The Curve x Available Light Podcast Framing

Goals: To give listeners…

1. The permission and confidence to talk about climate/nature

2. A B.B.Q-level competency on:

1. What is climate/nature and climate change/the nature crisis

2. The relationship between climate/nature and finance

3. Understanding of how we got here: why the economy is “delulu” and doesn't account for climate/nature

4. Understand the tactics used by companies to keep women as distracted consumers

5. A clear menu of potential next steps

6. Understand how to apply a climate/nature test across your portfolio and invest in the future you want

Ideas:

- To gauge what listeners want to hear about, suggest we do a poll on socials to capture sentiment about the topic, and collect everyone's burning questions they want discussed.

- Create a link tree/list to send out after the podcast is released with all the resources we talked about: people to follow, books to read, possible actions to take.

Approach:

- Funny: Such a serious topic requires humour to be approachable and make it as light as possible.

- Culturally relevant: Use culturally relevant metaphors to explain things in terms the audience understands.

- Demystified: Break everything down into simple concepts first, then go deeper on detail.

Reading Notes:

- I have not included any of the charts or graphics we could expect to accompany the conversation, or any of the specific statistics or examples we would use to back up some of the conversation threads. This will be step two once we have confirmed the framework for the conversation.

- I have included 2 optional sections in boxes for you to make a call on. Both are emotionally quite heavy and could take up too much time.

- Each section is broken into sub-headed groups of threads so you can skim the shape of the conversation before reading the detail.

- This is all up for grabs so mark up with any comments or questions.

Content Framing

1. Disclaimer: Why this feels taboo and the permission we'll give ourselves to have a heart to heart about climate, nature and finance

Conversation threads:

Why it feels like too much

- Like in the movie “Don't Look Up”, thinking about the climate and nature crisis means thinking about the end of the world as we know it. We have enough on our plates; this is probably the easiest way to psychologically spiral. It can bring up a range of emotions from hopelessness to depression to anxiety to anger.

The hypocrisy trap

- It can also feel hypocritical. How can I talk about this when I know I am part of the problem? But talking about it doesn't mean you have to radically change your life and go live on a commune, or that once you talk about it you can't ever buy plastic again. Hypocrisy is the price of entry to the conversation. Reference myself on a Euro holiday flying across the world.

- We've been fed a lie about how “guilty” we are as individuals. The truth is the system (we'll talk about this soon) is actually built to lock us in as consumers. Part of taking back our ability to change things is to acknowledge this.

Nobody taught us the 101s

- You are busy. The world is crazy. And, like finance, no one has done a great job of teaching us the 101s and how to have this conversation.

- What we are fed in the media is debilitatingly depressing. Who wants to dwell on that? We don't hear a lot about the solutions we can actually get behind. That's on purpose. We like to think of companies as neutral actors, but there is an agenda that benefits from us not talking about this. If we did, we might get together and demand change on such a massive scale that it would disrupt the current business models benefiting from extraction.

Permission to be angry

- Hot take: getting angry is good. We generally need to talk about stuff that makes us mad. A simple framing is that the entities enabling the activity that causes climate and nature impacts are stealing from us: stealing your ability to swim in a river, stealing your ability to afford insurance because floods are so common now, stealing your health because of pollution and soil quality, and literally stealing the future away from our children. Most relevant here: companies who do not respond and adapt to the climate and nature crisis and the risk that comes with it are stealing future value from us as investors and consumers.

We have more power than we think

- In finance, we are usually “retail investors”, almost like consumers of stocks, with not much power other than to sell our stocks. But if we look at shareholder activism, we can see investors getting together and demanding change. We can do the same, be it through how we invest, purchase and vote. Or literally just by talking about it.

2. What Is the Climate/Nature Crisis: And Why It's the Biggest Threat to Your Stock Portfolio Since the G.F.C

Conversation threads:

Nature vs climate: the definitions

- Define “nature” and “the climate”, how they are different and how they relate to one another.

