Cary Krosinsky on Whether the Financial System Can Fix Itself | Decoded x HERizon

This is part two of our Decoded x HERizon event: a conversation and live student Q&A with Professor Cary Krosinsky, hosted by Akshat Bhaskar and Amaira Akbar. Cary teaches at Yale, Brown, and NYU Stern, co-founded the Carbon Tracker Initiative, and has written eight books on sustainable finance. He opens with his framework of the seven tribes of sustainable finance to tackle the core question of the conversation: can the financial system actually correct itself.

He argues that moral divestment has largely failed while strategies pairing real returns with real impact have worked, and points to asset owners like the New York State Common Retirement Fund and Temasek as models for how billions actually get moved. The conversation ranges from rethinking GDP to account for human and environmental costs, to why western cooperation with China on climate is unavoidable, to India's own distinct path forward. He and Amaira also dig into the energy footprint of AI and what it might take to offset the jobs it displaces.

He closes with his five levers of change, corporations, investment, innovation, policy, and people, and practical career advice for students headed into climate, tech, and finance.

Recorded live in partnership with HERizon. Part one, our associate team's session on ESG and decarbonisation, is up as a separate episode.