Core priorities – from cutting carbon emissions and investing in clean tech to building inclusive workforces – were under constant attack, much of it from the government. At one point, the administration even tried to stop the construction of a giant offshore wind farm that was 80% done. 

Inside companies, sustainability leaders had to keep their heads down. Their departments saw reduced resources and clout, and a handful were shut down. But the biggest story of the year may be that there is a story: the sustainability work continued. In the U.S., talking a lot less about sustainability (“greenhushing”) became the norm.

Still, many adopted some British philosophy: keep calm and carry on … quietly. But looking only at the U.S. gives a warped picture. While headlines focused on the handful of companies pulling back on sustainability, or on a slowdown in clean tech growth, globally, the story was different. The U.S. is not the world. 

Part of what kept sustainability on the corporate agenda was the harsh reality of the world’s greatest challenges getting worse. Inequality grew, especially at the very top, where individuals amassed unfathomable wealth (hundreds of billions of dollars) and some corporate valuations hit unreal heights ($4 trillion to $5 trillion). 

Meanwhile, climate impacts escalated; political winds don’t change actual winds. For example, part of Los Angeles burned to the ground (at an estimated cost of up to $250 billion) during unprecedented wildfires, historic heat baked India, Pakistan, and the EU, and devastating floods in Texas killed dozens of children. Scientists told us that climate change is “beyond scientific dispute,” at “tipping points,” and “extremely dangerous” (and that the world will blow past the 1.5C warming target). Insurer Allianz issued an eye-popping report that climate change could “destroy capitalism.” 

In addition, the world got less democratic and pulled to the right and generally away from the sustainability agenda, making collective action even harder. This puts more pressure on business. And even facing headwinds, sustainability didn’t die. That’s the top story of the year. Let’s look at that and some other big themes.

Against all odds, sustainability keeps going

Reports of sustainability’s death were loud –Bloomberg Businessweek ran a cover story about it – but greatly exaggerated. Yes, a few high-profile companies scaled back some goals. But as the year wore on, the big consulting companies looked past one-offs and gathered real data. 

The results were clear and striking. In an Accenture-UN Global Compact survey, 99 percent of global CEOs said they will maintain or expand sustainability commitments, and nearly 9 in 10 said the business case is stronger today than it was 5 years ago. Yet half admitted that they’re uncomfortable communicating progress – a perfect demonstration of the conundrum they face. Other data told the same story: more than 80% of companies increased sustainability investments over the past year (Deloitte), expect to boost spending next year (CapGemini), or are already capturing economic gains from decarbonization (BCG). The Sustainable Supply Chain at MIT found, in its report “Sustainability Still Matters,” that 85% of companies were maintaining or accelerating sustainable supply chain practices. I’m seeing the same in my work with large companies: the ambition remains, even as the messaging gets muted.

China leads a global acceleration in the clean economy

If you only watched the U.S., you’d think clean tech was slowing. But globally, the transition surged. In recent years, nearly all the growth of electricity in the OECD countries has come from renewable energy. But this year, the transition expanded to the developing economies, with enormous growth in solar in India, Pakistan, Poland, and across Africa. In the first half of 2025, global use of coal and gas was actually flat to down, including in India and China (where total emissions fell as well). Globally, renewables passed coal as the world’s largest source of electricity. In addition, electrified vehicles made up 23% of global new car sales in October, even as U.S. sales dropped after the government removed tax incentives. 

Behind most of the clean tech explosion is China, which now controls over 70 percent of global manufacturing capacity in nearly every clean tech category. They’re not just making stuff; they’re installing it very rapidly. In the first half of 2025, China added more solar than the rest of the world combined; in May alone, it installed more solar than the U.S. added in all of 2023 and 2024. More than half of new passenger car sales in China are electrified, and electrification of heavy trucks is accelerating now as well, creating a drag on diesel demand. The tipping point on the clean economy is in the rear-view mirror.

