Just a few years ago, pledges to tackle climate change were a staple of corporate PR. Amazon trumpeted its climate pledge and stamped it on the name of Seattle’s biggest arena. Walmart promised to slash a gigaton of carbon emissions from its supply chain, and the world’s largest money manager, BlackRock, with its $11 trillion in investments, pressured companies to come up with a plan to zero out their emissions by 2050.

Now, many corporations are avoiding the subject altogether. During earnings calls, mentions of many well-known terms related to the climate are down 76 percent compared to three years ago, according to a recent analysis of S&P 500 companies by Bloomberg. The sharpest declines came from financial firms and consumer discretionary companies, the category for those offering optional purchases, like Starbucks and Airbnb. 

The hesitancy to talk about climate change — sometimes called “greenhushing” — could decrease pressure on the big corporate polluters that have been slow to cut their emissions. The trend has been linked to a growing backlash against sustainable investing, as well as a shifting political landscape with President Donald Trump’s second term underway. “I think large companies in particular today are very, very cautious,” said Hortense Bioy, the head of sustainable investing research for Morningstar, a financial services firm.

Companies have been caught in a tug-of-war: On one hand, investors are pressuring them to be serious about the risks of climate change to their business. On the other, the mention of any word related to so-called ESG — the polarizing acronym that refers to “environmental, social, and governance” investing — threatens blowback from the Trump administration. The way to thread the needle, experts suggest, is to stay away from flashpoints like ESG and talk specifically about the financial risks that the warming planet poses to companies.

John Marshall, the CEO of the Potential Energy Coalition, a nonpartisan marketing firm focused on climate action, says that silence isn’t a winning strategy. “We do not think that voters or consumers are at all impressed, regardless of their political stripes, by taking the concept of climate change out of any language,” Marshall said. 

His research shows that investors and the public want companies to talk about climate change — as an investment risk, not a matter of morality. According to a Potential Energy report from last September, 3 in 4 Americans surveyed think companies have a responsibility to limit their impact on the climate. What’s more, roughly 9 in 10 U.S. retail investors want companies to reduce emissions and prepare for the ways increasingly unpredictable weather could lead to risks like supply chain disruptions and rising insurance costs.

The first signs of greenhushing appeared in 2023, when the Swiss consultancy South Pole found that a quarter of large companies around the world had decided not to publicize their progress on climate targets. The reason, South Pole later found, was that companies wanted to avoid the legal risks that came with high-profile pledges. It was a response to countries crafting new laws against “greenwashing,” the term for deceptive environmental advertising.

At the same time, financial institutions were already dealing with the backlash against ESG, which heated up in 2022. Lawsuits targeted asset managers, pension funds, and federal agencies, claiming that “woke capitalism” was putting politics over financial interests. Red states including Florida and Texas pulled billions in state funds out of BlackRock and other ESG-friendly firms. BlackRock, which in 2021 had supported almost half of shareholder proposals to address environmental and social issues, pulled a U-turn. Between July 2023 and June 2024, it only backed 4 percent of them.

“They were too visible and too vocal about what they were doing in that space,” Bioy said. She expects that companies with big climate plans may now have to disclose the opposition to ESG as a risk in their annual reports. That sense of caution is showing up in the markets, too: Over the last two years, there has been more money leaving sustainable funds in the U.S. than what’s coming in, according to Morningstar’s research. 

Bioy suspects that trend still has room to run, given Trump’s hostility to climate action. Already, corporations including Apple, Walmart, and Siemens have stepped away from the climate coalition that formed during Trump’s first term. Bioy pointed to the guidance circulating in government organizations warning against using terms like “pollution,” “clean energy,” and “climate science.” “Companies that do business with the administration or any state organization, they will be careful not to use those terms,” Bioy said.

In the past, some companies have used language around climate change that embraced a moral framing, such as “do the right thing.” But most people don’t think that’s the province of what businesses should be doing, Marshall said. Two-thirds of Americans believe that businesses should avoid taking a stance on political issues, according to his firm’s research. The moral framing provokes backlash because it feels like “forcing an idea on somebody,” Marshall said. “We have seen it’s much more effective to have language in the business community that’s about money and reality.”

It raises the broader question of how regular people should talk about climate change when many of the terms environmental advocates use can provoke a knee-jerk reaction. “I think that the climate movement needs to be very thoughtful about and strategic about whether or not it is a DEI or ESG initiative,” said Austin Whitman, CEO of The Change Climate Project, a nonprofit offering tools to help businesses cut their emissions. “I think for all of us across the spectrum, regardless of what cause we’re fighting for, we need to distance ourselves from these lightning-rod acronyms and topics that are really easy to just cut down with a single swipe.”