Climate Confident

Making Data Deliver Net Zero - A Chat With Gavin Starks of Icebreaker One

January 12, 2022 Tom Raftery / Gavin Starks Season 1 Episode 55
Climate Confident
Making Data Deliver Net Zero - A Chat With Gavin Starks of Icebreaker One
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Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

One of the most interesting companies in the Climate space has to be Icebreaker One. Icebreaker One is working across industries and governments to create a web of open net-zero data connecting financial, engineering and environmental data to help inform net-zero decisions.

Sounds ambitious? Absolutely - but they have form doing this! How are they doing it? To find out more I invited the founder of IceBreaker One Gavin Starks to come on the podcast and tell us more. He didn't disappoint.

We had a fascinating conversation covering how Gavin has done cross-industry open data sharing projects previously, the challenges facing this one, and the consequences of getting it right.

This was a truly fascinating episode of the podcast and I learned loads as always, and I hope you do too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

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And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

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Credits
Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper


Thanks for listening, and remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Gavin Starks:

How are they going to mandate the delivery of net zero. Because it's not good enough just to say, you've got to invest in low carbon, that doesn't give me confidence that we're going to hit the target. And so the there needs to be a way of us very acutely measuring the impact here and all of these things will ultimately flow into the equivalent of credit scoring for organizations.

Tom Raftery:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you are in the world. This is the climate 21 podcast, the number one podcast showcasing best practices in climate emissions reductions. And I'm your host, global vice president for SAP. Tom Raftery. Climate 21 is the name of an initiative by SAP to allow our customers calculate, report and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In this climate 21 podcast, I will showcase best practices and thought leadership by SAP, by our customers, by our partners and by our competitors if they're game in climate emissions reductions. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast in your podcast app of choice to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Climate 21 podcast. My name is Tom Raftery with SAP and wouldn't be on the show today I have my special guest, Gavin. Gavin, would you like to introduce yourself?

Gavin Starks:

Hi, thanks, Tom. My name is Kevin Starks, and I'm the founder of icebreaker one. I've got a background in data spanning too many decades now, including co chairing the development of the open banking standard, setting up the Open Data Institute's decade ago and then prior to that setting up a venture backed company called Amy, which was aggregating all of the carbon footprinting information on earth.

Tom Raftery:

All of the carbon footprint information on earth it sounds like a small little backroom project while you were

Gavin Starks:

I like small projects, I think, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective. I studied astrophysics, uni and worked at Jodrell Bank radio telescope, laughing out sections, the universe, so I don't like small projects.

Tom Raftery:

Earth is very small, when you're happy with the entire universe.

Gavin Starks:

It did seem like a smaller subset. So it's very, very achievable. And it feels like we're doing that now. I think you know, the amount of Earth observation data now we're scanning the whole earth, I think three meter resolution on a daily basis now multispectral. So that changes everything.

Tom Raftery:

So tell me about icebreaker one. So actually, before that, you said the open banking standard? What What's that?

Gavin Starks:

So open banking standard was an initiative led in the UK by Treasury initially. And what we did there was brought together all of the high street banks, a bunch of startups and SMEs and government regulators and so on, and created a standard for data interoperability that is now regulated. So it's mandatory across the sector. And the the, when we talk about interoperability, it's just it's not just technology interoperability. And there are standards for API's and data and so on. There's also legal interoperability, liability, modes of redress dispute resolution, consent management. And what that enables is really pretty seamless ability to share your bank data, and things like bank statements with third parties. So if you want to integrate your bank statements with your accountancy firm, it's a few clicks, if you want to pay your tax earlier this year to great delight, and using the government website without any copy and paste, there's three clicks, and I paid my tax. So it's really about removing friction from the system. So the reason it's a standard really is it's easy to say, be interoperable, but being interoperable in the same way across an entire market. That is cohesion. So it's a mixture of cohesion and interoperability, and then having it regulated, so everybody has to do it isn't something I thought we'd see in my lifetime, to be honest. But we managed to pull it off. And it's now in dozens of countries.

Tom Raftery:

Kudos, kudos. And how did it move from being in the UK to being in dozens of markets?

