ESG, COP, NZBA*, etc. etc... An entire word salad of climate policies has been cancelled under the Trump administration – not to mention the very words, climate change.
Even green business startups are deleting climate language and relabeling things. They are dropping terms like “decarbonization” and “climate-friendly” and substituting product pitches that stress national security or domestic manufacturing advantages. According to Ed Ballard at the Wall Street Journal, “Climate Startups are Going Quiet About the Climate.” (WSJ March 23, 2025).
What does this translation from climate to business language mean for climate action? Is this translation a linguistic shift with no consequences? Do we simply substitute the terms, “resilience” and “risk management”, for “ESG” and “sustainability” as suggested by Latitude Media?
I believe there is a greater opportunity here.
The bulk of climate activism has focused on legislation, regulation and policy initiatives – the language of lawmakers. Activists became proficient in policy-speak by schooling themselves in the “sausage-making” legislative processes after being frustrated with the glacial** pace of climate legislation.
Underlying this approach is an assumption that business would not go green unless required by regulation and laws (the sticks) or incentivized with subsidies (the carrots).
A smaller number of activists view the climate emergency through the lens of market forces. They see the motivation for going green through economic and business concepts, like “competitive advantage” and “industrial transformation” and favor regulation lite.
These so-called “conservative” climate activists are mostly segregated into separate organizations, like RepublicEN, or separate caucuses of nonpartisan climate activist organizations, like the Conservative Caucus of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby. (CCL had 50 people show up for a conservative lobbying day last year. One thousand people attended the regular lobbying day.)
Learning the language of business and market forces would strengthen climate advocacy.
By getting schooled in the dynamics of market forces and business strategies (“sausage-making” 2.0), activists would gain proficiency in the language of climate doers, the companies that actually build windmills, install EV charging stations, and innovate lo-carbon cement.
A new critique of climate action based on policy alone says that the old environmentalism was too much about “stopping things” (see Rachel Pritzker’s interview with The Bulwark, "Rethinking the Environmental Movement” on YouTube.)
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson provide a now infamous example of a plan to build a climate-friendly bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The well-intentioned project got stopped by years of regulation and environmental reviews. Writing in their new book, Abundance, they quote Governor Newsome saying: “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things.”
Bilingual activism that speaks fluently in policy, market forces, and business strategy could be more successful in building the big things needed to address the climate emergency. Policies can set the stage and provide incentives (carrots and sticks), but light rail and solar farms and geo-thermal systems get built by business – businesses subject to market forces, strategic limitations, and financial realities.
It's not just about learning how to talk to Republicans, it’s about creating more robust climate action and building big climate-friendly things.
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*ESG (environment, social and governance) is a framework for corporations to assess their sustainability progress.
COP (Conference of the Parties, aka the Paris Accord) is an international treaty focused on on climate mitigation and finance.
NZBA (net zero bank alliance) part of the UN Environment Program, is a commitment of global banks to aligning their lending, investment, and capital markets activities with net-zero targets.
**Glacial: The Inside Story of Climate Politics is Chelsea Henderson’s 2024 book about the history of climate politics.
Nicely written. Mark Fackler. Durango, CO and La Jolla, CA
Wise words,Trudy. Tack to the prevailing winds. -Gerry Elman in Denton, Texas