A recent conversation with Frederick Teo, CEO of GenZero, left me thinking about one of the more unhelpful habits in carbon markets: our tendency to frame everything as a duality.

Reduction versus removal. Avoidance versus sequestration. Technology versus nature. Engineered removals versus nature-based solutions. Voluntary versus compliance. Quality versus scale. Integrity versus liquidity. The list goes on.

Carbon markets have become very good at creating camps.

And to be fair, some of this is necessary. Definitions matter. Methodologies matter. Accounting boundaries matter. Permanence matters. Additionality matters. The differences between project types, credit types, storage pathways and risk profiles are real. We should not blur them away in the name of simplicity.

But there is a difference between distinction and tribalism.

Too often, the market takes useful distinctions and turns them into false binaries. We start with technical differences and end up with ideological camps. One side argues that engineered removals are the only credible path because they offer durability, measurability and industrial control. Another argues that nature-based solutions are the only scalable path because they are available now, relatively low cost, rich in co-benefits, and rooted in living systems that already regulate the planet.

Both camps are right about something. Both are also incomplete.

The more useful question is not: which one wins?

It is: what do they have in common, where do they diverge, and how do we build a market that can value both properly?

That is the thought I have been sitting with.

And the first place this becomes interesting is in the comparison between direct air capture and nature-based solutions.

At first glance, they could not look more different.

Direct air capture, or DAC, is industrial. It is made of fans, filters, sorbents, heat, pressure, pipes, storage infrastructure and clean energy inputs. It belongs to the world of engineering, chemistry, project finance and industrial scale-up.

Nature-based solutions, or NbS, are biological. They include forests, mangroves, grasslands, peatlands, regenerative agriculture, soil carbon, wetlands and coastal ecosystems. They belong to the world of ecology, land stewardship, community engagement, biodiversity, water cycles and living systems.

One looks like a machine.

The other looks like a forest.

One is associated with hard hats and industrial plants.

The other with roots, soils and canopies.

So the market instinctively treats them as opposites.

But perhaps they are better understood as two different expressions of the same fundamental act: the work of reversing entropy.

Atmospheric carbon as disorder

When we burn fossil fuels, we take carbon that was once locked away in dense geological reservoirs and disperse it into the atmosphere as CO₂.

Coal, oil and gas are concentrated stores of ancient carbon. They are relatively ordered, energy-dense and physically contained. Combustion breaks those bonds, releases energy, and sends carbon into the atmosphere in a highly diluted form.

Atmospheric CO₂ is now spread across the sky at roughly hundreds of parts per million. It is everywhere and nowhere. It is diffuse, mobile and mixed into a vast atmospheric reservoir.

That matters because once carbon is dispersed, getting it back is hard.

Carbon removal is not simply “capturing a molecule”. It is the act of taking something highly diluted and reorganising it into a more concentrated, durable or useful form.

In simple terms, carbon removal is the work of reversing dispersion.

That is where the entropy framing becomes powerful.

Entropy is often described as a measure of disorder, but for this discussion the more intuitive idea is dispersion. Systems tend to move from concentrated to dispersed, from organised to disorganised, unless energy is applied to maintain or restore order.

Fossil fuel combustion disperses carbon.

Carbon removal attempts to gather it back.

That is true whether we are talking about DAC, afforestation, soil carbon, enhanced weathering, biochar, blue carbon, ocean alkalinity, BECCS, mineralisation or long-lived biomass storage.

The methods differ dramatically. But the underlying work is similar: take carbon from a dispersed atmospheric or biogenic state and move it into a more ordered, stable or durable reservoir.

DAC: resisting entropy through technology

DAC is perhaps the most literal form of entropy resistance.

CO₂ is dilute in ambient air. To capture it, DAC systems must move large volumes of air across chemical materials that selectively bind CO₂. Those materials must then be regenerated, typically using heat, pressure, vacuum, moisture swings or other energy inputs. The CO₂ must then be concentrated, compressed, transported and stored or used.

Every step is a fight against dispersion.

The atmosphere does not naturally hand us concentrated CO₂. We have to impose order on it. We have to separate a trace gas from a vast background and turn it into a concentrated stream.

That requires energy.

It requires materials.

It requires infrastructure.

It requires a catalyst or binding medium that can grab CO₂ from the air and then release it in a controlled way.

