About Kate Mackenzie
I work with academics, journalists, NGOs, and occasionally, companies, towards effecting action on climate change. My sweet spot is the intersection of finance, industry, science, policy, social equity and how all of that relates to climate change. I'm usually in the awkward space of working on a topic just before most other people catch on to its importance. I like finding out what is really driving things, and helping other people understand that too, and figuring out what can be done.
I started writing about energy, finance and climate in 2009 when I launched the FT's Energy Source blog, which is now a newsletter still doing a decent combination of policy, politics, industry, climate, finance (although not so much commodity markets, which I used to also include). Then I wrote for FT Alphaville where I become very interested in capital markets, monetary policy and the financial sectors and economic models of certain Asian countries.
From 2014-2022-ish, I was big on climate finance; both the "transition" type and the "physical" type. I was instrumental in getting financial climate risk regulation off the ground in Australia via my work at a couple of thinktanks. I was an original contributor for Bloomberg Green, where I wrote a fortnightly column about finance. I co-authored the first peer-reviewed paper on the (mis)use of climate models for business analysis purposes, which has since been cited by everyone who ever writes on this*.
In 2020 I became interested in international financial architecture and it changed how I see pretty much everything. Since 2022, I have become very interested in the political economy of climate change. Back in 2008-09 when I was first writing about energy, the oil price spikes and crashes showed how energy – a very weird industry for the past 150– odd years – is tightly connected to human wellbeing in the modern world. I hope it goes without saying that the natural world, including a stable atmosphere, is even more vital for humans. So we need to solve for all of those things. It's hard, and being right doesn't mean succeeding.
Now I co-write The Polycrisis; a series on the political economy of climate change; geopolitics, trade, and finance; published by Phenomenal World.
At some point in 2024 I will upload my various papers, essays and pamphlets here. I made this Ghost website my main site in mid-2024 after Wordpress messed me around with their billing.
In the meantime, you can follow me on Bluesky or, if you must, on Twitter. You could, if you wanted to, also subscribe here for my newsletter. You never know; if some more people subscribe I may get it going for real this time!
You can email me [myfirstname AT thisdomainname]. If I don't respond after a few days, feel free to try a second time. You know how life is. If I still don't respond then it's probably a lost cause. Sorry. My time is finite like everyone else's.
If you've read all this, wow! You are rewarded with a couple of good links in the footnote below.
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*If you are interested in more recent developments in this fascinating and kind of disturbing field, I highly recommend Madison Condon at Boston University and everyone at the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk and Response. For a fascinating social & technical history of climate models, check out R. Saravanan's book "The Climate Demon".