Reflections on the upGrad ESG & Leadership Masterclass

Most webinars are a waste of an hour.  You join, you endure forty-five minutes of someone reading their own slides aloud, you leave having learned nothing that you could not have gleaned from a two-paragraph Google search.  The organisers congratulate themselves.  The speaker adds “thought leader” to their LinkedIn profile.  Everyone goes home none the wiser.  The KnowledgeHut upGrad masterclass on ESG and Leadership held on 1st June 2023 was not that.  It was the kind of session that is uncomfortably rare in the professional development space, one where the speaker had actual operational knowledge, actual skin in the game, and an actual opinion about what matters and what does not.

As the then Chief Executive Officer of Equinox Zenith and President of the Board of Red Sycamore, I was tapped to deliver a masterclass on my thoughts on corporate leadership in the ESG industry.  We are living in the age of climate change, and the primary risk exposure for any business operating on an intermediate to long-term horizon is carbon taxes and carbon credits.  Not reputational risk.  Not consumer sentiment.  Not the annual sustainability report that your communications team writes and nobody reads.  Carbon taxes.  The hard financial impost that governments are legislating into existence at an accelerating pace and that will determine whether your business model survives the next decade.  This is not a point the industry has failed to make.  It is a point the industry has made badly, repeatedly, in language so laden with jargon and moral earnestness that the average CFO closes the tab within thirty seconds.  The upGrad session made it differently.  It made it as a financial argument, not an ethical one.

The Tesla Example, Revisited with the Benefit of Hindsight

The Tesla example is worth dwelling on because most commentators who cite it get it wrong, and the years since have made the correction considerably more interesting than it was in 2023.  Tesla Incorporated is routinely discussed as an electric vehicle manufacturer.  For years it was, more accurately, a regulatory credit arbitrage business that also happened to make cars.  In 2022, Tesla reported US$1.78 billion in regulatory credit sales.  In 2023, that figure was US$1.79 billion.  In the first quarter of 2024 alone, it reported US$595 million.  Tesla’s competitors, General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, were paying Tesla to exist, funding their most dangerous competitor because they had failed to meet the emissions standards Tesla exceeded by design.

That revenue stream has since collapsed, and the collapse is the sharpest lesson in this entire argument.  Tesla’s credit revenue fell 28% in 2025 to roughly US$2 billion.  By the second quarter of 2026, it had cratered to just US$146 million, down 67% year-on-year, after the 2025 Working Families Tax Cuts Act reduced the American civil penalty for missing Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to zero, removing rivals’ incentive to buy Tesla’s credits at all.  In Europe, Toyota and Stellantis withdrew entirely from Tesla’s CO₂ pooling arrangement for 2026, with Stellantis instead building its own compliance pool alongside its Chinese partner Leapmotor.  Tesla did not lose this revenue because carbon regulation weakened.  It lost it because rivals stopped needing to rent compliance from a competitor once the political and structural conditions shifted.  The lesson from 2023 was correct.  Carbon markets are a market to be captured.  The lesson the intervening years added is that a revenue model built on renting a regulatory gap is only as durable as the regulation itself, and regulation is precisely the variable a competitor’s own government can legislate out from under you.

The Immediate Takeaways, Tested against What Actually Happened

The session’s immediate takeaways were three.  ESG market leadership translates into market dominance.  ESG market leadership affects market access.  ESG market leadership is part of personal and corporate branding.  None of these are new ideas.  The ESG consulting industry has been saying variations of them for years.  What distinguished the upGrad session was the specificity of the argument and the absence of the usual hedging.  Most ESG presenters will tell you that sustainability is important and that you should consider doing more of it.  This session told you why, with numbers, and what happens to businesses that do not.

As we approach 2030, every signatory to the Paris Agreement remains under increasing domestic political pressure to demonstrate measurable progress on their climate pledges.  The mechanism most governments are reaching for is the carbon tax, and what was transitional in 2023 is now live.  The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered full operation from January 2026, and the definitive regime now imposes an actual carbon cost, rather than a reporting obligation, on imports from countries without equivalent carbon pricing.  For any Southeast Asian manufacturer exporting to Europe, this stopped being a future problem two years ago and is now simply an operating cost.

The CBAM is not alone.  Singapore introduced its carbon tax in 2019 at S$5 per tonne.  It rose to S$25 per tonne in 2024, and is on schedule to reach S$45 per tonne in 2026 and S$50 to S$80 per tonne by 2030.  Companies that had not begun decarbonisation planning by the time of the original masterclass were not behind the curve.  They were off the map, and the map has only become less forgiving since.

Leadership as a Structural Observation, Not a Values Statement

The point about leadership was equally unambiguous.  Leadership is not the art of commanding.  It is the exercise of influence to effect preferred outcomes.  Corporate leadership without ESG leadership is inadequate corporate leadership.  This is not a values statement.  It is a structural observation.  A chief executive who does not understand their company’s carbon exposure, who cannot articulate a credible decarbonisation pathway, and who treats ESG as a communications function rather than a strategic one, is not fit for purpose.  The market has continued to agree, and more emphatically than in 2023.  A study that year found 77% of Asia-Pacific firms included ESG metrics in evaluating senior executives’ remuneration packages, up from 63% the year before.  The board is watching.  The shareholders are watching.  The regulators, now armed with CBAM’s fully operational enforcement regime, are watching with considerably sharper teeth than they had two years ago.

What the upGrad session did, and what very few ESG presenters manage to do, was land the argument without losing the audience to either despair or boredom.  The carbon market is not a threat to be managed.  It is a market to be captured.  Every industry has exposure to it.  The businesses that are ahead of this are not the ones that hired a Chief Sustainability Officer and issued a glossy annual report.  They are the ones that built carbon strategy into their revenue model, though Tesla’s own subsequent collapse in credit revenue adds a crucial refinement: the model must be built on genuine, durable environmental value, not on a regulatory arbitrage that a rival government can dismantle in a single tax bill.

Red Sycamore, for what it is worth, is doing exactly this, building investment-grade blue carbon credits for the compliance market across up to 500,000 hectares of seagrass coastline in the Siargao region of the Philippines, with further access to coastline near the Bay of Siam in southern Thailand.  It is not a charitable endeavour.  It is a financial instrument backed by measurable, verifiable environmental impact, calibrated using Reef Aquaculture Conservancy MRV methodology, and structured to meet compliance-market documentation standards rather than the voluntary-market self-certification that collapsed so publicly elsewhere in the industry.  That distinction, compliance-grade and durably verified versus voluntary and cheaply revocable, is precisely what the upGrad session was advocating, and precisely what the market has since demanded of every serious corporate player, whether they were ready for it or not.

Most of them were not.  The gap between where corporate ESG strategy stood in 2023 and where it needs to be today is not a gap that gets closed by webinars.  But it helps, occasionally, to hear someone make the argument without apology, without hedging, and without the insufferable self-congratulation that has become the signature register of the sustainability industry.  The upGrad session was that.  It should have had a larger audience.  It should have been recorded and circulated to every senior management team in Southeast Asia.  It was not.  That, too, is a data point about where the industry actually is.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith & Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code