What UK Business Can Learn From America's Climate U-Turn

Hey, thanks so much for listening. I would love to be able to help you more on what it is that you are listening to and why you're listening to, to me. If you could click on the link in the show notes, that would be awesome because it will help me define what it is that we should be talking about on this podcast. The world's second largest polluter just deleted its own power to fight climate change. Not lost it in court, not had it voted away, chose to delete it. And here's the bit that should stop you: the businesses that supposedly benefit from this—they didn't ask for it. In fact, most of them told the government not to do it. If you're running a business in the UK or anywhere outside the US, this is genuinely one of the biggest strategic opportunities of the decade—an almost. Nobody is talking about it in those terms yet. Because what America just got wrong is exactly what the rest of us can get right if we move quickly. Hi, if we haven't met before, I'm Will Richardson. I run a sustainability channel about what's actually happening in climate and business, the parts most people don't cover honestly. I've spent the last 25 years in this industry, I built and ran one of the UK's leading sustainability consultancies. I've worked with FTSE, NASDAQ, and extra-listed businesses across food and beverage and media, marketing, and advertising. I've sat in the boardrooms where these decisions actually get made. I'm telling you now, this US story is not primarily about America. It's about what happens next everywhere else. So in the next 10 minutes, I want to walk you through 3 things: what America actually did right in plain English, the 3 mistakes they made that every business leader watching should learn from, and the specific advantage this hands to any UK, European, or Asian business willing to hold its nerve. Let me show you what I mean, what actually happened. So let's start with the facts, because the story that got reported in the UK press was quite thin. In February 2026, the US government erased something called the endangerment finding. Sounds technical, it's actually simple. Back in 2009, backed by more than 200 pages of peer-reviewed science, the United States officially recognized that greenhouse gases threaten human health. That single finding became the legal foundation for nearly 17 years of rules limiting carbon emissions from cars, power plants, oil and gas wells— basically the whole US regulatory approach to climate. Take that finding away, and the legal basis for those rules just collapses. The administration called it the single biggest deregulatory action in the country's history, and the numbers behind it are honestly sobering. One analysis says the repeal could raise US emissions by around 10% over the next 30 years. That's linked to as many as 58,000 early deaths. And 37 million extra asthma attacks by the middle of the century. And it doesn't stop with cars. Removing this finding clears the way to scrap limits on power plants and on oil and gas wells too. Just to give you a sense of scale, transportation is already America's biggest single source of greenhouse gases. If the US motor vehicle sector was its own country, it would be the 4th largest emitter on Earth. So this isn't a small technical adjustment. This is the removal of the main tool for cutting emissions across the entire US economy. The irony nobody's pointing out. And here's the irony, because it's a good one. America is pulling back on climate rules at exactly the moment the evidence for keeping them is louder than it's ever been. Separate research projects that wildfire smoke alone could kill around 70,000 Americans every year by 2050. Deaths from extreme heat in the US have already more than doubled in recent decades. Insurance costs in Florida and California have gone through the roof. The physical case for regulation is stronger this year than it's ever been. The rulebook is being torn up at the exact moment the case for it is the strongest. Remember that because it comes back later. So mistake one: ideology over evidence. Now let's get into the useful part because there are three specific mistakes. Buried in this story. And honestly, if you understand these 3, you understand something important about how climate strategy fails in any organization. The first mistake is that they let ideology override evidence. And this is where the reporting most people saw is misleading, because this was not businesses demanding change. The opposite. By 2017, hundreds of major US companies, including oil and gas majors and industrial manufacturers, had publicly accepted the reality of climate change. The US Chamber of Commerce, which is not exactly a hotbed of climate activism, recently called the endangerment finding settled law and said it wasn't seeking to repeal it. So who actually pushed for this? A small group of activists who worked at it for 16 years, partly funded by a $2 million campaign. And in their own words, they deliberately kept the work quiet so participants wouldn't be shamed before it was finished. Think about that for a second. The market had moved on. Public concern had grown. Even the industries. this was supposed to help had accepted the reality. And the policy dragged everything backwards anyway. That is the danger of letting a small, determined group override the evidence. The rest of the economy pays for it. Now, before you think this is only a US problem, ask yourself, in your own organization, is there a strategic decision right now being made on the basis of what the evidence actually says, or on the basis of what one influential person happens to believe. Because the mechanism that just blew up American climate policy is the same mechanism that blows up boardroom decisions every day at every scale. Mistake 2, chaos over stability. Second mistake, they created chaos in the exact market that needs stability. And this is the part that should really wake up anyone running a business. Even the so-called winners here are