Join me on a walk along the west branch of Elk Creek after this transcript
Listen to the interview while you read along.
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:00
Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I'm your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thank you for joining the conversation.
Today, we're going to be talking investing, particularly green investing. For 25 years, our guest today, Peter Fusaro, has gathered business leaders interested in steering capital toward climate solutions. When he launched the Wall Street Green Summit in 2002, clean energy was just a niche interest, and carbon markets were not even really in their infancy.
Today, global investment in the energy transition exceeds $2 trillion annually, and climate risk is a key concern for insurers, banks and asset managers, not to mention the rest of us too. This year's Wall Street Green Summit, which will happen on March 10 and 11th in New York, comes at a critical moment. Insurance companies are withdrawing from California, Florida and, increasingly, parts of the Midwest, creating stress that affects mortgage markets, municipal budgets and household wealth. At the same time, AI data centers and electrification generally is increasing electricity demand faster than the grid can adapt. Our existing infrastructure and the way we plan, finance and build it are no longer fitted to the times.
This year's Wall Street Green Summit agenda reads like a map of where capital is flowing and where it's stuck. Next-generation geothermal is competing with nuclear to become a new source of clean power, particularly for data centers. Carbon removal technologies are scaling from pilots to bankable projects. And AI is reshaping both energy demand and grid management, as well as new insurance products are coming online designed to de-risk all of this transition.
Speakers at the event include climate tech investors, carbon market architects, fund managers running long and short sustainability strategies, and entrepreneurs building everything from fungal leather to ocean cleanup technology. And by the way, Earth911 is a media sponsor for the event.
Peter is a pioneer in energy risk management and environmental finance. He's advised corporations, governments and financial institutions on energy and carbon markets for decades, and he's authored several books about clean energy trading and green investing. And through his consultancy, Global Change Associates, has shaped how Wall Street thinks about the business of sustainability.
Peter also recently contributed an article to Earth911 about the growing influence of climate risk on corporate and investor decision making. It's become self-evident to many business leaders that the cost of climate damage is one of, if not the leading, threat to the future of their companies.
So we will talk with Peter about how the climate finance conversation has evolved over a quarter century, whether Wall Street has internalized climate as a systemic risk, and what it will take to unlock capital for these emerging sectors like hydrogen and carbon capture. And finally, we'll explore why flexibility and resilience—not just renewable generation capacity—has become the new definition of grid reliability.
You can learn more about the conference at TheWallStreetGreenSummit.com — “The Wall Street Green Summit” is all one word, no spaces, no dashes: TheWallStreetGreenSummit.com.
After 25 years of connecting capital to climate solutions, what has Peter Fusaro learned about the green trends that actually move markets? Let's find out right after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome to the show, Peter. How you doing today?
Peter Fusaro 3:58
Pretty well. We're going forward. Sustainability has had some nicks and cuts, but continues to move around the world, and we're now in our 25th year with the Wall Street Green Summit. So I think that's kind of a nice standard to look at. I'm watching and seeing a lot more new technologies emerge, and by the way, funding went up last year, even though people are particularly negative on climate tech recently.
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:29
I imagine when you started this in 2002 it's kind of like shouting into the void. How has the conversation overall shifted since 2002?
Peter Fusaro 4:38
It shifted, frankly, because we've had millions of young people enter this sector who embrace sustainability. It's not a political issue for them. I actually think they were taught by their teachers the good stuff. I was at Earth Day 1970, 55 years ago. And I think that this is the fruit of a lot of hard work that people put in.
So I actually—particularly when you see Climate Week in New York with 100,000 people in September—it's just amazing that there's so much impetus. And what happened to Climate Week was kind of interesting. This year we saw companies and countries. The Basque Country looking at climate tech, the Welsh Government looking at climate tech, companies like DocuSign and Airbnb buying forestry offsets. These are new things. And so I was kind of more amazed at the breadth of what's taken place, besides the depth of a real industry emerging.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:39
I'm surprised you say that. Last year, 2025, was actually bigger than '24, which was a huge—$2.1 trillion went into various forms of renewable and clean tech in '24. Where do you think we landed in '25?
Peter Fusaro 5:53
According to what I saw in December from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, 2.2 trillion, so up about 5%. But it wasn't a down year.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:01
That's good to hear. Frankly, I was worried, but I think everybody has really internalized this at the operational level. But do you feel like at this point, as your article argued, that Wall Street has embraced that notion that this is a systemic financial risk?