Seen through this lens, DAC is not just a climate technology. It is an industrial system designed to reverse the dilution of carbon.

Its promise is control. DAC can, in principle, be sited where clean energy and storage are available. It can produce a measurable stream of captured CO₂. It can be paired with geological storage, mineralisation or durable utilisation pathways. It can offer high permanence and relatively clear accounting.

But its challenge is also obvious. It is energy-intensive because it is doing something thermodynamically difficult. It is trying to extract a dilute molecule from a vast and well-mixed reservoir.

This does not make DAC bad. It makes it honest.

DAC is a machine built to fight entropy with energy.

Photosynthesis: resisting entropy through biology

Nature-based solutions do something similar, but through a completely different architecture.

Photosynthesis takes atmospheric CO₂, water and sunlight, and uses biological machinery to create sugars, biomass and eventually more complex carbon structures: wood, roots, leaves, soil organic matter, microbial biomass and ecosystem structure.

A forest is not just “stored carbon”. It is a living system that uses solar energy to organise matter.

A mangrove is not just a carbon project. It is a biological infrastructure system that captures carbon, stabilises coastlines, supports biodiversity, filters water and builds soil.

A healthy grassland or soil system is not merely a passive sink. It is an active metabolic network of plants, fungi, microbes, roots, nutrients and water flows, continuously converting energy and matter into structure.

That is also entropy resistance.

The difference is that biology does not fight entropy by brute-force separation. It fights entropy through metabolism, growth and self-organisation.

The energy source is sunlight.

The machinery is life.

The binding structures are chlorophyll, enzymes, roots, lignin, microbial processes, soil aggregates and ecological relationships.

Where DAC concentrates CO₂ through engineered chemistry, photosynthesis organises CO₂ through living chemistry.

And this is where I think the comparison becomes genuinely useful.

DAC and nature-based solutions are not opposites in the way the market often frames them. Both require energy. Both require a capture mechanism. Both require a pathway to bind or store carbon. Both are attempting to move carbon from a more dispersed state into a more ordered one.

One does it through technology.

The other does it through biology.

One is engineered concentration.

The other is biological self-organisation.

The market’s false comfort with binaries

Why does this matter?

Because carbon markets often use categories as shortcuts for judgement.

Engineered removal becomes “high quality”.

Nature-based solutions become “cheap but risky”.

Avoidance becomes “less real”.

Removal becomes “more real”.

Technology becomes “permanent”.

Nature becomes “temporary”.

These framings are not always wrong, but they are too blunt.

A poorly designed DAC project powered by the wrong energy system and lacking credible storage is not automatically high-integrity because it is engineered.

A well-designed mangrove restoration project with strong tenure, conservative baselines, robust monitoring, community alignment and meaningful ecological resilience is not automatically low-integrity because it is biological.

The category is not the quality.

The pathway matters. The design matters. The counterfactual matters. The governance matters. The monitoring matters. The permanence risk matters. The claims made by the buyer matter.

The market needs taxonomy, but it also needs maturity.

And maturity means resisting the temptation to use labels as substitutes for analysis.

Technology and biology both require catalysts

Another useful similarity is that neither DAC nor photosynthesis captures carbon by magic.

Both require catalysts and enabling systems.

In DAC, the catalyst may be a chemical sorbent, solvent, membrane or mineral process. The system is engineered to bind CO₂ selectively, regenerate the capture medium, and produce a concentrated stream.

In biological systems, the catalysts are enzymes, chlorophyll, microbial processes, fungi, root systems and ecological conditions. Photosynthesis itself depends on highly sophisticated molecular machinery. Soil carbon formation depends not just on plants growing, but on the interaction between roots, microbes, minerals, moisture, land management and time.

This is important because NbS is often described as if it is somehow passive.

“Plant trees and carbon happens.”

That is not serious.

Biological carbon removal requires design, management and stewardship. The biological machinery is extraordinary, but it is not automatically durable, additional or well-governed. Forests can burn. Soils can be disturbed. Mangroves can be cleared. Carbon can return to the atmosphere through decomposition, land-use change, drought, fire, disease or poor governance.

Likewise, DAC is often described as if it is automatically permanent.

But permanence is not created at the point of capture. It is created by what happens next: geological storage, mineralisation, monitoring, liability frameworks, infrastructure integrity and long-term governance.