Gavin Starks:

Sure. So we started off with a very UK remit there. And what we did at the point of publishing, what we were doing is mandated that everything that initiative did would be openly licensed. So all the documentation and the documents were all Creative Commons licensed. And all the code was MIT licensed. So it enabled other people to copy it directly and So we've had calls very quickly from other countries saying, Oh, can we do that, too? How do we do that, which might as well just go to the website and copy it. New Zealand was the first day of the bat, to get there, and got to market within a couple of years, with most of the market on boards, as an industry led initiative, and then other countries like Canada, right, the way through to Hong Kong, Singapore, etc, have all been exploring the same architecture of how do you really create this interoperability at scale across sectors. And that's very much led me to the thinking behind icebreaker one, which I set up a couple of years after the US banking work was having done this in the middle of the financial sector, which, again, the facts of the bank is that at first, it was a bit bewildering. But based on that, we said, well, could we do this for other sectors? And could we enable large scale data interoperability, not just open data, but of the commercial data, that sensitive stuff that people don't want to share? Can we crack this web of data piece? We've got all the technology that says it's not a technology problem. It's a cultural problem, a legal problem, governance, challenge, and so on. And so we have this blueprint from open banking that we thought, well, maybe we could apply this across other areas. And so I set up icebreaker as a nonprofit to take these ideas forward into energy water transports, the built world and agriculture, which are only areas most linked to net zero.

Tom Raftery:

Right? So just before jumping into that, where does the name come from?

Gavin Starks:

A few different points. One. One of my friends describe me as a bit of an icebreaker personally. I also live on one so I'm sitting on a an icebreaker just next to the next the terror bridge right now. And we added the one partly because my my son's very into Thunderbirds, so felt felt like we should really have a double barreled name. So icebreaker one it was

Tom Raftery:

nice, nice, nice, nice. So tell me a bit more about icebreaker one. I mean, we have it at a very broad level right now let's get down a little more into it. How will this help with this is the climate 21 podcast and we want to talk about climate emission reduction stories and strategies. So bring the two together for me.

Gavin Starks:

Sure. So there's this sort of coming of age of IoT and sensors where everything is getting censored. So we've got this huge tsunami of data coming towards as mixed, as I mentioned, with the Earth observation data. So today's the simplest it's going to be, so it's only going to get more complex from this point onwards. And then really, everybody's saying, well, we need to invest trillions, and we heard it copying $130 trillion worth of global assets now have to be aligned with the Paris Agreement. That's, that's 40% of global assets. So the financial community now needs access to information that you might not have had before. Otherwise, we're going to make decisions that lead us in the direction of net zero, but don't necessarily hit net zero. And it's really quite important that we hit net zero. So to get the data flow there, and whether that data flow is the carbon intensity of a kilowatt hour across a system at a particular period, or whether it's the scope three emissions from part of someone's supply chain, the investment community really need access to that information. But suddenly, the engineers forget, we need to both direct the finance to net zero solutions and prove it in to demonstrate net zero, we need to give the engineers the opportunity and capability to vastly improve our efficiency, we've got to hit 50%, we've got to have our carbon emissions in the next eight years. Okay, so we need to double our renewable energy production. And we need to have our energy consumption and or double our energy efficiency, maybe a better way of putting it. So suddenly, you've got everybody say, oh, we need all the data for X Y, Zed. And I spent a couple of years talking to hundreds of people with and the conclusion from whether it's a hedge fund or whether it's an insurance company or whether it's an engineering firm or whoever it was, like we just need all the data. Okay, well, and the natural response from countries or big organizations, or multinationals to that question is, well, let's build a big data portal and put all the data in one place. And I'll say that doesn't work.

Tom Raftery:

Why don't why doesn't that work? Just, I mean, I have a good idea of myself but just for people who are listening.

Gavin Starks:

