Advertise on podcast: Two Steps Forward — Sustainability Meets Business Reality

Prologis operates more than 6,000 warehouses, data centers, and distribution centers worldwide. You may never have heard of it, but there’s a good chance your last online order passed through one. Susan Uthayakumar, its Chief Energy and Sustainability Officer, joins Joel Makower and Solitaire Townsend to talk about the squeeze on power supply and the backlash against data centers. She also covers building for climate risk, keeping global standards in every country, and why she still does this work.

Recorded live at Solutions House during Climate Week NYC, this special episode turns the mic over to the audience. In an ask-us-anything session, Joel and Solitaire field questions from the crowd on AI, regeneration, misinformation, recycling myths, and intergenerational blame. They also cover how to talk with people who disagree with you, and how to stay hopeful when climate impacts hit close to home. The episode opens with the hosts asking each other questions: their regrets, their guilty pleasures, and how they handle the stage fright that never quite goes away.

What do data centers, energy shocks, extreme weather, Flock cameras and anti-oligarch anger have in common — and could they add up to something new? Joel Makower and Solitaire Townsend dig into whether the public is starting to connect a handful of "wild card" events, what history's unlikely coalitions (and its failed ones) can teach us about how this could go, and why sustainability teams need to get back to being an early-warning system instead of just a reporting function.

Sustainability conferences are expensive, exhausting, and logistically brutal — so why does everyone keep going? Joel Makower and Solitaire Townsend dig into the real business case for in-person events: not the keynotes or panels, but the peer connections, chance encounters, and hallway conversations that never show up on an expense report. They talk through what a recent industry report gets right about event value, how the sustainability events calendar has changed shape, and why "intimacy at scale" might matter more than perfect programming.

Are sustainability professionals working at the wrong level inside a system that resists real change? Joel and Soli dig into that question this week — why external validation is the wrong thing to chase, what a "hero's journey" framework does and doesn't explain about doing this work, and why renewable energy's transformation over one lifetime is the best evidence that incremental effort compounds. Plus, a quick update on the "spheres of influence" framework, now headed toward a forthcoming ISO net-zero standard.

Climate scientist Dr. Katharine Hayhoe — Nature Conservancy chief scientist, Texas Tech professor and author of "Saving Us" — joins Joel and Solitaire to explain why hope beats doom as a climate strategy, why more disasters don't produce more action, and the one underrated lever she'd hand a Fortune 500 CEO instead of another renewable-energy announcement.

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 best material, and why treating your audience like friends might be the most underrated tool in climate communications.

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 whole communities uninsurable, and the reality that social movements — for and against sustainability — are among the most powerful forces shaping corporate behavior. As Soli put it: This is literally our job. And we're not doing it.

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 need right now.

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 insurance not as a brake on risk-taking, but as an enabler. Without it, businesses don’t launch, infrastructure doesn’t get built, and innovation doesn’t scale. Insurance is the social safety net that allows the economy to function — and, increasingly, to transform. But here’s the catch: The model is under strain.

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 what sustainability elders can do to support — and learn from — the next generation.

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 advocacy, fandom as a force for behavior change, and the growing importance of “handprint” impact alongside traditional corporate footprint metrics.

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, who heads  global sustainability strategy at Interface, the floorcovering giant. Interface remains instructive not because it is perfect or singular, but because it demonstrates what happens when sustainability becomes part of a company’s identity rather than a program. Over time, that identity attracts employees, shapes culture and builds customer loyalty — reinforcing itself in ways no disclosure requirement can mandate.

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 attacking climate science and policy, despitecorporate retreat and the rise of “climate hushing,” public concern about climate change in the United States has remained remarkably stable. Which raises an obvious question: Ifthe public hasn’t moved, why has business? The answer, he told us, has less to do with ideology than imagination. Or rather, a failure of it.