- Draw an analogy between the body and earth's living systems and look at our “blood panel”: the 9 planetary boundaries and our current “results”. [Fact-check: as of the September 2025 Planetary Health Check, 7 of the 9 boundaries are breached, with ocean acidification the latest to cross.]

- Why has this happened? Highlight earth's resilience, like human resilience, and how we only get a disease after years of living like a party animal. The earth is the same.

Earth as our unpaid supplier

- How does finance fit into this? Introduce the analogy of earth as our biggest supplier, who hasn't been paid.

- Explain our current neoclassical/capitalist economic model vs a hypothetical ecological model: one treats nature as an endless, free input, the other treats nature as the basis for the economy; one doesn't price in nature, one does. Guess which one keeps our supplier happy?

G.F.C vs This Crisis: An Internal Shock vs An External One

- How does this impact our economy? Remember the G.F.C: the economy, like nature, is super interconnected. Fallout in the sub-prime mortgage market caused a domino effect that wiped out X amount of value, but then the economy rebuilt itself. It was in a way an internal event. Talk about the government bailouts.

- The climate change and biodiversity crisis is an external event that is both caused by the economy (because we don't price in the cost of nature and climate and therefore pour money into activities that cause climate change and biodiversity loss) but also impacts the economy in a way that no government can bail us out from.

What it looks like on the ground

- On the climate side, imagine a series of events (droughts, storms, floods and heatwaves) that wipe out food-growing regions, disrupt supply chains and infrastructure, and cause mass deaths across the world, and it does not stop. No government can pay money to stop that from happening. The global economy is driven to a halt.

- The nature side is even more fascinating, in that actions we take can have unintended consequences. Here's one stark example:

Back in the early 1990s, India had tens of millions of vultures (often cited as around 4 to 5 crore / 40 to 50 million). They were nature's clean-up crew, quietly disposing of animal carcasses and stopping disease from spreading. Then a veterinary painkiller called diclofenac poisoned them. Within roughly 15 years, over 95% (up to 99%) of India's vultures were wiped out. The consequences were shocking:

- Dead animals rotted in the open, spreading disease.

- Wild dog populations exploded, driving up rabies cases.

- Carcasses dumped in rivers contaminated drinking water.

- An estimated half a million additional human deaths (2000 to 2005) were linked to this collapse.

- The economic cost? Around U.S$69 billion per year in mortality damages.

Bringing it home: the food-company example

- So that kind of feels like an “over there” problem, right? Consider that roughly one in every three bites we eat exists because of pollinators like bees, butterflies and birds (and about three-quarters of the world's main food crops depend on them at least in part). Say you invest in a big listed food company (think Nestlé, General Mills or Mondelez) and love eating its products. Bee populations in the almond, berry and apple-growing regions it buys from are wiped out due to long-term pesticide use, and suddenly its supply is down. It has to buy from elsewhere, but where else can produce enough? This costs a lot. At the same time there is flooding at its main manufacturing facility and workers are going on strike because of rising food costs. All of this results in a worse share price and higher prices for the consumer. Now imagine this en masse, where every global food company is impacted, profits can't be maintained and food costs skyrocket.

Table summary: Potential section: Where are we at right now, and where are we heading? Talk about the current state with a set of high-level metrics and what they mean. Give a view of the best case and worst case scenarios by 2030.

3. Who let it get to this? The history of how we built a delusional economy and how it's coming to bite us

Conversation threads:

A quick history: oil, growth and the S&P

- Quick history lesson: the industrial revolution, oil, and how oil enabled successive technology booms. It made everything more efficient and cost less, but started to chew through finite resources.

- Our modern economy was built on the assumption of cheap and abundant oil for energy that never priced in that resources were finite. That meant endless growth, endless G.D.P growth, and we can see it in the year-on-year trend of the S&P 500. We love to talk about the fact that it has grown over time, to the point where it would almost be a fireable offence to talk about what happens when the conditions for growth (e.g. resources) run out.

