Why Carbon Credits Don't Legally Change Hands, and what GCMU has Built to Fix that — Chris Canavan

In this episode of This Week in Carbon, host Rene Velasquez sits down with Chris Canavan, CEO of the Global Carbon Market Utility (GCMU) — a financial markets veteran from Goldman Sachs, international project finance, and emerging markets who came to carbon as an outsider and immediately spotted something insiders had learned to live with: the market has been running without the foundational infrastructure every other financial market takes for granted.Chris has spent his career in commodity markets, derivatives, securities markets, and project finance. Now he's directing that experience toward building what he calls the missing layer — a utility-governed registry of title that allows carbon credits to be legally owned, enforced, collateralized, and financed like any other asset class.Key topics covered:Why carbon markets, despite three decades of activity, remain "adolescent" — and what happens to adolescents who age without ever maturingThe single most effective way to accelerate market development: "plagiarize" from markets that have already solved these problems over decades and centuriesThe DTC, Swift, and Chicago Board of Trade origin stories — how every major financial market infrastructure was born from crisis, not foresight or planningWhy the "integrity precedes scale" narrative gets the causation backwards — and what the history of financial markets actually shows about how scale and integrity interactThe shocking reality: no one can confirm, hand on heart, that the transfer of a carbon credit is a legally enforceable true sale of ownershipWhat a registry of title actually means — and why the analogy is Kenya issuing a sovereign bond registered in EuroclearWhy commercial actors — exchanges, registries, data providers — are structurally disincentivised from building foundational market infrastructureThe free rider problem: why collective action is the only path — and why the market still hasn't had its epiphany momentGCMU's utility model: governed by a 501c3 with a fiduciary obligation to scale the market, not fatten marginsThe grain warehouse receipts story: how fungibility and standardization turned the Chicago Board of Trade from a sleepy trade association (that had to offer free drinks just to get attendance) into the global epicenter of commodities marketsWhy carbon doesn't need to become crude oil — it needs to become the aircraft equipment market, governed by the Cape Town ConventionWhat the market looks like in five years if the foundational layer is built: less friction, institutional confidence, and credits that can be financed and collateralized like any other asset classA genuinely different perspective on why the carbon market is stuck — and a rigorous, historically grounded blueprint for what it would take to get it unstuck.🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and more.