Carbon Markets & Sustainable Finance From Deep Geological Time to Net Zero
The definitive critical guide to climate change, carbon markets, and sustainable finance - for finance professionals, policy makers, and every informed citizen who refuses to accept surface-level answers to the most consequential challenge of the century.
The climate is changing. Carbon markets exist. Trillions of dollars are being redirected. But are the right parties being held responsible? Are the measurements honest? And is carbon even the whole story?
This book is not a polemic - and it is not a cheerleader. It is a data-driven examination that asks the questions the industry would rather you did not ask, and answers them with evidence.
What does the 800,000-year ice core record tell us - and what are the genuine limits of what that data can prove? If 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions, why does so much climate policy target individuals? How much carbon does a single AI training run produce - and can AI save more than it costs? Are green bonds actually green, or is the label a marketing exercise paid for by the issuer? How did 90% of a major rainforest carbon programme turn out to be phantom reductions? Why is the nitrogen boundary more severely transgressed than the climate boundary - and why is no one pricing it? What happens to sustainability when industrial agriculture, ocean plastics, and chemical pollution go entirely unpriced?
Spanning 27 chapters across 7 parts:
Part I - Climate science from first principles, including an honest account of what the 170-year instrumental record can and cannot tell us about a system operating on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years.
Part II - The political economy of emissions: corporate concentration of responsibility, the carbon footprint of AI and data centres, the real limits of individual action, and how climate regulation can be weaponised as social control rather than genuine environmental policy.
Part III - Carbon markets in full: cap-and-trade mechanics, the complete history of the EU ETS, global carbon pricing from California to China, and an unflinching assessment of the voluntary carbon market's integrity crisis.
Part IV - The global regulatory map: EU Green Deal, Taxonomy, CSRD, the US Inflation Reduction Act, SEC climate disclosure rules, and the Paris Agreement and ISSB IFRS S2 framework.
Part V - Sustainable finance in practice, including the $4 trillion green bond market, ESG ratings divergence, transition finance for hard-to-abate industries, and a major examination of why genuine sustainability requires pricing chemical pollution, nitrogen loading, ocean plastics, and biodiversity destruction - not carbon alone.
Part VI - Technology as both solution and problem: solar and battery cost curves, AI for climate, carbon dioxide removal at gigaton scale, and the governance vacuum around geoengineering.
Part VII - Four data-driven scenarios for 2050, the green growth versus degrowth debate, and a conclusion that holds the full complexity without false comfort.
Every chapter is built on data. Dozens of original charts, tables, and diagrams. No prior knowledge of climate science or finance is assumed - concepts are introduced from first principles and built systematically.
Written for finance professionals navigating ESG mandates and carbon market exposure; policy makers and their staff; MBA and economics students; journalists covering the energy transition; and readers who want the full picture, including the parts the industry would prefer to leave out.
The sky is finite. So is the soil. So is the ocean. So are the insects. This book explains exactly what that means - and what a sincere response would require.