Both systems need capture.

Both need conversion or concentration.

Both need storage.

Both need monitoring.

Both need energy.

Both need governance.

The differences are real. But the similarities are more important than we usually acknowledge.

Permanence as entropy delayed

The entropy framing also helps with permanence.

In carbon markets, permanence is usually discussed as a time horizon. How long does the carbon stay out of the atmosphere? 30 years? 100 years? 1,000 years? 10,000 years?

That is useful, but we can also think of permanence as the ability of a system to resist the return of carbon to a more dispersed state.

Combustion returns biomass carbon to the atmosphere quickly.

Decomposition returns it more slowly.

Soil disturbance can accelerate release.

Geological storage can hold carbon for very long periods if properly selected and managed.

Mineralisation can convert CO₂ into stable carbonate forms.

Biochar can slow decomposition by converting biomass into more recalcitrant carbon.

Long-lived wood products can extend the residence time of biogenic carbon.

From this perspective, every carbon storage pathway is a different strategy for delaying or preventing re-dispersion.

DAC with geological storage says: capture the carbon, compress it, inject it underground, and isolate it from the atmosphere.

A forest says: bind carbon in living biomass and soils, and maintain the ecological system that keeps that carbon cycling within a productive landscape.

Biochar says: take recently captured biogenic carbon and convert part of it into a more stable form.

Enhanced weathering says: accelerate mineral reactions that bind CO₂ into dissolved or solid carbonate forms.

Blue carbon says: use coastal ecosystems to capture and bury carbon in low-oxygen sediments where decomposition is slowed.

Each pathway is a different answer to the same question:

How do we prevent carbon from returning to atmospheric disorder?

The “and” market

This is why the market needs to move from “either/or” to “and”.

We need emissions reductions and removals.

We need engineered removals and biological removals.

We need nature-based solutions and industrial infrastructure.

We need short-term climate mitigation and long-term durable storage.

We need high-volume pathways and high-durability pathways.

We need project-level integrity and system-level scale.

We need carbon accounting and ecological intelligence.

We need scientific rigour and market pragmatism.

The climate problem is too large, too urgent and too complex for single-pathway thinking.

This does not mean everything is equal. It does not mean every credit is good. It does not mean buyers should be indifferent between a tonne stored for 30 years and a tonne stored for 1,000 years. It does not mean avoidance, reduction and removal should be collapsed into one undifferentiated claim.

It means the market should be capable of holding multiple truths at once.

DAC has a critical role to play, especially for durable removals and hard-to-abate residual emissions.

Nature-based solutions have a critical role to play, especially for near-term scale, biodiversity, land restoration, water systems, community value and planetary resilience.

Avoided deforestation matters because losing existing carbon stocks and ecosystems accelerates climate damage now.

Restoration matters because degraded landscapes can become productive carbon sinks again.

Soil carbon matters because agriculture is one of the largest human interfaces with the biosphere.

Blue carbon matters because coastal ecosystems can be incredibly carbon-dense and highly valuable for adaptation.

Engineered removals matter because we need durable storage pathways that can scale over time and provide high-confidence neutralisation for residual emissions.

This is not a hierarchy of virtue.

It is a portfolio problem.

Carbon markets should become better at comparing, not collapsing

The answer is not to pretend that DAC and NbS are the same.

They are not.

DAC generally offers clearer measurement at the point of capture, stronger potential durability when paired with geological storage, and an industrial pathway that may be more controllable over time.

NbS generally offers lower near-term cost, broader co-benefits, existing deployment potential, and the ability to restore living systems that matter beyond carbon.

DAC faces energy, cost, infrastructure and scale constraints.

NbS faces land, permanence, governance, leakage and climate-risk constraints.

These are not reasons to dismiss either category. They are reasons to compare them properly.

A mature market would not ask, “Is DAC better than nature?”

It would ask:

What is the storage duration?

What is the reversal risk?

What energy inputs are required?

What ecological or social co-benefits are created?

What are the land-use implications?

What is the counterfactual?

What is the cost curve?

What is the monitoring regime?

What claims can the buyer credibly make?

What role does this credit play in a portfolio?

That is a more useful conversation than arguing over camps.

Nature is not low-tech

One of the reasons I like the entropy framing is that it elevates the way we talk about biology.