Peter Fusaro 6:20
Yes, they have. Actually had a discussion yesterday with another sustainability exchange emerging called GIGS. So Wall Street likes exchanges, likes to trade, likes volatility, and certainly likes uncertainty. What people don't understand about Wall Street, it's about the edge. What's the arbitrage opportunity?
And one group that's been very proactive in the last several years—I've been watching them get bigger and bigger—is the reinsurance industry. They're starting to not only put their money where their mouth is, but also fund things on carbon credits, carbon sustainability, sustainability projects. So they've been always very proactive, but they're even more stepping forward, not just the big names like Munich Re and Swiss Re—smaller insurers.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:10
I mean, given what's happened with insurers beginning to pull out of states like California and Florida, it seems to me that they must be concerned about the loss of premium payments, and so do you see them therefore investing more in climate projects to make these places bankable?
Peter Fusaro 7:29
That's probably a good correlation, but I'm not so sure, because after Katrina, they were dropping coverage on the Gulf Coast. That was quite a while ago, and so that's one way of not dealing with a problem.
And my own opinion is almost all coastal areas will be impacted by climate, and the storms will get more severe. We blew through one and a half degrees C last year, so I actually don't think things are going to get better in terms of storms, fires, floods, etc. So, but they are looking for new venues for investment. So I think they're trying to balance some of that, like you said. But I'm just seeing them go into more sustainable projects, clean technologies, things like that. You normally wouldn't see them.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:22
The way that you're describing it, it sounds like they see the rising incidence of disastrous weather events, climatic impacts, as primarily an investment opportunity. How fast do you think that market's going to grow over the course of the next decade?
Peter Fusaro 8:38
I don't really have a number for it, but I do see new entrants coming in. So it's not just the big insurance and reinsurers, it's newer companies. But you've never heard of, like Kita, for example, out of the UK—they've been very proactive. Another one's Ariel Re—never heard of them. They're looking at projects to insure. So it's a little different kettle of fish. It's not the traditional reinsurance insurance industry. It's newer players coming in looking at risk opportunities.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:10
Is that driven by those younger participants in the market that you were describing earlier? Kita, for instance, was founded by Gen Z and late millennials.
Peter Fusaro 9:22
Yes, it's true. It's kind of—there is that correlation of all these young people, young professionals, specifically, who are highly educated and motivated. The one interesting thing that I tell people about the climate tech industry, it's not a nine-to-five job, but there are a lot of nice people that are collaborative and sharing, which is very unusual for a sector. But it's—I just see that DNA. It's very different.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:53
Well, given that 2025 was slightly larger in terms of capital flowing into renewables and clean tech, are we at that tipping point where it has become mainstream finance rather than having to resort to describing itself as impact investing?
Peter Fusaro 10:10
Yeah, it's beyond impact investing, but I don't think it's mainstream. And I always get people asking me about investing in the retail market, which really has very little offering for what I'm talking about, right?
So, you know, the number that Bloomberg has put out is $215 trillion. So I can make the argument we're still under-investing in this sector. I'll give you an example. Energy is an $8 trillion business, food is a $5 trillion business, water is a $3 trillion business. So we have these large, capital-intensive businesses that still are in the beginning of their transformation. We'll call it a transition. And we're still under, really under-investing in the sector generally.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:55
What would you say we need to invest on an annual basis?
Peter Fusaro 11:00
Seven to 10 trillion a year. I mean, we really need to move the needle. We're not anywhere near that, and we're seeing some pushback, as you're well aware, of wind power in the U.S., so that's not helping.
The better news is, I had a meeting with the Lithuanian consulate yesterday. They're building out wind power. So it's kind of like one size fits all, and the game has been bending the cost curve, getting the cost reductions that took decades for solar, but now we have 95% cost reduction, global deployment. Wind power—about 50, 60% cost reduction, global deployment. So what's started to occur is the maturation process of these industries, where they were really outliers 25 years ago, they're really mainstream.
Mitch Ratcliffe 11:53
Well, given that—and you mentioned this a moment ago in passing—what do you see? Your assessment of the state of green investing after Donald Trump returned to the White House—is the uncertainty he has injected into the market become a barrier to some people moving money into it that might have otherwise done so?
