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Welcome to Keeling’s Descent with Ryan Davidson

KD #1: We can only scale carbon removal to relevant levels if we emphasize its economic benefits over its climate benefits.

I used to think carbon removal was a distraction from “real” climate action.

Like too many people working in decarbonization, I thought it was a red herring in the hunt for a sustainable future, a moral hazard enabling us (not just oil companies, but everyone) to continue emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

I’ll come straight out and tell you that I no longer believe those things.

My name is Ryan Davidson, and for my full-time job, I’ve worked for a wave energy technology developer on business development, policy advocacy, and communications, among other things, since 2021. After a few years working on emission reductions, though, I realized reductions alone wouldn’t be enough to slow climate change to a halt. I understand I’m preaching to the choir here, but in spring 2024 it hit me just how vital removals will be, too.

I started learning about carbon removal in my free time in mid-2024, mulling over what my personal philosophy on the topic might be. I completed the AirMiners Boot Up program last fall (shoutout to AirMiners co-founder, and fellow IRCR contributor, Jason Grillo). During and after that time I met folks working in all corners of the CDR ecosystem who were kind enough to offer me their time and wisdom.

Semi-confident in my understanding of the vast world of CDR, last November, I started committing my thoughts to writing  in Renaissance Carbon, a weekly Substack on the tech, politics, and culture of all things carbon removal. One of my main points – perhaps the main point – has been that we can only scale carbon removal to relevant levels if we emphasize its economic benefits over its climate benefits. While this has been (and will continue to be) especially true during the second Trump administration, I believe the point stands regardless of who occupies the White House.

One of my first Renaissance Carbon posts included a “10 Commandments of CDR.” We live in a different world now than in late 2024, but I believe the Commandments still generally hold:

    1. Thou shalt not focus too much on DAC.
    2. Thou shalt not cast stones at DAC, either.
    3. Thou shalt emphasize CDR methods with viable revenue streams beyond CDR.
    4. Thou shalt not rely upon the voluntary carbon market to build a gigaton-scale CDR industry.
    5. Thou shalt not forget about lifecycle emissions.
    6. Thou shalt not compare CDR to waste management.
    7. Thou shalt not mistake CCUS for CDR.
    8. Honor thy market-pull mechanisms.
    9. Honor thy subnational policy mechanisms.
    10. Thou shalt not covet funding for emissions reductions.

My CDR beliefs have evolved over the past nine months, but I wouldn’t change much about this list. If I were to change anything, I’d reword Number 4 and add an 11th one somewhere: CDR is not an industry at all. I’m highly confident in this statement for several reasons:

    1. Lots of CDR methods are only similar to each other in that they each happen to remove CO2from the atmosphere.
    2. If we consider carbon removal an industry, the failure or scandal of one company could poison the well for other companies that are in no way similar.
    3. Just as carbon emissions are a negative externality, carbon removals are a positive externality. “Carbon emissions” isn’t an industry, so carbon removal isn’t either.
    4. Bunching together a variety of seemingly different climate technologies and processes and calling the aggregate an “industry” shines a spotlight on one of the biggest things we don’t want to put in the spotlight: the fact that we’d support projects primarily for their climate benefits to begin with. Whether you like it or not, the economic argument must take precedent.

Individual CDR methods like direct air capture and biochar may be industries, and even MRV may be its own industry, but bundling the entire CDR ecosystem together and acting like it’s a cohesive industry will do us more harm than good. Throughout 2025, I’ve added additional pillars to my CDR philosophy. Here are a few of them:

    • CDR is not about “degrowth.” The Abundance discussion, spurred by the New York Times bestseller from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is a bit too simple, unstructured, and, in my opinion, optimistic. But what Klein and Thompson get right is that we won’t scale low- and negative-emissions infrastructure with the same stringent regulations in place that strangle infrastructure development today.
    • CDR can help bolster national security if we want it to . As one example, manufacturing negative-emission materials may allow us to build a domestic circular economy and reduce our reliance upon imports. As another example, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) can remove CO2 from the atmosphere and provide baseload power to the grid, all the while supporting local feedstock providers and decoupling the domestic economy from global supply chains.
    • There are no silver bullets in addressing climate change. Within the world of carbon removal, perhaps the biggest violation here comes from unrelenting proponents of ocean iron fertilization. When we give any solution the silver bullet treatment, we implicitly decide that its benefits outweigh its risks. Sometimes, I fear we lose the forest for the trees. Or in the case of OIF, I guess we lose the algae bloom for the plankton.