The core delusion: Nature Inc. isn't sending invoices

- This brings us to the core delusion in the current version of our economy: the true cost of “doing business” is not being brought onto the balance sheet of companies.

- Think about this. If Nature Inc. decided tomorrow to start charging for her services, and not a wild amount of money, but a rate like infrastructure, the equivalent of “paying for power”: for the clean air, water, soil nutrients, pollinators, photosynthesis, and compensation for the clean-up needed from a business (emissions, heat created, rubbish, rivers poisoned, people getting sick because of pesticide use). How would a company's books look? And what would the share price look like?

We can actually measure it: impact-weighted accounting

- Now, this might seem crazy, like how on earth could this be done? Actually we have enough data to calculate the costs of environmental and social damage caused by extractive practices that have been normalised in the economy.

- It's called impact-weighted accounting, pioneered by Harvard Business School academics and now developed into a framework by the Impact Economy Foundation. These accounts are being published as “twins” to sit beside the financial accounts. What is usually the first thing we look at when we think about investing in a company? Profits. This method creates a measure called true profit, which accounts for this “nature cost”. The results are bleak.

- A study looked at the 20 largest European companies by market cap. With social and environmental costs fully accounted for, combined profits of €209 billion turn into a net loss of €19 billion; climate costs alone eat 60% of reported profits. Imagine what would happen if the market woke up one day and decided to price this real cost into the stock price.

Internalise profits, externalise costs: so who pays?

- Again this doesn't make sense. If there is all this cost eating into the profits, where do those costs land? How come it doesn't show up? This reveals the trick that our current economic model plays, called “internalising profits, externalising costs”. All the benefits of using nature are included on the books, while all the costs are borne by who? Us. We pay higher taxes and rates so the government can clean up after businesses, we can't swim in the rivers or at the beaches some days, we pay higher food prices, we get hiked insurance rates to cover natural disasters, we pay for more health care, and then we get told that to get ahead we need to invest in the companies contributing to it.

- We also get told that we couldn't possibly stop all of this because then the economy wouldn't grow, and if the economy doesn't grow then it will collapse. Which is really crazy, right? Nothing else in the world just grows and grows and grows. Except cancer, which eventually kills its host, which is exactly the trajectory we are on now.

How the time lag made a few people very rich

- Again, this seems crazy. Why would the government or a central bank or anyone let this happen? We talked before about how resilient nature has been. This means there has been a massive time lag between when our modern economy was set up, with all the accounting standards and “ways of doing things”, and the impact of that set-up showing up in the hectic way it is now: natural disasters, global warming, collapse of ecosystems. In that time, people got really, really rich and really, really powerful. Think about it: imagine just not paying wages. Or not paying rent. Then these people got lobbyists, or actually got into government, and made sure the rules stayed set in their favour. They got the profits, we shouldered the costs, they paid their taxes to the government. Arguably this worked for a while, but now those rising external costs are beginning to create impacts that are shaking the foundations of the economy itself.

The macro view: how the dominoes fall

- This gets into macroeconomics, the branch of economics that studies the behaviour, performance and structure of an economy as a whole, rather than focusing on individual consumers or single businesses, which is what we often focus on in investing. It's the bird's-eye view of an economy, where you can see all of the moving parts holding it together. When we think about G.D.P, the rate of employment, inflation or interest rates, we are switching into this mode of thinking. The key players in the macro economy are the government, central banks, the financial institutions (like banks, who translate central bank policies into borrowing costs for businesses and consumers), and us, acting as the consumers, borrowers and workers creating value.

- Natural disasters get so frequent that insurance companies stop insuring, for actual damage, business or supply chain disruption. So a disaster happens and businesses go under or houses are lost. G.D.P takes a hit.

- Who steps in? Central and local governments. But these governments are already in debt. Now they have to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for recovery over multiple years. Rating agencies look at a country and its liabilities and downgrade its rating, so lenders charge more to give it a loan because of the increased risk.

