ISSB Chair Emmanuel Faber continues to tinker with messaging…

This is from a recent speech at the 2026 Beijing International Sustainability conference:

• Adoption of our Standards continues with momentum. I sometimes hear that ESG is something of the past—that now it’s all about geopolitics; it’s all about AI and other things. Well, the truth is that ISSB Standards have never been about ESG. We’re not about acronyms and separate disclosures and metrics. We are building a comprehensive language that will help—maybe not entirely with the sustainability of the planet, but certainly with the sustainability of business models and the future-proofing of capital markets—with better information for better decisions. This is our remit. This is what we are working for. And when we discuss what truly matters for companies worldwide, and what truly matters for investors, banks and insurance companies, it is resilience—the resilience of business models. How fit for the future are they, given the fact that geopolitics is not putting sustainability topics aside? It is making the sustainability topics that relate to business models even more acute, because geopolitics is about changing supply chains, availability of resources, critical minerals, agriculture and other goods. It’s about access to water; it’s about issues in transition risks that may not have been foreseen before. So, a tool that allows companies to express to their shareholders and their investors, in a convincing, reliable manner, their ability to thrive into a complex world—even more volatile, potentially, than we thought it was a few years ago—is even more a topic for today than it was in the past. And I can tell you that when we meet CEOs around the world, CFOs, investors, this is what they are telling us.

As we covered here, Faber himself has cited ESG in the past in setting out the importance of the ISSB’s work, so to say the standards have never been about that involves some revisionism (in a subsequent speech he modified his approach, saying that “The era of ESG has been a super-important one (but that) using ESG as the way to express and structure (the underlying work) has passed.”) We also looked previously at his citing of geopolitics as the new focal point, noting that he seems to use the term to be synonymous with, basically, everything. Still, it’s a good defensive spin: necessarily defensive, that is, at a time when many major political, regulatory and corporate players are running away from anything that smells even vaguely “progressive.”

Thomas Edsall recently set out in The New York Times the various elements of how the Trump administration “simply on the basis of personal grievances and political ideology, ‘is ceding opportunity after opportunity for the U.S. to be a leader in the global clean energy transition, and all the benefits such leadership can afford.’” It’s depressing reading, no matter how familiar by now, but does, by way of contrast, point to more inspiring developments elsewhere:

• A May 10 Substack post by Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford, where he heads the energy program at the Environmental Change Institute, reveals the stubborn shortsightedness of Trump’s policies.
• While America’s energy costs surge, over the past quarter century the wholesale cost of energy in Spain has fallen from the top ranks in Europe to the lowest ranks. How so?
• Twenty-five years ago, a third of Spain’s electricity came from coal. Today, coal is effectively gone. Gas, which surged in the 2000s as the replacement, peaked above 30 percent of generation in the late 2000s and has since been pushed back to roughly 19 percent. Nuclear has held steady around 19 percent, hydro and bioenergy together around 14 percent and the remaining capacity” — around 45 percent — “has been steadily filled by wind and solar.
• Rosenow concluded:
• This is the clearest example in Europe of the price effect that renewable advocates have been describing for years finally arriving in the data. More wind and solar on the grid means fewer hours when gas is the marginal plant. Fewer of those hours means a wholesale price that is decoupled from the gas market for most of the day. And a wholesale price decoupled from gas, in 2026, is a cheap one.
• Spain is now a working demonstration that you can take an electricity system that was 33 percent coal a generation ago, 30 percent-plus gas a decade ago, and run it on roughly 44 percent wind and solar with the resulting wholesale prices among the lowest in Europe.

The focus there is on energy, but the US is just as bizarrely regressive when it comes to water, supply chains, and the other areas cited by Faber. And there’s the ISSB’s peculiarly paradoxical primary challenge: the better it executes its core mandate, the greater the potential conflict with the aggressively destructive ideology of the single largest global player. The single largest global player for now, that is…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.