Jonathan Goldberg - Capturing Carbon - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 25]

My guest today is Jonathan Goldberg, the founder, and CEO of Carbon Direct, a company focused on advising and investing in carbon removal at scale. Jonathan started his career in the commodities division of Goldman Sachs and then went on to start a commodity hedge fund, BBL Commodities. In our conversation, we cover the state of the carbon problem today, the importance of global carbon standards and carbon taxes, and the future of carbon capture and removal technologies. This was a masterclass on all things carbon-related. Please enjoy my conversation with Jonathan Goldberg. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is the ultimate marketing platform for e-commerce. With targeted segmentation, email automation, SMS marketing, and more, Klaviyo helps you create your ideal customer experience. See why Klaviyo is trusted by more than 50,000 brands, like Living Proof, Solo Stove, and Nomad to help them grow their business. For a free trial, check out klaviyo.com/founders. ----- This episode is brought to you by DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean provides founders and creators with the platform they need to get their website and apps off the ground, all with low-bandwidth pricing to save them money over other cloud providers. If you are looking for the best place to build web apps or API backends on robust infrastructure, DigitalOcean is the place for you. They provide a fully managed solution that handles your infrastructure, operating systems, databases, and other dependencies on their new App Platform product. App Platform makes it easy to build, deploy, and scale apps. Get started for free at do.co/founders. ----- Founder's Field Guide is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Founder's Field Guide, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:03:25] - [First question] - Overview of his career [00:06:02] - The start of his commodities trading strategy and its evolution [00:09:08] - Key strategies for making money as a commodities trader [00:10:41] - Opportunity to trade commodities today [00:11:39] - Making the shift to carbon capture work [00:15:04] - Range of consequences for elevated carbon emissions and biggest buckets of carbon [00:18:52] - An outline of the Paris Climate Accord and other agreements on climate change [00:20:26] - Ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere [00:23:46] - The technology to remove carbon and incentives to invest in this technology [00:26:19] - Corporate participation in the carbon trade [00:28:35] - Balance of natural vs man-made solutions [00:31:53] - Making money without the altruistic goals [00:33:43] - Trends in the fossil fuel industry [00:36:41] - Convenient ways for consumers to switch to clean energy products [00:39:57] - The geopolitical will to shift towards cleaner energy [00:41:58] - Primary consequences of not making this shift [00:44:25] - The important role of regulation [00:46:01] - Thinking through the investing side of combating climate change [00:48:59] - Kindest thing anyone has done for him