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™. The full interviews for each guest are available on the SmarterMarkets™ Presents media portal.
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
Hosted By
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.
Hosted By
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.
Hosted By
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.
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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.
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