Thread by @EmilDimanchev

As clean industry grows, good information about it becomes more valuable & put behind paywalls. As a CO2 market analyst working behind a paywall for 5 years & having gone through a similar acquisition, my sympathies. It's nice to see the effort by @Ed_Crooks here. My 2 cents:

https://twitter.com/Ed_Crooks/status/1360308235434008576

A lot of the paywalled knowledge can be shared. Our clients at Point Carbon (bought by Thomson Reuters) generally didn't mind us sharing headline forecasts. What they paid for was the analysis & arguments behind the values, which is what made the information useful to them. #OCTT

At the same time, policy makers and stakeholders found bottom-line numbers like our CO2 price forecasts valuable because it helped them understand where the market was going under different policy scenarios and ultimately how to design and reform CO2 pricing.

I was one of the proponents of doing reports aimed at policy makers that we'd share widely, and I think those fed back into the value we were providing companies because it allowed us to deepen our policy analysis, which is one of the main variables driving the energy transition.

Publishing things like White Papers can also be fraught though. It has to be motivated by a desire to contribute to the public discussion. I've seen at least 1 bad example that was motivated by a desire to show off "thought leadership" for marketing purposes.🤦‍♂️

An important question is whether sharing gives away information that makes paying clients worse off relative to a competitor. In many cases like sharing with policy makers, academia, NGOs, that's unlikely to be the case so those groups should be able to have some access at least.

All in all, glad to see @Ed_Crooks and @WoodMackenzie trying to keep some of the Greentech Media analyses public. I hope they consider prioritizing access to the groups mentioned above and sharing openly when there's no reason not to.