Westport, Connecticut, United States
For 25 years, I traded energy at some of the world's leading trading houses. My edge was always the same: see risk clearly before others do, and act on it. That instinct is what drives Zero Intensity. Markets price what they can measure. Today, the carbon and water intensity embedded in raw materials, infrastructure, and compute power remains largely invisible, unverified, and unpriced. That is not just an environmental problem. It is a market failure. I founded Zero Intensity 18 months ago to fix it. The goal is to do for carbon and water intensity what commodity markets long ago did for oil, wheat, and natural gas. A universal specification. A common standard that makes environmental attributes transparent, comparable, and tradeable at scale. We start with data centers. Our Zero Intensity Protocol and Clean Compute designation give lenders, investors, and operators verified asset-level environmental data to underwrite, insure, and finance with confidence. Every raw material on earth follows. This runs deeper than Wall Street. I grew up on Goyder's Line in South Australia, a boundary drawn in 1865 marking the limit of reliable rainfall. Water scarcity was not a concept. It was daily life. My great grandfather Francis Gillen spent decades in Central Australia earning the name Oknirrabata, Great Teacher, for his evidence-based work among the Arrernte people. Durable understanding requires patience, humility, and respect for what is real. I carry that. My daughter Lili completed two years as an environmental scientist with the U.S. Peace Corps in 2025. Her urgency in the field is the same urgency I bring to building markets that make sustainability commercially compelling, not just aspirational.
Commodity trading