Peter Fusaro 12:10
He has had that negative impact, but he's really energy ignorant. The U.S. is the biggest oil and gas producer, and Trump had nothing to do with that. Technology had everything to do with that—3D seismic, horizontal drilling, fracking, all of this thing created all the revenue streams of a very capital-intensive industry that already had occurred.
Talking about drilling in Alaska—never going to happen. Talking about drilling in Venezuela—I work for Petróleos de Venezuela. Nobody understands the tens of billions that will be needed even to resuscitate a dead industry in Venezuela. Venezuela oil production went from 3.2 million barrels a day to 820,000. Now it's totally declined due to lack of maintenance, firing 15,000 people.
So what I'm getting at is, I'm telling people just ignore what's going on in D.C.—and I've worked for three presidents—and look at the capital markets and look what's occurring in the blue states like California, New York. New York has had a Green New Deal. California is now the fourth largest economy in the world and has embraced climate change with AB 32, their climate law.
So it's not that this is detrimental. I just think federal funding is dead, period. What people don't understand, under the loan guarantee program that was only $400 billion, and most of that money wasn't deployed, by the way. So they cut the loan program, and now they're trying to focus on oil and gas and geothermal and a few other niches. But the industry does not need that capital to go forward.
And what people mistake is the energy industry thinks in 40-year cycles. So this is a blip. You know, Exxon is still one of the largest renewable energy purchasers, quietly. I hate the word "green hushing," but a lot of people are doing things quietly. There's a fellow out in Denver working with Clorox on supply chain for sustainability. They don't talk about it.
So I think what we're seeing is people quietly doing things anyway, because if you're a multinational company, you're going to fall under climate regulations and laws around the world. And companies are not irrational. They don't do one thing in one jurisdiction and different thing in another.
So I actually see, directionally, more movement and sustainability, more movement in looking at beyond supply chain. I think we're very short-sighted, and this blindsided everybody. And I'll tell you why—it was AI and sustainability, AI, particularly for electricity. And I'll tell you why that happened.
So in 1990—I'll date myself—1992 we had the Energy Policy Act, which deregulated electric utilities. At that time, there were 110 investor-owned utilities. There are now 40. And I've always said to people, the irony of deregulation has been consolidation, not competition.
And so they stopped investing in transmission, distribution. They did invest in generation, but the problem is we didn't invest fast enough, and no utility planner on the planet predicted crypto, AI, data mining, all the stuff that's needed now, and we've really under-invested in this sector. And that's going to lead to some energy shortages, and particularly where renewables were plugging into the grid—and the batteries are getting better, by the way, a lot better technology—but we kind of missed the boat here.
So the numbers I'm seeing on data centers keep escalating. It was 2% of energy demand in 2020. I'm looking now at 10, 12% by 2030. I mean, it's just the gigawatt phenomena is occurring here.
Mitch Ratcliffe 16:09
Well, and your article made this point—that flexibility is the new base load on the grid. Is that transformation going to happen enough in the context of this very negative political environment to keep up with the demand that you see, that we all see rising from electrification and data center needs?
Peter Fusaro 16:28
There's going to be blackouts and brownouts. It's inevitable. There'll be weather-related events where it's that very hot day in the summer that blows through peak demand. One other thing utilities have done myopically is reduce what we call reserve margins—keeping some supply back from the grid. They don't do that anymore. It's down to single digits.
I work with a very large utility in Ohio, and they would model next-day consumption that they run a lot on data—on what in the past they were consuming, what the dispatch curve looks like, what they're going to do for load management.
And you know, the low-hanging fruit has always been energy conservation, energy efficiency, whatever you want to call it. It just never got the traction that it really could have. So for example, I live in New York City with 900,000 buildings. So greenhouse gasses in New York City is 75% buildings, not transportation. And we have a Public Law 97 now, and there's going to be some more investment to shift 100,000 buildings off oil, mostly to natural gas. There's really not a lot of solar, because it's solar rooftop capacity.
So there's just been a very—I've worked on this thing for 45 years, and 45 years later, we're still looking at energy efficiency, low-hanging fruit. Now we call it proptech. So you go to property owners looking at technologies, but it's the same caveat—what's the payback period? How much does it cost, and can we afford to do this?
And typically, the low-hanging fruit has been, you know, the solar and windows and things like that, lighting systems, retrofits, those type of things. But you start looking at HVAC systems, and that becomes more expensive. And here in New York, we're trying to repurpose commercial buildings into residential—they're not built for that. So we'll even see if that even occurs.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:39
What role do you see AI playing in managing a more distributed and volatile energy system like we're talking about? Is it going to be a net benefit?