The Anti-ESG movement hits DEI the hardest

While the broader sustainability agenda kept moving, some parts didn’t. Companies rushed to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs after the new administration made clear – with an executive order on day one) – that it didn’t want DEI in the government supply chain. The government even threatened to block mergers over DEI policies. Some big brands – Accenture, Disney, Google, Target, and many others – quickly and publicly distanced themselves from diversity goals. Mentions of “DEI” in Fortune 100 company reports fell an astounding 98%. But some backlash followed: minority customers boycotted Target, and Disney, McDonald’s, and others faced pushback from employees and consumers. Some B2B buyers, like the city of London, shifted their business away from companies that had retreated. A small, brave handful of companies stood their ground. Apple pushed back on anti-DEI shareholder resolutions, and Cisco issued a simple statement, “our commitment to an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion is appropriate and necessary.” 

The banks send mixed messages

The collapse of the Net Zero Banking Alliance – which only required non-binding long-term pledges – didn’t bode well. And yet, the central banks raised the alarm about the risk of climate change to the global economy and the European Central Bank said it would include climate change in asset valuations and risk analyses. Some large banks, such as Crédit Agricole and Deutsche Bank, announced major new commitments (hundreds of billions of dollars) to clean tech financing. Global investment in the clean economy is on track to grow to $2.2 trillion this year (double fossil fuel investment), and Millennials and Gen Zers continue to drive demand for sustainable investment options. As they say, follow the money.

Regulatory requirements are in flux

Reporting mandates have helped keep sustainability on the agenda, but the rules are under heavy debate. The EU’s “Omnibus” process sought to “simplify” the requirements, and the EU Parliament seemed to agree. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will likely narrow in scope to cover only companies above €450 million ($500M+) in revenue (and 1,750 employees). And the due diligence law CSDDD could apply only to those over €1.5 billion ($1.7B) in revenue (and 5,000 employees). Additional requirements to report on climate risks and plans are partly up in the air, both in the EU and in California. Other legal signals added to the confusion. A German court ruled against Apple’s “CO₂-neutral” watch advertising, highlighting the increased policing of environmental claims. And in the U.S., a group of state attorneys general tried to sue asset managers for “manipulating energy markets” simply by considering climate risk — a sign of how polarized basic fiduciary practices have become.

AI’s impact is shaping up to be good, bad, and ugly

The good: AI is undoubtedly improving efficiency and lowering emissions, from buildings to transportation to procurement. It will unlock new breakthroughs in energy, education, and healthcare and disease prevention. The bad: the rising need for energy, and what that means for grids and carbon emissions, are legitimate issues. But the efficiency of tech always rises and some say the energy crunch is overstated. Also, AI initiatives at companies may actually be failing, or execs have little or no idea if the spending is paying off (just imagine if sustainability initiatives had that track record). The ugly: Social risks seem to be rising, including job destruction (it’s hard to build a thriving world with people underemployed) and the replacement of human relationships with code. 

For me, the biggest unknown is what happens now that anyone can create videos that are nearly indistinguishable from reality. It’s not just about mis- or dis-information, but about crossing a new threshold to not knowing what’s real at all. I have many questions. Like, when there’s no fact base, how do we tackle big shared challenges like climate change or inequality?

U.S. business leaders say nothing – or worse

This was not a year of corporate courage. Early in the year, some major law firms capitulated to government demands about how they operate and whom they represent…and agreed to give free services to support the government’s agenda. Law firms helping to undermine the rule of law was not a pretty sight (and many lost employees). Some clients like Microsoft, sent a clear market signal that wanted to hire law firms with stronger principles. And some firms stood firm, as did, importantly, some key universities. 