Nature-based solutions are often treated as the soft, low-tech side of carbon markets. DAC is the serious technology. Nature is the nice-to-have.

I think that is wrong.

Photosynthesis is one of the most sophisticated carbon capture systems on Earth. Forests, soils, wetlands and oceans are not primitive. They are complex adaptive systems that have regulated atmospheric chemistry for hundreds of millions of years.

A leaf is a solar-powered carbon capture surface.

A root system is a carbon delivery network.

A soil microbiome is a biochemical processing layer.

A mangrove forest is coastal infrastructure.

A peatland is a long-duration carbon archive.

A living ecosystem is technology, just not technology invented by us.

That does not mean every nature-based credit is high quality. It certainly does not mean we can ignore the hard work of baselines, tenure, monitoring, permanence and governance.

But it does mean we should stop treating biology as somehow less sophisticated because it does not look industrial.

Nature is not low-tech.

Nature is deep tech, evolved.

DAC is not unnatural

The reverse is also true.

We should not treat DAC as somehow illegitimate because it is engineered.

Human civilisation is now operating at planetary scale. We have already altered the carbon cycle through technology. It is not unreasonable that part of the response will also be technological.

Industrial carbon removal will be necessary if we are serious about net zero and net negative pathways. There will be residual emissions that are extremely difficult to eliminate. There will be sectors where durable removals are required. There will be a need for storage pathways that are less exposed to biological reversal.

DAC is expensive today. It is energy-intensive. It is infrastructure-heavy. It is not a substitute for decarbonisation. It is not a licence to keep emitting.

But it is also not a distraction by definition.

The right critique of DAC is not that it is artificial. The right critique is whether it is powered cleanly, financed responsibly, deployed honestly, and used for the right claims.

Again, the category is not the quality.

A better language for the market

Perhaps what we need is a better language.

Instead of technology versus nature, we could talk about engineered carbon ordering and biological carbon ordering.

Instead of permanent versus temporary, we could talk about storage duration and reversal risk.

Instead of removals versus avoidance as a moral hierarchy, we could talk about the function each intervention serves in the carbon cycle.

Instead of arguing over which pathway is “real”, we could ask how each pathway moves carbon, stores carbon, delays emissions, protects stocks or reduces atmospheric accumulation.

And instead of building camps, we could build portfolios.

That is ultimately where I think the conversation needs to go.

The climate system does not care about our ideological preferences. It responds to concentrations, flows, stocks, feedback loops and time.

Carbon markets should do the same.

The practical implication

For buyers, this means thinking more carefully about portfolio construction.

A credible carbon portfolio should not be built around fashion. It should be built around function.

Some credits may be used to address near-term emissions while supporting avoided ecosystem loss.

Some may finance restoration and biological carbon removal.

Some may support emerging durable removal technologies.

Some may be used for long-term neutralisation claims.

Some may sit in a contribution model rather than an offsetting claim.

Some may support jurisdictional outcomes, sovereign climate strategies or Article 6 cooperation.

The point is not to flatten these categories. The point is to assign them the right job.

That requires more nuance from buyers, more honesty from sellers, more rigour from standards, and better intermediation from the market.

It also requires us to stop treating difference as opposition.

The punchline

The divergence between DAC and nature-based solutions is real. But it is not a battle between technology and nature.

It is a divergence in how each system resists entropy.

DAC uses engineered systems, external energy and chemical processes to separate, concentrate and store carbon.

Photosynthesis uses sunlight, biological catalysts and living systems to organise carbon into biomass, soils and ecosystems.

One captures carbon through industrial separation.

The other captures carbon through biological self-organisation.

Both are trying to reverse the atmospheric dispersion of CO₂.

Both require energy.

Both require catalysts.

Both require storage pathways.

Both require governance.

Both can fail.

Both can be improved.

Both are needed.

And perhaps that is the broader lesson for carbon markets.

We need fewer false binaries and more integrated thinking. Less “either/or”. More “and”.

Not because distinctions do not matter.

But because the climate problem is a systems problem. And systems problems are rarely solved by single-pathway thinking.

Carbon markets will mature when they stop asking which camp should win, and start asking how different interventions can work together — with integrity, transparency and purpose — to restore order to a carbon cycle we have pushed out of balance.

Tune in to the CARBON EXPOSURE podcast, where I unpack this with Fred on camera.