Peter Fusaro 18:49
That's the net benefit. That's, you know, the machine learning, the large language models, the things that AI is very good at will help some predictive modeling. Okay, it will take that data I was describing on next-day power, for example.
But, you know, you're talking about consumption in what we call load pockets. There's nothing there. So Southwestern Connecticut—people don't understand that's a load pocket going into New York City. It's a problem. And we're starting to finally see Hydro-Québec, after 40 years, will be wheeling power down into New York City. I don't remember the exact date, but they're building the capacity, because Hydro-Québec has too much hydropower.
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:35
The Trump administration is trying to prevent the shutdown of coal-powered plants, arguing that it's necessary for maintaining base load. That's going to cost tens of billions of dollars just to keep those things open. There's an example of trying to play chess by the President in an environment where he needs to be cooperative.
Peter Fusaro 19:53
Not going to happen. We burned 55% coal-fired capacity at one time. We're down to 15%. Yeah, that wasn't due to environmental rules. It was due to economics. They basically repowered coal plants with natural gas and some renewables.
So this is not going to resuscitate anything. The things they're saying in Washington—and my wife has an expression, "second-rate material"—the cabinet appointees don't seem to have their feel for what's really going on in markets, what's really going on in the energy sector, which is 73% of greenhouse gasses.
And so they can make these pronouncements, but no one's going to invest. You know, the chairman of Exxon said, "I'm not putting any money into Venezuela. It's too risky." They're not stupid. Unfortunately, the people in Washington are very energy ignorant. They don't seem to understand you can't mandate industry to start burning more coal. Doesn't work that way.
Mitch Ratcliffe 20:55
I want to come back to base load reliability right after a quick commercial break. Folks, stay tuned. We'll be right back.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let's get back to the conversation with Peter Fusaro. He's producer and co-host of the Wall Street Green Summit, which is going to take place in New York on March 10 and 11th in 2026. And you can register and learn more about the event at TheWallStreetGreenSummit.com. That's all one word, no space, no dash. TheWallStreetGreenSummit.com.
Peter, a few weeks ago, I had Dan Yates—he's the CEO of Dandelion Energy—on the show. And this is a home geothermal system provider that uses heat pumps to warm and cool homes. Your article for Earth911 pointed out that Fervo Energy has just raised about almost $500 million for next-generation geothermal. Has geothermal technology for both home heating and cooling and energy generation hit its tipping point? Are we on the beginning of that same hockey stick rise that we saw?
Peter Fusaro 21:59
We are seeing that. And that's one thing the Trump administration is behind—geothermal—and there is more opportunity. It used to be very sited to the Ring of Fire around the world. Now we're looking at other sites for geothermal. Geothermal closed loop doesn't make any emissions. It is getting its real renaissance now. So that's one positive note where everything is a lot—and the capital markets really have embraced geothermal.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:28
It does seem that drilling is what the Trump administration enjoys.
Peter Fusaro 22:33
IUn Texas, they call that “poking holes in the ground.”
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:37
So do you see geothermal positioned to become a go-to solution for tech companies seeking to power these new data centers?
Peter Fusaro 22:44
It depends how much the gigawatt capacity will be. The tech companies are going to consume a lot more energy. It's going to be a piece of that, particularly probably in California and Nevada, but not everywhere. I mean, there's been some geothermal in New York City that's been—no payback period. Just, it just doesn't make economic sense here.
Mitch Ratcliffe 23:06
Do you have a sense of where it does?
Peter Fusaro 23:09
Where there are those geographic assets, so to speak, that make economic sense—where they can do the drilling and get enough capacity out to turn turbines.
Mitch Ratcliffe 23:23
Should local leaders be thinking about this as an asset that they can promote to industry to bring business to their communities?
Peter Fusaro 23:32
Yes. Here's the disconnect, though. Most local leaders aren't particularly energy conversant. They really don't understand what you've been talking about. And even in New York State, we don't have an energy office anymore. Many, many states have abolished energy offices over the last 40, 50 years. They came from the first oil shock in '73.
So there's kind of a disconnect. I think promoters could sell that as business development to politicians—yeah, that would make a lot of sense. But I'm not quite sure that they're going to be marketing that.
