Rama Variankaval, global head of the center for carbon transition for JP Morgan Securities LLC, speaks during the Aspen Ideas: Climate conference in Miami Beach, Florida, US, on Thursday, March, 9, 2023. Aspen Ideas: Climate is a solutions-focused event designed for the public to interact with and learn from climate leaders whose ideas and actions are critical to address our collective future.
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Rama Variankaval is in his twentieth year working at JPMorgan Chase and at the end of 2020, he expanded his role in the corporate finance advisory arm of the bank to help spearhead the bank’s strategy on decarbonization, which refers to reducing or eliminating carbon dioxide emissions from a system or process.
He believes that decarbonization is a megatrend for the global financial markets, much like digitization has been for the last few decades.
“At any point in time, there are certain megatrends that impact more than just a narrow part of the economy,” Variankaval told CNBC in a video interview earlier in August. In his career at JPMorgan, Variankaval’s mission has been to identify and have a viewpoint on what those megatrends are and then to “direct our energies, our efforts, our balance sheets, to align with those megatrends.”
He believes decarbonization is a megatrend because global regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will touch every business in every part of the world.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re an energy client, or a consumer products client, or a retail client, there is something about this megatrend that is going to impact your business model, your business,” Variankaval told CNBC.
The topic of ESG investing — which stands for environmental, social, and corporate governance and is describes an investing strategy which incorporates non-financial measures of responsibilities — started coming up in 2018 “quite frequently,” Variankaval told CNBC. The focus on ESG was a harbinger of the forthcoming and increasingly intense focus on climate.
Climate change has been an issue for much longer than decarbonization has been a global financial megatrend, but a number of factors coincided to make decarbonization a business imperative.
The Paris Climate Agreement, adopted by 196 parties at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015, was “a fairly massive catalyst,” Variankaval said.
By 2020, large asset owners, like pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, started to prioritize decarbonization “with higher intensity,” says Variankaval.
As the largest asset owners started to prioritize decarbonization, their influence trickled down and influenced the behavior of other financial gate keepers. Asset managers started asking the companies where they were making investments to start focusing resources and operations on decarbonization. For publicly traded companies, that pressure came in the form of proxy votes on issues relating to decarbonization.
In 2020, JPMorgan formally announced its Center for Carbon Transition, a group responsible for designing and implementing the JPMorgan strategy around climate and sustainability as it pertains to its client-facing businesses, and to also engage with those companies about that strategy “because we felt everyone was thinking about these topics” at the same time, Variankaval told CNBC.
President Joe Biden signs The Inflation Reduction Act with (left to right) Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY; House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-SC; Rep. Frank Pallone, D-NJ; and Rep. Kathy Catsor, D-FL, at the White House on Aug. 16, 2022.
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The Biden administration’s landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, signed in August 2022, further established the megatrend, accelerating the flow of capital into decarbonization and low-carbon technologies like solar, wind, green hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, carbon capture, and other areas.
The IRA lowered the net cost of capital for these decarbonization technology companies by as much as 5% (500 basis points), according to Variankaval, because it made it cheaper for decarbonization companies to put together their capital stack, or financing for deals. Deals that were typically done with a combination of debt and equity got a third source of capital added to the mix: Tax credits and the associated tax equity.
The IRA happened just as the broader economy simultaneously slowed down because the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to combat rising inflation. The higher interest rates in the broader economy counteracted some of the incentives of the IRA, but even against the backdrop of a softening broader economy, the IRA has already turbocharged the sector. By JPMorgan’s count, more than $100 billion of investments have been announced in just the last year with a direct link to the IRA, says Variankaval.
Also, there’s about $50 billion a year going into climate tech companies via private funding and venture capital funding pathways, says Variankaval.
“We see massive amounts of capital formation happening around the climate theme, or around the decarbonization theme, and we absolutely want to be the bank that is a leader in helping our clients navigate that, whether they are small clients or big clients,” Variankaval told CNBC.
While the IRA is specific to the United states, companies and governments are re-evaluating their own industrial policies around the globe to focus more on resiliency than they previously have, says Variankaval.
“We went, I think, a period of 15, 20, 30 years, where efficiency was the number one guiding principle of how you organize yourself,” Variankaval told CNBC. The thinking was: “let’s find the cheapest place to do every part of our supply chain, and stitch it all together,” Variankaval said.
But now, the resiliency of a company’s supply chain is being given as much priority as efficiency. And sustainability is a keystone of resiliency.
In addition to a sharpening global focus on decarbonization, the Covid-19 pandemic brought a particularly strong spotlight on the importance of supply chains, their vulnerability, and the importance of focusing on resiliency in supply chain management.
“All of these are coming together in a way to, I think, be perhaps the largest change in how capital flows that at least I have seen in my lifetime,” Variankaval told CNBC.
It’s too soon to be picking winners and losers
In addition to helping its clients adapt to a decarbonizing economy, JPMorgan also sees opportunity in being the bank for the burgeoning and potentially high-growth sector of climate tech companies.
