The Carbon Curve

The world needs to remove billions of tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere — and an entirely new industry is emerging to do it. On The Carbon Curve, Na'im Merchant explores the people, policies, and technologies driving carbon removal forward through conversations with the sector's leading voices. From policy wins and market shifts to breakthrough technologies and global perspectives, each episode unpacks what it takes to scale carbon removal to meet the enormous climate challenge. New episodes every two weeks.

carboncurve.substack.com

Last refreshed: June 25th, 2026 at 2:33 PM

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Episodes

Ben Rubin on launching the Carbon Business Council to help the carbon removal industry reach gigaton scale

Episode 5 of The Carbon Curve is with Ben Rubin, Executive Director of the Carbon Business Council. Over the past two years, the carbon removal (CDR) sector has flourished according to a Climate Tech VC report. Carbon removal, carbon utilization and CCS companies, as well as carbon marketplaces raised a combined $1.5 billion in the first half of this year. That's an eightfold increase over the same period last year (with much of that growth happening in the carbon removal space) which led me to ...

Aug 03, 2022•19 min

Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Charm Industrial, on forging a new path towards building trust in the carbon removal industry

Our 4th episode of The Carbon Curve is with Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-Founder of Charm Industrial, where they're developing novel carbon removal and renewable industrial syngas technology. Prior to charm, Peter was CEO and co-founder at Segment a software as a service customer data platform, which grew to 600 people before it was acquired by Twilio in 2020 for 3.2 billion. He previously studied aerospace engineering at MIT Building trust is absolutely critical to generating the political will ...

Jul 28, 2022•21 min

Dai Ellis on what scaling up HIV medicines can teach us about building a thriving carbon removal market

The third episode of The Carbon Curve podcast is with Dai Ellis. Today’s discussion is about sketching out a vision for the carbon removal market. Creating that market is going to be really tricky. Unlike other climate technologies carbon removal, for the most part, doesn’t deliver a product or service besides its climate benefit. But the market for carbon removal can’t exist without large purchasers creating consistent demand. In recent months we’ve seen the private sector take up that mantle b...

Jul 21, 2022•41 min

Chris Neidl on how OpenAir Collective reimagines the model for climate activism

The second episode of The Carbon Curve Podcast is with Chris Neidl ( Twitter , LinkedIn ), Co-Founder of the OpenAir Collective . OpenAir is a volunteer-led, global network accelerating carbon removal advancement and evolution through member initiated missions. OpenAir has completely re-imagined climate activism by mobilizing people to not just support, but co-create policies at the local, state, and federal level to scale up carbon removal. The group is grounded in open source principles like d...

Jul 07, 2022•37 min

Introducing the Carbon Curve Podcast + Jason Hochman on a New Coalition to Scale Up Direct Air Capture

Introducing The Carbon Curve Podcast with Na’im Merchant Na’im is an advisor and thought partner to start-ups, policy groups, and research organizations on scaling up the climate technologies to meet the monumental challenge removing billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. According to the IPCC, large scale carbon dioxide removal is “essential” to meeting our climate goals - but few people know about carbon removal, how critical a tool it is in combating climate change, or the ways they can...

Jun 30, 2022•23 min

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