What I've seen—there's another company called Gradient Geothermal that I sent somebody a press release yesterday—doing very, very well, based in Denver. They've been basically looking at emissions reduction sites where they can plug in their geothermal assets. So there's a lot of activity, but a lot of them are smaller players. They're not all the big players in geothermal yet.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:30
We're describing a very distributed generation environment where, for instance, you could put a geothermal system at a carbon scrubbing facility in order to power it—becomes self-sustaining. Where do you see nuclear fitting into this? In fact, you have a session at the summit on whether or not it can scale fast enough. Is fission and fusion on track to begin to take up some of this slack?
Peter Fusaro 24:57
My own opinion is no. But I have an open mind. We've only built one plant, nuclear plant, since 1978. That's the Southern Company plant, which cost $31 billion—cost overruns with federal loan guarantee. So large-scale nuclear is not particularly viable, and we won't go into the waste problem and everything else associated with that.
So building nukes, that's one problem. Second problem, we don't have the workforce anymore in nuclear power. I remember working out in Ohio, and they had to bring in somebody 78 years old, because they had no expertise internally.
I work with Korea Electric Power, which does the best nuclear fleet on the planet. They've built in the UAE, they've built in China. I could not bring nuclear engineers from South Korea to the U.S. due to national security issues. So we don't have the workforce.
So people are talking about nuclear power. That's going to happen with the SMRs, fine. Let's see how that plays out. And most of the stuff I've seen is looking at 2032 to 2035—it's quite long dated. That's even with fast-tracking, siting and everything else. So I don't see it as a longer-term solution.
The other problem is, we're shutting nuclear plants. And that's a very expensive proposition. I have sat in the only decommissioned nuclear reactor in this country at Brookhaven National Lab, and it's the only one that was ever done. So that's another problem.
So they've had life extension of the fleet. There's been a roll-up in the industry with significant players. But let's just see how the SMRs come to be. They're all about 50 megawatts. I hope they can make it through the promised land. But, you know, one of the companies out of the UK is making money on the magnets, not the nuclear power. So I'm just saying there's issues here that it's not so simple to site, build a nuclear plant without the workforce.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:05
Our investment in our skills and our training of workers to run these kinds of complex systems, it sounds like, is a key to unlocking the potential the United States has to potentially reassert itself as a leader in this movement. How do you think we should address that? Should we kind of start to invest in this kind of training? What do we do?
Peter Fusaro 27:28
Yes, they should. And some of the universities have been very involved in the oil and gas industry. School of Mines in Colorado, Texas A&M—there have been very specific programs in many colleges. I don't see that for nuclear. So workforce retraining is a nice buzzword, but you actually do the heavy lifting. Sure. And so I don't see, programmatically, that really occurring very much.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:55
What about fusion? You know, I've been watching this for a couple of decades now. We seem to be getting closer. What's your estimated time of arrival for fusion?
Peter Fusaro 28:06
Same thing—2032, 2035. And my speaker at the conference will be speaking about fusion specifically.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:13
So do you see that as a potential panacea once it starts to roll out? Because, of course, it doesn't carry the safety issues that fission does.
Peter Fusaro 28:22
I hope it commercializes more quickly. But this is science. I actually see the next 15 years—it's going to be renewables and natural gas. It's not going to be oil. We don't burn oil for power generation. It's not going to be nuclear, because it's pretty static.
And so what's left? It's, you know, the niches are renewable energy, which grew substantially. It's still not all mainstream, but it's getting better and cheaper. But it's natural gas. We're sitting on boatloads of natural gas, and nobody wants to talk about this because of CH4 and the methane equation. But it's going to be natural gas. You're going to see natural gas power those data centers.
Mitch Ratcliffe 29:10
Do you see methane scrubbing and various forms of carbon capture in conjunction with natural gas as a path to a more sustainable use of that material?
Peter Fusaro 29:20
That would be better. But I will tell you, the carbon capture is a very expensive proposition. I've looked at numbers like $400 a ton. I mean, it's not quite there yet.
We've seen leakage in the Appalachians for one of the facilities. The Norwegians are very advanced on this. It's kind of sporadic where it's really capturing a lot of it. I was looking at Permian Basin—it made a lot of sense, because the industry does CO2 injection into old oil and gas wells and tried to marry that with CCUS.