One of the most rewarding parts of writing Renaissance Carbon is learning lessons like these. I’ll continue writing Renaissance Carbon, which I’ve recently expanded to cover a broader range of carbon-related topics than just carbon removal. This publication with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal, however, will focus exclusively on CDR.

I thought for a while about what to call this publication. I decided on “Keeling’s Descent” because that’s exactly the long-term goal of the CDR ecosystem: to not only flatten the Keeling Curve, but to force it downward. Before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 levels sat at around 280 parts per million (ppm). Now they’re at 424 ppm, representing a human-caused increase of 51 percent. Don’t get me wrong; we’re much more than 51 percent better off now than we were before the Industrial Revolution. But at some point, our increased well-being will plateau while emissions and their associated negative impacts continue to expand. Given the quantum leaps we’ve seen in clean energy technologies over the past couple of decades, I’m inclined to believe that point is now.

Charles David Keeling, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, started collecting atmospheric CO2 readings at the Mauna Loa Observatory in 1958. The saw-toothed upward-ticking graph has become one of the most iconic visuals in climate science. Graphic courtesy of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Achieving net-zero emissions globally by 2050 would imply that the curve will flatten out within the next 25 years. I hate to say it, but this feels like a pipedream. The curve won’t trend downward for a very long time; I’d give it at least three decades, and even that might be aggressively optimistic. I am optimistic that it will someday happen, though.

On this note, I’ll offer a disclaimer. I’m not going to use this platform to paint a rosy picture of the future or push crackpot proposals that will magically help us remove 10 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. I consider myself a climate optimist, but optimism without realism is nothing short of insanity. I may discuss uncomfortable topics, and we will face all too many inconvenient truths in the years to come. One example: Oil and gas companies will play a huge role in scaling CDR. Do they see it as a hall pass to continue producing fossil fuels? Maybe. Do they see it as a way to stay relevant? Absolutely. But does that even matter?

Finally, at the end of each Keeling’s Descent post, I’ll drop the latest CO2 reading from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In the summer months, this number will fall because the growth of land-based vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere outweighs human-caused CO2 emissions. In the fall, winter, and spring months, this number will rise as biologic sinks (and humanity, of course) release their CO2 back into the atmosphere.

Nobody knows when (or even if) the Keeling Curve will reach an apex.

But when (or if) it does, let’s be ready to pull the curve downward while building our economy upward.

Latest CO2 reading: 423.84 ppm

Ryan Davidson is a business development and policy specialist in the U.S. marine energy sector, and in his free time he writes Renaissance Carbon, a weekly Substack about the tech, politics, and culture of all things carbon. The opinions expressed in Keeling’s Descent are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any employer.

Contact: ryandavidson911@gmail.com

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CDR Industry Culture to Withstand a US Climate Policy Superstorm – Climagination with Jason Grillo

… And what ‘Fight Club’ can teach us

Greetings again after I took the summer off from writing! Here’s something lost in the discourse surrounding the One Big Beautiful Bill and its dire consequences for climate movement in the United States: the much-coveted 45Q tax credits remain intact. In fact for CCS purposes the value per ton of those credits increased to be at parity with DAC credits. Despite the many setbacks the climate movement saw in the OBBB passage, carbon dioxide removal seems to have escaped the worst of outcomes. Begs the question: why?

I’m not going to rehash the politics of how and why the OBBB itself came to pass. Rather, in this piece I’m going to explore some upstream reasons why I believe that carbon dioxide removal was spared the worst, with culture as a primary driver.  To be clear: I believe the bill’s repercussions for many climate solutions – especially the wind, solar, and electric vehicle industries – will hamper economic growth and climate progress. Think of this writing more as an opinion essay rather than a data-driven argument, drawing on experience as an entrepreneur, policy advocate, and community organizer.

