A complicated tangle of forces is pulling and pushing sustainability in a range of directions on clean energy, climate and sustainability issues. States and cities are enacting new laws covering everything from climate disclosure to net zero energy building performance, while European leaders institutionalize sustainability reporting mechanisms and rules, with business and institutional interests across the board pushing in various directions. Meanwhile, the economics of many clean energy practices keep getting more favorable, even while the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution raises new red flags.
The bottom line is that the sustainability movement continues to move forward, changing a number of its tactics and retooling its outreach but not moving away from the fight.
Facility executives at commercial and institutional facilities and at the governmental level will need to navigate a complex assortment of often competing regulatory, cultural and economic drivers, leading to a lot of tough balancing acts.
We live and work in a globalized economy where the policy decisions of governments around the world can end up reverberating in our backyard. So, while the Trump administration pulls back clean energy tax credits, cancels wind and solar projects and claws back federal grants, the European Union’s friendlier approach to clean energy continues to have profound impacts on the corporate sector.
In fact, 2025 happens to be the first year that companies subject to the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) need to file reports on the environmental and social risks and opportunities of their operations. Meanwhile, in California, climate disclosure rules will start to ramp up in 2026. While these laws have different requirements for different size businesses, with the most required of the largest corporations, they yield a kind of trickle-down effect for the marketplace, with climate and sustainability practices becoming increasingly a standardized norm.
After years of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement blossoming, under a range of reporting systems, these systems are starting to coalesce, ultimately making the processes more streamlined and user-friendly. These trends are also competing against an anti-ESG political movement, as states like Florida, Texas and West Virginia seek to ban ESG criteria or financial institutions that use them from state investment funds.
This state-level movement seems to be waning somewhat under the weight of the evidence that such laws can raise costs for the governments that impose them. The Wharton School, for example, found in a study that a Texas law prohibiting municipalities from contracting with banks that had ESG policies led major banks to exit the Texas municipal bond market, reducing competition and driving prices higher. As a result, recent bills in various states are getting less stringent, with loopholes demanded by the financial markets.
As ESG is ultimately about reducing a range of corporate and shareholder risks, from climate threats and regulations to public health liabilities, many companies and financiers find these practices and evaluations useful.
Of course, businesses are driven by a range of interests. A report from the green business company Trellis, How to Set Sustainability Strategy in 2025: Thriving in an Era of Impact and Backlash, identifies six sustainability archetypes defining drivers of these programs, from the so-called box checker simply seeking to satisfy requirements to the impact and purpose driven company seeking to be known as an environmental leader.
Companies driven to be more sustainable by their customers, employees or investors are not likely to be dissuaded from this path. Think of a company like Patagonia, for whom environmental leadership is integral to its brand identity. By contrast, ExxonMobil, has a very different calculation.
Businesses certainly have to follow their economic drivers, which again sometimes push in opposite directions. Arguably the most important story in sustainability these days is the plunge in the cost of wind and solar energy, making fossil fuel sources, especially coal, much less competitive. We’ve gotten to the point where a company might choose clean energy sources based on price alone.
One of the most powerful economic crosscurrents is the AI revolution, which is driving the construction of massive data centers with ravenous appetites for energy and water. As tech giants have often been the leaders on clean energy and sustainability, this has led companies with some of the strongest sustainability goals and teams to construct complexes that use as much energy as an entire city.
Speaking of tech giants, there has been much discussion of a memo that Bill Gates recently posted entitled “Three tough truths about climate.” Much of the commentary on this memo claimed that Gates was giving up on climate action. The memo rather reflects his usual techno-optimism in focusing on the progress that has been made to date on clean energy and other greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction strategies.
Gates argues that more focus should be placed on increasing the resilience of poor countries to climate disasters, while GHG reduction efforts should be focused on “reducing the Green Premium”, i.e., making the most effective climate change mitigation technologies cheap enough to be fully competitive with conventional alternatives. So, no, Gates is not abandoning action on clean energy and sustainability either.
Altogether, while some companies may be engaging in green hushing to avoid attracting unwanted attention to their sustainability programs, and some may be pulling back from their most ambitious net zero goals, these programs continue soldiering on and, in many cases, continuing to break new ground in pursuit of solutions to the sustainability programs of our time.
There is one last driver and stakeholder worth mentioning – Mother Nature. She really doesn’t give a hoot about our press releases or shareholder reports or political labels. Oblivious to all of that, she will just keep following the logic of the chemistry, physics and biology that push her forward. And she happens to control the air, water, land and climate that lives, governments and businesses all depend on, so my strong advice to everyone out there is: Don’t tick her off.
Ken Sandler, Ph.D., is a clean energy and sustainability analyst and thought leader who spent 35 years advancing green building and sustainability policies and programs across the federal government. In addition to being a Building Operating Management Facility Influencer, he writes his own newsletter, Regenerative Insights, available on LinkedIn and Substack.
