SmarterMarkets™

We present a special episode of SmarterMarkets™, bringing you exclusive interviews from the IETA North America Climate Summit 2026.

SmarterMarkets™ returned to the IETA North America Climate Summit to catch up with market practitioners on the challenges and opportunities in the development of the carbon markets.

This year’s conference focused on the “New Carbon Order: Innovation, Investment, and Interoperability.” In partnership with IETA, we caught up with a cross section of participants about what they and their organizations have been working on, where they see progress, and what we need to be doing next. Some common themes included the ongoing integration of compliance and voluntary markets, the role of AI and digital technology in carbon markets, and the need for standardization and harmonization across the growing network of country and regional emissions schemes.

We’ve compiled a selection of those 7 interviews into this Special Episode of SmarterMarkets™. Our guests, in order of appearance, are:

Guy Turner – Managing Director, MSCI Carbon Markets

Sandeep Roy Choudhury – Co-Founder & Director, VNV

Alex Saer – CEO, Cercarbono

Alexia Kelly – Managing Director of Carbon Policy and Markets Initiative, High Tide Foundation

Mandy Rambharos – CEO, Verra + Candace Vinke – Chief Program Development and Innovation Officer, Verra

Benoît Clément – VCM+ Fellow, Financial Infrastructure for Carbon Markets (FICM), Verified Carbon Market Collaborative (VCM+)

Thomas McMahon – Co-Founder, Abaxx Technologies

This week on Catching Up On Climate, we welcome Mandy Rambharos and Candace Vinke into the SmarterMarkets™ studio. Mandy is CEO at Verra and Candace is Chief Program Development and Innovation Officer at Verra. David Greely sat down with them at IETA’s North America Climate Summit 2026 this week in New York City to discuss Verra’s newest carbon standard, the Scope 3 Standard (S3S) Program – and what it means for carbon markets.

This week, we kick off Catching Up On Climate 2026 with Dirk Forrister, President & CEO of IETA. David Greely sits down with Dirk to discuss what he and IETA have been focused on this past year – and what he sees as some of the most important things happening in climate and carbon markets ahead of IETA's North America Climate Summit next week in New York City.

This week we celebrate our 300th episode with Robert Friedland, Executive Co-Chairman of Ivanhoe Mines and Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of I-Pulse. David Greely sits down with Robert to discuss the world’s ever growing hunger for metals and what the mining and tech industries, governments, and markets are doing – and need to be doing – in a week when LME copper prices hit a new record high.

We close out our Summer Playlist this week with Ben Hunt, author of Epsilon Theory & President/Co-Founder of Perscient. David Greely sits down with Ben to discuss the insights in his recent Semantic Manifesto. They talk about how AI and LLMs have given us the tools and computing power to map and track the structures of the stories that we tell ourselves in markets – and to explore the invisible, but very real world of stories and semantics.

This week, we present SmarterMarkets™ Encore: Ideas Worth Repeating. We’re bringing back an older Summer Playlist episode from 2023 with Frances Haugen. Frances is an advocate for accountability and transparency in social media and the author of the memoir, The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook. 

This past week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, agreed to an $18 billion dollars settlement with several U.S. states and territories to resolve claims that Facebook and Instagram harm children. They agreed to make a number of changes to its platform and algorithms, including time limits and the ability to choose a feed that is not driven by an algorithm. 

In this episode, David Greely sat down with Frances to discuss the algorithms designed to capture our and our children's attention, their flaws, and how we can incentivize change and build better social networks. We thought it was timely to give this another listen.

On this week’s installment of our Summer Playlist, we welcome Russell Robertson back into the SmarterMarkets™ studio. Russell is Chief Business Development Officer at Abaxx Exchange and Clearinghouse in Singapore.

David Greely sits down with Russell to discuss his perspective on India's evolving role in the gold and silver markets and its growing importance to the global commodities derivatives industry. They also talk about the developing new network of markets and trading corridors stretching from India to the Middle East, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Singapore – and the opportunities it creates.

We continue our Summer Playlist this week by welcoming Sunil Kashyap back into the SmarterMarkets™ studio. Sunil is Managing Director at FinMet Pte Ltd., Singapore.

David Greely sits down with Sunil to discuss the surge of new developments and new initiatives being announced in Asia's gold and silver markets including the growth in trading activity of Abaxx Exchange’s gold and silver futures markets in Singapore, the Hong Kong Exchange reviving its gold futures market in Hong Kong, and Singapore pursuing an OTC gold clearing initiative to create a Loco Singapore market.

This week on our Summer Playlist, we welcome Josh Qiao into the SmarterMarkets™ studio. Josh is CEO of Yongan International Financial SG. David Greely sits down with Josh to discuss how Yongan is providing access to China’s futures and options markets for international traders, why it chose to become a clearing member of Abaxx Exchange, and the opportunities this creates in the commodities futures markets.

Our Summer Playlist rolls on this week with Mark Lewis, Partner and Managing Director at Climate Finance Partners LLC. David Greely sits down with Mark to discuss the recently released European Commission's EU ETS review proposals and what they'll mean for the outlook for the EU ETS and other carbon markets.