This week on LinkedIn, I’ve been publishing my 2025 predictions about key trends to expect in corporate sustainability and the intersection of climate tech, energy, and data centers.
I wrapped them all up in one post over at Overt Impact, and you should at least click that link to feast your eyes on the not-subtle Hitchhiker’s Guide reference in the obviously AI-generated image that illustrates the piece, which I won’t reproduce here in full.
What I will do here is provide a summary of that professional sounding post with a slightly warmer, more personal series of takes below. I promise I wrote this myself. Mostly.
- Corporate Sustainability Reporting just got real. In Europe. Mostly.
The EU’s CSRD rules are kicking off, and a big swath of EU-based companies and others that do enough business there now have to report their emissions. The catch? There’s not much in the way of a standard way to do it, so good luck finding, reading, and comparing those reports. Still, it’s a solid first step, and someone out there will figure out how to make sense of all this data. (I might try? Or help someone try? What’s important is that we try to try.) - AI is an energy-guzzling minivan on the highway to the next climate disaster, but get in fellow travelers, we’re going optimizing.
AI isn’t a fad. Please don’t be that person. This isn’t like NFTs, I promise. But it uses a metric heck-ton of electricity. Optimizing AI for energy efficiency has to be a focus for someone in 2025. (Again, possibly me.) - Data Centers are booming, and they, too, are thirsty as heck for electricity, and matching up supply and demand is hectic.
Thanks to the AI non-fad we just discussed, and all the demand for data storage and processing that would exist anyway, rest assured data centers will continue to outnumber elementary schools in my neighborhood by a solid margin. We’ll see more cool (pun intended) approaches to making them more energy efficient in 2025, but we’ll also see demand to continue to require natural gas for a dirty fallback to renewable energy, not to mention diesel backup generators, which some data center operators might prefer we not mention. - Most companies that made commitments to interim carbon emissions goals in 2025 on their way to 2030 on their way to 2050 are going to be making this face: 😅
Lots of companies won’t hit their 2025 climate goals, but that’s not going to be a surprise to anyone paying attention. Everyone is looking at 2030 as the big milestone year, which is conveniently in the future, and give us a chance to make up some ground. Hopefully it’s an opportunity to gain momentum. - The Biden administration locked in lots of climate funding on the way out the door, which is good. Unfunding technology is not the way Trump will set the US and the rest of the world back on climate change.
The Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA” is a branding choice, but context is helpful) has been a huge success, and the majority of funding for climate tech it put in place can’t be undone. Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election, apparently, so we shouldn’t expect the federal government to lift a finger in favor of further corporate sustainability disclosure regulations, and we can expect (again) existing environmental regulations to go lightly enforced. As my AI friends keep trying to tell me every time I ask for a summary of this issue, “it’s a mixed bag.”
Thanks for reading, this was fun to work on, and if you follow me on LinkedIn and BlueSky and whatnot, thanks for your patience as you’ve been seeing this in like six different forms all week, and I’m not quite done with it yet.