U.S. companies have been slow to act on super pollutants. Methane, refrigerants and other gases with high global warming potential are responsible for roughly half of the temperature increase the planet has experienced to date, yet most companies have made carbon dioxide the focus of climate strategies.

That’s a missed opportunity, experts said this week at Trellis Impact 26, because mitigating super pollutants can have greater near-term impacts on global warming than efforts to tackle CO2. 

“There’s an overwhelming opportunity but an underwhelming response,” Tristam Coffin, co-founder of êffecterra, a sustainability and engineering consultancy, said of refrigerants, one class of super pollutants.

Why the U.S. has been slow to act on superpollutants

Lack of awareness is part of the problem, noted Luke Pritchard, director of the Beyond Alliance, which brings companies together to share best practices on climate on climate solutions. Until recently, superpollutants were a niche topic discussed mainly by science nerds and climate blogs.

Technical issues around tracking and accounting for some superpollutants also played a role. Electricity use can be metered and used to calculate associated carbon dioxide emissions, noted Coffin, but refrigerant emissions are much harder to track. That’s partly because the emissions are unintentional: They happen when the gases leak during use and when equipment is disposed of. Assets containing refrigerants are also frequently distributed across multiple facilities. 

Regulation is an additional factor, said Ramé Hemstreet, chief energy officer at Kaiser Permanente: Tougher rules in the European Union have compelled companies in the region to act faster to remove refrigerant gases from greenhouse gas inventories.

How the U.S. is catching up

The previously niche topic has been pushed up the corporate agendas by a small number of first-mover companies and non-profit allies. Earlier this year, for example, the seven founding members of the new Superpollutant Action Initiative — Amazon, Autodesk, Figma, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Salesforce and Workday — committed to investing up to $100 million to cut superpollutant emissions.

The initiative is run by the Beyond Alliance, which also operates several other projects designed to help companies take action on superpollutants. These include a partnership with êffecterra focused on investment opportunities in Scope 3 refrigerant decarbonization and the Superpollutant Academy, a collaboration with carbon-credit rating agency Calyx Global that helps companies build the knowledge needed to support high-quality superpollutant mitigation through the voluntary carbon market.

What the companies are investing in

At Trellis Impact 26, Hemstreet described how he is collaborating with colleagues to eliminate superpollutants from cooling systems. He advised the audience to “shoot ahead of the duck” by identifying equipment that is due to be replaced for operational reasons and working to identify replacements that don’t use superpollutants. But finding cost-effective options in the U.S. can be challenging, he noted. 

Companies with smaller superpollutant footprints can look to solutions outside their value chains. Around a year ago, Google said it had contracted for credits generated by projects that will destroy 25,000 tons of methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) by 2030. The high warming potential of the gases mean that the impact of the credits over 100 years will be equivalent to eliminating 1 million tons of CO2. In 2024, Workday became one of the first buyers of credits generated by projects that prevent methane leaks from orphaned oil and gas wells. 

As with any type of carbon project, superpollutant credits vary in quality. But a relatively large number of projects have earned high scores from carbon credit rating agencies. The scores stem from confidence that the gases will not be returned to the atmosphere, the comparatively simple mechanisms used to measure the quantity of gasses captured and the limited alternative incentives available to deal with the gasses. A focus on superpollutants was one reason why Salesforce and Autodesk recently topped a buyers leaderboard created by Calyx. 

The post How the US is catching up on superpollutant mitigation appeared first on Trellis.

As sustainability leaders digest the SBTi’s updated Corporate Net-Zero Standard, it’s clear that the new guidelines provide only a thin and distant lifeline to companies in the struggling carbon removal sector. The new standard’s limited and long-delayed requirement to take responsibility for ongoing emissions won’t reverse the recent fortunes of the voluntary carbon market (VCM), which was bigger in 2008 than it was in 2023.

Although innovative startups continue to find funding and advance, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) companies are the canary in the net-zero solutions coal mine. Nori, Running Tide and others have closed up shop, and Climeworks is adjusting its business model because customers won’t pay enough per ton of carbon. The forecast from the most recent State of CDR report of 42 million tons per year by 2030 is far below predictions from just a few years ago. 