- Banks see the increasing impact of natural disasters on their books, with more defaults and certain borrowers unable to get insurance, increasing the risk they hold, meaning higher rates or refusing to bank newly “high risk” customers.

- Central banks, trying to stimulate the economy, reduce interest rates to increase the money supply. But this doesn't work, because lower interest rates do not instantly rebuild ruined factories, homes, farms or physical property. Dead crops and depleted fisheries cause lasting shortages. Cheap credit cannot grow food faster or fix ruined ecosystems. When you genuinely have a supply shortage, more money can't get you more goods; lower interest rates just give people more money to chase fewer goods. This makes inflation worse instead of helping the economy.

A correction is coming, and the only question is who drives it

- We are heading for a massive correction, and it's up to these entities where that correction occurs. Either nature “corrects” our economy the hard way, by making it impossible for it to operate as it has been, or we correct the economy so it acts in line with nature and we turn the ship around.

- We are seeing all the signs of these entities having this W.T.F moment, and now openly discussing how to change the rules and the incentives to (a) try to stop or slow the climate and nature crisis and (b) get prepared to adapt to the new reality we have created for ourselves of season after season of disaster.

4. Why is this so hard to talk about? The cost of talking about it and the tactics used by companies to keep women consuming

Conversation threads:

The short-term value dilemma

- One of the most uncomfortable things that can come up here is this mismatch between short term thinking and mid-long term thinking “I know this A.I thing might be a massive bubble and is going to bring on a global water crisis, but what about the short-term value I'm giving up if I pull out of this stock now?”

Our brains aren't built for this

- The reality is our brains are really badly built for this, which explains why, just like the movie “Don't Look Up”, we know this is coming but day to day no one seems to be panicking:

- Our threat detection evolved for dangers that are personal, abrupt, immoral and immediate: a face, a predator, a sudden noise. Climate change is impersonal, gradual, caused by everyone, and mostly elsewhere. It has no face and no deadline, so the amygdala never fires. We respond to the form of a threat, not its magnitude.

- Psychological distance makes threats abstract. This is called “construal level theory”: the further something is in time, space, social relation or certainty, the more abstractly we represent it, and abstract things don't drive behaviour. Remember The Hunger Games? Most of us listening to the podcast live in District 1 or 2. We are the lucky ones. We haven't really been impacted by climate change and nature loss yet, unlike other “districts” for example the developing world, where people's lives are being destroyed daily, so it doesn't feel real.

- We discount the future steeply and inconsistently. Hyperbolic discounting means a cost now feels much larger than a much bigger cost later. Every climate decision is structured exactly like this: we have to sacrifice now to ensure we do not get completely f***ed later.

- Loss aversion protects the status quo. Losses loom about twice as large as equivalent gains, and avoided future losses barely register as gains at all. So the certain, immediate cost of change dominates the uncertain, deferred benefit. Every time.

The consumption treadmill

- In our world, as well as investing literally, we invest through how we spend our money as consumers. And the outlook is incredibly bleak on this: business is booming. This demand is fuelling the climate and nature crisis. It's so, so easy to blame individuals, ourselves, for this, but there is a far darker side and it has everything to do with big tech companies hijacking other parts of our psychology.

- Meta and others hire experts in behavioural design to build user experiences that take advantage of our brain's wiring to keep us hooked. We know this. Its relationship to the collapse of climate and nature is a little more hidden. A large chunk of the influencers or people we follow, we arguably follow because they are aspirational. They have what we want, and the algorithm picks up on this and sends you more aspirational content, and it makes you want something more and more, and the less and less you feel without it, and then you get targeted with an ad to buy something that makes you feel part of that world, so you do. And then the next week these people have something different, so you go and buy it or a cheaper version, because now you have to keep up with your chosen aesthetic. So companies, who at this point don't have to pay for the water they pollute or the emissions they cause or pay proper wages, realise they can send new products to influencers week to week and “seed” curators to post about the new aesthetic and keep you on the consumption treadmill. And the platforms benefit: they rent out the predictive power of your data to advertisers to target you.