Sure. Well, partly cultural companies we've all been programmed not to share. And I spent four years at the ODI with organization saying, you know, we'd love it if everybody else is open as long as we don't have to be. And there's plenty of initiatives that I've tried. And there's, you know, there are some cases where it's worked. But I think there's a step before that, that we need to work out. It's not to say that we don't need to put certain cask as a data together for particular particular types of analytics. But starting off by just saying, let's just put all the data in one place isn't a good strategy. It's not a good strategic approach. And so it's, you know, we build a big data lake and then start mining it. Well, what's the use case? Before we get into that? So the Blueprint here that we've got from open banking is leave the data where it is. And then when it's needed to provide consent, within a tightly controlled process, so that your risks and controls are managed. So that you can say, yes, you can have access to that for that purpose. Now that when you're looking at, say, national energy data, it's there's national national security interest in there, there's commercial interest in there, there's IP in there. So people are not naturally inclined to just say, well, we'll just take all our data and put it in some, even if it's a Data Trust, or some kind of centralized, you know, national supercomputing facility, it's heavy lifting to get people to get you the data. And it's because it's also at that point, it becomes a distinct project rather than business as usual. So we're trying to move the dial here from a centralized approach to a decentralized approach. There's over with energy, there's over 1000 companies in the energy sector in the UK, going to each one of them saying, Oh, could you put your data over here doesn't scale. We've got this wonderful thing called the web, which is the most successful data architecture in history. I've heard it scaled pretty well. You know, we went from zero to a billion websites, and not very long, but we didn't, and the process of that really take the, the rest of the system along with us, which is why we're now trying to retrofit things like GDPR. And trying to kind of close various steel doors after the horse is now turned into a unicorn somewhere else. And the sort of process here that we take with icebreaker one is to say, how can we bring together the legal components, the business units, the regulators, and so on. And so if we construct this in a way that's very repeatable, we can connect people rather than collecting all the data. And so the approach we're taking is, how can we get all of the organizations in a particular sector, as we did with banking, to agree that that's a really good way of doing something and then just say, rubber stamp that here is how we're going to share smart meter data from wind turbines, across the whole network, here are the terms conditions, here's where it's free, here's where you have to pay. Here's the control points. So not everybody is allowed access, only certain people in the market are allowed access to certain levels of granularity of data. So we're doing the really heavy lifting work, you know, starting with the use case, he's setting up advisory groups getting industry and government around the table, to say which things are really material here. And as we start to unpack them, there'll be repeatable for the whole market. So open energy is a program now that's been running for just over a year, was part of a national competition, which we won, to develop open energy as an equivalent to open banking for the energy sector. And it's, you know, it's all the heavy lifting you might imagine it's a,

Tom Raftery:

I can't even begin to imagine I mean, just trying to get all those stakeholders to agree. It's my head, my head is exploding, just thinking of the concept right now.

Gavin Starks:

But it's a classic thing. You know, there's the infamous XKCD cartoon, you know, you're 12 standards, you want to make another one that unites them all, suddenly, you have 13 standards. So that's what we're not doing. So what we what we are doing, and this is where the the government's involvement and regulatory involvement is really key in getting people around the table is we can say, well, what's best practice right now? What have you got? What's working? Okay, that's, that's version one. Right? From a from a technical standards point of view. You've got a metadata standard, you've got an API standard. Okay, great. No, it's not perfect. But let's all agree that that's the one that we're just going to run with an iterate. Let's then wrap around the really tough bits around consent management and liability transferring data rights and who can do what with which bit of information. Those are the those are typically the blockers to data flow. Once we've agreed that the data can flow, it's you know, it's not hard to set up an API these days, although a lot of people seem to still think things. But you can just take your, you know, if it's relatively infrequently changing data, then it's really not hard to share it, it gets different, you know, when you get down into sort of, per second, or even per 30 minutes, it has different challenges. But I think the question comes back to what's the use case. So we tend to talk about rather than rather than talking about real time data, we talked about relevant time data, what's decision relevant data. And then as we layer this together with other information, just looking at the scope of what is energy data, includes the weather, because the cables melt. So suddenly, you're into this very diverse, distributed, decentralized network of information that people need access to. And so the more we can improve that access and reduce the friction of that access from a bilateral contract, that might take three to six months to something that is three clicks, and takes six seconds, means that we're going to enable whoever is in that ecosystem, whether it's the engineers or the finance folks, or people building analytical tools or developing AI, let's give them access faster, so that they can work out how to make us twice as efficient, have twice the amount of renewables, get that to market get twice the amount of funding moving.

Tom Raftery:

Nice, nice. And there's, to my, you know, naive mind, there's a nice match between the financial and banking data and the energy data, because as you alluded to the GFANZ proposal that came out of cop 26, in Glasgow, and the 130 trillion, it without the right energy information, it could be very easy to direct some of that 130 the wrong way. So will the two systems talk to each other?