worried. Oil and gas trade bodies actually warned the US government that a national rollback would create a patchwork of different state-level laws, meaning companies would have to juggle different rules in California, Texas, New York, and every other state. The American Petroleum Institute— and I don't say this lightly— said out loud that it still supports federal regulation of methane emissions. When your own industry lobby is asking the government to keep the rules, that tells you the rules are doing something useful. Here's the lesson: regulatory certainty Strictness is an asset. Chaos is a liability. Business can plan around strict rules. Business can plan around loose rules. What it cannot plan around is rules that swing wildly depending on who's in office. That's the environment American businesses are now living in for the next decade. And mistake 3, pulling the rug. The third mistake. They pulled the rug out from companies that had already put real money down. Businesses that spent billions building electric vehicles, next-generation infrastructure, cleaner supply chains suddenly found the ground shifting under them. And the timing was pretty brutal. This all landed right after a record year for global sales of electric vehicles. One energy analyst summed it up bluntly: Oil companies are now facing a very different reality than they expected. with new drilling on hold because of the uncertainty. Capital hates uncertainty. Always has, always will. That made a serious climate investment in the US in the last 5 years is now sitting on top of a policy environment that didn't exist when the investment case got signed off. That's a nightmare no CFO wants. And this one applies broadly. If you're an executive planning multi-year investments right now, ask yourself which of your investments assumes a stable policy environment, because that assumption is now visibly fragile, and not just in America. What this actually means for us. So what do we do with all of this? And here's the good bit. Every American mistake points straight at a UK European and Asian opportunity. If we choose to take it, and I mean genuinely take it, let's talk about it. There's 3 things. First, treat regulatory certainty as a competitive advantage, not a burden. The US just proved what happens when the rules swing wildly: investment stalls, capital freezes, talent leaves. A UK business that builds its carbon strategy on stable evidence-based grounds can do something its American competitors can no longer do reliably. It can plan, and planning is a genuine monetizable advantage. Second, don't wait for regulation to tell you what your customers, investors, and staff already know. Look at the US example. Hundreds of American companies accepted the science years before this repeal And just kept going. Leading businesses set their own direction. They measure their emissions properly, work to recognize frameworks, and act because it makes long-term commercial sense, not because a politician told them to. And third, and this is the one I want you to sit with: watch the market signal, not the political one. Electric vehicle sales hit. Global records, even as US policy turned against them. Renewables capacity is still growing globally at a record pace. The real economy is telling you exactly where this is heading. Read the market, not the noise. The bigger opportunity, and for anyone thinking at the policy level or in any government adjacent role. The lesson is even sharper. America has handed a gift to every economy willing to hold its nerve. Talent flows towards stability. Capital flows towards stability. Clean tech investment flows— guess what?— towards stability. When one of the world's largest markets deliberately makes itself unpredictable, the businesses The money and the researchers start looking for somewhere calmer to build the next 20 years. Staying the course on climate is not just the right thing to do environmentally, it is the specific mechanism by which the UK, Europe, and Asia catch the investment America is now pushing away. This is a genuine strategic window. It will not stay open forever. And here's one more thing worth saying, because I know some of you are thinking it. Politics turns, and then it turns again. This finding took 16 years to unpick, and it will now face years of legal challenge in US courts. It may well come back, but any business that lurches with every headline exhausts itself. The businesses that win are the ones with a strategic strategy Stable enough to outlast whoever happens to be in charge at any given moment, regardless of what happens in Washington. That principle holds. So here's what I want you to take away: start with the one thing you can actually control. Know your own number. You cannot manage what you have not measured, and a credible carbon baseline is the foundation for everything that comes after it. And build a strategy that does not depend on the political weather, and you will be building the kind of advantage your competitors will spend the next decade chasing. If this was useful, and here's what I do on this channel: every week I take one part of the sustainability conversation businesses are getting wrong, and I show you what to do instead. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Drop me a comment with this. And given what's happened in the US, is your business actually treating regulatory certainty as an advantage yet? Or are you still waiting to see what happens? Genuinely curious how people are reading this moment. And if you're a sustainability professional, a consultant, or advisor, I'm building a network of practitioners who do this work properly. Links in the description at 51 to Carbon Zero. We help organizations turn sustainability from a reporting exercise into a business advantage. If you want to be a part of our network, drop me a comment or send me a message. And if you know an enterprise organization that might benefit from a chat, please put them in touch. I'll see you next week.

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