Silence Was the Loudest Message at GreenBiz 26

This post originally appeared on The Sustainability Story Substack. Subscribe here.

I’ve spent the last week trying to figure out how to write this.

On my return flight from Phoenix, I kept replaying conversations from GreenBiz 26—not just the panels or the keynotes, but the ones that happened in hallways, at dinner tables, in the back of Lyfts. The real talk.

What I heard over and over was that people are scared. And almost no one is willing to admit it publicly.

That silence is the real story of GreenBiz 26—and it has consequences for corporate sustainability.

Americans are being killed by masked federal agents in broad daylight. Immigrants without criminal records are being detained indefinitely in camps the government refuses to name. The Trump Administration erased the federal government’s ability to address climate change. A sitting president is openly calling for the nationalization of elections while laying the groundwork to rig the midterms.

But the Dow just hit 50,000. So, I guess we’re fine.

The conference program, meanwhile, was largely scrubbed of anything that might be construed as critical of the Trump Administration (full disclosure: I didn’t attend every session so please let me know if I’m wrong). In a moment that demanded a serious main stage reckoning about the role of business in defending democratic norms, we got a cheeky debate about the relevance of the Chief Sustainability Officer.

I don’t blame the Trellis team. I know many of them personally. I know many wanted more space for honest discussion. But business is business. When greenhushing is already rampant, it’s hard enough to attract sponsorship dollars—never mind when programming risks retaliation from an administration that has made clear it punishes dissent.

While I understand the logic, what worries me is how deeply our field has internalized it. Off the record, I heard the same justification again and again. One colleague told me his company holds billions in federal contracts—one wrong word and those contracts disappear, along with jobs. Another said GreenBiz “isn’t political,” so it avoids politics altogether.

But are we even talking about politics anymore?

What’s happening in the United States has moved well beyond partisan disagreement. The things that make markets work in the first place—rule of law, institutional stability, protected speech, independent courts—are being dismantled. And that’s not even mentioning the general moral decay spreading across the land.

A 2025 survey of corporate executives found that most would only collectively speak out against the Trump Administration if the stock market dropped by at least 20 percent. I understand the calculus. When maximizing short-term shareholder value is the primary directive, silence makes sense. Many CEOs are betting this moment passes, more or less as Trump’s first term did.

Maybe they’re right. But what if they’re wrong?

Here’s what concerns me most as a sustainability communications professional: the companies staying silent right now are making both a moral and strategic mistake. As Spider-Man says in Captain America: Civil War: “When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you.” Companies collectively have the power to stop this, but they choose not to.

When the political environment shifts, companies that chose business-as-usual will face a credibility gap no sustainability report can close. Employees, customers, and investors have long memories. They’ll remember who spoke up, and who didn’t, while democratic institutions were being hollowed out.

We already have a word for this: policywashing. It’s what happens when a company’s stated values collapse under scrutiny of its political behavior. We’ve spent years warning about the reputational cost of greenwashing. Policywashing carries the same long-term risk. And the bill always comes due.

The eeriest thing about GreenBiz was how normal it felt. The wining and dining, the networking, and the unspoken mutual agreement not to talk about the elephant in the room and kill the “vibe.”

So what does courage look like now?

It doesn’t have to mean a CEO going on cable news denouncing Trump—though hell yeah if they do. It can be internal—telling employees that democratic norms are not “political,” but foundational. It can be quiet coalition-building with peers facing the same pressures. It can be participation in industry initiatives, even private ones, that draw a line around the rule of law.

And for sustainability communication professionals specifically, it starts with facing the reality that your net zero commitment means little if democracy dies.

The silence at GreenBiz suggests we’ve forgotten that—or decided we’re just too scared to talk about it.