LinkedIn·Saturday, 22 August 2026·5d ago

This case raises a bigger question for me than whether the #carbonprice is high enough to make CCS viable. “Are we financing the…

Ingmar Nopens

This case raises a bigger question for me than whether the #carbonprice is high enough to make CCS viable. “Are we financing the decarbonisation of the existing system — or financing the transition to a different one?” CCS has an important role for genuinely hard-to-abate emissions. But fundamentally, it allows much of the existing system to continue: use fossil carbon, capture the resulting CO₂ and store it. It manages the emissions without necessarily removing the underlying dependency on fossil carbon. And when that solution also requires a sufficiently high carbon price to be economically viable, we add another vulnerability. Projects get delayed or cancelled, while our #carbondebt continues to accumulate. There is another approach. Reduce fossil carbon use. Cycle carbon through CCU where it makes sense. And increasingly replace fossil carbon with #biogenic carbon: let plants capture atmospheric CO₂, turn that biomass into commercially useful materials, and keep that carbon stored in our buildings and products. The crucial difference is that the product has an economic reason to exist even without the carbon credit. #Carbonfinance becomes #transition capital — accelerating adoption — rather than life support for the business case. But perhaps the biggest difference is what happens upstream. Done right, scaling #regenerative biomass value chains can create new agricultural revenues while restoring degraded land, improving #soilhealth and supporting rural economies. Carbon then becomes only one outcome of a much broader #transition addressing multiple #planetaryboundaries and UN SDGs simultaneously. So perhaps we should ask more of every #climate #investment: • Does it reduce our dependence on fossil carbon? • Does it help repay our existing carbon debt? • Does it contribute to restoring the natural systems we depend on? • And would the underlying solution survive if the carbon price collapsed? #Netzero shouldn’t be about finding increasingly sophisticated ways to keep the current #system running. It should be about building a better system. That should be the true choice of an #impact #investor Unfortunately, I see most of the investments going to the former… Earth Plus C-biotech

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