Climate tech’s Second Life moment

Here’s a historical precedent: Nearly 20 years ago, IBM made a big bet on the future of Second Life. IBM and other tech companies set up “virtual HQs” so that they could connect with employees and customers in the rapidly expanding digital world.

By 2010, the hype had faded, and Second Life never achieved commercial scale. Lack of demand sent the technology down the chasm that has claimed countless new technologies, from Segways to 3D TVs.

This same risk now looms over climate solutions providers. Venture investment is down more than 30 percent since 2022 —  a reflection of sober expectations about the growth of demand in the sector.

How to drive demand  

Much of the $250 billion invested in climate tech since 2018 was driven by aggressive growth forecasts that now look overzealous. This capital has created a heavily-stacked supply side in the market, from carbon credit brokers to energy and transportation tech to novel forms of carbon capture and GHG accounting platforms. 

At The Change Climate Project we field requests from suppliers regularly to access our community of corporate climate actors. To succeed, these solutions providers must win new customers, prove practical use cases and achieve cost reductions, leveraging customer successes into rising sales volumes. If demand doesn’t materialize for net-zero solutions providers, they won’t meet hyped-up valuations, and will fail. 

Some new markets materialize comparatively easily. Companies enter a space and, through the force of their marketing, convince customers to buy their products.

But climate solutions exist in a highly complex landscape of policy and market forces. Scaling demand requires intentional market-shaping far beyond what’s taking place now. Only an estimated 7-8 percent of total venture funding has gone into the supporting networks and systems such as measurement and verification, audits and standards that will help new markets form. 

Even less has gone into dedicated efforts to drive demand. Climate philanthropy’s two top favorites, policy change and sustainable finance, aren’t increasing market demand for key solutions, even after decades of grantmaking. There’s new hope that AI wealth will multiply philanthropy’s impact, but donors would need to mobilize quickly and embrace new approaches to giving that respond to this make-or-break moment for climate tech.

The role for corporate sustainability

With demand lagging, corporate sustainability teams need to recognize their critical role as buyers of climate tech solutions. Microsoft recently paused its carbon removal program, sending shockwaves through the market. Microsoft can’t be the only buyer in the market. Sustainability teams thinking about their own longer-term objectives can help accelerate market-shaping and demand growth by recognizing that they are key to building the climate solutions we all need.

Here’s what companies should focus on now:

Lead from the top. CEOs of companies that have made long-term carbon reduction a public priority must step up their public commitment to sustainability initiatives. This is the time for executive leadership to recognize the bigger picture and engage with key suppliers of lower-carbon services. This will give those suppliers a signal about future market conditions, and the confidence to keep building.

Focus on the consumer. Survey data consistently shows that climate change remains top of mind for consumers. Companies are under pressure to show profitability despite weak consumer sentiment, high energy costs and fluctuating tariffs. Reframing sustainability in this context will lead to clearer articulations of value and better prioritization with an emphasis on things that matter to customers.

Advertise and market. The single greatest superpower of corporations is their ability to shape consumer trends. The market didn’t ask for the iPhone; through the immense power of its marketing, Apple convinced people they needed one. People need climate solutions now, and companies need to find a path beyond climate-hushing so that they can return to shaping market preferences for lower-carbon options. That means finding renewed comfort with talking about the widespread benefits of decarbonization. Authentic marketing can resonate with end customers while boosting demand for net-zero solutions across the value chain.

Influence behavior. Companies often convince people to spend money through loyalty programs, discount schemes and creative financial products. These techniques could help sustainability teams in conjunction with their marketing peers to create incentives that shift what people actually buy and shape the market for lower-carbon products. 

Build coalitions. Buyer-focused initiatives such as Kinetic Coalition, Beyond Alliance, Frontier, Center for Green Market Activation, Rewiring America and EnergySage make information available to net-zero solutions purchasers. But a party needs guests, not just hosts. Companies and individuals need to join these coalitions and others like them, and commit to buying and installing climate solutions.

It’s one thing to build a headquarters in Second Life; it’s a whole other thing to get people to show up for work there. After its collapse, some elements of Second Life went on to shape other, more lasting technologies, such as virtual reality. Some climate tech companies will adapt to market realities. Others will disappear. But concerted effort by sustainability and marketing teams can go a long way toward creating market demand that will sustain future growth and enable the best climate solutions to avoid the chasm.   

