In the final episode of our CDR Buyers Deep Dive, Tom and Emily ask what needs to change if carbon removal buying is going to move from early adopters to something much bigger. What would make buying easier, less risky, more attractive, and more scalable? And what happens when the market’s biggest buyer suddenly causes a wobble?

In this episode:

🔎 Trust Me, I’m Infrastructure: Buyers need confidence that what they’re buying is real, durable, verified and defensible. We hear why standards, MRV, insurance, registries and credible intermediaries are much more than just boring plumbing.

🧾 Making CDR Make Sense: It’s not enough for the system to be robust. It also has to make sense to people who don’t spend all day reading carbon removal procurement documents for fun. (No shame to those who do.)

🛡️ Risky Business: We explore how insurance can help unlock finance, reassure buyers and support developers before things go wrong. Reminder: we’re all on the same team here.

📣 Tell Better Stories, Please: We’ve all heard it. Carbon removal often gets explained in climate science language. But CFOs, procurement teams and senior leadership may just need a different story.

🏗️ The Supply Problem: Even if more buyers arrive, there still need to be enough projects to buy from. We learn why early capital, patient funding and policy signals are essential if supply is going to grow. And grow it must.

🧊 The Microsoft Wobble: With reports (and some viral LinkedIn posts) that Microsoft has paused new CDR purchases, we unpack what this means. Is it a market crisis, or a reminder that Microsoft’s buying behaviour was always highly unusual?

👥 Featuring

Guest insights from:

• Leila Toplic (formerly of Carbonfuture)
• Bee Hui Yeh (Patch)
• Ibrahim Sarwar (Artio)
• Caroline Corbett-Thompson (Wise)
• Adam Fraser (Terraset)
• Alexander Farsan (Klarna)
• Tank Chen (CDR.fyi)
• Ben Wynn (Glad)

Hosts: Tom Previte and Emily Swaddle

Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks

Podcast Coordinator: Ellie Morris

Get in loser, we’re going shopping. In part two of our buyers deep dive, Tom and Emily move from motivation to mechanics. Because deciding to buy carbon removal is only the beginning. The real challenge is everything that comes next.

In this episode:

🏗️ Buying CDR Is Not Exactly A Trip To The Shops: Tom and Emily step inside the deal room to ask what buying carbon removal actually involves, and why the process still looks different from buyer to buyer.

🤝 Direct, Marketplace, Or Somewhere In Between?: We explore the major routes into the market, and how each path shifts who carries the burden of due diligence, education, risk, and relationship management.

📚 A Tiny Language Check-In: Offtakes. Pre-purchases. Payment on delivery. Emily makes sure we are all still speaking the same language.

💥 Buy Now, Pay Earlier: We look at catalytic buying, and why paying early can matter as much as buying at all. For early-stage suppliers, pre-purchases can unlock cash flow, credibility, and further finance. But for buyers, they also mean taking on very real delivery and technology risk.

💸 Money, Money, Money: Eventually, every lofty climate intention runs into the same question: which budget line is paying for this? We explore the internal mechanics of getting CDR through procurement, finance, legal, and contract systems that were not really designed with carbon removal in mind.

🧾 Internal Carbon Pricing, Revenue Shares, And Other Ways To Fund The Madness: Klarna explains its internal carbon fee model. Wise explains why it ties climate finance to revenue. The wider point: there is still no single standard approach, but serious buyers are finding ways to make climate spending durable.

😵‍💫 Why It Still Feels So Higgledy-Piggledy: Buyers, suppliers, and intermediaries are all building the path as they walk it, and that friction has consequences for who enters the market, and who gets left waiting for capital.

👥 Featuring

Guest insights from:

• Paolo Piffaretti (ClimeFi)
• Bee Hui Yeh (Patch)
• Brendan Molony (Docusign)
• Caroline Corbett-Thompson (Wise)
• Adam Fraser (Terraset)
• Ibrahim Sarwar (Artio)
• Alexander Farsan (Klarna)

Hosts: Tom Previte and Emily Swaddle

Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks

Podcast Coordinator: Ellie Morris

In the first part of our buyers deep dive, Tom and Emily start with a deceptively simple question: why is anyone buying carbon removal at all? In a market with no universal mandate, high prices, and a dash of reputational risk, the real surprise is not that buying is hard. It’s that any company manages to do it in the first place.

In this episode:

💸 Why Buying CDR Can Look Completely Irrational: From a CFO’s perspective, carbon removal can look expensive, risky, hard to explain, and suspiciously like something that arrived in their inbox before the budget meeting. So what gets a purchase over the line?

🌱 Belief, Conviction, and Backing the Market Early: For some buyers, the motivation starts with a simple premise: carbon removal will be necessary, so the industry needs support now.

🏢 From Climate Values to Corporate Strategy: Conviction matters, but no market scales on vibes alone. We explore how CDR gets translated from ‘the planet needs this’ into something that can survive contact with a spreadsheet and at least one sceptical colleague from finance.

⏳ Buying Early as a Competitive Advantage: What if carbon removal is not just a climate gesture, but a strategic hedge? We unpack the argument that early buyers are not simply purchasing tonnes for today, but locking in future relationships, terms, and access to supply before the market tightens.

⚖️ Responsibility, Risk, and the Long-Term Licence to Operate: As climate regulation evolves, investors pay closer attention, and supply chain pressures grow, will carbon removal start to look less like a nice-to-have and more like part of how some businesses are preparing for the future?

🔀 Putting It All Together: No one wakes up one morning, points at a carbon removal contract, and says: yes, this alone will save the quarter. This episode traces the messy mix of motives that gets a purchase over the line.

👥 Featuring

Guest insights from:

• Alexander Farsan (Klarna)
• Adam Fraser (Terraset)
• Caroline Corbett-Thompson (Wise)
• Paolo Piffaretti (ClimeFi)
• Leila Toplic (formerly of Carbonfuture)

Hosts: Tom Previte and Emily Swaddle

Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks