Holding the Line. A Few Thoughts on Sustainability…
Holding the Line: A Playbook for ESG Leadership in Hostile Terrain. Few would disagree with a playbook that says to integrate better into businesses to drive substantive change. The catch is that this is exactly what most sustainability professionals were trying – and frequently failing - to do before the ESG backlash and, as a result, this is likely the line that resonates most broadly: “The terrain has shifted. The question is no longer how loud we speak—but whether we are still standing when the noise subsides.”
If endurance is set to prove essential key for sustainability professionals then at least it’s nice to know that it pays off. Survival of the greenest: Older companies are surprisingly more sustainable than younger ones.
I don’t think we’re any closer to figuring out where AI-driven electricity demand ends up given all the moving parts – demand for (and profitability of) AI, efficiency of algorithms and hardware, and competing demands for power Andy Lubershane's thought process is a great way to think through it with the bottom line being a doubling of dispatchable capacity over the coming 20 years.
Andy is increasingly constructive on geothermal in that mix and I expect one of the reasons is learning rates which we’re seeing from Fervo.
As for the other area where confidence is firming up – nuclear – it’s felt like a non-stop run of positive news flow on this front so just a reminder from Matthew Wald that there’s a lot hard, mundane problems to be solved like concrete.
‘Move fast and break things’ works great when you’re talking about social media. In robotaxis, that’s a terrible idea as GM’s Cruise discovered in 2023 when one of their vehicles dragged a woman down a San Francisco street. With Tesla’s robotaxi service set to kick-off in Austin today and this news earlier in the week - Waymo Applies for NYC Testing Permit – it’s worth contrasting the different approaches. The rubber is about to meet the road and Waymo’s ‘slow & steady’ looks to be the winner to me.
Sea level rise is only part of the problem for marine infrastructure - waves are getting bigger too (see Marc Gongloff) - but the World Resources Institute’s 2025 study, Strengthening the Investment Case for Climate Adaptation, gives a lot of encouragement for those looking to invest some dollars in the developing countries.
I wrote recently that 1-in-5 Americans regularly get news from influencers on social media (America’s News Influencers) and that’s generally a bad thing with a global meta-study indicating some pretty ugly outcomes around trust in institutions (fundamental for a functioning democracy), hate, polarization and populism as well as seeing a greater exposure to misinformation. Now adding to that is Reuters Institute for Journalism 2025 digital report showing that “for the first time, social media has displaced television as the top way Americans get news.”
Even with the best communication strategies, if you’re not reaching people, the only way to learn is through experience and that can be painful but at least they’re learning. The Conditional Effects of Air Conditioning: How Air Conditioning Affects Climate Change Views by Partisanship in Los Angeles County. Sandlin. 2025
Although everyone focuses on hurricanes, the accumulation of smaller ‘severe convective storms’ are equally impactful to insured losses and a big part of that is from hail stones. When we’re already seeing the largest hail stones in the US coming in somewhere between a golf ball and a tennis ball, the expectation that they may become 15-75% larger is more than a little disconcerting. Scientists say large hail will become more common in warming climate.
It’s not just what is falling but what’s not. In this case, rain. The title of the paper itself shouldn’t be terribly surprising - Warming accelerates global drought severity. Geberechorkos et al. 2025 – but the extent to which atmospheric evaporative demand (AED) or ‘atmospheric thirst’ is impacting global drought conditions is striking.
Before it all gets too depressing, not everyone is learning the hard way. Not only is the Texas energy system not going backwards - recall Anti-renewable bills die quietly in GOP-controlled Texas Legislature – they’re making forward progress with this news: Texas finalizes $1.8B to build solar, battery, and gas-powered microgrids.
Something else that’s helping: solar panels. They cut water stress, boost bird populations, and can be a reliable source of income for farmers while also addressing a key constraint for the energy transition: land. As a result, Trump Administration’s USDA choice to reshape REAP loans to disincentivize solar development on farmland is likely going to go down poorly in rural America.
I don’t expect a universally positive response to the nuclear renaissance and I share the concerns regarding waste, security, and accidents but in the current environment JK Galbraith's framing feels apt: “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” At the very least we’re getting a lot of the latter and, as a result, I’ve got sympathy for both sides of the debate within the World Bank - Todd Moss has a run down on the internal politics – to end its longstanding ban on financing nuclear projects. That joins another major reversal from earlier this year: backing mega dams. Hopefully what proves a bridge too far will be the reported reconsideration of the bank’s ban on funding oil & gas projects.
There’s a chance neither of these decisions from the World Bank ages well but I’m personally more concerned with hydro especially in light of a recent example of the positives that come as you dismantle dams like those on the Klamath River with benefits ranging from recreation (First Time in 100 Years: Young Kayakers on a Ride for the Ages) to ecology (Klamath River flows free after last dams come down, leaving the land to tribes and salmon)
Full comments follow.
Simon.
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Holding the Line A Playbook for ESG Leadership in Hostile Terrain. This short playbook by Ioannis Ioannou and his LBS colleagues for sustainability professionals has been well-received. The message is that we need to move forward by focusing on substantive change by better integrating yourself into the business. Few would disagree. The catch is that this is exactly what most sustainability professionals were trying – and frequently failing - to do before the ESG backlash and, as a result, this is likely the line that resonates most broadly: “The terrain has shifted. The question is no longer how loud we speak—but whether we are still standing when the noise subsides.”
If endurance is set to prove essential key for sustainability professionals then at least it’s nice to know that it pays off. An interesting paper found that, even when adjusting for the size & profitability of a company, longevity has a strong correlation with sustainability. It seems that a long track record of public scrutiny has taught companies to get ahead of the problem and they tend to have “developed the structures, discipline, and resources required to carry out long-term goals” albeit possibly coming at the expense of innovation. Survival of the greenest: Older companies are surprisingly more sustainable than younger ones and you can find the (rather dense) paper here: Survival of the greenest: environmental sustainability and longevity of organizations. Haner et al. 2025
I don’t think we’re any closer to figuring out where AI-driven electricity demand ends up given all the moving parts – demand for (and profitabitly of) AI, efficiency of algortithms and hardware, and competing demands for power Andy Lubershane's thought process is a great way to think through it with the bottom line being a doubling of dispatchable capacity over the coming 20 years. Gas generation is the most visible, renewables with storage “has great potential … (but) with especially big error bars”, confidence is firming up on nuclear and geothermal, and we should see some “freeing up (of) grid capacity by doubling down on energy efficiency and load flexibility”. The bottom line? “In the next ten years: ~200 GW of natural gas generation (some of it distributed) + ~150 GW of firm capacity from renewables, storage, and load flexibility… In the following ten years (2035-45): Another 100 GW of natural gas generation (with additions slowing down due to carbon policy constraints, and perhaps the added cost of carbon capture) + 300 GW of renewables and storage (assuming a major uptick in transmission investment) + ~150 GW of nuclear + ~50 GW of geothermal…That suggests a grand total of around 950 gigawatts of new dispatchable capacity in the next twenty years — practically doubling the size of the existing power system. But of course, not all of that capacity will be available to data centers.”
One of the reasons why Andy is increasingly confident on geothermal is some good news from Fervo where the Cape Station Phase 1 project latest drilling data shows they’re getting deeper, hotter, and – critically – faster. CTVC run through the data with the technical leaps being: 4,805m (15,765ft) deep — Fervo’s deepest well so far; 271ºC (520ºF) bottomhole temperature— its hottest by over 40ºC; Drilled in just 16 days — with a max average rate of penetration (“ROP”) of 95 feet/hour (29m/hr), 79% faster than the DOE’s baseline for ultradeep geothermal.
Enhanced geothermal had an excellent stepping off point given the knowledge developed in shale gas but learning rates had been impressive – exceeding those in shale gas – and the latest Cape Station data indicates that’s ongoing which is key to driving down costs and allowing projects to scale. This paper pre-dated the most recent data but just eye-balling the figure below, it’s clear 4800m in 16 days is handy progress. “There have been reductions in drilling time and therefore cost in EGS projects developed in the 2020s. Adaptation of oilfield drilling strategies has shortened EGS drilling times by 50–70%.” Enhanced geothermal systems for clean firm energy generation. Home et al. 2025. Michael Thomas points out that, “by comparison, the shale gas industry, which transformed the world’s energy system, geopolitics, and environment saw early learning rates of ~18%. Geothermal’s learning rate is about twice that.”
As for the other area where confidence is firming up – nuclear – it’s felt like a non-stop run of positive news flow on this front so just a reminder from Matthew Wald that there’s a lot hard, practical problems to be solved. The new tech is what always catches the eye but they all end up sitting on the ground or, more accurately, concrete. This is a little nerdy but it’s an interesting dive into just one of gritty, mundane problems that only time & experience is going to solve: “Flattening the cost curve of nuclear construction will require even more innovations in design, materials, and management. Developments in nuclear concrete are just the beginning.”
‘Move fast and break things’ works great when you’re talking about social media. In robotaxis, that’s a terrible idea as GM’s Cruise discovered in 2023 when one of their vehicles dragged a woman down a San Francisco street. With Tesla’s robotaxi service set to kick-off in Austin today and this news earlier in the week - Waymo Applies for NYC Testing Permit – it’s worth contrasting the different approaches. To me, Waymo’s slow & steady approach to accumulating data has delivered an excellent safety track record and good relations with politicians & regulators has laid the foundation for the rapid robotaxi rollout that’s currently underway. With the likelihood that their extra investment into camera & LIDAR tech is going to continue to deliver relatively strong safety performance against Tesla’s camera-only approach (and significantly less robotaxi road mikles), the only thing slowing the roll out is cost … but with line of sight to a robotaxi costing half as much as a human rideshare per mile ‘maybe soon’, there’s little standing in the way of increasing momentum and an impressive (possibly insurmountable) first-mover advantage. Tesla has never tested a robotaxi service until earlier this year in Austin ahead of the launch. They’re relying on the data collected by the existing Tesla fleets, AI, and their camera system to deliver a product that is significantly cheaper and hence can roll out quickly. That makes perfect sense if it works flawlessly but intuitively when almost all of that Tesla data comes with a ‘safety driver’ (i.e. the Tesla owner), Tesla’s camera-only approach (not the camera & LIDAR approach of Waymo), and the focus on edge cases (99.99% of the time isn’t going to be good enough – you’ve got to be perfect), it feels like an accident is inevitable and that’s supported by anecdotal evidence for example, running a red light in San Francisco. Instead, Waymo really took their time with rolling out their service. Waymo, after launching in 2009, started road testing autonomous vehicles in 2010, got its first fully driverless ride on public roads in 2015, finally launched a commercial ride-hailing service in Phoenix in 2020. In then accumulated millions of miles of testing, gathering real-world driving data, and establishing an exceptional safety record with “71 million autonomous miles driven through March 2025, its Waymo Driver technology had 88% fewer crashes leading to serious injuries or worse and 78% fewer injury-causing crashes, compared to "an average human driver over the same distance in our operating cities." The accident rates with pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists performed even better relative to human drivers. (see CNET). Only then did Waymo then begin to expand the robotaxi service: San Francisco June 2024, Los Angeles Nov 2024, Atlanta (in partnership with Uber) later this year, and Miami expected in 2026. The NYC news this week is also interesting as they’re going to be manually testing their vehicles (they’ll have a robotaxi but with a human safety drive behind the wheel) which they’ll use to establish a presence and a local safety track-record as they work with local lawmakers to change state law to enable a robotaxi service. They’re going to run a similar manual testing program in 10 new cities (incl NYC) this year starting with Las Vegas and San Diego. To me it says that if Tesla hits any sort of bump in Austin then it will quickly be left behind as the Waymo rollout accelerates and that’s especially if the camera-only approach is found to be flawed (again, intuitively, situations like glare are very hard for a camera-only approach to handle) requiring a return to the drawing board on their entire FSD tech. As Andy Lubershane points out, a first-mover advantage is key: more vehicles means more training data, improved performance, and potentially creating an unassailable market position as their tech and operational lead continues to widen. Just how fast can they expand? Even with Waymo’s far mor expensive camera & LIDAR sensors, Andy found that the levelized cost per mile of an autonomous EV is +20% below that of a human rideshare and there is line of sight ‘maybe soon’ to almost half the cost of human rideshare as sensor prices come down.
Sea level rise is only part of the problem for marine infrastructure: waves are getting bigger too.Marc Gongloff points out that a “warmer sea surface generates faster winds, which in turn drive higher waves that also produce more energy. A 2019 study by a UC Santa Cruz associate professor, Borja Reguero, and others used satellite data and modeling to suggest waves had grown 0.47% more powerful each year (or about 1 megawatt per meter per year) between 1948 and 2008 and then 2.3% each year between 1994 and 2017. Two separate studies last year in the journal Applied Energy found similar results.”A recent increase in global wave power as a consequence of oceanic warming. Reguero et al. 2019
It's not just marine infrastructure that’s going to need climate adaptation dollars. The problem in the US is that we tend to be highly reactive given the political environment… That’s especially given the realities of mitigation efforts: the benefits come well after the upfront cost and, more importantly, beyond the likely terms in office for most politicians. Further, the relatively low prioritization of climate change in the American electorate means that near-term adaptation efforts focused on immediately apparent issues are those that are most likely to attract voter support and hence public dollars.
… but the World Resources Institute’s 2025 study, Strengthening the Investment Case for Climate Adaptation, gives a lot of encouragement for those looking to invest some dollars in the developing countries. It’s not just that the returns are high - every $1 in adaptation investment generates $10.50 in benefits over ten years, with average returns of 27% (and that’s likely understated given many of the benefits aren’t monetized) - but that the projects deliver not just on avoiding losses but also economic and social & environmental benefits which means that “over half of all monetized benefits of the evaluated investments do not depend on whether the anticipated climate-related disaster occurs.” If you’ve been spending some time on adaptation this is detailed run through 320 projects across 12 developing countries and breaks it down by country, sector, funding type, and the range of returns.
I wrote recently that 1-in-5 Americans regularly get news from influencers on social media (America’s News Influencers) and that’s generally a bad thing with a global meta-study indicating some pretty ugly outcomes around trust in institutions (fundamental for a functioning democracy), hate, polarization and populism as well as seeing a greater exposure to misinformation. Now adding to that is Reuters Institute for Journalism 2025 digital reportshowing that “for the first time, social media has displaced television as the top way Americans get news. 'The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up,' the report’s authors write, 'overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.” It gets worse, “These creators are also attracting audiences that traditional media struggle to reach. Some of the most popular personalities over-index with young men, with right-leaning audiences, and with those that have low levels of trust in mainstream media outlets, seeing them as biased or part of a liberal elite… Although social media and personality-based news are also on the rise in other countries, the changes are happening “faster and with more impact” in the United States… The proportion that say social media are their main source of news, for example, is relatively flat in Japan and Denmark, though it has also increased in other countries with polarized politics such as the U.K. (20%) and France (19%). But in terms of overall dependence, the United States seems to be on a different path — joining a set of countries in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia where heavy social media and political polarization have been part of the story for some time.”
Even with the best communication strategies, if you’re not reaching people, the only way to learn is through experience and that can be painful but at least they’re learning. Republicans in Los Angeles who don’t have air conditioning are “more likely to consider climate change a human-caused threat and more likely to support individual and government action to address climate change” than Republicans who have central air. The Conditional Effects of Air Conditioning: How Air Conditioning Affects Climate Change Views by Partisanship in Los Angeles County. Sandlin. 2025
It’s not just physical pain but financial pain too. That’s most keenly felt through rising house & car insurance rates. Although everyone focuses on hurricanes, it’s actually the accumulation of smaller storms (Severe Convective Storms - SCS) that are equally impactful… Swiss Re Institute's 2025 Natural Catastrophe report found that SCS are just as bad as hurricanes and also the systemic financial risk of rising insurance costs. On SCS, think tornadic and straight-line winds as well as large hailstones or anything bad that happens when you get towering clouds, lightning and thunder. For all the attention that tropical cyclones receive, the accumulation of a larger number of more moderate SCS means they contribute the same level of insured losses.
… and a big part of SCS are hail stones. If it feels like they’re getting bigger, it’s because they are. When we’re already seeing the largest hail stones in the US coming in somewhere between a golf ball and a tennis ball, the expectation that they may become 15-75% larger is more than a little disconcerting. Scientists say large hail will become more common in warming climate. “Our study suggests golf ball-size hail or larger will become more common because of more atmospheric instability, which leads to stronger thunderstorm updrafts… (and) strong updrafts are a key ingredient for the formation of larger hailstones… In our study, the largest hailstones are found to increase by 15% to 75%, dependent on greenhouse gas emissions.” You can find the study here.
It’s not just what is falling but what’s not. In this case, rain. The title of the paper itself shouldn’t be terribly surprising - Warming accelerates global drought severity. Geberechorkos et al. 2025 – but the extent to which atmospheric evaporative demand (AED) or ‘atmospheric thirst’ is impacting global drought conditions is striking: “Our findings suggest that AED has increased drought severity by an average of 40% globally… During the past 5 years (2018–2022), the areas in drought have expanded by 74% on average compared with 1981–2017, with AED contributing to 58% of this increase.
Before it all gets too depressing, not everyone is learning the hard way. Not only is the Texas energy system not going backwards - recall Anti-renewable bills die quietly in GOP-controlled Texas Legislature – they’re making forward progress with this news: Texas finalizes $1.8B to build solar, battery, and gas-powered microgrids. Texans care about grid reliability and the need for microgrids was brought home by the Mat 2024 derecho that pummeled Houston which is likely what encouraged a Texas legislature that approved the law in 2023 but failed to fund it until now, “It did pass a law that could strengthen the state’s electricity reliability by encouraging the construction of more microgrids — combinations of small-scale gas-fired power, solar, and batteries that can be built quickly. Last week, Texas lawmakers authorized a long-awaited $1.8 billion fund to support microgrid deployment at hospitals, nursing homes, water treatment plants, police and fire stations, and other critical facilities across the state. The Texas Backup Power Package Program has awaited funding since 2023, when it was created as part of a broader legislative package. The goal is to help Texans protect themselves against extreme weather-driven grid emergencies like the disastrous blackouts during 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, or the widespread power outages after 2024’s Hurricane Beryl”
Something else that’s helping: solar panels. The shade they throw decreases water stress and promotes increased plant growth (up to 20% more in dry years) and they can also boost bird populations.
They’re also pretty helpful for farmers. Farming is hard. It’s hard to do and it’s even harder to make money. That makes farmers deeply practical people and agrivoltaics make sense: US farmers switch to renting out sheep as lawn mowers for solar sites.
It’s also a reminder that land continues to be a binding constraint for the energy transition and solar is simply way better at capturing energy than growing, say, corn. A flag from Bill McKibben of a new study that solar PV generates the same amount of energy as corn ethanol in just 3.2% of the land-use footprint
I don’t expect that argument to get me terribly far but it does underscore why the Trump Administration’s USDA choice to reshape REAP loans to disincentivize solar development on farmland is likely going to go down poorly in rural America. 29.7 million acres of farmland are dedicated to corn growing for ethanol fuel in the U.S. Roughly 38% of U.S. corn harvested is used for ethanol fuel, rather than food. The sheer scale of that production should tell you that messing with the income of US farmers is a pretty poor political choice for any Federal govt.
The Economist doesn’t get enough respect for old-school English witticisms – whoever wrote the headline on Kim Jong-Il’s cover back in the 90s deserves a medal - so thought I’d flag their recent takeon how reducing aerosol pollution in India will only increase temperatures or, as they put it, “If India chokes less, it will fry more". Dark humor aside, it’s worth keeping front of mind that aerosols have been the single largest factor working against GHG emissions to limit the pace of global warming over the past century and, as that aerosol parasol starts to fray, we’re all going to feel India’s pain. If you’ve not spent much time on aerosols recently, Zeke Hausfather’s explainer will get you up to speed. Explainer: How human-caused aerosols are ‘masking’ global warming
I don’t expect a universally positive response to the nuclear renaissance and I share the concerns regarding waste, security, and accidents but in the current environment JK Galbraith's framing feels apt: “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” At the very least we’re getting a lot of the latter and, as a result, I’ve got sympathy for both sides of the debate within the World Bank - Todd Moss has a run down on the internal politics – to end its longstanding ban on financing nuclear projects. That joins another major reversal from earlier this year: backing mega dams. Hopefully what proves a bridge too far will be the reported reconsideration of the bank’s ban on funding oil & gas projects.
There’s a chance neither of these decisions ages well but I’m personally more concerned with the reengagement of the World Bank with hydro projects... Even for professed climate hawks, the environmental downsides of major hydropower projects are deeply concerning (from community displacement to ecological damage) with the Three Gorges dam still front of mind. However, perhaps what’s most relevant here is the very long development timelines for major hydro (one program the World Bank looks set to fund to completion in Tajikistan started in 1976) which are occurring on timeframes in which significant cost reductions are expected on alternative energy. Those cost reductions have been found to deliver enormous and rapid changes in the energy dynamics of less developed countries with Pakistan’s solar boom a key example (Pakistan's Surprise Solar Boom). Yes, with significant energy poverty in many of these regions and expected high GDP growth, ‘all of the above’ is an understandable energy strategy to adopt especially considering the need for clean firm power. However, few major hydro projects have ever been considered unalloyed successes and rolling them out over decades at the heart of massive energy transition feels particularly susceptible to miss-steps.
… especially in light of a recent example of the positives that come as you dismantle dams like those on the Klamath River with benefits ranging from recreation… First Time in 100 Years: Young Kayakers on a Ride for the Ages. "The remote and rugged Klamath River in Oregon and California, one of the mightiest in the American West and an ancient lifeline to Indigenous tribes, is running free again, mostly, for the first time in 100 years after the recent removal of four major dams. At the burbling aquifer near Chiloquin, Ore., that is considered the headwaters, a sacred spot for native people, a group of kayakers, mostly Indigenous youth from the river’s vast basin began to paddle on Thursday. Ages 13 to 20, they had learned to kayak for this moment. Stroke by stroke, mile by mile, day by day, they plan to reach the salty water of the rugged Northern California coast, more than 300 miles away, in mid-July."
… to ecology. Hotter temperatures are a problem for salmon as it speeds up their metabolism meaning they need to eat more to make their journeys upstream and they might not always have access to those calories (see Salmon are vanishing from the Yukon River — and so is a way of life). As a result, making it easier for them to get upstream should be a priority and hence efforts like this on the Klamath River are essential. Klamath River flows free after last dams come down, leaving the land to tribes and salmon. “Brook Thompson was 7 when her world turned upside down. "I witnessed the 2002 fish kill on the Klamath River," said Thompson, who's now 28 and a member of the Yurok Tribe. "It was devastating seeing thousands of dead bodies the same size as me in the river." That horrific event spurred Thompson and many other Yurok, Karuk, Hupa and Klamath Tribes people to lead a two-decade campaign to save the Klamath River from death. Their solution: Remove four dams that impeded the free flow of the river and had bred deadly algae that led to the 2002 fish die-off. On Tuesday, the final impediment was removed and the Klamath was again a free-flowing river.”