I actually went to Texas and spoke about this at the oil museum in Midland, Texas. But we'll see. So I look at everything but short term. And short term, to me, is the next five years—it's natural gas and renewables.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:15
Still, in some of my consulting work, I've been involved in understanding how AI for science can accelerate the discovery of new materials, new compounds and so forth. And you have a session at the upcoming event about how AI will transform climate tech investing. Can you characterize how, say, beyond data center demand, AI is actually going to accelerate the deployment of clean energy solutions?
Peter Fusaro 30:38
Well, some of that is on microgrids, some smaller scale, distributed energy. Some of that's in still in solar. We've got a group talking about tokenizing the SREC market. That's all going to be AI-driven—it's the first that's ever been done, by the way. They're going to announce that in March.
Some of that is going to still be looking at building envelopes, because that definitely is data. I have done energy audits here in the city, and it's all about the data. It's all about time of day, what the consumption patterns look like. So AI is actually going to be proliferating all over the place, in many, many different venues. I mean, on consumption, not so much on things like transportation. It's going to be more on the built environment.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:31
Do you see it accelerating the discovery of new materials that could be more energy efficient, that could provide better insulation and so forth? Is that a factor that you're considering?
Peter Fusaro 31:44
Definitely—specifically, as we get more robust systems in place, and quantum computing is really starting to take off, I think we're going to have breakthroughs nobody can anticipate.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:56
You just mentioned tokenization, and in the context of AI, with all that additional data, do you see any limit to what we can financialize in order to create the economic incentives to make these changes?
Peter Fusaro 32:09
No. In fact, I have got one speaker just to give you some context. So I was working with Stanford University. They have something called Jasper Ridge, which is their park, and this is in South Africa, where they were looking at biodiversity credits. And I said, well, that doesn't really make a lot of sense. And had a call in South Africa. I said, to just have biodiversity credits, it's too thin a market. Why don't you bundle that with the carbon credits?
Well, lo and behold, fast forward five years later, there's a group here in New York that actually has done a transaction for carbon credits, biodiversity credits, and water credits all bundled together. So you're absolutely right. There's no limit to financialization of these markets, and I think that makes a lot of sense.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:54
Now, a lot of this is going to be initially available in private equity and to the reinsurers that you were talking about. Is this going to be, long term, an opportunity for individual investors to participate in? And when do you see that coming to pass?
Peter Fusaro 33:08
I'm seeing sporadically that happening. I'm thinking this tokenization of the SRECs, which, to be blunt, you have to explain to people what a Solar Renewable Energy Credit is. When you start using acronyms, they don't know what you're even talking about.
There's another group which is actually doing projects in Africa for solar, which is selling into the retail market. So they're there. I'm starting to see a little bit of this, because for 25 years, people have asked me, "Where can I invest?" And I said, "Well, if you're not an accredited investor, you can't."
But I think that's going to start to change, particularly with this tokenization, because then they can actually have an offering on the retail market. I don't know if Coinbase will be doing this, but it's an opportunity here.
And as I said, I spoke to an exchange yesterday. They wanted to be—they've been approved by the SEC as the first sustainability exchange in the U.S.—and whatever, but they were only looking at equities, and now they're going to broaden themselves into commodities, which makes a lot more sense. So carbon credits, renewable energy credits, etc. Now they're getting much more interest, to be blunt.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:14
Well, in 2026, where do you see the most compelling risk-adjusted opportunities for investors, whether accredited or not?
Peter Fusaro 34:22
I think solar is still pretty easy. I think the batteries, depending on the technology, are going—and I'm going to a battery conference in two weeks here in New York. They have it once a year. That seems to me pretty viable, if they can scale and commercialize and grow.
Wind is off the table, except the completion of the Rhode Island plant. Unfortunately, they really built out a big wind infrastructure here in Brooklyn, and I don't know what's going to happen to it now.
And I think anything touching on robotics makes some sense. I'm actually involved with a company that's robotics hardware as a service. So I think robotics, because people don't like all the mundane tasks in the energy sector, like cleaning solar arrays or recalibrating devices. So I think robotics—and we're not so far behind China. I went to Carnegie Mellon, which was the first robotics institute on the planet, first computer science school on the planet. I think robotics are actually going to be very additive.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:30
I'm curious—what do you think about AI and quantum as investments now, given their potential to contribute to a more rapid transition?
