Ostriches, Velociraptors, and Milton Friedman

CTRL+F "ESG" → DELETE

The Repeal

When the White House pried the letters E, S, and G off the keyboard, I watched companies rename their “climate solutions” to “advanced energy" to keep their grants alive.

The values fight over how businesses should act got shoved in a drawer. Project 2025 repealed it, on the premise of unleashing the mighty power of capitalism. 

But the decisions the fight was about - who your company answers to, who can kill your project, whose trust you're spending - didn't go away. They got harder.

Cancel the letters from national discourse and the facts that created them are still there. Raw materials come from the (E)nvironment. Companies exist inside of a (S)ocial contract set up to establish the rules of law and property rights. Boards of directors are literally tasked with (G)overnance as a primary mandate.

You cannot de-platform reality. We actually do live in a real world with real people and real constraints.

Our response 

There were and still are good reasons to temporarily abandon the war of words. Pollsters and marketing minds can share strategies to win the hearts and minds of the public. This article is not about that rebranding fight.

As climate professionals, when policy took the money away, we didn’t quit. Yes, we grieved - privately and collectively - the ground temporarily lost, knowing the real pain that generations will suffer from time lost.

We picked over the carcass of the Obama and Biden climate wins. We resurrected what lifelines we could in the new era of Energy Dominance.

In short: We went back to work. 

The decisions didn't go anywhere

We temporarily live in a gilded society that naively wishes the old debates of stakeholder versus shareholder capitalisms were permanently settled in favor of Milton Friedman. They weren’t. And it’s time to say that out loud. 

Across the energy and climate sectors, in executive staff meetings and board rooms, the social context in which every company operates hasn't materially simplified. If anything, it's gotten more complicated.

The data center build out could have been generation-defining. It could have powered the transition to a clean grid and restored citizen faith in government and in corporate responsibility. Instead it is mired in a scandal that erodes value for everyone involved. 

1. The social license collapsed inside twelve months - and it's measurable.

Embold Research polled 2,045 registered voters August 8–13, 2026 (±2.3 pts). Opposition to a new data center went from 42% in August 2025 to 75% today. Strong support fell from 13% to 4%. More than 530 counties and municipalities have restricted or banned data center construction. Heatmap News

2. Customers are paying for the corporate build out.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimates wholesale power prices could rise as much as 50% as data center electricity demand doubles over five years. PJM's own independent market monitor has projected the same direction - higher generation costs, passed through to consumers. Spotlight PA

3. Projects are being cancelled.

Sentinel Grove Technology Park, near Port St. Lucie, Florida, was one of the largest data centers cancelled after opposition in Q1 2026. One gigawatt, up to $13.5 billion. It lost its planning board vote in October 2025, and the developers withdrew the land-use application entirely in February. Heatmap News

Despite the culture war values suppression, ESG is taking down projects all across the nation.

How I see the world

We are witnessing a textbook failure of leadership and strategic thinking that has eroded and will continue to destroy value for all involved. This problem set is one I’ve been working on and thinking a lot about with clients particularly this year. 

My current thinking reflects the following learnings: 

• Many of our leaders are not (yet) equipped to manage the challenges we face,
• We exist in a system that benefits from ostrich thinking, 
• We need new models to meet the climate and social crises, and
• Most importantly, the situation is recoverable. 

The Toolbox

While we certainly do need new leaders - urgently in some areas - many of our political, business, and social executives simply don’t have the right tools in their toolbox. 

Most people are "discrete discipline skilled” and poorly trained to connect the dots. A CEO who spent a career climbing the sales ladder understandably has had little exposure to how software engineering impacts product pipeline and ability to sell. A founder with a computer science degree isn’t highly knowledgeable about corporate sales cycles. Both are unlikely to have deep exposure to systems thinking, community management, or environmental policy - the topics that drive real economic value in this market. We need bridging models to highlight the gaps and build connections across these disciplines. 

Organizational theorists work to understand the domain knowledge and gaps that leaders and leadership teams inherited. We need to build new skill sets that meet the moment. Mapping the broader systems thinking analysis into business language and disciplines is real work that hasn’t been done effectively.

Ostrich Farming

Cancel culture whipsawed into the conservative movement and eliminated the term “ESG” from the lexicon. Collectively, our leaders told us to bury our heads in the sand: forget about the social contract, make money. 

We should all be very aware of one fact: we are living in an era of authoritarian rise and democratic backsliding.

There are real short term winners and losers engaged in that debate. Weaponizing a real framework into the culture war, to generate political and economic power, is itself a master class in what I’m arguing here. Somebody understood the strategic stakes.

Ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand. And the problems don’t disappear because we stopped talking about them - not ours as a society, not the one businesses face earning the social contract. 

Nothing Stays Outside 

The strategies and structures that carried us - somewhat adequately - need reexamining. Two things changed at once: the climate crisis, and the era of data centers and artificial intelligence. The data center build out is the clearest case. It competes for the same land, the same water, the same grid interconnection, the same neighborhoods as our clean energy projects.

Many of us grew up in a world where social trust and corporate decision making were assumed to be different, unrelated problems. Traditional economic and firm-behavior models treated social trust and politics like Jurassic Park’s velociraptors at the kitchen door. Build a strong enough door and you can live with what’s outside. 

But the lessons that practitioners of stakeholder theory were trying to teach all along were that endogenous and exogenous are false constructs. We are living in an era when we get to learn that when you create a velociraptor, it will probably try to eat you.

We must alter our strategies and train a generation of business leaders to face the new reality. 

The Path Back

I am not a climate optimist in the year 2026. Hope and hopium both have a role; they can catalyze social change. But I read the headlines and the IPCC reports, and we are far off track. We have no adequate plan for the harms we are already creating. 

Doomerism and Climate Realism are no better. Getting on track means solutions that weigh the present and the future at once, and most of my work aims there. What I’ve watched hold with clients is simpler: people can learn, systems can be linked, and incentives can be adjusted. 

Invitation

There is creative, meaningful work to be done at this intersection, where business meets society, where social trust is won and lost, and where simplistic management theory falls flat on its face. I invite you to join the journey and to follow along here to learn more. 

The theories we need to study and build become the skills that we'll need to continue to address climate change, correct course, and mitigate the harms.

This is no longer something that we can wait for or something that we can vote our way in to or out of. It’s here.

This is the first of four essays on this topic. The next asks why capable, serious leaders don't see this coming. The third asks who decided we should stop looking, and by what authority. The fourth runs the data center build out through the method I use with clients - what went wrong, and what a version worth building would have required.

Whether you study management theory, lead a local climate coalition, fund the organizations doing this work, allocate capital into the sector, or run a company and can't work out why your leadership team can't see the whole picture - you'll find a shared language here for what you’re up against.

The best climate investors never call themselves climate investors — Yoann Berno, Climate Insiders
Another ESG class hiding in plain sight?

Colorado voters will decide whether to put a 'right to natural gas' in the state constitution — Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun
A reminder that the battle needs to be fought at every level of government (and Jesse is a terrific writer).

Why can't utilities innovate? — David Roberts, Volts
I always admire Quinn Nakayama at PG&E's reflections on the space and the hard work he and his team do against the odds.

The 30,000-mile fish finger — Ed Conway, Material World
Supply chains are so interesting. A simple dinner, a complex journey.

-- Jonathan