- So we are in this really hard position where on one hand our brains are in self-denial about what is the end of the world as we know it, and on the other hand we are being duped into doing the very thing that is pouring fuel on the fire.

The pressure cooker of being a woman

- We already know how women are marginalised from finance, and part of that is the share of discretionary income we lose by spending on beauty, clothing and things to keep up with societal expectations of us as perfect career girls with perfect bodies and all the treatments, and perfect mothers with all the things. Being a woman is to be in a pressure cooker. Add in the expectation to save the planet and it can sometimes feel like “Really? Do you think I have time for that?”

The credibility trap: there's no safe position to speak from

- There is a really contradictory, well-researched dynamic whereby advocating for sustainability with an inconsistent lifestyle reduces your credibility. So we might see an influencer giving tips on reducing emissions but also promoting a product with lots of plastic and think “seriously?”. But here's the trap: a highly credible advocate, an influencer who is super sustainable, isn't more effective than someone who is moderately sustainable. In fact they suffer from “do-gooder derogation”, where we think “this person is kind of an insufferable goody-two-shoes”.

- The calculus we run when we think "I can't talk about this, I bought fast fashion last month" is not irrational. It's an accurate read of a real social penalty we have built for ourselves. Add in the finding that being too sustainable is also punished, and there is no safe position from which to speak. That's what produces inaction.

Why this suits companies perfectly

- From a company perspective, this is perfect, right? Women are hooked into consumption by social media, and we have this social conditioning that then keeps us from taking action. We are totally disempowered.

- I want to be clear: I think first and foremost social media is hurting women because it's eroding our collective self-esteem, our ability to focus on things that matter, and is taking our discretionary income through e-commerce. And I think it's shutting down our ability to tap into our feminine, matriarchal instincts of care and concern. Not all of us are or will be mothers, but we all have children in our lives who we care about. The idea of them living in a Mad Max world is awful, right? That is where we are heading if action is not taken.

Table summary: A proposed section titled The twin crises of AI and climate/nature, which focuses on the interaction between AI and the environment. It includes factual discussions on energy and water use in data centres and addresses the moral dilemma of investing in AI.

5. What's a girl to do? A clear menu of potential next steps depending on time and energy

Conversation threads:

The good news first

- ok, so this feels super depressing, right? Would it make you happier if I told you that we actually have all the solutions, and all the money we need to implement those solutions, that will “save the world”?

- Putting aside pure investing for a second, whether you literally have no time or are secretly ready to tie yourself to an oil tanker, there is a whole menu of things you can do that will get you thinking about this, so that when all this risk becomes real, you are prepared.

The menu

Table summary: Suggested actions to address the climate and nature crisis categorized by the level of effort required. Low effort actions include behavioral changes like avoiding fast fashion for a month, educating oneself through movies, checking flood zone status, and researching climate-positive companies. Mid effort actions focus on political engagement, such as voting in the NZ general election on Saturday 7 November 2026, contacting the Prime Minister and Ministers regarding policies like mining in New Zealand, and reviewing Greenpeace petitions. High effort actions involve deeper commitment, such as joining Greenpeace or taking a course on the fundamentals of the climate and nature space.

It doesn't have to be “giving up”

- So much of the time, because this doesn't feel super real yet, making change feels like “giving up” the relatively free, rich lifestyles we have. But if we don't start making changes, when the world as we know it ceases to exist we will get the mother of all whiplash.

- The big secret is that it doesn't have to be giving up. It's true the oil and gas boom, the industrial revolution and globalisation lifted billions of people out of abject poverty, extended the average lifespan, cured disease and did so many other things to raise living standards on planet earth. But beyond this, has the ability to buy anything from anywhere at one click made us any happier? Do we feel more or less connected, human or content because of the hustle, the speed at which we live? Has Instagram or a new dress every week made us happier or feel more love? No. In some of the most developed economies we have created nations of the anxious, depressed and medicated. It's not rocket science that you see people buying rural properties and going back to nature; even the whole trad-wife thing, to some degree, has echoes of wanting to go back to simpler times.

