Two Steps Forward — Sustainability Meets Business Reality

What can climate communicators learn from stand-up comedians? Quite a lot, it turns out. Joel Makower and Solitaire Townsend sit down with Stuart Goldsmith — climate comedian, podcaster, and Live at the Apollo veteran — and Esteban Gast, the Colombian-American comedian behind the Climate Comedy Cohort. They talk about performing for hostile rooms, the power of vulnerability, why hypocrisy is the b...

Soli and Joel ask an uncomfortable question:sustainability professionals are trained to track trends and build momentum —but are we actually prepared for wild cards? We went through some big ones: a 90% probability El Niño that most supply chains aren't pricing in, a data center oppositionmovement that's blocked $18 billion in U.S. projects, an insurance exodusthat's quietly making who...

Joel and Soli dig into the new State of the Sustainability Profession report, which reveals a field under pressure — shrinking CEO engagement, shifting reporting lines, and budgets in flux. Then, author and activist Katharine Wilkinson joins to discuss her new book Climate Wayfinding , and why the inner work of grief, community, and reimagination may be exactly what sustainability professionals ne...

The word "resilience" is everywhere right now. Which probably means it's already in trouble. In our latest Two Steps Forward episode, Soli and Joel and pulled on this thread — and found something worth sharing: resilience isn't a rebrand for sustainability. It's what sustainability always was, just dressed in language that the C-suite might finally recognize.

We spoke with Linda Freiner, Group Chief Sustainability Officer at Zurich Insurance Group, on the role of insurance in a world of increasing risk. What became clear is that insurance isn’t peripheral to sustainability. It is, in many ways, the operating system beneath it. Insurance, after all, is about pricing the future. And right now, the future is anything but predictable. Freiner frames insura...

What does it take to start a career in sustainability today — when the field is more established, but the expectations are higher than ever? In this episode, we speak with three early-career professionals about breaking in, building influence and navigating the realities of corporate sustainability. It’s a candid, hopeful and occasionally sobering conversation about what’s changed, what hasn’t and...

Recorded live at the GreenBiz 26 conference in February, this episode of Two Steps Forward features Dylan Siegler, head of sustainability at Universal Music Group. Siegler discusses how the music industry’s greatest sustainability impact may come not from reducing emissions, but from influencing billions of fans through culture and storytelling. The conversation explores sustainable merch, artist...

For much of the past decade, corporate sustainability has been absorbed into the machinery of management — metrics, disclosures, target-setting and compliance. Necessary work, certainly. But something essential has been lost along the way: the idea that sustainability is fundamentally about invention. That thread runs through the latest episode of Two Steps Forward, in which we talk with Liz Minné...

For all the noise surrounding climate — the backlash, the culture wars, the political theatrics — here’s an uncomfortable truth: most Americans haven’t changed their minds at all. That’s the quiet bombshell from our recent podcast conversation with Yale’s Anthony Leiserowitz, founder and director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Despite a second Trump administration openly atta...

In this episode, we talked about Solitaire's remarkable new novel — but the most useful part of the conversation wasn’t about the book’s alternative Roman Empire or its sword-wielding heroine. It was about what writing fiction taught her about what makes any story actually work. Solitaire’s biggest takeaway is deceptively simple: Stories are not about issues, they are about people. Not systems...

In the first episode of our  Two Steps Forward  podcast for 2026, we reflect on the evolution of sustainability journalism. The occasion: Marking 25 years of covering sustainable business on Trellis.net (née GreenBiz.com). As sustainability has evolved, so too has the field of journalism. In the early days, sustainability was largely about environmental engineering — reducing waste or saving energ...

What does it mean to be a corporate sustainability thought leader these days? In this episode Joel Makower and Solitaire Townsend delve into that question, confronting a paradox at the heart of corporate sustainability: At the very moment when business needs to step up and help shape the sustainability agenda, most companies have lost their nerve to talk about it. In an era of climate disruption,...