The post For climate solutions providers, it’s make or break time  appeared first on Trellis.

Community opposition to data center development has become a hot-button bipartisan issue, and citizens and politicians are demanding more information from would-be developers and their customers about potential impacts to electricity prices, water supplies and other natural resources.

Businesses must treat those concerns and questions seriously if they want to retain their social license to operate in this moment of spiking energy demand and rapid deployment of artificial intelligence services and the infrastructure to support them, said former Obama administration official and Tennessee Valley Authority board member Michelle Moore during an energy tutorial on June 23, at Trellis Impact 26 in San Francisco.

Seven in 10 U.S. residents have serious concerns about how to make sure their voices are heard on data center build-outs in their communities, noted Moore, whose energy nonprofit Groundswell brings community solar and energy efficiency programs to rural communities, citing recent Gallup research. That sentiment is bipartisan, uniting citizens who don’t see eye-to-eye on many other issues.

“There is one thing they agree on,” said Moore. “They don’t like data centers.”

A groundswell of opposition

Growing community opposition to big data centers came up frequently during the Trellis Impact keynote program on Tuesday: Several speakers urged corporate sustainability professionals to ask tougher questions of their AI suppliers as part of contract discussions.

“We currently have the people driving this ecosystem not in the room, not at the table,” said Dara O’Rourke, an environmental scientist and professor at the University of California Berkeley, calling out AI companies including Open AI, Anthropic, DeepSeek and Mistral. “We really need all of you in the room to use your power to reach the good version of this.”

That pressure should be applied to the modelers, the data center providers, chip designers and utilities, O’Rourke said. In particular, the sustainability community should push back on the addition of natural gas generation to the U.S. grid — as Microsoft, for example, plans for several proposed data center projects despite its aggressive 2030 emissions reduction goal.

The Business Council on Climate Change, which represents companies including Google, LinkedIn, Pacific Gas & Electric and Salesforce this week published suggested questions that companies should ask their data center suppliers, including greenhouse gas emissions across all three emissions scopes defined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, energy consumption in megawatt-hours associated with training an AI model, and both direct and indirect water usage related to electricity consumption.

“If we do our jobs as the community’s customers, then these firms I listed at the start will actually have to hire you,” O’Rourke said. “They will actually need you on their teams doing this work and driving this forward in a serious way.”

The post Community opposition to data centers grows, crossing political divides appeared first on Trellis.

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis or its editors.

Two court decisions in recent months have changed the landscape of the political battle over ESG. In February, a federal court struck down Texas’ flagship anti-ESG statute as a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments (American Sustainable Business Council v. Hegar). In May, the Oklahoma Supreme Court invalidated the state’s Energy Discrimination Elimination Act on fiduciary grounds.

In other words, a law passed in the name of protecting pensioners from politicized investing was struck down because it harmed pensioners. The movement’s legal architecture is failing on its own stated principles. But the fight is far from over: Anti-ESG bills still outnumber pro-ESG bills in statehouses by roughly 2.5 to 1.

Defense doesn’t work

Sustainability executives have spent the past few years playing defense —  greenhushing, renaming funds, softening proxy language —  because the opposition had successfully framed itself as the defender of free-market capitalism. Here, I present the offensive strategy: a pro-market, conservative case for sustainability and social justice that relies on the power of markets and fiduciary duty, not on conviction and principle. 

The courts, it turns out, have been writing it for you.

The narrow path

The courts based their decisions on a narrow and old-fashioned idea: the right of capital owners and their fiduciaries to incorporate whatever considerations they deem material to the allocation of their own capital. Not a fund label. Not a ratings methodology. A property right.

The system of capitalism that the anti-ESG movement treats as eternal and immutable is, on inspection, a sediment of contested innovations. Limited liability was once denounced as a moral hazard severing ownership from accountability. The Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 were called the end of free enterprise. Index funds were dismissed as “un-American” and “Bogle’s folly.” Even shareholder primacy, the supposed bedrock of modern capitalism, dates to Milton Friedman’s seminal  1970 column in The New York Times, not to scripture or Adam Smith.

