Will it be RIP for ESG in the second Trump presidency?
Our co-founder Mark Lowe asks, in PR Week, what Trump’s election means for sustainability comms and ESG
Amid the noise of the US election, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that COP29 begins today in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Climate activists will not be quick to forgive President Biden or Keir Starmer, neither of whom will be attending the event. Meanwhile, its organisers are allegedly using it as a forum to strike fossil fuel deals.
In short, it’s been a bleak weak for anyone concerned about the climate crisis and energy transition. But, with Trump’s election, will we finally see the death of the Environmental, Social and Governmental (ESG) category?
Four years ago, ahead of COP 26, I mentioned on these pages that the chances of a Trump victory in 2024 were under-priced and that this could be very bad news for the sustainability agenda.
In the intervening period, we’ve seen some positive developments, not least the much-vaunted Inflation Reduction Act, which has sucked billions in green investment into the US.
But while, inevitably, all the drama focuses on America, it’s worth noting that even under Joe Biden the US has been a semi-detached participant in the energy transition.
Thanks to the shale revolution, America is now the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. And while the Democrats employ the language of climate politics, their focus when it comes to energy is, in Obama’s words, “all of the above”.
You could go further and say that, while Biden has used the language of sustainability, he’s engaged in the hard politics of oil and gas. With Trump, there is reason to believe we’ll see an inversion of this: fossil fuel boosterism coupled with increased competition around climate technology.
To understand why, we must look to China.
The progressive left tends to see President Trump as focused on cultural issues, but for decades his main obsession has been global trade, where he thinks the US gets a raw deal.
And while American politics is subsumed into the language of ESG, China has gained a mortal lock on the technology that will make the energy transition happen.
The production of electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries and wind turbines is becoming the locus of global trade and Trump is not going to want to cede more ground to China in this space, particularly with Elon Musk at his side.
So, for climate and sustainability communicators, there are reasons for optimism. And I’d add that the demise of the term ‘ESG’, although it’s unlikely to happen, might not be such a bad thing for us.
As I argued back in 2021, we need to move sustainability from being a polarising, cultural issue to a unifying, ‘real world’ one. It’s not clear that experts in this space even agree on what ESG means, with some seeing it as an investment category and others as a more abstract declaration of business intent.
If experts can’t unpack the term, we can’t expect consumers to do the same. Meanwhile, extreme weather events will continue to bring sustainability to our screens and, over time, to our homes. For all the political noise it’s here that, to paraphrase another American political giant, we’ll rediscover the fierce urgency of now.
