BETHLEHEM, Pa. — It’s “a really tough” moment for sustainability and action around climate change, Adam Walters said Monday.
“This is true, particularly given the direction that the federal government is taking,” Walters, a senior energy advisor for the state Department of Community and Economic Development, said.
“We’re also entering a period with rapid energy demand increasing. It’s increasing a lot, and it’s increasing very suddenly. So a lot is changing.”
Those changes, and how to address them, was the topic of Commonwealth Sustainability Week’s kick-off virtual panel, “The Work Continues — Framing Sustainability in a Shifting Economic and Political Landscape.”
More than 200 people attended.
In its fifth year, the week, which includes webinars and panels each day on sustainability topics, is sponsored by the Pennsylvania GreenGov Council and Penn State Sustainability.
“The good news is that there is amazing work happening everywhere, and it is just about coming together and finding that."Peter Boger, director for engagement for Sustain Penn State
“The good news is that there is amazing work happening everywhere, and it is just about coming together and finding that,” Sustain Penn State Director for Engagement Peter Boger said.
Borger's office is among three that make up Penn State Sustainability.
“So we hope that in joining the community here as part of Sustainability Week and, hopefully, our webinars throughout the year, that you are finding that community and that we are finding ways to help connect you to the people that will allow you to be a sustainability champion for Pennsylvania.”
A ‘proverbial space race’
The energy landscape is changing dramatically, especially recently, as data centers “are all the rage right now,” Walters, who moderated the hour-long panel, said.
“During the last couple of years, we've gone from different political orientations in [Washington,] D.C., different set of macro-economic circumstances, I think, for the energy sector, higher demand very suddenly and rapidly escalating,” he said.
“So I think in many ways, it's safe to say that 2025 and perhaps going into 2026 does not feel like a very, what I'll describe as, a very business as usual set of circumstances.
"And, I think in many ways, this can be a really discouraging sort of change in the landscape and the ecosystem around issues related to sustainability.”
Data centers — massive facilities that manage data for companies, using a tremendous amount of power to do so — have been a point of contention in recent months both in the Lehigh Valley and across the country.
Gov. Josh Shapiro in June announced that Amazon plans to spend $20 billion to establish multiple high-tech cloud computing and AI innovation campuses across the state.
Unprecedented demand has created what MHI Hydrogen Infrastructure Chief Executive Officer Michael Ducker called a “proverbial space race.”
As industries need more, affordable power, sustainability has fallen to the wayside, Ducker said.
“That's really how the dialog has evolved,” he said. “ … It's not just political. It's not just from the business front.
“It was really these two in tandem coming together that have both led to where I'd say the state of the industry has been for the better part of the past year, here right now.”
‘Doing it step-by-step’
However, Krista Johnson, U.S. president of Johnson Matthey, a technologies company, said she often says, “don't despair.”
“This is not a moment to believe that we are making massive steps backward,” Johnson said.
“Instead of doing it in one big bit, we're doing it step by step-by-step. It is thinking very quickly. It is pivoting very quickly. And it really is sort of saying, ‘We have control over some things we don't have control over everything.’
“So on those things over which we do have control, how do we continue to advance those and continue to make progress and demonstrate to all kinds of markets, be they global, international trade markets, be they stock markets, be they investors and the rest, measurable progress?
“Because it's that measurable progress that really is persuading people that this is the right thing to do and it makes sense to do it.”
Abby Smith, CEO of Team Pennsylvania, said industry and government commitments to sustainability may have set unrealistic targets, considering the market and the technology weren’t “quite there yet.”
“We have all felt a little bit of that changing political sentiment,” Smith said.
“People are concerned about how their electricity bills are rising and what's going to happen as we also see more data centers come online, that kind of thing.”
In the Lehigh Valley, just last week, PPL requested its first rate increase in nearly a decade.
But she said she doesn’t think there’s a backslide.
“AI is ultimately going to, hopefully, transform the energy sector in terms of efficiency,” she said.
The customer’s customer
Asked about how the rest of the world is perceiving changes in U.S. sustainability efforts, Johnson said, colleagues around the world just sort of get on the phone and look at me like, ‘What in the world?’”
However, here in the United States, she’s “using language that our audience can hear.”
"Well, all of a sudden, if you're looking at a 50%, 75%, 100% increase in electricity prices, it's going to be hard for our customer’s customer to talk about setting sustainability as the top of their list."Michael Ducker, president and CEO of MHI Hydrogen Infrastructure
“We talk about our blue hydrogen technologies and our green hydrogen technologies in the context of energy dominance, energy security, economic security, national security, which are messages that resonate in the United States, I think, maybe more than the messages around energy transition and zero carbon and things like that,” she said.
“Now, the attributes of our products have not changed. They remain key drivers and catalysts for energy transformation and reducing carbon and the rest of it.
"We talk about it using language that our audience can hear.”
Customer demand sets priorities, Ducker said. When it comes to electricity, it’s the customer’s customer.
“In the past 20 years, we've been looking at effectively flat, low growth on a per capita basis — it's actually been declining," Ducker said.
"And so it's actually pretty easy to talk about sustainability in that lens, right?
“ … Well, all of a sudden, if you're looking at a 50-percent, 75-percent, 100-percent increase in electricity prices, it's going to be hard for our customer’s customer to talk about setting sustainability as the top of their list.
"It’s going to be, ‘How do we get these prices back down?’”
'Flip the script'
Emerging technologies could “really flip the script from a lot of things,” Ducker said.
Over the past two decades, as solar and wind became more widespread, costs dropped, he said. The same can be said for energy storage, he said.
There are advancements in both hydrogen and nuclear power to watch, he said, even though realizing more nuclear power could still be at least a decade away.
“If I could take away two overarching themes, it’s to do not despair [and] innovation will continue to march forward, even if it is at a slightly uneven pace, which I think is the history of the modern world,” Walters said.
For a full schedule of events, go to the GreenGov Council’s website.
Not only is it Commonwealth Sustainability Week, it’s also Nurture Nature Center’s Climate Action Week, with events scheduled in Easton and Bethlehem focused on engaging residents in sustainability efforts.