“We absolutely want to be there with them at the ground level, and then have these companies grow with us. We want to be the bank of their choice,” Variankaval said.
Right now, Variankaval says, it’s too soon to know exactly which climate tech companies are going to the winners and losers.
“In a more traditional way of bringing about changes, a lot of research gets done in academic labs and government labs, and then people take it out and test it out in the commercial setting, and figure out what works, what doesn’t work. It’s a multi decade-long process,” Variankaval told CNBC.
It took two decades for the Internet from invention to wide business adoption, but “we don’t have the luxury of time when it comes to climate tech to go through the long-run process,” Variankaval said.
In some segments of climate tech, there are debates about which solutions are better than others that take on a near religious fervor. That’s not particularly helpful in his view.
“We have to deploy capital across all likely solutions, knowing that some may not really work as promised and the use cases may not quite be what we think they could be today. But others might surprises. And some might kick into action sooner, some might just take longer to kick into action. So you need to diversify in terms of technologies, but also in time horizons,” Variankaval told CNBC.
“You can’t really pick winners and losers at this point. We’re just too early. And that is at least how we think about it.”
Chris Martin of Coldplay performs at the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire on October 12, 2021 in London, England.
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Astronomer, the technology company that faced backlash after its CEO was allegedly caught in an affair at a Coldplay concert, said the CEO has resigned, the company announced Saturday.
“Andy Byron has tendered his resignation, and the Board of Directors has accepted,” the company said in a statement. “The Board will begin a search for our next Chief Executive as Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Pete DeJoy continues to serve as interim CEO.”
Byron was shown on a big screen at a Coldplay concert on Wednesday with his arms around the company’s chief people officer, Kristin Cabot. Byron, who is married with children, immediately hid when the couple was shown on screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” A concert attendee’s video of the affair went viral.
In May, Astronomer announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.
Byron’s resignation comes after Astronomer said Friday that it had launched a “formal investigation” into the matter, and the CEO was placed on administrative leave.
“Before this week, we were known as a pioneer in the DataOps space, helping data teams power everything from modern analytics to production AI,” the company said in its Saturday statement. “Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met.”
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corp., speaks during a news conference in Taipei on May 21, 2025.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold 75,000 shares on Friday, valued at about $12.94 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Friday’s sale is part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Earlier this week, Huang sold 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a separate SEC filing. The CEO began trading stock per the plan last month.
Surging demand for AI and the graphics processing units that power large language models has significantly boosted Huang’s net worth and pushed Nvidia’s market capitalization beyond $4 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable company.
Nvidia announced this week that it expects to resume sales of its H20 chips to China soon, following signals from the Trump administration that it would approve export licenses. Earlier this year, U.S. officials had stated that Nvidia would require special permission to ship the chips, which are specifically designed for the Chinese market.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday. Huang said during a news conference on Wednesday in Beijing that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.
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The Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish filed for an IPO on Friday, the latest digital asset firm to head for the public market.
The company, led by CEO Tom Farley, a veteran of the finance industry and former president of the New York Stock Exchange, said it plans to trade on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “BLSH.”
A spinout of Block.one, Bullish started with an initial investment from backers including Thiel’s Founders Fund and Thiel Capital, along with Nomura, Mike Novogratz and others. Bullish acquired crypto news site CoinDesk in 2023.
“In the first quarter of 2025, Bullish exchange executed over $2.5 billion in average daily volume, ranking in the top five exchanges by spot volume for Bitcoin and Ether,” the company said on its website. The prospectus listed top competitors as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.
The IPO filing says that as of March 31, the total trading volume since launch has exceeded $1.25 trillion.
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The filing is another significant step for the cryptocurrency industry, which has fought for years to convince institutions to embrace digital assets as legitimate investments.
It’s already been a big year on the market for crypto offerings, highlighted by stablecoin issuer Circle, which has jumped more than sevenfold since its IPO in June. Etoro, an online trading platform that includes services for crypto investors, debuted in May.
Novogratz‘s crypto firm Galaxy Digital started trading on the Nasdaq in May, moving its listing from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And in June, Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange and custodian founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, confidentially filed for an IPO in the U.S.
Meanwhile, investors continue to flock to bitcoin. The digital currency is trading at over $117,000, up from about $94,000 at the start of the year.
President Donald Trump, on Friday, signed the GENIUS Act into law — a set of regulations that establish some initial consumer protections around stablecoins, which are tied to assets like the U.S. dollar with the intent of reducing price volatility associated with many cryptocurrencies.
In its filing with the SEC, Bullish says its mission is partly to “drive the adoption of stablecoins, digital assets, and blockchain technology.”
Crypto industry players, including Thiel, Elon Musk, and President Trump’s AI and Crypto czar David Sacks spent heavily to re-elect Trump and have pushed for legislation that legitimizes digital assets and exchanges.