The Green Impact Economy: Can Carbon Recycling Save Us?

Aimée Christensen, Founder & Executive Director, Sun Valley Institute & CEO, Christensen Global Strategies

Nicholas Flanders, Co-Founder & CEO, OPUS 12

Derek Handley, Co-Creator, The B Team & Founding General Partner, Aera VC

Join us for a conversation on the green impact economy with the founder of OPUS 12, a company Bill Gates called “one of the first” to potentially crack atmospheric carbon recycling, the founder of the Sun Valley Institute and former ‘Climate Maven’ at Google, and a leading impact investor who co-created The B Team, a global sustainability alliance, with Sir Richard Branson. Together they will discuss new ideas and impact investment thematics to drive a carbon neutral world.

This is the first in a series of conversations to explore transformative breakthroughs and solutions for carbon reduction in the green (carbon and conservation), red (heart and health) and blue (oceans and water) impact economy.

Aimée Christensen is Founder & Executive Director of the Sun Valley Institute, a Center for Resilience, and CEO of Christensen Global Strategies, developing solutions for a resilient world. She has twenty-five years experience in policy, law, investment, philanthropy and business including with Google, the World Bank, Baker & McKenzie, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

At CGS, she advises corporations, investors, governments, philanthropists and organizations worldwide, including the Clinton Global Initiative, Duke Energy, FEMSA, Global Ocean Commission, Microsoft, Ogilvy, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Swiss Re, United Nations and Virgin. In 2012 she served as Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary General’s High-level Group on Sustainable Energy For All. She advised Virgin Unite in shaping three of Sir Richard Branson’s major initiatives: The Elders, The Carbon War Room, and The B Team. As “Climate Maven” at Google, she guided the company’s early climate change initiatives including a commitment to carbon neutrality, launching Google.org’s first climate project, RechargeIT, to accelerate the electrification of transportation, and successfully lobbying for AB32 in California (the Global Warming Solutions Act). While in law school she wrote and gained adoption of the first university endowment investment policy on climate change (Stanford University, 1999), At the Department of Energy, she drafted and negotiated the first bilateral and regional climate change agreements (U.S. – Costa Rica, Summit of the Americas, Argentina, Bolivia, Central America, Chile, et al., 1994-1998).

In 2009 she moved home to Sun Valley, Idaho where she manages her family office and is an individual and foundation member of Divest-Invest. In 2015 she founded the Sun Valley Institute, a Center for Resilience to protect regional quality of life and to serve as a model and resource to communities everywhere, convening the annual Sun Valley Forum to share strategies and catalyze action.

She serves on the boards of the National Forest Foundation, the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute on Sustainability at Arizona State University, and the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University. Aimée is a 2017 Women in Leadership & Zions Bank laureate, the 2011 Hillary Institute laureate and a 2010 Aspen Institute Catto Fellow. She has a BA from Smith College and a JD from Stanford Law School.

Nicholas Flanders is co-founder and CEO of Opus 12, a Bay Area startup that has developed technology to recycle CO2 emissions back into valuable products that has been named a CB Insights 2020 Gamechanger, a NEXT 50 Companies to Disrupt the World, the winner of the Keeling Curve Prize.The company was also been featured on the television show Inside Bill's Brain as a company providing a potential disruptive solution to greenhouse gas emissions.

Nicholas was listed in Rolling Stone’s 25 People Shaping the Next 50 Years. He co-founded Opus 12 while in graduate school at Stanford, where he was pursuing a joint MBA/MS in engineering with a focus on renewable power. Nicholas graduated with a triple major in mathematics, economics, and international relations from Cornell University.

Derek Handley is a futurist, entrepreneur and founding General Partner at Aera VC, a global alliance of families investing in iconic and transformative companies tackling the UN Sustainable Development Goals. He is also the founder of Wiser, a platform helping people ask better questions to develop a greater sense of self-knowledge and purpose in their lives. 'Wiser Conversations’ host online talks and a podcast with leading thinkers of today, as well as educational experiences that have run at the Oxford Character Institute, Hong Kong University and AUT University in Auckland where he is an Adjunct Professor as well as through workshops for families, professionals and elite athletes around the world.

Derek is an aspiring civilian astronaut signed up with Virgin Galactic. He co-founded The B Team, a business sustainability alliance with Sir Richard Branson. He sits on the board of New Zealand’s largest entertainment company, Sky New Zealand and was a formative member of the Air New Zealand Sustainability Advisory Panel. He created the Aera Foundation in 2015 as a charitable studio catalysing social innovations to reframe the status quo for a sustainable future. Derek was the Social Innovator in Residence at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania and is currently studying towards a Masters in Religion at Harvard.