Gavin Starks:

So very good question. So this is again, where you've got lots of different people doing different things, as we always do. And it's one of the reasons why building lots of centralized points isn't the first step. Because then you have to work out to connect them all. And say, Well, if we can work out what the wiring should look like, then it becomes easier to build different silos for different types of purposes. So what we're trying to do here is unlock a web of what we call a web of net zero data. And that connects financial information, engineering information, and environmental data to help inform netzero decisions. It's really early days at this stage, because we're trying to do that sort of breakthrough of building out particular use cases. But I think there's an exponential change element of this. And mapping this back into the the challenge that we have at hand, we need exponential change around net zero, if we're going to have any hope of getting to a 50% reduction by 2030. And so we need to radically increase the ability for us to share actionable information and decision relevant information. The financial community can then use that to hold people to account in their investment thesis. So when people are creating, whether it's a procurement or an investment or sovereign wealth fund, how are they going to mandate the delivery of net zero, because it's not good enough just to say, you've got to invest in low carbon. That doesn't, that doesn't give me confidence that we're going to hit the target. And so that there needs to be a way of as very acutely measuring the impact here. And all of these things will ultimately flow into the equivalent of credit scoring for organizations. There's already been capital flight away from things that are gonna be stranded assets. But where does it fly to? Well, it flies to the places where there's the most demonstrable action to net zero, Microsoft saw that with their own announcements about retro actively becoming carbon neutral, though. That's the beginning. Yeah, so when we were here, and looking at your height, we d risk the investment profile for a low carbon technology. There's two elements to that. One is we have to increase the risk of the fossil fuel and demonstrate what that looks like. So actually, you drive the behavior to treat assets or stranded assets faster. But then we end up in the in the just transition conversation of cinema You can't just switch off the coal fired power plants tomorrow, because you'll switch off the hospitals. So how do we de risk the investment then in the replacements and get into market faster, because every every single year, we accelerate change, we create an exponential change downstream. So we'd love to see the information flows there about the demonstrable net zero at the design stage, the construction stage, the operational stage, and the decommissioning stage of infrastructure projects. So that that information can flow to people who need it. And the people who need it are predominantly the financial community who need to make investment decisions, the engineers who need to know what works, and the policymakers who need to help unblock things that are in the way and, and amplify things that will accelerate that change. So one of the groups that we are part of is called the climate financial risk forum. And that's run through the Financial Conduct Authority, the Bank of England and The Pensions Regulator in the UK. And around the table there, you've got legal in general, but Viva BlackRock and so on, the question we are bringing to the fore there is what's the information flow that you need to make your investments material and demonstrate that you're going to deliver the low carbon future that we need. Now joining these systems up is, again, hard work. But it requires a sort of multi dimensional approach of bringing together government and industry and bringing together sectors so that they can maximize the trillions are going to flow in this direction.

Tom Raftery:

Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned the policymakers part of it, because I think, you know, that's obviously crucial, and possibly underappreciated. One of the issues that I am seeing at the moment is that there's a huge focus on hydrogen. And if you start to look at the numbers around hydrogen, for many of the use cases being put forward, it makes no sense. I mean, hydrogen is today, made Monday yet percentage of hydrogen today, globally is made by steam fracturing, methane, making it a de facto fossil fuel to produce a kilo of hydrogen, the moment causes the production of between 10 and 12 kilos of co2, if it's made, and kind of a European grid, if it's made in China causes between 18 and 20 kilos, co2 per kilo of hydrogen. And then there's the whole efficiency problem. Now for some use cases, I can see a potential for hydrogen, but for others, it's an appalling idea that will make us far worse than we are right now. Transportation is an obvious one there. So the getting that kind of information, for example, to policymakers who are being inundated by lobbyists for fossil fuel industry, who are saying hydrogen will save the world is obviously hugely important.

Gavin Starks:

Absolutely. And so access to trusted information, that word trust comes right to the fore there. And that's something we've heard from hundreds of organizations over the last few years, is, yes, we're getting the information. But you know, where's it coming from? Is it credible? How do we maintain data quality? There's lots of, you know, actually business as usual challenges in the mix here. Even if you take the net zero agenda out of the equation, how are we going to make sure we've got better data to make decisions as businesses? And I think there's some really interesting trends. So this idea of mapping out the data value chain is something that we're taking into organizations now. And they're really struggling, it's not as a different way of thinking is typically you'll say, Well, how do how do we get our own house in order? And then what do we need from other people? And we're going to ask them for it, and so on. So when you're taking more of a use case, led approach, and you say, well, who's in the data value chain here, and that includes the customer chain, as well as the supply chain as well as across your organization? The architectural approach to that needs to be web that needs to be web based, but then you immediately have these blockers as well. Who's whose liability is that? Yeah. Where's the dispute resolution process? Who's going to take the lead and working out these really difficult inter organizational relationships? But again, we have a blueprint for this that is functional, and it can reduce the friction. And I think, to your example, there that evidence you know, from let's say, somebody out there has created some hydrogen process that is You know, radically less than the existing mechanism? Well, let's get that to market as quickly as possible. Let's get as many eyes on that as we can. But there's, there's another component to this, which, you know, we've all been learning the hard way through social media, of even if you're not on Facebook, and you're not being tracked, and you've switched everything off, you're being tracked, because the people you know, are being tracked. And then you can, your profile can be discerned from that that's already happening in the commercial sector, and is only going to increase more. So this idea of where is the data flowing about our organizations, who's responsible, who's accountable and so on? The questions around that are going to get tougher. As I said, you know, today's the simplest, it's going to be the natural corporate antibodies that kick in, I was like, well, we should close everything that unfortunately, closing everything down is the opposite of what we need to do, right? In order to, you know, stay in business, you know, businesses, you know, if you look at the richest companies on Earth, right now, they've made their money by connecting. And through those connections, their data increases in value, the most connected, rather than just having it all. So it's quite a, it's quite a seismic change at one level for people working, particularly in large corporates, where you're trying to navigate a data strategy for the future, is how do we connect, not collect? Without letting or feeling that we're letting a whole bunch of value? Leave the door? But actually, there's gonna be more coming in and going out.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And, again, you're working within the UK? On this open energy? Will this be similar to the open banking? Will it be copy and pasted throughout the rest of the world? Hopefully?

Gavin Starks:

Well, I'd certainly encourage that. I think the, we've got a couple of early signals of that. We've had a very great relationship with New Zealand since we started the open banking piece and help them there. We're in conversation already about potentially taking the open energy piece over running some pilots in New Zealand, with local partners, our own approaches federated and decentralized. You know, there's another initiative called Mission Innovation. And that's part of the multinational efforts for green powered feature. The Secretariat of that includes China and the Ministry of Science and Technology, Italy, Ministry of ecological transition, and the UK is the business in energy and industrial strategy department. So icebreaker ones part of the Secretariat of that now we're taking open energy into that framework, the UK, fortunately, has the lead role as on data and interoperability. So we've just taken all of the work from open energy and copy pasted it in there. And we're hoping to work start working on demonstration international demonstrators, because this could help not just domestically, but also with cross border data flows. So there's, there's some good platforms there for us to take things forward.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, and were you up to cop 26? Was that of any use to you?

Gavin Starks:

Yeah, so it was we had a very intense cop 26, representing I think every day for about six days on different fora, Mission Innovation, launched their first roadmaps, a 10 year mission, to create a green powered future with the open energy kind of model embedded in it. We also had, I think, a few good signals coming out from industry. So my takeaway is, at a political level, while we didn't achieve what everybody wanted to achieve, we did actually achieve a lot. It won't get us to 1.5 in time, at a political level, the industry I suppose the signals I was getting from industry, I'm more confident about than any other point I've been through. So I think there's a lot of noise, still huge amounts of greenwash huge amounts of noise, and statements. And in the heart of it. At the heart of that though, there is signal and I think that signal has some exponential qualities to it. So the key thing we have to do really is start finding what can grow exponentially and just amplify that and give it as much oxygen as possible. And certainly data came up in hundreds of conversations I've had over the over the period. So we've got a lot of work to do. So I think the you know, the good news is I don't think it's as bad as Some of the more extreme on the kind of activist side might be projecting, we definitely need to be worried. You know, I'm an astrophysicist. Climate change. I spent the last 15 years working on climate change for this reason. But the the levers of change have to be this combination of government and policy, large companies and the investment community driving that change, that the action for consumers and for citizens, is to ask your pension provider, your bank, your insurance company, what is their net zero strategy? That's point two, how are they going to prove it? That's the question I love. And the third one, how is your chief execs renumeration tied to delivering that target? Perfect, because those are the those are levers every 100,000 people calling up their pension providers, they'll get they'll get paid attention to. It's interesting.

Tom Raftery:

It's interesting. Just on this podcast alone, in the last couple of months, the number of people who have brought up that exact point, contact your pension provider and your bank, your insurance company, and ask them to justify or ask them to show that they're doing this. That's it,

Gavin Starks:

show me the plan and show me how you're going to prove it. I think it's the second one is super important in the mix that and the third one is just a good provocation.

