You’ve worn a few different hats in this space — founder, strategist, policy driver, thought leader. How do you think about your role in carbon removal right now?
Right now I spend most of my time focused on the conditions that allow carbon removal to scale credibly. I’m less focused on advocating for any single pathway and more focused on establishing clear definitions, fit-for-purpose standards and MRV – incentives that reward real outcomes rather than narratives, and governance that keeps communities and ecosystems centered rather than at the margins.
From my time at Heirloom, I saw firsthand how much of the challenge is translational – connecting technology development, commercial strategy, project finance, and policy in ways that actually work in practice, and understanding how those choices shape norms, expectations, and credibility in a young industry. That kind of connective work is essential within companies, but it’s just as important across the broader ecosystem as carbon removal moves from pilots toward real infrastructure. Much of my work now is focused on helping bridge those gaps so learning can happen without undermining trust.
How have your experiences in CDR shaped the way you think about credibility, trust-building, and accountability in carbon removal?
My experience in carbon removal has made it clear that credibility, trust, and accountability have to be concrete and tangible, even though we often talk about them in abstract terms. They’re shaped by equity, transparency, and accessibility – including how assumptions are made explicit, how uncertainty is handled, who bears risk, and who benefits over time. In emerging fields like carbon removal, it’s common for technology and implementation to move ahead of standards, regulation, and policy, and trust erodes quickly when expectations aren’t aligned across developers, buyers, communities, and policymakers.
That experience has led me to think about accountability less as a question of perfection and more as a question of design. In practice, accountability needs to look different across the life cycle of a technology, especially for first-of-a-kind projects. But when it comes to climate claims, we still need a high degree of certainty about what’s being delivered. Credible carbon removal requires that accountability be built into the system from the start, through clear boundaries on claims, honest treatment of uncertainty, and incentives that reward learning without obscuring tradeoffs or shifting risk onto others. When accountability is embedded in standards, MRV, and policy early, it creates the conditions for trust to compound and allows the field to move faster with confidence rather than slower through controversy.
You’ve written about the need to shift the conversation from how much carbon removal costs to the cost of climate inaction. How do you think that reframing should change how policymakers and buyers make decisions?
When we frame carbon removal primarily around its per-ton cost, we’re implicitly treating it like a discretionary commodity rather than a form of climate risk management. Deciding whether something is “cheap enough” is ultimately a values judgment about which risks we’re willing to tolerate, who bears the costs of delay, and over what time horizon. The more useful comparison isn’t “Is this cheap enough?” but “Compared to what?” – compared to the costs we’re already incurring from climate inaction, and the risks we’re continuing to accept by underinvesting in the full climate toolkit.
For policymakers, that reframing would shift carbon removal from the margins of climate policy into the category of public infrastructure and risk mitigation, alongside things like disaster preparedness, insurance backstops, and public health. We don’t build sewers, hospitals, or wildfire response systems because they pay for themselves on a per-unit basis; we build them because the cost of not having them is unacceptable. Carbon removal plays a similar role as a public good, especially as we confront residual emissions and overshoot risk.
For buyers, it would change the question from “Is this the lowest-cost ton?” to “What risk am I helping reduce, and over what time horizon?” That means anchoring decisions in avoided damages, balance-sheet exposure, and long-term credibility, not just near-term price signals. When carbon removal is understood as part of managing real economic and social risk – from insurance markets to supply chains to community resilience – higher upfront costs look very different. The goal isn’t to justify any price, but to make decisions proportionate to the scale and cost of the problem we’re already paying for.
From your experience with Heirloom and now on the policy side, what’s the biggest practical challenge you see in translating pilot project success into scalable infrastructure?
One of the biggest questions carbon removal is grappling with right now – particularly for approaches that require physical infrastructure – is how to translate pilot-scale success into repeatable interventions. The field has made real progress proving technical feasibility, but deployment at scale requires something different: the ability to attract long-term capital, navigate permitting and system integration, operate reliably over decades, and earn durable social license. Bridging that gap is less about inventing new technology and more about aligning systems that weren’t designed to work together.