But the larger trend was accommodation. When the U.S. government strong-armed companies like Intel and US Steel to give up ownership stakes, silence reigned. A business sector that has long rallied “government overreach” stayed quiet, even as the government rounded up citizens and legal immigrants or deployed national guard troops into cities. Instead companies either evaded attention (like avoiding the eye of Sauron in LOTR), or openly courted favor by parading through the White House and giving the president golden baubles. There were a few voices pushing back – a couple of op-eds from former CEOs or anonymous current ones calling the government’s actions Marxist or Maoist. But it wasn’t much of a resistance. Each company may believe that silence is the safest strategy, but the collective effect is a weakening of institutions that strengthen democracy and the economy.

What to look for in 2026

Predicting anything these days is laughably hard, but a few topics will likely rise on the sustainability agenda: growing concern about plastics and health; the limits of greenhushing as a strategy; and the repercussions of AI’s attack on reality, especially as the U.S heads into midterm elections. Misinformation and anti-science hogwash will continue to plague us. 

This has been a tough year. But the story of sustainability in this era is one of winning and losing. The battle to put sustainability on the agenda was won – which is partly why the backlash has been so intense. And global investment in the clean economy is awe-inspiring and exciting. But our challenges are still growing, and 2026 will bring both devastating weather events (which are now not “record” but normal) and amazing stories of people rising to the occasion. Where we’ll be by early 2027 is anyone’s guess.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

The 80-year-old executive, who sounded remarkably youthful in a phone interview with Fortune, harkened back to the days in the 1960s and ’70s when “freedom was in the air.” The vibe was very different then: “It was like, I don’t want to work for ‘the man,’” he told Fortune, referencing a formative summer when he worked as a bellboy in Lake George in the Adirondack foothills of upstate New York. “I had sort of been on the traditional conveyor belt: go to college, get out, get a job. And then I met all these sort of bohemian characters who — their idea was, you didn’t have a career. You kind of improvise your life. You know, the idea was to kind of maximize experience and do interesting things and take some risks.”

Freston added that he was a big fan of both “beat” and libertarian literature, the former made famous by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and the latter by Ayn Rand. They both had common themes, he said: “experience and being an individual were important.” As he writes in his new memoir Unplugged, this improvisational journey took him to Afghanistan and India, a business career that was “wild and fulfilling and for a long time profitable.” But it was also “really hard work” and was “really humbling,” adding that “humility is not a thing you see a lot of in the entertainment business.” He didn’t comment directly on the major figures in the current bidding war for Warner Bros., but the example of David Zaslav moving into famed producer Robert Evans’ Hollywood mansion is a prime example of the neo-mogul mindset.

Freston has long been semi-retired, advising media brands such as Oprah Winfrey and Vice while serving as the chairman of the ONE Campaign, the anti-poverty effort in Africa led by U2’s Bono (a friend, Freston said).

As Freston rolled back the years with Fortune and looked out on a much-changed media landscape, he briefly donned his antitrust hat to analyze the bidding war between Netflix and his old company Paramount for Warner Bros. Discovery and how things got to this point. “No matter which way it goes, there’s really nothing in it for the consumer,” Freston said with a sigh.

How Netflix followed in MTV’s footsteps

Freston observed that the media industry is now dominated by “monolith companies … increasingly run by tech people, where data becomes more important than instinct.” He highlighted A24 and Neon as two companies that remind him of the old, almost artisanal MTV, where refreshing the creative instinct became core to success, because Viacom’s once-dominant basic cable lineup appealed to a transient youth culture. “Our challenge was: how do we continue to innovate for these changing demographics that would pass through us, whether it be on [Nickelodeon] or on MTV or Comedy Central or whatever.”

Just 33 years old when he started leading MTV, Freston pointed out that the original audience was Baby Boomers like himself, which was then replaced by Gen Xers with different sensibilities, and so on. Talent can’t be overlooked, Freston argued, because he wanted a creative and “cutting edge” mentality that would stay hooked up to a youth culture that turned over every five years or less. “I didn’t put a salesperson in charge, which would be a traditional way in the television business. I had a creative person in charge.”

