Episode 5

"Alumni Talk: Perspectives on Sustainable Financing"

Hosts: Gijs Tuitel, Jim Maskell

Guest: Willem Klok, PhD candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology

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The episode opens with hosts Gijs and Jim welcoming Willem Klok, a PhD candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology whose work probes how money-flows shape climate action. Over roughly forty minutes, they explore why “if there’s no finance for something, it just doesn’t happen,” as Klok bluntly puts it, framing finance as the hidden engine—or brake— behind the energy transition. Klok recounts moving from mechanical engineering into social-science research after realising that “on the technical side, we’re actually doing quite good… we just have to get the wind turbines up.” His master’s work on community resistance to Dutch on-shore wind farms led him to a bigger question: are today’s capital markets genuinely steering money toward climate solutions or merely “window-dressing”?

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To answer it, his PhD decomposes the financial system with transition-studies tools. He distinguishes two currents inside the sustainable-finance “niche.” The dominant stream is financially driven: investors avoid coal or buy EV shares chiefly because the risk–return calculus favours them. A smaller, more transformative stream is values driven: people refuse coal “because I don’t want to contribute to climate change.” The first tweaks the rules, the second rewrites the system goal by adding what scholars call emotional or expressive returns. Klock argues we need both, yet policy and research overwhelmingly favour the first. Hosts test the personal side of his thesis. Inspired by Klok’s blog post, they have just switched from a mainstream Dutch bank to the ethical lender ASN, a move he calls one of the easiest, highest-leverage climate actions: “Your money now is the world in 30 years from now.” For every €1 400 kept at a high-carbon bank, he estimates about 1 t CO₂ will be financed—comparable to a third of the average Dutch person’s yearly red-meat footprint. Switching accounts takes “literally fifteen minutes,” yet locks in decades of avoided emissions.

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The conversation then zooms out to systemic risk. Klok explains fossil-fuel assets as an “inverse bubble.” Instead of prices overshooting value on the way up, here the book value stays flat while real economic worth erodes; when the market finally notices, the correction is sudden and contagious—“very likely… a financial crisis” akin to 2008. Cultural inertia, not rational analysis, keeps capital trapped in these soon-to-be stranded assets. Beyond spreadsheets, Klok’s prolific blogging trains him to publish ideas before they are “perfect”—a counterweight to academic perfectionism and a channel for public knowledge transfer that industry partners crave. His curiosity spills into personal-growth posts because, he says, “the human mind is the most complex system I know.” Asked for a closing takeaway, he returns to the wallet: “Start by switching a bank to something that fits you… how you spend your money has an influence on how that world is turning.” The hosts echo the call, reminding listeners that small administrative acts today determine the planet’s balance sheet for decades to come.