There’s an adage that politics is downstream of culture. So it would follow that carbon removal culture is part of the reason that CDR has to date enjoyed downstream political support in the USA, . The nature of the industry and the policy advocacy efforts by many, many dedicated individuals to this point in time has provided something that regulators, civil servants, elected officials – and their constituents – can get behind, on both Left and Right, in conservative or liberal contexts.

Here are some of my observations on the advantages that CDR achieves in its general industry culture:

1 – Carbon removal represents a new type of climate solution, famously thrust into the spotlight in 2018 with the IPCC statement that removing excess atmospheric CO2 is going to be necessary to achieve the world’s climate targets. Being new has spared CDR from excess baggage of decades of fighting over environmental policy. This offers a contrast to renewable energy, or EVs which are making headway significantly now, but only after decades of opposition and foot-dragging.¹

Furthermore, the novelty of CDR is not in stopping emissions, but targeting what is existing in the atmosphere already – which makes for a different framing of climate solution. In short, there’s no incumbent industry that is going to resist the threat of being displaced!

2 – Because CDR features many different technological approaches, the industry as a whole can offer a diverse set of co-benefits to a wide variety of stakeholders beyond the all-important ton of atmospheric carbon dioxide removed. In other words, while industry insider participants may contend adamantly about advantages and drawbacks of particular CDR methods, there’s enough benefits to serve the additional needs of many interested parties. CDR is not biochar alone, Direct Air Capture alone, or BECCS alone – it is a set of widely varying solutions centered around one central problem.

3 – Third, branding. Excess atmospheric carbon dioxide is legally characterized as pollution as of the 2007 Massachusetts vs EPA Supreme Court decision. And pollution = bad. As such, the carbon removal industry strives to clean up this big carbon spill in the sky² – and do so in a way that does not threaten incumbent industries. And in doing so consider the non-climate aspects of a CDR solution – a climate solution which does not talk about climate per se, similar to how the first rule of ‘Fight Club’ is to “not talk about Fight Club”.

A corollary: Transforming a pollutant into a product that can provide value to a customer turns the climate conversation on its head. It tickles the imagination to think that a ‘bad’ can become a ‘good’. I’m particularly fond of the Reversing Climate Change podcast not just because of the content, but because of the mindset that leads us to think that reversing the worst of climate change is possible – it suggests agency rather than passivity.

These factors make conversations about carbon removal easy to enter into. The ‘ask’ in carbon removal is not so much asking people to change their lifestyles – that can lead to resistance. Rather to seek support for forward thinking solutions that truly tickle the imagination. To wit, anecdotally I’ll say that I’ve had many conversations with family, friends, and friends of friends about carbon removal, and I frequently hear:

“You can do that? Really??”

“Yes, really. We can turn a waste pollutant into a product or service of value.”

And when I tell people that if we stop emitting CO2 first and foremost, while scaling up carbon removal, then we can draw down the 425ppm of carbon dioxide³ to preindustrial levels over the course of decades, I get the same response: 

“This is possible? Really?” 

Yes. It. Is. Possible. 

This framing imbues the industry with a message of hope, which has enabled CDR (to date) to sidestep the culture wars that have led many climate solutions to fall victim to pitched on-again / off-again battles in the United States, depending on the whims of 2 or 4 year election cycles. A positive culture emerged from a blank slate, offering potential economic benefits while moving forward on a narrative of hope.4

I firmly believe we need an “all of the above” strategy for climate solutions – no one solution set alone is enough. Threading the needle of culture can lead to policy success downstream; some sectors of climate solutions have succeeded at that better than others. Carbon dioxide’s ability to avoid the worst of climate culture wars to date has to be considered a success in the early stages of the industry.

Jason Grillo is the Principal of Earthlight Enterprises marketing consultancy, Co-Founded AirMiners, and is a voluntary contributor to CDR.FYI. This post appeared on the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal blog. 

The opinions expressed in this writing are each author’s own and do not reflect the position of any employer or associated organization.

¹See GM’s EV1 which was on the US market from 1996 to 1999 

²Hat tip to Mike Robinson at Pacific Coast Legacy Emissions Action Network (PACCLEAN.org) for this metaphor

³As of August 2, 2025, per https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2

4And “hope is a good thing – maybe the best of things”