BlogRemovals, avoidances, and the rise of the portfolio mentalityDate25 August 2026AuthorRoss Kenyon

On this pageA registry expands from avoidances to removalsThe rise of superpollutantsGetting good at avoidances makes you better at removalsThe portfolio paradigm arrives in carbon dioxide removal

A registry expands from avoidances to removalsWhen the cofounder and CEO of Rainbow, Ludovic Chatoux, talks about why Rainbow exists, he said something almost disarmingly plain. “The idea was to quite simply enable the financing of relevant climate solutions,” he told me. Notice what is missing from that sentence. There is no mention of carbon removal. But that’s only because removals are just one of many relevant climate solutions.In its early days, Rainbow primarily looked at projects where emissions get avoided, rather than pulled out of the sky, like industrial decarbonization, biobased construction materials for buildings, biogas, and e-waste. As removals left the lab and became commercially deployable, Rainbow built methodologies for and started certifying those projects, too. But caring about both carried a polarizing valence during those early years.“When we entered the carbon removal space,” Ludo said, “many carbon removers criticized anything other than purely removal. Explaining our belief in avoidance to those focused entirely on removal was tricky, even though working on avoidances taught us valuable lessons about operationalizing removals. That expertise has compounded over time in ways that may not be obvious to those who have only done removals.”From roughly 2018 to 2024, he figures, the removal market needed to establish itself, and it did so by building a narrative against avoidance and most other kinds of credit. “What’s good is that removals are taken seriously,” he said. “But the war footing was always meant to be temporary. The two sides shouldn’t be battling. They’re complementary.”All those years in the supposed minor leagues of avoidances turned out to be training. The expertise the team built assessing biobased building projects now feeds straight into its mineralization work, since both live in the world of building materials. The years spent on biogas show up again in BioCCS. This portfolio approach is increasingly mainstream as big commercial players also stand up in support of it.An early company slide, from before Riverse rebranded to Rainbow. The philosophy was always to finance whatever was climatically relevant, whether avoidance or and removal.

The rise of superpollutantsThe market is further validating Rainbow’s belief that removals and non-removals are complementary. Registries that launched as removal-only purists are expanding to cover everything. And the more seasoned avoidances registries are developing removals methodologies. One of the most salient examples of this is the recent rush to develop higher credibility approaches to superpollutant mitigation to avoid the worst effects from methane, refrigerants, and other compounds with powerful climate impacts.Perhaps most interestingly, corporate conversations within and adjacent to carbon dioxide removal are taking on a portfolio approach, with removals and avoidances such as superpollutant mitigation financed side by side. Google’s recent paper lays out its thinking on stacking and bridging scenarios, and argues for thinking in terms of impact on global warming and how specific molecules affect the atmosphere. There is a careless and dangerous way to read the Google paper. If all you take from it is that methane is cheaper and faster and therefore we should focus on that over CDR, you have misread the assignment in a way that could be genuinely damaging. You cannot finish all the methane abatement, flip a switch, and expect carbon removal to be sitting there ready to scale to gigatons. CDR has to be built out now, in the background, while the short-term work of methane abatement happens.Google’s wealthier posture allows them to plan this far in advance and with a sophisticated portfolio of climate assets. The portfolio view as advocated by Google is fully supported by Ludo. But the lazy version of it, where CDR competes with funding for more urgent climate needs now, is a trap.The good news is: the learnings from avoidances transfer in novel ways to removals.Flip to Page 76 of Google’s 2026 Environmental Report and you’ll see this graph that reinforces the importance of superpollutant mitigation, nature-based solutions, and long-term removals.

Getting good at avoidances makes you better at removalsRainbow’s quantification engine—the core of their operation—has been sharpened on avoidance projects that are, in Ludo’s telling, often harder to model than removal. “Modeling the life-cycle assessment of an avoidance project is actually more complex than some removal projects,” he said. Counterfactuals and attribution challenges make it hard to define where exactly carbon impact happens in the circular economy refurbishment value chain. By the time you can do that cleanly, a straightforward removal lifecycle analysis feels almost restful. It also speeds up the team’s certification and audit processes, because they’ve already been tested against more mature projects.My favorite example, and the one Rainbow is happiest to talk about, is e-waste. A refurbished iPhone carries something like eighty to ninety percent less embodied emission than a new one, and the refurbishment work is stubbornly, beautifully manual, with people sitting and fixing phones one at a time. The margins are thin, the work does not easily scale, and plenty of these businesses go bankrupt for want of capital.“It’s a great case of carbon finance,” Ludo said, and he is right. It is exactly the sort of real, unglamorous climate work that a thoughtful registry can keep alive, down to the difficult problem of allocating who along the chain actually earns the carbon gain. It is also a useful mirror. There is no removal in it whatsoever, and yet it is plainly worth doing.Alt Eco takes electronics like computers that would otherwise be retired and refurbishes them for reuse. Their avoidance credits are certified by Rainbow.

The portfolio paradigm arrives in carbon dioxide removalSo Rainbow’s arc turns out to be the industry’s arc, run a few years early and in reverse. It started out trying to finance whatever was climatically relevant, and is now watching the most sophisticated carbon removal buyers in the world validate the portfolio view it has long wanted to foster. It’s hard to stay the course this long in business. And it’s hard to believe in something that isn’t canonical in one’s industry. There is immense pressure to conform, in rhetoric if not in actual practice. When companies are jockeying to be seen as the most credible and high-performing to Fortune 100 buyers, outsider views pose an asymmetric risk: it’s either a great thing or a terrible thing, and likely nothing in between. Developing competent corporate strategy lies in knowing which kind of asymmetry your divergent beliefs are. Because sometimes companies and their leaders take iconoclastic stances that aren’t courageous, but delusional.This avoidances vs. removals dichotomy should have been an easier falsity to spot though. Whenever you have a binary split there’s usually some truth content in each which is why one of the positions hasn’t already won the debate. The truth always was that some avoidances are high-quality and some removals are low-quality. The details here matter, and the more comfortable we get in that careful kind of analysis, the more robust and trustworthy our carbon market institutions will become.In Rainbow’s case, I’m glad they stayed true to what they believed was the truth long enough for the carbon dioxide removal industry to begin to converge upon the portfolio mentality in a much more thorough capacity. Being convicted in this way is how one builds something that could last decades.The Rainbow team at Manufacture Bois Paille, a biobased construction material company, in 2023 - back in its (first) avoidance and mitigation era.