The sustainability landscape is littered with bold claims, ambitious targets and a widening gap between rhetoric and reality. Against that backdrop, Siemens AG presents a case worth examining — not because it declares itself a climate leader, but because it treats the climate transition as an operating constraint rather than a branding opportunity. Eva Riesenhuber, Siemens’ Global Head of Sustaina...

What's going on at COP30? You wouldn't know much by reading the mainstream media, other than the relatively mild protests and the usual infrastructure problems nearly all COPs face. But what should companies know about the substance of the event? In this episode of our Two Steps Forward podcast, we take stock — Soli from inside the Blue Zone at COP30 in sweltering Belém, Brazil, and Joel c...

What happens when the world’s dominant measurement system for corporate climate impact no longer reflects the world we’re operating in? And what should replace or supplement it?

At this year’s Climate Week in New York City, amid the 1,000-plus events and 100,000 attendees crowding the streets and stages, one theme stood out: leadership. Not just any leadership, but the kind that comes from the very top. On our Two Steps Forward podcast, recorded live at Solutions House, my co-host Solitaire Townsend and I sat down with Jesper Brodin, CEO of IKEA and chair of The B Team, t...

Solitaire Townsend and Joel Makower dive deep into the messy, confusing and often misleading world of corporate carbon claims. “Carbon neutral” once carried a certain promise. When Interface, the carpet company, popularized the phrase two decades ago, it felt like a step forward — an early signal that business could take responsibility for its role in the climate crisis. But as Soli and I explore,...

What is the connection between creativity and sustainability? That's the topic of the conversation between Joel and Soli this episode. To be clear, this isn’t just about those who can play an instrument, tell a story or paint a picture. Indeed, we challenged the popular notions of people as “creatives”or “influentials,” since these labels segment people unnecessarily. Instead, we emphasize that cr...

Godelnik’s critique of current corporate efforts calls for moving beyond incrementalism and into systems-level transformation that prioritizes values over profits. “We’re living in an era where, for the most part, what we’re doing is tweaking the system rather than transforming the system,” he told us. “I call it sustainability as usual... grounded in the prioritization of profit maximization and...

How does a corporate sustainability professional meet the moment? That’s one of the questions we posed to Unilever’s chief sustainability and corporate affairs officer Rebecca Marmot in a live-on-stage podcast recording session during this year’s London Climate Action Week. Marmot, who joined Unilever 18 years ago after stints at L’Oreal and in the U.K. government, discussed the some of the keys t...

How much circularity can one company squeeze out of a toothpaste tube? That’s the mouthwatering challenge taken on by Colgate Palmolive, the iconic 220-year-old company whose chief sustainability officer, Ann Tracy, has been leading the charge to make Colgate toothpaste tubes not just recyclable, but potentially turned back into new tubes. It’s not just toothpaste, as Tracy told us. If the process...

Financial services is high on the list of the most fascinating and challenging sectors for sustainability. Ellen Jackowski, Chief Sustainability Officer at Mastercard, is one of the sector's leaders. In just a few years at the financial services giant, she's helped pioneer approaches to using payment systems to inspire, inform and enable change at a mass scale. Jackowski talks about her co...

Hawken's latest book, “Carbon: The Book of Life,” explores carbon's role in living systems, not just an evil gas contributing to climate change. He criticizes the climate movement for objectifying carbon and advocates for a shift in narrative from fear to possibility. Hawken highlights the limitations of technological solutions like direct air capture and bioenergy carbon capture systems and encou...

“I'm excited for this moment,” Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, an advocacy group that works for racial, economic and climate justice, told us right off the bat. “It's a tough moment, but I'm excited for it,” he said, citing the group’s 20-year history of harnessing culture and storytelling to “shape our political experience.” In this episode of the Tw...

The tech giant’s chief sustainability officer reflects on how she’ll make the most of this critical time in the two decades since she’s been working to advance sustainability, in the debut episode of our biweekly podcast Two Steps Forward.  Soon to celebrate 10 years at Google — preceded by sustainability leadership roles at the White House and Defense Department — Kate Brandt, the chief sustainab...