E182 Luke Baldwin: Rarer Than Diamonds

Second Nature · Jul 9, 2026 · 1h 25m · transcript

Luke Baldwin started a carbon credit business in 2023 — by his own admission, the worst possible year to do it. The market was in freefall, trust was gone, and nobody was buying. Two years later, his business closed the first deal in the world to capitalise future carbon removals as an intangible asset on a corporate balance sheet.

This conversation goes into why the environmental sector still hasn't built a product good enough to compete for capital, why "voluntary carbon markets" is the wrong name for the wrong reasons, and why nature-based credits are about to become one of the scarcest…