Peter Fusaro 35:41
I think, if you got a good stomach, do the investment. They're not mature, there's a lot of volatility, obviously. So the NVIDIA chips, I noticed that's come off, and others. I think it is the future, but it's kind of the entrepreneur's perspective. Entrepreneurs create the future. So the future is coming, but, you know, to make an actual prediction, that's volatility, that's markets.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:09
I want to turn to what is potentially coming that's bad for just a moment, and that is that your article in Earth911 notes that mortgage markets depend on insurability, and we said that's not guaranteed anymore. Are we approaching a moment where climate risk is fundamentally going to reprice real estate in vulnerable regions? And what do you see that doing to the broader economy?
Peter Fusaro 36:32
It's already happening. Yes, that was the thrust of the article. There's more risk, and they're going to have to manage that risk. I think the broader economy, which is so consumption-driven in the U.S., it's going to have a problem. I mean, housing is a really large industry.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:51
So you see those costs flowing through to impact consumer spending and potentially even the purchase of new technologies as they come online?
Peter Fusaro 37:00
Yeah, that's going to be expensive. It's not going to get cheaper. It's going to get more expensive.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:05
Any thoughts on how we avoid that roadblock?
Peter Fusaro 37:09
No, because the other option—you just drop coverage.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:15
Do you think that's going to happen?
Peter Fusaro 37:17
Yeah.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:18
Where do you think it will happen? I mean, California is already that. That's the case here in Southern Oregon, where I could get insurance on my home with two companies and only two companies. Where should we be worried about it?
Peter Fusaro 37:33
The Gulf Coast, particularly. California, obviously. Not the Northeast, not the Midwest so much. Yes, there have been more severe storms and different climatic events. There's more unpredictability in the weather.
And unfortunately, they've also fired people from NOAA—National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. It seems a lack of expertise seems to be our biggest problem that no one wants to talk about—that when you decapitate federal agencies, you actually lose things in society.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:11
Is it the disdain for expertise that we have to overcome as a nation?
Peter Fusaro 38:18
Oh, definitely. When 54% of the population reads at a sixth-grade level, and people are staring at tablets, and the SATs have gone down in the last 50 years twice to be recalibrated 100 points—I was a professor at Columbia University, and I had problems with the students in terms of deductive reasoning.
So I think we've got some really major knowledge gaps in this country that are not being addressed. And I think the denigration of elites and academia is disgraceful, because if you just want people preaching to the choir, they're going to sing the choir back at you.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:58
I'm curious, as you look at the ultra-high-net-worth people who are resisting some of these new tax proposals—not to advocate or not advocate for them—do you see them as having alternative destinations for their life and wealth that makes the United States less attractive as a place to anchor their business and their living?
Peter Fusaro 39:22
Well, the real tech bros already have the bunkers already sited. Some of them are in New Zealand, as we know, and Hawaii.
Mitch Ratcliffe 39:29
Bunkers, though, are for a meltdown. But what about just day-to-day business?
Peter Fusaro 39:33
I look at societal risk now. I don't look at this thing monolithic. It's multi-pronged. In my opinion, there is a calculation here to create a lot of chaos and dissuade foreign people to come and be in U.S. universities, which is a bad thing, in my opinion, and foreign workers.
My grandparents came from Italy. They were immigrants. That was no big deal about that. I actually think immigrants are very driven people and work damn hard. So I think we're turning our back on a lot of things, but the knowledge capital that's being lost is disgraceful, because that's what drove our society into a service economy.
You know, we're not an agrarian economy anymore, which is the 19th century model, and we went through industrialization, post-industrialization, to really where we are today.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:36
Your article concludes with the phrase, "Risk is rewriting the rules, and resilience will rewrite the opportunities." As you bring everybody together in March in New York, what's the one message you want attendees to take away from the Wall Street Green Summit?
Peter Fusaro 40:52
That we can do this thing. It's a heavy lift, as my dad would say.
You know, I've spent 56 years now in sustainability, before it had a name. I was eating organic food in Pittsburgh at a food co-op in '71. So I've done this stuff. And what I've learned is change takes decades. Yeah, doesn't happen quickly.
The good news is, I think because generationally more young people have engaged on the issue of sustainability—so when I was on the board of the University of Michigan's Urban Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, I used to make a joke: I had a call option on young people.
So my takeaway is, I have a tremendous valuation on young people. I'm 75. They're inheriting this world, and they get the sustainability message globally. I've been to 50 countries, so it's not—they're different. They're actually very similar in their thinking. And so that is kind of that optimism that I still believe in. So that's the message of the summit. I bring in no government officials, no academics. It's all people in the trenches with solutions, and that energy level is very good.