In many cases, MTV was someone’s first job, “and they’d learn some things and leave in a few years, and they’d be replaced with another younger person.” He argued that keeping the employee population young made it easier to reinvent the network periodically. When the end came shortly after the millennial generation’s heyday, exemplified by the Total Request Live program, Freston explained that the same forces afoot in Warner-Netflix-Paramount were leaving MTV exposed to the digital wave.

“We were precluded from using our music video library online,” Freston said, explaining that the same licensing deals that had enabled MTV to dominate youth culture for decades proved its undoing when YouTube disrupted how young people liked to watch music videos. “The real players turned out to be the social networks and it was hard to invent one,” he added. “You had to buy one of the ones that were out there, and the only one that ever really got bought was MySpace, and that kind of disintegrated.” The other social-media networks were able to build “unbelievable franchises because they were able to run at losses for years without Wall Street piling on, which would have happened for any of the legacy media companies.”

Reflecting on his own “missed opportunity” to bridge this gap, Freston recounted Viacom’s attempt to buy Facebook when the platform had only $9 million in revenue. He recalled Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to discuss a potential acquisition: “I remember he had a hoodie on and flip flops. It was February in Times Square. And he was younger than anybody on our young staff.” While Viacom was the first to make a bid for Facebook, Freston believes Zuckerberg was never serious about selling, more that he was “curious about, what’s a youth media company today look like.”

The MTV-Netflix cycle

Netflix and other platforms, of course, achieved massive scale by playing the upstart MTV role. “They were able to run at a profit because they were these new growth businesses. Wall Street turned a blind eye to losses for a long time. They got forgiveness on that score.” He added that they began to “vacuum up IP” without necessarily having deals in place. While Netflix went the more traditional licensing route when Hollywood didn’t see it as a threat, Freston noted that MTV was prevented from fighting YouTube’s viral videos with its own digital music presence, almost like a revenge of the record labels that wrote those terms into the licensing deals.

Freston said he doesn’t think any legacy media company distinguished itself in meeting the digital challenge with full force. “Disney did the best job, I think, which was basically tripling down on their content capabilities in trying to make themselves more invincible and more crucial for the streaming services and for the digital onslaught to build up the biggest array of IP.” He agreed that it was ironic in some senses that Netflix seems to be following that playbook with its pursuit of Warner Bros. He said he sees the same old cycle turning: “The forces for this deal seem to be inexorable. Consolidation seems to be the strategy for the moment.”

Today, Freston said he sees his former empire, MTV, as a cautionary tale of what happens when that emphasis on creativity gets severed. He lamented that leadership has “run it into the ground over the last 15 years” by replacing music-obsessed staff with “traditional kind of Hollywood showmaker type people,” replacing hungry, music-obsessed creatives with a shorter-term mindset. His most symbolic grievance is the removal of the words “Music Television” from the logo—a decision that “drove me crazy.”

Freston said he was grateful for his exciting ride at the helm of Viacom for many years, and grateful for some of the genuine friendships that emerged from his time running MTV. He highlighted Bono specifically, with whom he has worked in a chairman role for ONE and (Red), fighting poverty and AIDS in Africa. He said he knew a bit about Africa and poverty issues from his time working and living in Asia and also traveling in Africa, but he also mentioned good relationships with certain people he clicked with: John Mellencamp, David Bowie (a “fascinating character”) and Jon Bon Jovi.

In his laid-back style, Freston added that he wasn’t sure when he sat down to write that there’d by “any kind of reasonable narrative to my life, which at one point seemed to be all these disparate parts.” He came away thinking that his career had been in pursuit of a couple common objectives: trying to “live and exist off the mainstream, more on the edge of the road,” where things are more interesting and independent.