This shows up as a classic “valley of death.” Efforts beyond the pilot stage are often too large and complex for grant funding, but still carry too much uncertainty for infrastructure finance. Carbon removal also functions as a public good, which raises real questions about whether traditional project finance models are sufficient on their own. When standards, policy, and markets lag behind deployment, projects end up absorbing risks they can’t price or manage – whether that’s around claims, revenue certainty, or regulatory treatment. That makes it hard to move from one-off efforts to scalable portfolios.
Getting to scale requires earlier clarity on expectations: what counts, how performance will be measured over time, who bears which risks, and how learning from early projects is incorporated without penalizing first movers. When those conditions are in place, capital can flow, projects can replicate, and pilot success becomes the foundation for real infrastructure rather than an endpoint.
From your perspective, how should standards balance the need for scientific rigor with the practical realities of creating credits that real buyers and projects can actually use? How do we build the standards and MRV that are fit for purpose for gigaton scale CDR, while also allowing for innovation and flexibility in the near term?
Standards should primarily protect climate integrity by ensuring that carbon removal claims are credible at scale. That means prioritizing a high quality bar over broad eligibility: if the bar is set too low in the name of flexibility, you risk crowding in weak claims, crowding out real climate benefit, and undermining trust in the entire ecosystem.
In my view, standards shouldn’t be the main mechanism for helping every new approach reach scale – that support can and should come from other levers like public procurement, R&D funding, deployment incentives, and policy that de-risks early projects, while standards focus on what can be credibly claimed. Standards should not be expected to carry the burden of scaling technologies themselves; their role is to define what can be credibly claimed, while other policy and market tools do the work of deployment and scale.
In practice, that requires clear guardrails: conservative accounting, transparent treatment of uncertainty, strong durability and reversal provisions, and verification approaches that are feasible to execute at scale. It also means accountability that goes beyond “do no harm.” Standards should include expectations around equity and justice. This means not just minimizing harms, but ensuring meaningful participation, fair governance, and tangible local benefits for the communities and ecosystems where interventions take place.
At the same time, rigor doesn’t have to mean rigidity. Standards should be designed as living systems: versioned updates, public documentation of methodological choices, and mechanisms that incorporate real-world learning without moving the goalposts retroactively. The goal is a carbon management ecosystem where innovation is encouraged, but claims remain disciplined, with flexibility in how projects meet requirements, not flexibility in whether outcomes are real.
Five years from now, what would need to be true for you to feel confident that carbon removal is scaling with integrity?
Tough question! Five years from now, I’d feel confident that carbon removal is scaling with integrity if a few things are clearly true. First, that there are widely accepted guardrails around what can be credibly claimed, with transparent treatment of uncertainty and real consequences when claims don’t hold up. Second, that carbon removal is embedded in durable institutions – through public procurement, policy, and long-term signals that reward real climate outcomes – rather than relying only on early markets.
Importantly, integrity at scale would mean that communities and ecosystems are demonstrably better off, with meaningful participation, fair benefit-sharing, and governance rooted in the places where carbon removal is actually happening. Finally, I’d want to see a field that’s still learning openly. This means standards evolve based on evidence, tradeoffs are acknowledged, and progress is measured by disciplined outcomes rather than hype.
Bio
Noah McQueen (they/them) is a scientist, strategist, and systems thinker working at the intersection of research, entrepreneurship, and climate policy to support the responsible scale-up of carbon removal. They are the co-founder of Heirloom, where they helped develop and scale a novel direct air capture approach, and currently serve as Director of Science and Innovation at Carbon180, leading efforts to align scientific rigor, policy design, and accountability in carbon removal deployment.
Beyond their institutional roles, Noah collaborates on global initiatives advancing carbon removal and advises early-stage climate companies navigating the transition from concept to impact. Their work is shaped by a multidisciplinary lens spanning chemical engineering, finance, commercial strategy, and systems thinking, and by queer leadership that emphasizes power awareness, inclusion, and long-term trust – grounded in the belief that building a livable future requires both scientific rigor and earned public trust.
