy that avoids mentioning climate, carbon removal is squarely on the agenda. Carbon removal doesn’t need to fit neatly into the affordability + AI + anti-corruption agenda that is prominent on the left as midterm elections approach. Take the Thriving Economy Project, for example, which includes clear calls for the next Congress to support increases in RD&D and credit purchasing for removals at DOE.
What I came away from NYCW thinking most differently from when I arrived is that we don’t need to fit carbon removal into these near-term salient political frames for ambitious policies to be included in the “climate” agenda for the near future. Being honest that carbon removal is a critical long-term strategy — for a thriving economy, for a secure and safe society, for healthy and resilient communities — is what resonates most with our natural allies when it comes to why they should prioritize small but growing amounts of support for carbon removal today alongside everything else they are working on (e.g. permitting reform, etc.). Everyone understands that the long-term benefits from removals won’t be possible without near-term investment today. If we can keep making this case, I’m optimistic that we can keep muddling forward until the time is more opportune to move fast and at scale. After all, the carbon removal community is quite resilient.
The “murky at best” point is probably what I found most interesting here.
There’s clearly momentum and resilience in the carbon-removal ecosystem, but the harder question is what happens when removal has to compete for capital, energy and policy attention with things like AI and rapidly growing electricity demand.
I keep coming back to this tension: we may know carbon removal will be needed, while still not knowing which approaches can actually survive the path to scale.
That uncertainty doesn’t make the field less important to me it makes the questions around economics, energy use, permanence and policy even more important.