Mark Trexler helps companies navigate climate change

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Mark Trexler, Det Norske Vertias

Mark Trexler views himself as a climatographer.

It’s on his LinkedIn profile, along with an explanation that what he really cares about is “getting from ‘here to there’ when it comes to successfully addressing climate change.”

That philosophy has taken Trexler around the globe — including to 11 of the 15 United Nations conferences on climate change. He recently returned from December’s confab in Copenhagen.

He’s seen the gatherings evolve and grow from a feel-good collection of experts working to mitigate climate change to an international event, complete with crowds and violent protests.

The issues at stake — trying to establish a global carbon policy before climate change issues become impossible to ignore — have come front and center.

Portland-based Trexler brings a business perspective to his work. His current position as director of climate strategies and markets for Oslo, Norway-based Det Norske Veritas (literal translation: “the Norwegian truth”) has him working with companies and organizations around the world.

He is specifically focused on establishing a global price for carbon — imposing a cost on the emission of greenhouse gases which cause global warming.

Trexler was working on corporate climate services and carbon market transactions long before it was in vogue.

“He was almost like a prophet crying out in the wilderness,” said Dave Einolf, whose Endeavour EHS consulting practice helps companies with environmental compliance. “It takes a certain amount of focus and courage to base your career on something as potentially ephemeral as carbon has been.”

Trexler and his nine-person team were hired wholesale by Det Norske Veritas last year after the group left EcoSecurities, a publicly traded carbon-trading firm based in Dublin that was acquired by JP Morgan last September.

Prior to moving to the Northwest in 1992, Trexler worked in Washington, D.C., for the World Resources Institute, as one of the founding members of that group’s climate team.

As a consultant Trexler worked with companies — including Nike and PacifiCorp, but mainly international firms — to help them devise policies around going carbon neutral and employing offset programs.

Det Norske Veritas, a 150-year-old risk-management company that grew out of the shipping industry, is at first glance an odd fit for Trexler.

But what started as a business to verify that ships were seaworthy evolved into risk-management in the energy industry. After the Kyoto Protocol, DNV started doing verification work on the clean-development mechanism for carbon credits — essentially proving that offset programs are doing what they say they’re doing.

Trexler and his team are developing two consulting areas: corporate positioning strategy and carbon market forecasting.

At its core, Trexler’s work is about the price of carbon and what kind of assumptions a company makes about what that price will be and how that price is built into financial models.

With cap-and-trade legislation all but dead in the United States, it’s a legitimate question to ask: How likely is that there will ever be a global price set for carbon?

“It’s just a matter of when,” he said. “If you believe the science, and I do, it’s inevitable that there will be a knee-jerk reaction at some point.

“The longer we don’t act, the more unpredictable it is what will happen when we do act. That’s why climate change is a fundamentally problematic issue. It’s the boiling frog issue. We’re not wired to act until it’s essentially too late. We can’t even solve Social Security. How do you expect us to meaningfully address climate change?”