Why Skipping Carbon Markets Is the Riskiest Trade of All — Gordon Bennett & Adelfio Ronci (ICE)

In this season finale of This Week in Carbon, host Rene Velasquez sits down with Gordon Bennett, Global Head of Environmental Markets at ICE, and Adelfio Ronci, Director of Environmental Products at ICE, the exchange that has spent twenty-five years building the infrastructure underpinning the world's major environmental commodity markets, from EU Allowances and UK Allowances to California Carbon, renewable energy certificates, and now CORSIA.This is an episode about market architecture: what separates a liquid, functional environmental market from a technically elegant contract nobody trades and why the answer is almost always the same.Key topics covered:- Why carbon markets only scale when governments create a compliance obligation and why twenty years of evidence backs that up- The gap between what exists and what's being used: over a billion tons per year of carbon credits are eligible under existing compliance schemes globally, yet retirements sit below 200 million tons- CORSIA's extraordinary setup: open interest grew from 206,000 tons at end of 2025 to over 1.4 million tons — but with 42 million tons of eligible supply against a potential liability of 120–200 million tons, the market faces a structural short squeeze ahead of the January 2028 compliance deadline- Why CORSIA prices have moved from $21 down to $9 and the three bottlenecks keeping supply constrained: Letters of Authorization, corresponding adjustment infrastructure, and insurance- The SARPs problem: only a handful of countries (Japan, Brazil, New Zealand, Canada, France) have fully transposed CORSIA obligations into national law, without which airlines have no legal compliance requirement- Gordon's reframing of speculation: "the raw speculator is the person who doesn't hedge" and why intermediaries who take risk are essential, not problematic, to a functioning market- Why you can't do anything without price and what it means to allow goods and services to be produced with "a hundred percent atmospheric subsidy"- ICE Green Trace: how a lunch-and-learn about mortgage manufacturing became the blueprint for a digital carbon credit production pipeline, built with Environmental Resources Trust- Strategic investments: BeZero Carbon, Space Intelligence, Meridia, and the just-announced Isometric Series A, all pieces of the same carbon asset manufacturing thesis- What carbon market maturity looks like in 10 years: 60% of global emissions covered, 10 billion tons priced and Gordon's insurance analogy for how we get there without waiting on governments- The knighthood that Adelfio Ronci will earn if CORSIA delivers on its potentialThe most market-infrastructure-focused conversation This Week in Carbon has ever had — and a compelling case that the plumbing is already built. It just needs the water to flow.🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and more.