The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 11 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Orbuch: Legacy carbon offset market operated as an aligned house of cards
“Because the registries and the feedback loop with the registries is to just keep issuing credits and make each credit look the same as every other credit, everyone's incentivized the other way because the buyers don't want to go back and say, Wow, all this mon…”
Orbuch: Avoided deforestation carbon credits have near-zero net impact due to leakage
“Avoided deforestation, for example, is like a classically cheap and conceptually compelling credit especially in, you know, say the Amazon that's I mean, basically impossible to prove the counterfactual because there's often significant amounts of leakage, and…”
Orbuch: Next-generation carbon registries must be buyer-funded with ex-post credit issuance
“So there's two things that change. One is that the buyer pays the registry to evaluate deliveries and two, the credits are issued after they've been delivered, not preemptively before.”
Orbuch: Overly conservative scientific governance breaks carbon removal project finance
“Like, loudest, most conservative scientist in the room-based governance doesn't work for this. You actually do need to make something off-takeable and contractable, and the way you do that is for these emerging more uncertain approaches, or the approaches that…”
Orbuch: Categorize CDR by trapping mechanism rather than natural versus engineered
“One thing that I found a little more useful is to kind of just think about like, what's the actual trapping mechanism for the CO two? Like where does the carbon actually end up? And there you can sort of think like, okay, well, it's leaving the air and another…”
Orbuch: Carbon removal is fundamentally costlier than basic emissions reductions
“Carbon removal is never intended to be a substitute for emissions reduction, and, like, to that point is going to be dramatically more expensive than the vast majority of reductions, right? Like, that's just how this works. Like, not burning something is going…”
Orbuch: Carbon removal must match emission permanence to achieve true net zero
“An emission is permanent, basically. Like, an emission of CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, not forever, but hundreds of thousands of years. And if you want to somehow net that out with a proportional removal, like, it's not propo…”
Orbuch: Direct air capture will be far easier to verify than biomass
“Some of the more expensive methods, like direct air capture, are gonna probably be easier to verify. And some of the potentially cheaper methods, especially those using biomass, are probably gonna be harder to verify.”
Orbuch: Tying supplier margins to narrowing error bars aligns incentives with science
“What you want is you want the supplier to be able to sell more tons and make more money for the same cogs if they can bring in the error bars around the uncertainty. And innovate on measurement, innovate on modeling, innovate on how they deploy, innovate on th…”
Orbuch: Removing biomass for CDR severely depletes ecosystem nitrogen and phosphorus
“It's not like the plants are just like creating a block of carbon. Like there's nitrogen and phosphorus and iron and other stuff in there. And if you're taking that out of the cycle, you're taking the nutrients out in ratio with the carbon. Right. In contrast,…”