- Loving what you own and buying less so you have less clutter, buying from local producers or having your own garden, making food at home, sharing stuff with your friends and family, gifting and giving things away instead of throwing them away, composting, and riding a bike instead of being stuck in traffic. Spending more time hanging out, playing, going into nature, booking local holidays with groups of mates. To me this actually sounds like a dream. I would feel richer if I was living like this, and that's the whole point. There is this concept from Alison Rice (host of the Offline podcast, she is epic and you should go and listen to her) called “a little, rich life”.

The investing conundrum

- If we focus on investing for a second, we are in this really funny conundrum. On one hand, if the market doesn't price in climate/nature risk yet, then it's not a given that it will move that way, and therefore am I losing out on value? On the other hand, the market requires people to move out of investing in certain companies because of climate/nature risk in order to create a big enough signal that they are not investable.

- Which leads us to the cold hard truth: to date, the financial performance of E.S.G investing has on average been broadly indistinguishable from conventional investing (the big meta-analyses find a mix of positive, neutral and negative results, with no clear edge either way).

Why climate/nature-positive companies will actually win

- So what's going to change? Investing in climate- and nature-positive companies isn't a good idea because they are going to win more customers, which they might; it's because they will survive the massive physical and transition shocks coming. Physical risk: is it investing in the ability to survive the actual physical impact of floods, droughts, fires, crazy weather and biodiversity loss on its supply chain, or will its customer base be reduced because of this? Transition risk is about whether the industry or business will survive the change in laws, policies, regulation and government spending, or the financial sector pulling out (banks simply not lending to it any more), or new taxes and accounting standards that make it price in nature. Or whether it will be overtaken by new technology.

6. How to apply a climate/nature test across your portfolio: Getting ahead of the reality check and making sure your portfolio is climate and nature aligned

Conversation threads:

The thought experiment

- Imagine the stock market woke up and reflected the true profits we talked about earlier. It's not something we think about, but how much value would drop out of your portfolio? And more importantly, how can you future-proof your portfolio today by understanding where climate- and nature-related risk sits in it?

- Whether or not you act on this and actively move money is a super complex question, especially when you see governments like Trump's literally leaving the Paris Agreement (withdrawal took effect January 2026) and putting policies in place that incentivise extraction. At the least, here are the questions you should be asking of your portfolio.

Seven questions to ask your portfolio

1. "What does this business need from nature that it doesn't own and doesn't pay for?" Food companies need water and bees. Beverages, brewing and distilling need clean freshwater in specific catchments. Fashion needs cotton, which needs irrigation. Insurance needs a stable climate. Data centres need water and a grid. This means the business has cost risk when these are priced, or when it is prevented from using them entirely.

2. "Where does the company physically exist?" Not the head office: the factories, farms, mines, warehouses and server halls. Concentration in one drought-prone basin or one cyclone-exposed coast is a real risk that a diversified-looking share register hides. Dependence on certain supply chains means if they go down, the company is choked.

3. "Beyond lip service, what's being spent on transitioning to a new climate- and nature-positive model?" No one expects companies to change overnight. It takes investment, time and resources, for example innovation to find new materials and energy sources.

4. "How much of the business is propped up by subsidies, or by the government as the main customer?" If the company is a climate- and nature-negative business, one of the easiest levers for the government to pull is to cut subsidies or contracts.

5. "If a company is in tech (with no immediate impact), what impact is it enabling?" Look at the company's customers and see whether they are climate- and nature-positive. If 70% of the company's customers are coal mines, it's holding a huge amount of climate and nature risk.

6. "Where is there competition who can supply a solution that requires less impact?" If there are better ways of delivering the same solution with less impact, this could be where demand flees to when the screws are turned.

7. "Does it feel like the company is doing something naughty?" Climate and nature litigation is on the rise, and companies are paying huge fines, causing actual losses, reputational damage and loss of customers.