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Jonathan Maxwell (English businessman)

Jonathan Maxwell (born April 26, 1974) is a British businessman, an author and commentator, focusing on investment-led solutions to the sustainability issues of existing and future infrastructure.

He is founder and CEO of Sustainable Development Capital LLC; and author of ‘The Edge: how competition for resources is pushing the world and its climate to the brink.’

He is a regular commentator on national and international media platforms.

Career

Maxwell spent his early career in finance and business, working for HSBC Infrastructure, managing the IPO of the HSBC Infrastructure Company, the first main market LSE-listed infrastructure fund.

While working in finance and business, Jonathan witnessed at first hand the nexus of infrastructure and environmental consequences around the world and decided to set up a company - Sustainable Development Capital LLP - to establish a new set of investment funds, focused on energy efficiency, as the largest and most cost-effective source of immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

Promoting energy efficiency

Maxwell’s activist fund-management playbook espouses the view that governments and populations will benefit faster by considering how much energy is wasted before it is used, rather than simply creating more renewable energy systems.

Lessening competition for key global energy resources will not only help mitigate climate change, but growing conflict for those resources.

Due to inefficient power generation and transmission infrastructures, centralized supply planning, and old-fashioned facilities, particularly in the public sector, he claims that up 70% of traditional power systems’ energy inputs are wasted “in the journey from molecule to extraction, conversion, generation and distribution."

“Nega-watts”

Maxwell’s view of solving these inefficiencies is a way to cut energy consumption rapidly, reducing emissions faster than by solely building more renewable energy production. He has called the wasted energy “nega-watts”.

His view’s cogency has been evidenced by the success of several funds within SDCL raising funds from institutions and private sector to become the UK’s first and largest sustainability-focused investment fund, filling the existing gap caused by the markets’ failure to recognise the problem.