Each of these innovations was tested, contested and eventually metabolized by the markets. Others failed and vanished; markets dispose of their failures efficiently. That process is not a flaw.  It’s capitalism’s essence. A system that can no longer admit new entrants and new preferences is not being conserved. It is being embalmed.

Responsible investing is simply the current iteration: products, frameworks and analytical claims offered to a market that will sort them. And it has been sorting them vigorously. Greenwashed funds have been pruned. Label inflation has been punished by investors and regulators. Anyone claiming that ESG operates beyond market discipline has not watched fund flows since 2022.  

The apparatus of “free market” protection

Nevertheless, roughly two-thirds of U.S. states have enacted legislation that restricts government dealings with firms over their postures toward favored industries. In 2025, statehouses saw 192 anti-ESG bills proposed against 76 in support. 

These laws compile lists of disfavored private actors, prohibit commerce with them and require loyalty attestations from the rest. We have a name for this. It’s called industrial policy, and it carries central planning’s signature feature: the costs land on people who never voted for them.

After the Texas law took effect, five of the largest municipal bond underwriters left the state. The lost competition cost Texas issuers an additional $300–$500 million in interest on $31.8 billion of borrowing in the first eight months alone. 

That is a tax, levied by legislators on their own school districts and water authorities, that subsidizes a political posture. Friedrich Hayek warned about the delusion that legislatures could outperform the market’s discovery process; the anti-ESG movement has spent the past five years proving him right.

Fear is understandable, but the strategy is self-defeating

In short, opponents argue that ESG smuggles political preferences into capital allocation, distorts fiduciary judgment and corrodes the system that produced American prosperity. Defending capitalism requires stopping it.

Their solution is to freeze capitalism’s current configuration in legislative amber. But stasis has never been how durable systems persist. Resilience comes from absorbing new entrants and retaining what works through market competition — precisely the capacity the anti-ESG project attacks. It attempts to assure capitalism’s permanence by disabling the adaptive mechanisms that sustain it.

The court in Oklahoma turned the movement’s flagship legal theory —  that pecuniary factors alone may guide fiduciaries — against it. Fiduciary duty cuts both ways: If a manager’s climate-risk analysis is material to returns, prohibiting that analysis is the breach.

The demographic arithmetic

Here’s the forward-looking argument: The largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history is underway. An estimated $124 trillion in U.S. household assets will change hands through 2048. The succeeding generation may not always favor sustainable strategies, but it’s clear that a growing cohort of capital owners will demand that they are on the menu. 

American gatekeepers can greet these new owners as they have every prior generation: Develop your tactics, and the market will grade them; some will compound, some fail and the system will grow more robust. Or they can greet them with statutes that limit choices by prohibition, blacklist chosen managers and pre-emptively adjudicate their analytical frameworks in state legislatures.

The conservative case

Freedom of contract, capital allocation by owners rather than by legislatures, skepticism of government lists of disfavored businesses, resilience through adaptation rather than mandate — these are conservative commitments, and every one of them sits on the responsible-investing side of this fight. The recent court decisions established no new principles; they applied old ones to laws that violated all three.

The anti-ESG movement believes it is defending the American way of life. But that has never been a fixed inheritance to be guarded. Rather, it is a process of open entry, honest testing and ruthless pruning that each generation is invited to join. Let the market decide. It was always going to anyway.

The post Capitalism thrives through adaptation and change. The anti-ESG movement wants to freeze it appeared first on Trellis.

A new era of sustainability is emerging, focused on operational execution, infrastructure, and the organizational authority to build both. It’s a lot harder than the old days of voluntary commitments, aspirational targets and PR strategies.  

In dozens of conversations in recent months, corporate sustainability leaders — whether they work in finance, manufacturing, logistics, real estate, or consumer goods — tell me the hands-on work is intensifying, even if the communications around it are not.

They are zeroing in less on what they intend to do and more on how, specifically, to do it. The questions, and work to be done to answer them, have gotten harder and more concrete: Which battery storage configuration is needed for our footprint? How do we get procurement and engineering to agree on AI governance? Where does circularity sit in the org chart when it stops being a pilot and starts being a regulatory requirement?