The “beat-poet” executive said he still believes in the MTV brand, and it could come back with some creativity, maybe by positioning MTV as a human curator to counter “algorithm-type music consumption.” But he knows he isn’t the man to lead it. “It’s really a young person’s business,” Freston said, suggesting the reins should be handed to a 25-year-old who can operate with the same risk-taking humility he learned decades ago on the roads of Asia.

Editor’s note: The author worked for Netflix from June 2024 through July 2025.

During a panel moderated by Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle, Kindred Ventures founder Steve Jang and Sapphire Ventures partner Cathy Gao tackled the question dominating Silicon Valley: Are we in an AI bubble? The answer was, in short, maybe, but that’s the wrong question to ask.

“I think it is a bubble, but bubbles are good for innovation,” said Jang. He argued that the term “bubble” is often just finance shorthand for a “new technology wave” that occurs every five, six, seven years. According to Jang, this market heat is functionally necessary: “You need a bubble in technology and startups … to not only attract the world’s best talent to work on a certain set of problems but you also need the capital to fund them.”

Jang pointed to the exodus of top engineers from stable roles at tech giants like Google, Meta, and Uber to launch startups as a “good signal” rather than a warning sign. While admitting that “bubbles popping are bad,” Jang suggested that as long as the media continues to question the market, it helps “release pressure” and keeps the ecosystem healthy.

Gao agreed that in certain pockets, “valuations have far outstripped any sort of fundamental” metrics. However, she cautioned against dismissing the trend entirely, noting that the current growth curves “far outstrip the growth curves of companies we’ve ever seen before,” making the total addressable market difficult to calculate. “I don’t think we have a good sense of how big some of these companies can ultimately become.”

The Investment Playbook: Infrastructure vs. Workflow

Beyond the macroeconomic debate, the panelists outlined divergent strategies for surviving the pop, whenever it comes. Jang emphasized that in a true technology wave, “the whole stack changes,” creating opportunities from the bottom up. He noted that Kindred Ventures is focusing heavily on “accelerating and modernizing the AI infrastructure,” including chips, GPU marketplaces, and specialized frontier models. He observed that despite new entrants, margins remain high for cloud and chip providers, giving them “pricing power on all of the application layer companies.”

Gao, who focuses primarily on the application layer, offered a stricter framework for survival. “Let’s get real: AI is no longer a differentiator,” Gao said. She warned that “AI for X” companies are vulnerable. Instead, she said she looks for companies transitioning from simple features to complex workflows that embed deeply into an enterprise.

“In the future, it’s just going to be a customer support workflow tool, and every company will be powered by AI,” Gao said. She argued that despite the volatility, “first-mover advantage is actually real” in the enterprise sector, citing the enduring dominance of Salesforce and Workday that dates back to the cloud era.

Heartbreak Ahead for Robotics

The conversation turned darker regarding the future of robotics. Jang offered a “spicy” prediction for the sector, warning that many current startups are building on “primitive models” roughly equivalent to the “GPT 3.5 phase” of robotics.

“A whole bunch of robotics startups … are going to have a lot of heartbreak when the models improve and they’ve built for something sort of in the past,” Jang predicted. He added that many consumer robotics companies will likely “fall by the wayside” or shut down because the societal and governmental adoption cycles will be too long for startups to survive.

“We’re all going to be using robots on a daily basis,” Jang said. “Our kids are going to be riding in robots in a daily basis. That area is super exciting. But think about all of the startups building humanoids.” They will have to prove that their humanoids won’t, say, fall down or screw up or be buggy. “It’s going to move around in your office or household or on the street even,” he stressed, noting that every part of the physical world is going to have to prepare for humanoid robots potentially malfunctioning. “Think about that. And that is a deep tech problem.”

Looking toward 2026, Gao offered her own counter-intuitive forecast: despite better models, selling into the enterprise is “going to be even more difficult.” She cited unresolved issues regarding trust and visibility as hurdles that the industry has yet to clear. “People are going to be more focused on trust and visibility, and we haven’t really solved that problem yet.”