David Gelles

speaker

265 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 28 Jan

David Gelles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Inside the U.S. reversal on climate change action · 28 Jan 2026 podcast

Many of the commitments that had been made had simply not been upheld.

And what I tried to do over the past couple weeks was really understand what had happened.

And this was very much the conversation, and it wasn't always an easy one to have, that I was engaging with leaders at Davos.

Several things.

The first, and it's unavoidable, is President Trump.

As we've already noted, he came back to office a year ago and unleashed a raft of radical policy changes that changed the energy trajectory in the United States, changed the incentive structure for corporations here and abroad who wanted to embrace change.

clean energy, and that has had ripple effects.

But as I did the reporting, it became clear that that was just one of a much broader set of realities that have changed on the ground and in the markets over the last six years.

A couple others that have been really important in essentially silencing climate action over the

a really strong Republican grassroots pushback against climate action in the business community.

This is things like ESG and CSR.

In 2020 and 2021, many corporations...

really took it upon themselves to say that it was their job not just to run profitable businesses, but to engage in the social issues of the day.

ESG stands for what?

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance Factors.

This is Wall Street jargon that, you know, depends on who you're talking to, can mean a whole lot of different things.

But ESG became shorthand for companies caring about trying to tackle climate change.

And what you found was that a lot of local Republicans, and I'm talking specifically about local Republican state treasurers, many of them were very uncomfortable with this.

And they started pulling their money from companies like BlackRock, banning state governments from doing business with companies that were pursuing climate action, and ultimately opening investigations into some of these companies and even suing them.

So that was another big piece of why corporate America sort of backed off its engagement with climate change.

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