I wrote two pieces for Rainbow earlier this year. The first argued that carbon markets need field engineers, not just scientists. Erica Dorr, Rainbow's head of science, read it and pushed back: the binary was too clean, the caricatures too neat. I wrote a response piece about her work as a scientist applying her knowledge in carbon dioxide removal. Today I brought both subjects of those essays onto the show to hash it out together.

What is science and what is engineering? It sounds like a question from your first week of college, but in carbon removal it maps directly onto how registries set requirements, how projects get certified, how you balance rigor with feasibility, and ultimately whether the whole system holds together or collapses under its own weight. Erica and Samara Vantil, one of Rainbow's environmental engineers on the certification team, walked me through how these two disciplines actually interact on a daily basis at a working carbon registry.

The conversation went somewhere I didn't expect. The real tension isn't between science and engineering at all. Those two are closer to each other than either is to the commercial side. The actual friction lives between the technical teams (science and engineering alike) and the commercial pressures of needing to ship credits, sign projects, and keep the lights on. And every decision about where to set a requirement, how many samples to demand, whether to accept a conservative discount or reject a project outright, sits right in that tension.

We talked about Charm's decision to reduce sampling, about whether quality discourse has become meaningless repetition, about the optimal number of travel deaths being non-zero, and about how you know whether you're cutting scope for the right reasons or because you're about to lose a deal. These are the questions that everyone in carbon markets faces and almost no one talks about publicly.

My sincere thanks to Samara and Erica for engaging with this so openly. These are, as Erica put it, the ultimate questions.

This Episode's Sponsors

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⁠⁠⁠Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA⁠⁠⁠

Resources

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Rainbow

"Why carbon markets need field engineers, not just scientists" (Rainbow blog)

"What scientists actually do in carbon removal" (Rainbow blog)

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

"327: Carbon Removal & the Philosophy of Science: Kuhn's Paradigms & Feyerabend's Anarchism—w/ Anu Khan & Holly Jean Buck"

"Learnings from the Field: Reducing MRV Costs by 97% Through Ops Consistency" by Charm's Max Levine & Tim Thomson

"The Uncomfortable Truth About Carbon Removal Quality" (this is where the line, "the optimal number of traffic deaths is nonzero" comes from.