In this episode of What Goes Up Must Come Down, Simon is joined by Stacy Kauk, Chief Science Officer at Isometric, a carbon registry. Together, they explore the challenges of scaling a market where buyers do not fully trust what they are buying, suppliers struggle to finance what they are building, and the science is still catching up with the ambition.

TL;DR

• Shopify's entry into carbon removal came from the top down, driven by a CEO who decided that a technology company with a small physical footprint could have more impact funding innovation than counting scope emissions
• Reducing emissions and removing carbon are not competing priorities — they are both necessary, and treating them as a trade-off is a false dichotomy that slows corporate action
• Isometric's buyer-paid model removes a key conflict of interest: because the registry is not paid per credit issued, it has no incentive to lower the bar
• Starting from an extremely high scientific bar, then relaxing requirements as data improves, protects the integrity of earlier credits and gives suppliers a stable foundation for project financing
• The market is currently facing a supply-demand mismatch: supply is scaling, but buyer uncertainty around reporting standards is creating hesitation — a gap that risks stranding the most promising solutions

The early days of CDR purchasing at Shopify

In 2018 and 2019, a lot of leading companies were beginning to think seriously about their emissions footprint. Microsoft had made its landmark 2030 net-zero commitment. Sustainability was rising up the corporate agenda. Shopify was thinking through the same questions — but arrived at an unusual answer.

"It was a top-down approach rather than a bottoms-up," Stacy explains. "The CEO really got into doing his own research and came back saying: we are a technology company. We have already taken steps to reduce our emissions. We do not have a significant physical footprint. If we were to focus on scope one, two, and three commitments, we are not really going to drive change in the world."

Instead, the decision was made to spend an annual budget on supporting novel CDR technologies — companies and approaches that needed early buyers to prove out their models. In September 2019, Shopify committed five million dollars a year to the leading climate solutions.

It was relatively early days. Most carbon removal technologies had seen little real-world deployment. There was no established registry, no agreed protocol, and no playbook for how a corporate buyer should evaluate a CDR project. Stacy and her team had to build that assessment capability themselves, collaborating with leading academics to review supplier-written methodologies one by one.

"At the end of the day, that is not how a market scales," she says. "That is not how we end up with solutions that have been tested, verified, and that buyers can trust."

Building a science-first standard for CDR at Isometric

After nearly five years at Shopify, Stacy joined Isometric — a carbon registry with a structural difference that drew her in immediately. Most registries are paid by the project developers whose credits they issue, which creates an obvious tension: the more credits issued, the more revenue. Isometric is paid by buyers.

"We are almost exactly the buyer's agent," Stacy explains. "We are not incentivised to over-credit. We are not incentivised to turn a blind eye."

Isometric started where no protocol existed. The team wrote the world's first methodology for enhanced rock weathering (ERW) — a process that accelerates the natural breakdown of silicate rocks to draw down CO₂ — as well as the first protocols for ocean alkalinity enhancement and wastewater alkalinity enhancement. Since then, the registry has expanded to cover biochar, Direct Air Capture (DAC), reforestation, and more.

The approach was deliberately conservative from the outset. "We started from an extremely high bar," Stacy says. "As we learn more and get data in, we are not usually tightening things further. We are relaxing the rules where we were being overly conservative." That direction of travel matters. Setting the bar low and raising it later calls into question the integrity of every credit already issued. Setting it high and gradually relaxing it as evidence improves protects past vintages and gives suppliers a stable foundation.

Transparency is central to how this works in practice. On the Isometric registry, buyers can click through to see a full mass balance of any project, inspect the underlying calculation, and trace the evidence all the way down to individual data points — a meter reading from the electricity supply to a site, for example. "Once you have that transparency, what it does for buyers is automatically reduce risk," Stacy says. "They have a public-facing registry disclosing exactly how the credit they purchased was issued. It is fully inspectable."

This is a significant departure from how carbon markets have historically operated — opaque price points, unknown provenance, no accessible documentation. That opacity was not just frustrating; it was a structural barrier to scale. Trust cannot be assumed. It has to be earned through verifiable data, and that requires openness.

Building CDR systems for scale — learnings from Isometric

Scaling the CDR market requires solving two problems simultaneously on the supply side: project financing and long-term purchase commitments. Each is difficult to secure without the other already in place. To help suppliers navigate this, Isometric allows projects to lock in their protocol requirements once they are ready to make a financing decision. That certainty matters enormously to the investors and lenders assessing whether a project stacks up.

On the demand side, the picture is more complicated. The market is currently facing what Stacy describes as a mismatch: supply is scaling up, but buyer behaviour is hesitant. The reason is uncertainty around reporting standards — what kind of credit can be used for which purpose, how different scopes and subscopes should be handled, and how CDR fits within frameworks like the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol.

"Some buyers are just hanging out and not purchasing anything until this is sorted," Stacy says. "Others are over-procuring and diversifying their portfolios so they are ready for anything." Both responses are understandable. Neither is good for the market. The risk is a valley of death: a period where supply and demand fail to meet, stranding some of the most promising solutions right at the moment they are trying to move from pilot to commercial scale.

"We made a lot of progress in the 2020s, and I think that is what people sometimes forget," Stacy says. "This industry has come really far in roughly eight years. We cannot afford to have demand gaps that erode that." Her view is that a scientifically defensible, transparent bar — one that is honest about what is known and what is not — is far more valuable than a perfect standard that delays action. Buyers who have made net-zero commitments and are thinking carefully about how different instruments match their different emission types are already doing the right thing. The task now is making it easier for more of them to follow.

Conclusion

The CDR market has moved from theory to practice faster than most people expected. Real credits are being issued against real protocols, backed by data that independent scientists can scrutinise. That is genuinely remarkable progress.

But the next phase is harder. Scaling from thousands of tonnes to gigatons requires more than better science — it requires a market where buyers trust what they are buying, suppliers can finance what they are building, and the standards that connect them are stable enough to support long-term decisions. That means science-first registries, genuine transparency, and reporting frameworks that actually incentivise CDR procurement.

Stacy's career — from buying credits at Shopify to setting standards at Isometric — traces exactly this arc. The lesson from both sides is the same: quality is not a constraint on scale. It is the only way to get there.

If your organisation is ready to take meaningful climate action, consider Klimate as your partner in navigating the carbon removal market.

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