How to stop undermining gigatonne scale carbon removal

This is Nick. Today, I’ll turn the pen over to Peter Minor and Greg Becker, co-founders of Absolute Climate. Their piece addresses one of the biggest questions facing carbon removal: How to scale in a way that builds trust, attracts investment, and delivers lasting impact. They argue that permanence and MRV are not obstacles but essential foundations for making carbon removal work at gigatonne scale.

Earlier this year, Paul Gambill and I made some rather provocative claims about the industry’s path forward, and I am glad to bring in new perspectives to keep the conversation moving.

P.S. I will be welcoming more guest contributors in the months ahead. I hope you enjoy this first one, and if it sparks ideas, I would love to hear them.

OPINION

In order to be effective, carbon removal (CDR) needs to scale dramatically. We all agree on that. Without scale, it will remain an expensive drop in the bucket compared to ongoing emissions and the broader work of mitigation. Right now, the system is built around a small group of corporate buyers, and the volume of removal is a rounding error compared to what’s needed.

Scaling requires more than just speed, however. The better path forward is to scale with standards that align credit claims to real impact, clarify what’s known and what’s still emerging, and use smarter tools to make delivering rigorously qualified removals easier. 

This approach demands measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems that enable projects to deploy today while maintaining trust and accountability with an eye for tomorrow. Early-stage projects naturally come with uncertainty but provide essential real-world data to improve MRV over time. These lessons are critical to unlocking the investment and resources required for additional scale. The challenge is designing frameworks that balance rigor with flexibility, allowing innovation and accelerating deployment while maintaining buyer confidence.

Finding the right balance requires MRV systems that are strong enough to build trust but flexible enough to allow new ideas to grow and projects to get started. Getting this right is key to making carbon removal work at the scale we need.

The cost of deprioritizing measurement and verification

The focus on permanence, MRV, and additionality exists today because their previous absence broke trust in the voluntary offsets market. Stripping out rigor for scale led to lofty claims, shaky results, and lots of greenwashing. We can't afford to wait another decade for sentiments around CDR to improve, especially not if we repeat the same mistakes. We can’t afford to fail.

A carbon credit is a promise. It represents a ton removed from the atmosphere in a real, measurable, durable way. That value depends on a project’s ability to demonstrate mitigation of existing and eventually historical emissions. When that promise is broken, it enables more emissions, undermines fair competition, and fuels the kind of scrutiny that can consume years as developers try to shore up buyer confidence again. We’ve seen this in the rainforest offset market, where over 90% of credits sold were later deemed worthless. Buyer pullback followed, rightfully so. So did public backlash. And the trust crisis in that market, as well as its impact on other credit markets, still hasn’t gone away.

Many, if not most, CDR pathways are still in their early stages, and innovation is expensive. Those doing more credible work today often end up competing with others who make comparable claims but cut corners and don’t necessarily deliver the same results. This creates a market where responsible innovators, whose solutions are more expensive and less immediately scalable, are disadvantaged rather than rewarded. Scaling quickly without proper safeguards could cause the system to collapse under the weight of its false promises, as we’ve seen plenty of times in other carbon credit markets.

Prioritizing scale over integrity risks market confidence, public trust, and billions already invested. Trust, once lost, is hard to regain.

Evolving the system without weakening it

Today’s carbon removal market often prioritizes established pathways, which, while effective, can limit the flexibility needed to scale emerging technologies and foster innovation. The solution isn’t to lower standards to level the playing field between less mature solutions and proven ones.

To encourage innovation without compromising trust, the carbon removal market requires systems that acknowledge the diversity of projects. Not all removals are equal. Credits should reflect differences in their atmospheric impacts, certainty, and the ability to measure results accurately. Early-stage carbon removal technologies are already issuing credits, demonstrating that innovation can advance within existing frameworks. But using the same label for these credits as for those from mature pathways clouds market clarity. Innovation deserves credit, but it must be classified to accurately reflect uncertainty.

This opens the door to a tiered MRV approach. Early-stage projects and buyers focused on innovation can use a simplified monitoring approach to move faster and at lower cost. Meanwhile, buyers who require more confidence can rely on thorough, independent monitoring.

For this flexible system to succeed, two safeguards are crucial: 

1. Transparent tracking and clear disclosure of any differences from a project or technology’s actual atmospheric impacts. 

2. Incentives must encourage projects to continually improve their MRV methods, preventing a race to the bottom.

Satisfying these two conditions effectively categorizes credits by technology maturity and risk, helping buyers and investors understand the landscape and support projects fairly at different stages. This system would be similar to the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) used by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Together, these approaches provide a path to scale carbon removal responsibly, striking a balance between the need for innovation and the imperative of integrity.

At Absolute Climate, this balance is reflected in the development of flexible crediting labels that support early-stage projects while providing clear signals when solutions are ready for broader deployment.

Carbon removal is entering a new phase, defined not just by bold climate goals but by real money, real scrutiny, and real expectations. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and JPMorgan are putting hundreds of millions into long-term offtake agreements, and their investments are helping usher in the heightened scrutiny that now defines the market. The standards set today will shape how the market grows, who gets rewarded, and whether the solutions backed actually deliver.

This moment is not about relaxing the rules. It is about being smarter in how they are applied. That means moving beyond blanket claims and binary labels, building systems that recognize nuance, reward rigor, and evolve with the science.

Effective MRV frameworks provide the flexibility to support early-stage projects while clearly signaling when a project is ready for scale. By establishing a clear “North Star” for MRV quality, the industry can maintain confidence without creating unnecessary barriers to deployment.

The future of carbon removal depends not on lowering the bar, but on proving we can clear it.

If you’re interested in learning more about Peter and Greg’s work, check out Absolute Climate and follow them on LinkedIn.

— Peter, Greg, and Nick