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What the heck is “surficial mineralization”?
On New York’s solar farmland, German nuclear, and Argentinian gas
A new fundraise from Isometric, plus more of this week’s — and last week’s! — big money moves.
Rob talks with Hannah Bebbington Valori, head of Frontier Climate, about the group’s new $915 million fund.
A new Searchlight Institute report joins a growing chorus arguing that corporate climate targets do more harm than good.
The move by University of Pennsylvania researcher Danny Cullenward intensifies a debate over integrity at the carbon accounting organization.
A well-known scientist has resigned from the independent oversight board of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, renewing questions about the integrity of one of the world’s most important arbiters of carbon emissions standards.
Danny Cullenward, who is also an economist and lawyer, notified the organization’s leadership on Monday that he no longer has “any confidence in the Protocol’s governance structure,” according to his resignation letter, which he posted publicly. He had previously tried to sound alarms about the organization and its lack of transparency in a paper he published in April.
Cullenward’s resignation letter goes a step further, accusing the Protocol of covering up an internal complaint he and a fellow board member filed, and of handing the reins of at least one of the organization’s standards to “a secret, industry-dominated drafting process.”
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol declined to comment on Cullenward’s resignation or answer questions about his account of events leading up to it.
The Protocol launched in the late 1990s as a joint project of the World Resources Institute, an environmental group, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, an industry association. Today it is the world’s leading standard-setter for corporate carbon accounting. More than 22,000 businesses rely on its methodologies to calculate and report their emissions. While adhering to the Protocol’s standards is still mostly voluntary, it will soon become a requirement under European Union and California disclosure rules.
Cullenward’s accusations arrive in the middle of a major revamp at the organization that began in 2022, designed specifically to improve the integrity of its corporate accounting standards. As part of the overhaul, it also put in place a new governance structure to improve transparency and accountability. Technical working groups made up of external experts would develop proposals to revise the standards to more accurately capture companies’ full carbon footprints, and then an Independent Standards Board would review and ultimately approve them. The Protocol appointed Cullenward to the independent board as one of its inaugural members in September 2024.
Cullenward’s reasons for leaving, as described in his letter, center around the development of a forest accounting standard to be used by companies that manage forests or have wood in their supply chains. The technical working group assigned to develop the standard could not reach a consensus, and ultimately submitted two competing proposals to the Board. Members associated with landowner groups and the forest products industry authored one of them, while the group’s research scientists primarily wrote the other.
According to Cullenward’s letter, as well as memos written by the academic scientists in the working group reviewed by Heatmap, the industry proposal, known as the “managed land proxy” method, would enable companies to claim they were removing carbon from the atmosphere when they cut down trees or used virgin wood. “This is the opposite of what physically happens when a forest is cut down,” Cullenward writes.
The method produces this counterintuitive result by allowing companies to take credit for all the carbon sucked up by the forests they manage, or in some cases by all the forests in a region, even if the company had no part in boosting that sequestration. If companies were to apply this accounting method to their products, Cullenward adds, not only would making virgin paper appear to involve zero carbon emissions, it would also apparently help to restore the climate. It would also look much more advantageous to the climate than producing recycled paper.
His concern is not just with this proposal, but also with how the Protocol handled a complaint filed by a proponent for the managed land proxy approach that challenged the scientists’ expertise. In response, the organization quietly solicited opinions from additional outside scientists on the two proposals.
Cullenward’s letter asserts that this was a decision made solely by the board’s chair, Alexander Bassen, alongside Protocol staff and without the rest of the board’s input. He writes that when these external comments were later shared with him and his fellow board members, the authors were “presented as neutral arbiters of a contested scientific debate,” even though they had been specifically referenced in the complaint as supporters of the managed land proxy approach.
Cullenward says he tried to “pursue internal accountability” but faced retaliation. In February he and another board member, an Australian forest ecologist named Heather Keith, filed an official complaint. The Protocol enlisted an outside mediator to resolve their dispute, but Cullenward says the hired adjudicator failed even to read the full complaint before meeting with him. The mediator also did not review any of the recordings of key board meetings referenced in the complaint, and was barred from speaking to technical working group scientists.
Cullenward and Keith eventually received a response to their complaint from the mediator but were told they could not share it, and the matter was deemed closed. According to a spokesperson for the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, who reached out to me with an update on the matter in late May, an independent review found “some process shortcomings” but “no material breach” of the organization’s rules or of due process. They added that “recommendations to address process shortcomings and strengthen conflict resolution are being reviewed and implemented.”
I reached out to Keith, who told me in an email that she was “deeply concerned about Danny’s resignation.” She praised his “wide-ranging expertise” in carbon accounting, law, and governance, and his “extensive contributions” to the board’s discussions. “One of the most valuable assets in a Board member is his demonstrated independence in making judgements that is based on a sound knowledge of climate science,” she wrote. The board “should be encouraging more people with Danny’s expertise and motivation for climate action to benefit the global community, not losing such valuable people.”
Cullenward’s primary concern moving forward is a new partnership between the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the International Organization for Standardization, which establishes technical specifications for a range of industries and purposes, to unify their emissions accounting rules. The two groups’ first joint undertaking is to develop a standard for assigning emissions to specific products, which will include forest carbon accounting.
While the Greenhouse Gas Protocol has publicly listed the members it assigned to the joint working group, the ISO is under no obligation to do so. Cullenward asserts in his letter that the new joint groups “operate with confidential membership that is heavily tilted in favor of industry interests.” He says a representative from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development told him that the group may draw on an existing ISO standard based on the managed land proxy approach.
