Greenhushing Is Louder Than Trump’s Blustering
In the current political circus, where climate commitments are thrown under the bus in favour of short-term votes and the President of the free world is more concerned with the ‘woke’ journalist in a defence WhatsApp chat than those inept enough to invite him in, it’s increasingly difficult to avoid the relentless ESG bashing coming from certain corners of the globe. From corporate boardrooms to the upper echelons of government, sustainability has become a political punching bag.
If, like me, you find it all somewhat exhausting, I’d recommend the animated film Flow. There is no spoken dialogue in Flow. Not a word. Instead, it tells the story of a stray cat and an unlikely gathering of animals attempting to survive together as floodwaters consume the Earth. A quiet reminder that we are all stakeholders on this planet, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. The animals in Flow, though, adapt, cooperate and move forward. A lesson, it seems, lost on those steering our ship.
While the creatures in Flow are trying to rise above the water, our own political class seem intent on pulling us further below.
The ESG retreat
It is undeniable that we are witnessing a retreat from ESG targets. As Trump barrels through this second term like a bull in a freshly red-painted china shop, emboldened by allies who believe the rest of the world, especially pesky Europe, are little more than freeloaders on America’s coat-tails and all resources are theirs for the taking, large corporates and entire governments have conveniently decided now is the time to recalibrate their public climate ambitions.
Major corporates like UBS and Standard Chartered have quietly dropped references to financed emissions from executive pay plans. BP, having once draped itself in green branding, has binned performance targets linked to its transition business altogether.
These steps are often framed in pragmatic terms such as war, economic stability, or shareholder feedback, but let’s be real. It’s Trumpism at the root of this reversal.
And yet, there’s something hollow about this ESG backlash.
The cost of doing nothing
Here’s the thing: pretending a problem doesn’t exist does not make it go away. Just ask the residents of Spain, who recently braced themselves for another round of freak storms. Or the polar scientists quietly recording that Arctic sea ice has now shrunk to its lowest winter extent in satellite history, with the White House defunding such research along with over 80 other guttings.
It is easy, in Westminster, Washington or Wall Street, to treat nature’s unravelling as something abstract: an issue for the global south, for future generations, or simply for someone else to pay for. But global supply chains, commodity prices and even European energy security (although, admittedly, Europe’s energy mess is largely of its own making) are already being buffeted by these environmental disruptions.
Take cocoa prices, now at record highs because of failed harvests, as a further example. Or imagine the impact of deep-sea mining on the biodiversity of the very oceans we all rely on, now being eagerly eyed up by mining firms with Trump’s White House posturing to waive the environmental protections that stand in their way.
To do nothing is not to hold the line. It is to allow the liability to accumulate, until the bill arrives with interest.
The quiet continuation
Despite the headlines, I would argue that much of this so-called ESG retreat is, in fact, a strategy rather than an operational reality. The phrase for it is greenhushing, the act of deliberately downplaying sustainability initiatives, not because they aren’t happening, but because shouting about them has become politically inconvenient.
You can see it in the quiet proliferation of debt-for-nature swaps, such as Amundi’s push to embed ESG goals into Lebanon’s upcoming debt restructuring. You can see it in the strength of the social bond market, up to $657 billion last year, defying hostility and funded largely by US government agencies. Even institutional investors are quietly snapping up ESG assets like they’re going out of fashion because, commercially, they know these problems are only going one way.
Greenhushing is not surrender. It’s survival.
While some companies may be unwilling to risk rocking the boat, there are also those that, instead, fly under the radar while still tackling the climate crisis head-on. Take Global Blue Chip’s recent investment in E.On (which, as an aside, is one of two new energy companies recently added to the portfolio). As energy firms pivot to secure Europe’s energy independence from the US’s shifting political winds, E.On has partnered with Denmark’s ARC to develop a carbon capture project that could remove 400,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year.
E.On has come into the portfolio as a small position seeking to benefit from Europe’s dawning reality that it needs to become more independent with a Trumpian regime in power across the pond, and a key aspect of that is inward investment in energy infrastructure. E.On, along with another small holding taken in RWE, provides exposure to renewable energy projects, still very much the energy choice of Europe which remains committed to its net-zero goals, and the largest energy distribution grid in Europe.
Ultimately, E.On’s carbon capture project with Denmark is a classic example of what Flow’s animal ensemble teaches us: cooperation in the face of crisis. E.On is not shouting this from the rooftops. Nor is it likely to appear in a Trump Administration speech. But it is real. It is happening. And it is quietly ensuring that sustainable progress is not held hostage to America’s electoral cycles.
