Leadership and Advisors
Helping You Identify Opportunities in the Environmental Attribute Market
Wagner Carbon offers a skilled team of experts to help you fund, develop, and execute projects that generate environmental attributes (EA). The team is here to manage the generation of EAs, offer key insights on voluntary and regulated markets, and advise on some of the globe’s most complicated industrial climate challenges.
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Tom Colgan
SENIOR LEADERSHIP
Tom focuses on identifying, evaluating, and investing in companies and programs generating permanent, real, verifiable, monetizable, environmental attributes. He also manages investor relationships for Wagner Carbon.
Tom is also Chairman of Wagner Forest Management, Ltd. He was instrumental in investing over $650 million in timberlands across New England and eastern Canada for institutional clients. Tom is on the Board of Directors of Farm Credit East and is a senior advisor to the Carbon Containment Lab at Yale University. He holds multiple degrees from Duke University.
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Santosh Lakhan
SENIOR LEADERSHIP
Santosh focuses on developing and operating greenhouse gas emissions reduction projects across the U.S. Santosh oversees the application of complex economic and regulatory scenario modeling for investment opportunities, and then manages the deployment and operations of assets to ensure emissions reductions are generated to meet market demand.
Prior to founding ECC, Santosh was a Vice President at Verdeo Sindicatum. In this role, Santosh worked with leading energy companies in the United States to reduce their energy consumption and emissions profiles.
Santosh spent 7 years advising Fortune 500 companies as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company and The Boston Consulting Group. Santosh served energy clients and was a part of McKinsey’s Energy Practice and Metals and Mining Practice in Johannesburg, South Africa.Santosh is a mechanical engineer and holds an MBA from New York University with specialization in Financial Instruments and Markets, Quantitative Finance, and Statistics & Operations Research.
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Ben Apple
SENIOR LEADERSHIP
As a founder of Environmental Commodities Corporation and Managing Director of Keyrock Energy, Ben led the development of the largest portfolio of mine methane abatement systems in the world. Since 2006, he has worked with the largest and most productive industrial and mining companies in the U.S., all in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of carbon-intensive processes.
Ben has designed several emission reduction technologies that are currently operating in the U.S. and Asia, and has developed emission reduction quantification tools that are used by numerous companies and regulators.
Ben was a military officer for six years, serving five years in the U.S. Air Force and one year as a United Nations Military Observer. He is on the Board of Directors of Resource Central, a four-star, innovative nonprofit dedicated to helping people save water, reduce waste, and conserve energy. Ben received an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania, MSIE from Northeastern University, and BSME from the U.S. Air Force Academy.
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Dean Takahashi
ADVISOR
Dean Takahashi is the founder and Executive Director of the Yale Carbon Containment Lab (CC Lab).
Prior to launching the CC Lab, Dean was Senior Director of the Yale Investments Office for more than 33 years. During his tenure, the Yale Endowment was one of the world’s top performing institutional funds, growing from $1.5 billion to more than $30 billion. Annual spending from Endowment increased from $49 million to $1.4 billion.
Together with Yale’s Chief Investment Officer David Swensen, Dean developed numerous innovations to endowment management, allocated capital to nascent markets, and partnered early with leading investment managers. Dean helped build investment programs in venture capital, biotechnology, absolute return, emerging markets, sustainable forestry, renewable energy, and carbon offsets. He also developed stochastic models that integrated asset allocation and spending policy, and an illiquid alternative asset fund model now widely used by institutional investors.
Dean received his BA magna cum laude with distinction in Economics in 1980 from Yale University and his MPPM in 1983 from the Yale School of Organization and Management. A Lecturer in Economics since 1992 and Adjunct Professor at the Yale School of Management since 2006, Dean taught a senior economics seminar in Yale College and a course on endowment management at the School of Management. In 2018, he received the Merton J. Peck Prize for distinction and excellence in teaching in the Department of Economics.