Meanwhile, over a year after the corporate forest accounting technical working group submitted its proposals, the Independent Standards Board is now contemplating kicking off a seven-month public comment period on the recommendations, Cullenward writes. He concludes that this elongated comment period is just for show, and that the issues “have already been delegated” to the joint working group with the ISO.
I asked the Greenhouse Gas Protocol how it planned to ensure “transparency and accountability for its stakeholders,” as it has previously promised, when the membership and meeting minutes of the joint ISO working groups are not disclosed to the public. I also asked, for the second time, whether the organization plans to publish meeting minutes from Independent Standards Board meetings — a requirement under the board’s governing rules that it has not followed. The Protocol declined to answer.
A new scientific report on the state of the industry shows a growing gap between what we can do and what we need to do.
The gap between the world’s current capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the amount we’ll need to remove to materially address climate change is so large, it's hard to fathom crossing it. Now, a new report warns that the chasm is widening.
The third State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report, published on Tuesday, finds that while carbon removal research and deployment has advanced significantly in the past two years, it is still not growing quickly enough to reach the scale required to support the Paris Agreement temperature limits. Carbon emissions, meanwhile, have continued to rise globally, raising the amount of carbon removal required in turn.
“We’re seeing a lot of signs that there’s still growth happening,” Morgan Edwards, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of the authors, told me. “But we need to see a step change in both early indicators like investment and also actual deployments” between now and 2030, in addition to serious emission reductions, she said.
The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal is a project between researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Maryland, the University of Oxford, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. The latest report collates a wide range of indicators to assemble a detailed portrait of progress in the sector, from the number of research papers and patents published, to project deployments, costs, and investment, to voluntary purchases and policies.
The world currently removes approximately 2.2 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year through intentional human activity, the authors found, which is equivalent to about 5% of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. Nearly all of that carbon removal happens through what the authors deem “conventional” methods, which include planting trees, improved forest management, soil sequestration on farms and grasslands, and coastal wetland restoration.
Less than 1% of the 2.2 billion tons comes from “novel” methods such as direct air capture, bioenergy with carbon capture, enhanced weathering, and biochar, the most common method. Novel carbon removal increased from 1.4 million tons in 2023 to 2 million tons in 2025, with biochar responsible for most of that. In total, novel forms of carbon removal have to grow to 70 million by 2030 and 360 million by 2035 for the world to achieve net zero and begin to reverse warming back down to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, the authors found. And that’s assuming the emissions curve starts to bend dramatically downward.
“The gap will continue to grow if we do not pursue immediate and ambitious emissions reductions today,” Edwards said. Though the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree goal looks to be receding further out of reach, she stressed that net-zero emissions implies significant carbon removal, regardless of what temperature target you’re aiming for.
No matter how you look at it, getting to 70 million tons by 2030 would require a major shift. Right now, the most optimistic expectation for how much the carbon removal industry will grow by that point, based on corporate announcements, is about 42 million tons per year by 2030, according to the report. The capacity in the pipeline from projects that are under construction, however, amounts to just 8.4 million by 2030. At the country level, only about a third of national climate strategies even mention novel carbon removal methods, and overall carbon removal ambition among countries would have to double to close the 2030 gap.
This isn’t impossible — other technologies have achieved comparable growth rates. The report’s authors estimate that carbon removal would have to scale at speeds similar to solar power and electric vehicles. Unlike those singular solutions, however, carbon removal consists of many different technologies that intersect with a range of industries — oil and gas drilling, farming, forestry, mining — and therefore may not scale as linearly. Also, unlike EVs and solar, carbon removal isn’t a useful product with an obvious market. It’s a public good, like waste management — and an expensive one, at that.
Carbon removal funding is also highly concentrated, the authors warn, making the industry vulnerable to sudden shifts in policy and investment appetite. For example, Microsoft alone has made more than 80% of carbon removal purchases to date; then in April it confirmed it was pausing procurements, leaving behind major uncertainty over who, if anyone, will fill its role in the market. Similarly, most government funding for pilot projects to date has concentrated in three countries — the U.S., Sweden, and Denmark — but more recently the U.S. has dismantled much of its support.
The industry is also concentrated in terms of deployment. Biochar and bioenergy with carbon capture account for almost all of the 2 million tons of novel removals the authors identified. Direct air capture facilities removed just 1,500 tons in 2025, according to the report. All of that came from Climeworks’ two facilities in Iceland — Orca and Mammoth — and it’s significantly less than the roughly 40,000 tons these facilities were designed to capture each year. (While there are a few other direct air capture plants operating, they have not yet had any removals certified by a third party, and so were not included in the estimate.)
There are some bright spots in the report. Research funding, scientific publications, demonstration projects, public policies, and private investment in carbon removal are all trending up. It’s just that the results of these efforts — in terms of patents, projects under construction, and the amount of carbon being removed — are uneven.
While the report is a valiant effort to assess how far carbon removal has come, the overall picture remains deeply uncertain. That word, “uncertain,” appears over and over, applying to such questions as:
The authors emphasize the need for more research, public policy, and funding to narrow these uncertainties — especially on the demand side of the equation.
“Both demand and supply side policies are important for innovation, but much of the policy we’ve seen for CDR today has been more supply-side focused,” said Edwards. “There’s a need for a strong signal to companies who are developing these technologies and implementing CDR on the ground that the demand will be there.”
