Sustainability Currents

The AI boom has largely been framed as a race for chips and compute, but as the technology scales, some of its biggest constraints are becoming increasingly physical. On this week’s episode of the Sustainability Currents podcast, Stephen Byrd, global head of thematic and sustainability research at Morgan Stanley, joins Shaheen Contractor, Bloomberg Intelligence senior sustainable finance research analyst, to explore whether electricity and infrastructure could become the next major bottlenecks to AI growth. They discuss energy affordability and security, the implications for the energy transition and what physical constraints could emerge next. The conversation also examines where investors may still be underestimating the risks and opportunities created by the AI build-out.
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“You’re going to be in the red if you don’t go green,” says Ben Makowiecki, agriculture sustainability director at Lloyds Banking Group. In this episode of the Sustainability Currents podcast, Bloomberg Intelligence analystGrace Osborne speaks with Makowiecki about why farm resilience is increasingly financial resilience. They explore how finance can better reflect the realities of transitioning agriculture to more regenerative practices, and why everyone from insurers to infrastructure developers has a growing stake in strengthening farm resilience, including its potential to reduce flood risk. This episode was recorded Oct. 6.
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Traditional development funding is under pressure even as the need for investment in healthcare, water, energy access and other basic services remains high. Can innovative finance help draw more private capital into these areas? On this week’s episode of the Sustainability Currents podcast, John Simon, co-founder and managing partner of Total Impact Capital, joins Shaheen Contractor, Bloomberg Intelligence senior sustainable finance research analyst, to explore how new financing structures can pool capital, manage risk and attract investors to projects that can be difficult to fund. They discuss the role of concessional capital and technical assistance, where these structures work — and where they don’t. The conversation also examines how the investor base is changing and what could come next for impact finance.
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Climate risks are becoming easier to identify and model, but turning that knowledge into projects remains a major challenge. Michael Berkowitz, executive director of the University of Miami’s Climate Resilience Institute, joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Sustainability Analyst Chris Ratti to discuss how cities can move from planning to implementation, which technologies could reshape resilience and how the new Resilience Finance Lab aims to mobilize capital for adaptation and climate-risk projects.
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Solar and storage account for 70% of all new capacity added to the electric grid in the first half of 2026, and the US now has enough solar capacity to power more than 50 million American homes, according to a recent report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie. On this week’s episode of the Sustainability Currents podcast, Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota and current president and CEO of SEIA, joins Eric Kane, Bloomberg Intelligence director of sustainable finance research, to discuss key findings from the group’s U.S. Solar Market Insight report. They discuss the strategic road map for scaling American solar and storage, bipartisan market reform, soaring power demand from data centers, grid interconnections and much more
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