Three forces are driving this shift: AI, energy demand and circularity compliance. They are also the through lines we’ll be going deeper on during Trellis Impact 26 starting tomorrow and running through Thursday at the Moscone West in San Francisco. Below I explore all, and point out relevant event sessions, too.

Will you be at Trellis Impact 26? Come find me and tell me if you agree or (even better) disagree with my take.

AI is starting to change sustainability in real ways

The AI boom is behind an explosion in data center energy consumption as well as big investment in new ways to fuel it: grid hardware, energy management software, batteries and next-generation geothermal. While this energy demand is a complicated variable for companies that spent years building science-based targets, it is spurring unprecedented financial support.

AI is also enabling sophisticated tools that sustainability teams are beginning to deploy in earnest. Think AI-assisted lifecycle assessment, automated Scope 3 data collection, satellite-based deforestation monitoring and investor-grade disclosure analysis. 

At Okta, a cybersecurity company, a team of sustainability, engineering, technology, and global operations staffers is rolling out AI tools that show which models for tasks like writing, coding, or analysis are most energy efficient. 

The cross-functional team “treats sustainability criteria as a design input for technology decisions rather than a reporting obligation attached afterward,” Alison Colwell, Okta’s Senior Director of Sustainability & Responsible Technology, told me.

On the investor side, financial giants like Goldman Sachs and sustainable investment specialists like Parnassus Investments are using AI to surface material risks buried across mandatory filings and voluntary ESG reports at a scale and level of rigor that was previously impossible.

You can see Laura Sennett, from Goldman Sachs’s Sustainable Investing Group, and Marcy McCullaugh, Sustainability Research Director at Parnassus, at the How AI is changing investor analysis session at Trellis Impact 26 tomorrow June 23. 

Energy has become a strategic bottleneck

In many markets, renewable energy has finally become attractive because it’s the fastest available path to new capacity. That may prove more durable than any policy mandate.

The C-suite is now making decisions about battery storage, distributed energy resources, power purchase agreements and on-site generation on speed-to-power logic as much as emissions logic because grid interconnection timelines stretch three years or more in many markets. 

Steelmaker Nucor and data center operator Aligned have invested in large-scale on-site battery storage — not primarily as a climate play but because getting reliable power quickly demanded it. 

Maersk and Bloom Energy, meanwhile, are turning to microgrids, distributed generation, and flexible on-site infrastructure as faster options. Check out Maersk Head of Energy Procurement Carlo Bertani and Bloom Energy’s Kaushal Biligiri, Senior Energy Transition Champion, during the Near-Term Solutions for a Constrained Grid session at Trellis Impact 26 on Wednesday June 24. 

Circularity is a regulatory reality (not just a voluntary philosophy)

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation arrived faster than most corporate sustainability teams anticipated. 

Packaging regulations across states including Colorado, Maine, and Oregon, where enforcement carrying penalties of up to $25,000 per day, took effect last year. Registration for California’s textile EPR program begins next month. There’s even growing momentum toward a national circularity framework. 

The focus has shifted to harder operational questions, like how do you build a circular fiber supply chain at scale? How do you synchronize supply and demand for recovered electronics? How do you operationalize reverse logistics so that the cost of collecting, sorting and reprocessing materials doesn’t exceed the value recovered? 

Data center hardware offers a window into how this is taking shape. iFixit, a longtime advocate for right-to-repair policy, is extending the useful life of devices through open-source repair guides that keep hardware in service longer. Molg is building robotic microfactories to disassemble servers that have reached their “end of life” into components, and recover far more value than conventional recycling allows. “We’re energized by this generational moment,” Rob Lawson-Shanks, Molg’s CEO, told me, where advances in AI and robotics are “converging into a massive opportunity to reshape circular infrastructure” — and eventually scale it “beyond data centers to all electronics.”

Meet Lawson-Shanks and iFixit sustainability director Elizabeth Chamberlain at the Next Frontier of Circularity in Data Centers session at Trellis Impact 26 on Wednesday June 24.

The post How sustainability is being reshaped in 2026 appeared first on Trellis.