What Happened to AGSG?

I gotta ask you about sort of the political things south of the border, that, you know, it's, it's been a wild ride the last little bit.

I kind of have a bit of a joke that, you know, I wanna give Donald Trump an award for someone who has sped up the green transition faster than anyone, because with the price of oil right now sort of through the roof, I think energy transition is, you know, happening really, really fast.

Let me just get sort of like a, a temperature check on you, but you're someone who understands climate change and the realities of climate change, and how, to some degree, kind of screwed we are in certain ways.

But you're also following the transition closer than just about anyone I know.

Where are you on the sort of hope versus fear, anxiety meter? If zero is sort of neutral and 10% is extremely hopeful and minus 10 is extremely [laughs] pessimistic about climate change, where do you put yourself on that meter?

Yeah, I think maybe last time we spoke I was, you know, nine, because I think it was probably during the Biden administration, right? So we had a lot of stuff going in the right direction from the political standpoint.

I think at that time, Mark Carney was probably still special climate envoy at the UN.

[laughs] So it was a pretty different dynamic.

You know, I think today I, I'm probably a five in terms of, you know, where we are on, on progress.

I'd say I'm quite a bit higher though in terms of where there's investment opportunities.

They probably are a little more pragmatic than they were a few years ago, but I think, you know, there's definitely an optimistic outlook for some of the themes that we look at versus obviously a much more pedantic and pragmatic approach at the political level, right?

So, like, talk to me in terms of the, the opportunities that you're seeing, right? Like, being able to see this and you're looking at it from a lens of, you know, really profitability, share price performance, doing that financial analysis.

Mm-hmm.

At the same time, I know that you want us to [laughs] solve climate change, that this is an issue that sort of matters to you.

So, you know, wearing just the strict financial hat, like, what are some of the biggest opportunities you're seeing right now in terms of IRR or profitability?

profitability?Yeah, so I think the biggest change maybe since we last spoke was obviously the AI dynamic and, and the need for incredible amounts of energy to drive new data center applications.

I guess the, the challenge, again, from a societal and environmental standpoint is that energy footprint.

The good news is that, you know, that does drive demand for renewables, for, for battery storage, for grid resilience technology.

These are all things that, you know, we've been pumped on for, for years, but now you've got that real impetus of growth.

It's not as policy-driven as it was, right, when, when there was the IRA under President Biden and, you know, there were significant policy carrots put in place.

Now it's really just cost curve and, and the need for new supply to come on quickly.

So, you know, we see tremendous opportunities in, in that energy dynamic as well as in water use.

It's, it's an increasing issue as we go through climate change.

I mean, I always call it a changing climate, not climate change, because we're in it, right? And the reality is we are facing severe weather events, we're facing more drought, we're facing the need for better use of water, and we're also facing greater demand for water use as, you know, these cooling applications are needed within data centers and power plants.

So, you know, for the solutions providers, there's a real uptick in their, their growth runway, I think, over the next number of years.