As we warned, various magical proposals to make carbon go away so we could have our economies and eat them too are not working out. It’s Heatmap’s turn to admit a painful reality. Under the headline “The Sorry State of Carbon Removal” it laments that “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.” Now whether we need to do it or not is more open to question than they have yet faced. But if we can’t do it, we won’t do it even if we need to. So what’s Plan B? Shut down the economy because the dang thing won’t stop emitting the dreaded carbon, which has evidently replaced chlorine as the “devil’s element” in some people’s mythology?

To their credit, they do not minimize the scale of the problem. The article begins:

“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.”

Now we could poke them in the eye for waiting so long to notice it. But at CDN we’re all about open debate and honesty and if someone realizes they’ve been wrong and comes clean, it’s actually enormously helpful both on the specific point and for the example it sets. But again, they’re only half-way there. They continue:

“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.”

So what exactly is sacred about Paris? It is well-established that its temperature limits were a political device not a scientific finding.

Also, why do emissions keep rising globally? Many people, Heatmap definitely among them, have assured us that “renewables” with smaller carbon footprints are growing fast, galloping away in the race to achieve not just Net Zero but also efficiency, affordability, reliability and all that there. And now here comes the Physics Reaper. Including on this whole gee-whiz starry-eyed George-Jetson carbon removal. As the piece adds, drawing on the report:

“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.”

Planting trees? Gosh. Why didn’t nature think of that one? But we are in favour of improved forest management, wetland restoration and a general disposition to work with nature not against it including when it comes to a lawn that welcomes native plants rather than imposing monoculture through machinery and chemicals. However the simple fact is that the “novel” stuff hasn’t worked, the natural stuff is part of a carbon cycle that doesn’t do what we want it to, and Plan A where you prevent emissions because you can’t abracadabra them away is also not working since it was premised on wind and solar replacing oil and gas and they can’t.