The market is moving toward removals. Here is why measured avoidance still belongs on the table — said plainly.
There is a hierarchy forming in carbon, and it is worth naming honestly rather than talking around. At the top, in the eyes of the most serious buyers and the emerging integrity bodies, sit durable removals — carbon physically taken out of the atmosphere and stored. Below them sit avoidance and reduction credits — emissions that were prevented rather than extracted. The direction of institutional preference is not ambiguous. Removals are where the premium, and much of the credibility, is migrating.
The LMCX Carbon Avoidance Token is an avoidance instrument. We are not going to pretend otherwise, because the fastest way to lose a sophisticated buyer is to blur a distinction they already understand better than your marketing does. A CAT represents verified methane emissions that will not enter the atmosphere because a leaking well was permanently plugged. That is avoidance. It is not removal, and we do not present it as such.
So here is the honest case for why it belongs on the table anyway.
Start with the molecule. Methane is not a slower version of carbon dioxide; it is a different kind of problem. Over a twenty-year horizon it traps on the order of eighty times more heat than CO₂, and the bulk of its warming is delivered in the near term — the exact window in which the climate math is most unforgiving. A tonne of methane avoided this decade does more to bend the near-term temperature curve than a tonne of CO₂ removed slowly over the next century. Avoidance and removal are not competitors for the same job. Removals address the long-lived stock of carbon. Methane avoidance addresses the short-lived flow that is doing outsized damage right now. A serious portfolio wants both, for different reasons, on different timescales.
This is why the framing of avoidance and removal as rivals is a category error. A net-zero commitment is a claim about a trajectory, and a trajectory has both a near term and a long term. Removals are the instrument for the long-lived stock — the carbon that will still be warming the planet in a century, which has to be physically taken back out. Methane avoidance is the instrument for the near-term flow — the potent, short-lived emissions that determine how hot it gets in the next two decades, the window in which most of the irreversible damage is decided. An allocator who buys only removals has addressed the century and left the decade exposed. One who buys only avoidance has done the reverse. The serious portfolio holds both, sized to the two horizons, and does not pretend either one does the other’s job.
The legitimate critique of avoidance is not really about the molecule. It is about the counterfactual. An avoidance credit is a claim about something that did not happen — and claims about the unobserved are where over-crediting hides. If you cannot credibly establish that the emission would have occurred, and that your intervention is what prevented it, the credit is a story. This is the objection removals largely sidestep, because a tonne in a tank is a tonne you can point to.
We accept that this is the bar. And we think the answer is not to retreat from avoidance but to hold it to a standard high enough to survive the objection. That means three things, and we hold ourselves to all three. First, measurement — the leak that is being avoided is directly measured to OGMP 2.0 Level 5 before anything is issued, not assumed from a coefficient, so the quantity being avoided is an observation rather than an argument. Second, additionality that can be interrogated — the plugging program is subjected to a financial test that shows it is uneconomic without carbon finance, evidenced rather than asserted. Third, conservative accounting — we quantify on a 100-year global-warming-potential basis, deliberately declining the far larger 20-year figure that would let us issue nearly three times as many credits for the same molecules. We could inflate. We choose the conservative number, and we say so.
That last point deserves emphasis because it inverts the usual incentive. Most of the discretion in a methane credit runs toward more credits: the shorter GWP horizon, the more generous baseline, the longer crediting period. Every one of those levers, pulled the aggressive way, produces a bigger number to sell. We have pulled them the other way where the science allows a choice, because the buyer we want is the one who checks. An avoidance credit built to be checked is a different object from an avoidance credit built to be sold.
We are also clear-eyed about a moving target. As methane regulation tightens — fees on emissions, direct rules, funded plugging programs — the additionality runway for any paid abatement narrows. That is genuinely good for the climate and genuinely a discipline on us. It means the honest window for high-integrity methane avoidance is now, and it means every project has to keep proving that carbon finance is what makes the abatement happen, rather than assuming it once and coasting. We would rather operate under that pressure in the open than pretend it does not exist.
So we will not tell you the CAT is a removal, or that avoidance is “just as good,” or that the hierarchy forming in the market is wrong. The hierarchy is mostly right. What we will tell you is that verified, measured, conservatively accounted methane avoidance does urgent work that removals do not, on the timescale that matters most — and that the way to trust it is not to take our word for it, but to hold it to the counterfactual bar and watch it clear. That is the case. We are content to make it honestly.