Carbon markets are broken. Not because the projects don't work — but because nobody has decided they should. Troy Carter, founder of Earthshot Labs, has spent five years building the end-to-end infrastructure to get serious money into reforestation and conservation projects worldwide. He's watched the market go hot, go cold, and watched good operators go bankrupt for reasons that have nothing to do with their work. Now he thinks the whole fragmented, mistrustful, acronym-ridden industry is about to consolidate — and whoever ends up at the centre of it stands to do something genuinely historic.

Rich sat down with Troy in San Francisco during Climate Week to talk about why the demand problem is more real than the financing problem, why AI companies might be the unexpected saviours of conservation, and why he's been posting on LinkedIn asking if anyone wants to do a roll-up of distressed carbon projects. They also go somewhere most conversations in this space never reach — the sacred relationship between humans and the rest of this planet, and whether without that, none of this is actually worth fighting for.