There’s something slightly odd happening in sustainability at the moment. Some of the things we spent years arguing for are now happening at serious scale: renewables are overtaking coal, EVs are displacing meaningful volumes of oil, and clean technologies are becoming ordinary infrastructure. And yet the work does not feel simpler. If anything, it feels harder.
I think that’s because the transition has moved on. The question is increasingly not whether the technology works, or even whether the direction of travel is right. It’s what happens when all of this collides with an actual business: its assets, budgets, suppliers, customers, reporting, politics and people.
I spend a lot of my working life trying to separate sustainability as an idea from sustainability as something a business actually has to deal with. They are not the same thing.
The first is relatively easy to talk about: net zero, targets, ESG, commitments, disclosure, transition. The second is much less tidy. A procurement question arrives that somebody has to answer. A customer suddenly wants evidence nobody has been collecting. An asset has to cope with heat it was not designed around. A supplier becomes a risk. Energy economics change. A reporting requirement exposes the fact that three different departments all thought somebody else owned the data.
Then someone has to make a decision.
That, to me, is where the transition is now getting interesting. I don’t think our biggest problem is simply that clean technology isn’t arriving quickly enough. Some of it is arriving very quickly indeed.
The problem is that it has to enter businesses, infrastructure and institutions built around a different set of assumptions. Those systems are slow. They have budgets, legacy assets, procurement cycles, investment committees and five-year plans. They have people protecting their remit, and people who have inherited responsibility for “sustainability” without being given authority over any of the things that actually determine it.
That is a much harder transition than swapping one technology for another.
You can see the contradiction in today’s numbers. Renewables are scaling and EVs are displacing oil. At the same time, grids are struggling to absorb new generation, policy support has weakened in several markets, AI-driven electricity demand is helping justify new gas capacity, and power-sector emissions are still expected to rise this year.1
Here in Europe, the physical climate is becoming harder to ignore as background context too. Copernicus has just reported exceptional heat and dryness across western Europe, low soil moisture and river flows, and extraordinary wildfire conditions.2
I live in Athens. I don’t need much persuading that heat, water and fire eventually stop being “climate issues” and become questions about how places, infrastructure and businesses function.
That shift matters.
For years, sustainability work often began with a fairly abstract question: what should we commit to?
I think the more useful question now is: what has actually changed for this business?
Not in 2050. Now.
Has a customer changed what they expect? Has procurement changed? Has regulation changed? Has an energy assumption stopped being true? Is an asset more exposed than it was? Does a new technology now make economic sense? Is there evidence behind the thing the business has been saying publicly for the last five years?
And, crucially, who actually owns the decision?
I keep coming back to that last one because the sustainability problem inside many organisations is not lack of ambition. It is fragmented ownership.
Everybody can see a piece of it. Finance sees cost. Operations sees disruption. Procurement sees suppliers. Marketing sees claims. Leadership sees risk. The sustainability person, if there is one, is somehow expected to join all of that together.
Then we wonder why execution is difficult.
This is why I’m increasingly suspicious of adding complexity by default. Another framework may help. Another target may help. Another reporting system may help. But sometimes the better piece of work is much more basic: what matters here, what doesn’t, what decision are we actually trying to make, what evidence do we have, what happens if we wait, and who needs to own it?
That sounds almost embarrassingly simple. It isn’t.
Once sustainability moves from ambition into implementation, judgement matters more. There isn’t always a clean “sustainable” answer. Sometimes the right decision is to invest. Sometimes it is to adapt an existing asset rather than replace it. Sometimes it is to change supplier, collect better evidence before doing anything, or stop making a claim the business cannot substantiate.
Sometimes it is genuinely to wait.
That messiness used to bother me more. Now I think it may be the clearest sign that the transition is becoming real.
Solar panels, batteries and EVs are entering ordinary business systems, and ordinary business systems are full of competing priorities, imperfect information, legacy decisions and people. Of course it is messy.
So perhaps 44.5 is more interesting than it first looks. The technologies are moving. The climate is moving. Policy is moving in both directions at once. Businesses are being asked to make decisions somewhere in the middle of all of it.
That feels much closer to the real sustainability problem now.
Not persuading everyone that a transition should happen, but working out what to do as it does.
If this made you think of something, repost it with your take.