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:15
How can our listeners keep up on everything you do? Because you're putting out a lot of great information.
Peter Fusaro 42:21
Well, I sporadically do a podcast or write an article. I don't blog, really. I mean, I do my Summit. I've got another group. I've got another enterprise, which is my Wall Street Green Cap Intro, which we're relaunching to bring monies to the SME market—small, medium-sized enterprises—from accredited investors. And that's a global platform, by the way, because I see the phenomenon around the world. It's not like this is happening here, because we mostly talk about the U.S. It's happening everywhere. Yeah. And that's the better news.
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:55
Peter, thanks so much. This has been a really interesting conversation, and I'm looking forward to the summit.
Peter Fusaro 43:03
Well, thank you very much, Mitch. I appreciate it.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 43:11
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You've been listening to my conversation with Peter Fusaro. He is the founder and co-host and co-producer of the Wall Street Green Summit, which will be presented in New York on March 10 and 11th in 2026. You can learn more about it at TheWallStreetGreenSummit.com—and that is all one word, no spaces, no dashes. TheWallStreetGreenSummit.com.
I think the key idea to take away from this conversation is Peter's exhortation that we can make the transition if we are determined to push through the difficult political issues that we face now, to focus on two things: first, making the economics of a renewable energy-powered economy work; and second, to power that transformation, educate coming generations to do the intellectual and physical labor of building, maintaining and continually innovating to reach a new phase of human history that does not deplete the planet's resources for future generations.
The U.S. is currently steered by an administration that, despite its complaints that the market doesn't have enough freedom, is imposing a retrograde ideology on technologies, industries and individual companies. And that's why, as Peter pointed out, many companies that recognize the impending operational crises that will emerge as extreme weather and rising sea levels push supply chains and consumer spending into chaos need to run under the radar.
The rickety and fragile energy infrastructure needs an upgrade, both in the short and long term. Over the next 10 years, we must continue to accelerate the transition from natural gas to more profitable solar, geothermal and wind electricity generation, while we prepare to manage an incredibly complex new grid that puts power where it is needed, when it is needed. And the key to that mission will be the AI that is capable of managing such intricate complexity in real time, which, at the same time, is driving demand that will result in brownouts and blackouts if we fail.
It's a very difficult time, particularly because no one—not the boomers or the millennials and Gen Z—wants the transition to take decades. But change does take time. It does take decades, which requires coming generations to rethink their expectations, to move away from the sense that everything must happen immediately. Our immediate gratification society needs to wake up so that we can recognize the long term.
We need to invest not for next quarter's public company reporting cycle, but for all of our benefit. We can build that capacity for patience by investing more in education so that the American people are equipped with the knowledge and habits of thinking that can recognize the steps needed, the inevitability of failure that will teach us rather than signal failure. And we need patience. We need tolerance for the mistakes that lead to more learning. And with that, youth will continue to improve our world.
It's time to look ahead, not back to a golden age of an elderly imagination, but to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society that our descendants will be proud to pass on to their children.
So strap in, folks. It's going to be a wild ride, and we'll be here with the stories of success and failure that will help humanity continue to learn and advance.
I hope you'll take a moment to take a look at any of the more than 540 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear that we have in our archives. Please share one with a friend. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Folks, you're the amplifiers who can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, family and co-workers—even the people you meet on the street—that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you for your support. I'm Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let's all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
Image courtesy of Google Earth
A Cold Morning On The West Branch of Elk Creek
It was early on a January morning, with the temperature in the low 30s, when I walked the lower part of the West Branch of Elk Creek. The area would have been underwater if a dam had not been notched back in the early 2000s, so the old settler home foundations are still visible throughout the valley. Below, you can see one of these, a cement foundation that overlooks this tributary of Elk Creek as you climb the hill toward is spring-fed source upstream. Nature is reclaiming the cement, and the 19th Century stone foundations are all but lost as recognizable human artifacts.
The foundation of an early 20th Century home along the West Branch of Elk Creek
After parking at the lower end of the Elk Creek Trail, a former county road that has become a 6.5-mile trail through the Southern Cascades, you cross a bridge over the West Branch of the creek. Spring-fed, this stream runs year-round from up a valley that heads off northwest to its sources in the hills.
West Elk Creek is paralleled by a second old county road that passes between homesteads and fields cleared by settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was early morning, the shadows stretching far up the hill. Enjoy the walk.