Tom Raftery:

And, I mean, again, I know the answer, but maybe people listening don't why pension plan plans in particular?

Gavin Starks:

So one of the things when I was setting up icebreakers, like where's what organizational structures need to think about the long term like legally, is because most businesses, you're you're tied to quarterly return cycle. With the market, you're legally required to maximize value to your shareholders on a very short timeframe. So it doesn't drive the right kind of behaviors. I thought, Well, I'm not going to try and change the entire capitalist framework in the next 10 years, because it will take longer, I'd like to, I'd like to make big projects. I like big projects, but you got to you've got to also have a dose of realism somewhere in the mix. And I think there are structural changes that will happen in amongst us, but you've got to demonstrate the value along the way. So when we were looking at, you know, who cares who has to care about the long term, there are two grips that surfaced insurance companies, and pension funds. They're the ones who have to think on a on a 25 year horizon, actually not much longer than that, right. But the climate is now very much within that horizon. And the mechanism here, again, we have to understand the governance processes surrounding the financial institutions with which we entrust our money. The pension funds are required by law to maximize the returns for their pension for the funds themselves for the end stakeholders, which is you and me. So when they look historically, or what is the lowest risk to get a return, the data exists for obviously, for the fossil fuel industry for decades. It doesn't exist for as long for renewables. So we need to change the way the risk modeling is on, which is where you come back to the insurance companies who are a fantastic risk modeling. But then, you know, they don't have all the data. They're creating new models. And one of the programs the first program we ran, was working with AON with British insurance, Lloyds Willis towers, Watson Arup, to work out, what's the climate ready financial product? What does that even mean? And, you know, it's super interesting, because you know, you've got the domain experts in these different organizations have real specialism in the different areas. But really joining up into more systems thinking is really hard work. And it isn't necessarily happening. The degree you might imagine it is. So a lot of our work has been trying to bring together these multi stakeholder groups to say we have Cambridge University in the mix there that Cambridge Zero program to bring the climate science right to the table. So actually, it's that's not how that works. So you've got that model over there. No, that's not a thing. So bashing heads together, it's a continuous process, but we we've got to get on and make things and stop writing and not write reports about what should be done. We've got to go out and test this stuff.

Tom Raftery:

Fantastic. Gavin, we're coming towards the end of the podcast. Now, is there any question I have not asked that you wish I had or any topic we've not touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Gavin Starks:

I think that is really about the call to action. Yeah, I think that there's two calls to action. One is on a personal level, is do call up your pension provider and your insurer and your bank and say, show me your plans and tell me how you can improve it. I think we need to all take that into our workplace as well and say that what are we doing? What what change? Can we affect here? How can we de risk our internal politics here? And the more people who are saying, No, we'll support this, the more likely it is that you'll get the buy in. One of the journeys that I've been on many times now as you go in at the bottom of an organization. And everybody's totally passionate about doing something, but it's always somebody else's problem up the chain to make a decision. And so you go up the chain, right away to the boards. And the board says, Well, yeah, but we need the shareholders to approve it. And then the shareholder that you got shareholders, the pension funds, pension funds, well, we need the rest. That's we need the support from the pension holders, which takes you right the way back to the start. So everybody in the system wants to create change. There's almost no simple exceptions when they're actually in the minority. So there's a collective action problem where we've systemically disabled ourselves from taking action, so it needs everybody to take the question into the meeting. How are we going to make this net zero?

Tom Raftery:

Fantastic. Great. Gavin, that's been awesome. Thanks a million if people want to know more about yourself, or about icebreaker one are open financials or energy or any of the things we talked about today. Where would you have me direct them?

Gavin Starks:

Sure, just icebreaker one.org and my email is just Gavin at icebreaker one.org Just get in touch.

Tom Raftery:

That's fantastic. Gavin, that's been brilliant. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Gavin Starks:

Thanks very much.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks, everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about climate 21 Feel free to drop me an email to Tom raftery@sap.com or connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you'd like the show, please don't forget to subscribe to it and your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast it really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.

Introduce yourself
Open Banking Standard?
Icebreaker One?
Why not a data portal?
Will financial and energy data talk?
Trusted information...
UK only?
COP 26?
Why pension plans in particular?
Any question I haven't asked?
If people want to know more...