Ep. 313: Tom Montag on the Undiscovered Potential of Carbon Markets

Tom Montag is the founding Chief Executive Officer of Rubicon Carbon. Tom has over 20 years of experience in financial markets. Previously, he was the Chief Operating Officer and President of global banking and markets at Bank of America. Tom was also a member of the company’s executive management team, overseeing all businesses serving corporations, institutional investors and government entities. Before this Tom was a partner at Goldman Sachs, a member of the management committee, and was co-head of the Securities Division. In this podcast we discuss: 

• Dawn of derivatives at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and now Rubicon Carbon. 
• Assessing the current financial landscape. 
• Why focus on climate and carbon. 
• Understanding carbon markets: mandatory vs. voluntary. 
• Premise and controversy of the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) 
• Carbon’s products: Removals, Super Pollutants, Nature-Based 
• The Rubicon Carbon Ton: an ETF-like approach to carbon markets. 
• Understanding nature-based carbon projects. 
• Verification and integrity in carbon markets. 
• Parallels: early derivatives market and carbon markets. 
• Understanding over-crediting in carbon markets. 
• Carbon credits as an asset class? 
• Geography of VCM projects and demand. 
• Rubicon and Microsoft. 
• Missing time value of carbon. 
• Books mentioned: Red Rising series (Brown) and Shoe Dog (Knight). 

You can follow Tom’s work here. 

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