Which story is carbon dioxide removal actually in?—w/ Rudy Krehbiel of EcoEngineers
Every industry runs on a mythology, and carbon dioxide removal has several of them available at once. There is the hype cycle, where the trough of disillusionment is a phase you survive on the way to mainstream adoption. There is the solar cost curve, where a technology is expensive and clunky for years and then abruptly cheaper than everything else. There is Moore's Law, and also the one where the world returns to normal after the next election. Each of those carries a promise about the ending that may not deliver.
Rudy Krehbiel thinks some of those stories are misleading us, and this episode is about working out which ones. My introduction runs long because I wanted to talk about Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation first, a film about a man who does not know what genre he is in until the genre changes around him, and which you should watch whether or not you have ever thought about a carbon credit.
Rudy works on strategic development at EcoEngineers, who also sponsor this show, and he came into carbon dioxide removal from startups and venture capital, which is why he keeps reaching for diffusion curves. His read is that we are at the innovator stage and mistaking it for a trough. His figures, and they hold up against CDR.fyi's April 2026 snapshot: fewer than 50 million tonnes contracted, barely over a million delivered, Microsoft alone accounting for 78.5% of the disclosed total, and a median purchase outside Microsoft still under 100 tonnes. Diagnose that as failure and you start prescribing medicine for a disease nobody has.
The harder argument is the one about public goods. Solar panels and EVs deliver something microeconomic you would still buy if climate change did not exist. A tonne of carbon dioxide removed does not. That makes this, in Rudy's words, arguably the hardest public good anyone has tried to fund, and it is why he will not call the ending inevitable. I asked him to name the story we ought to be inside of. What he answered? You'll have to listen to find out.
The Show's Sponsor
EcoEngineers: a full-service advisory and consulting firm focused on carbon dioxide removal, decarbonization, and carbon markets.
Rudy works at EcoEngineers and EcoEngineers sponsors this show. I would have had him on either way, and you should know the arrangement.
Resources
- Subscribe to the Reversing Climate Change Substack for bonus content and ad-free episodes
- Climate Workers Anonymous, the other show I make
- EcoEngineers
- "How Carbon Removal Loses", the episode Rudy and I keep circling
- Belief that makes itself true: a hyperstition for carbon dioxide removal
- Why Don Quixote is so misunderstood
- How non-human intelligence will change us, with D.W. Pasulka, where the Marshall McLuhan scene comes up
- Adaptation (2002), written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Spike Jonze
- The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean
- Story by Robert McKee
- Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers
- Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore
- Gartner hype cycle
- CDR.fyi's demand structure snapshot, April 2026, the source for the Microsoft and Frontier concentration figures
- Public good, non-rivalrous and non-excludable, used correctly for once (my pet peeve)
- Whig historiography
- Alternative für Deutschland
- National Rally
- Hanging a lampshade
- The Bridge on the River Kwai
- Liberty ships and Victory gardens
More episodes from "Reversing Climate Change"
Don't miss an episode of “Reversing Climate Change” and subscribe to it in the GetPodcast app.
