The Loneliness of the Sustainable Leader

The people building the future, while surviving the present

Hello, is it me you’re looking for?

If you’ve read my precursor newsletter The Outpost of Possibility before - welcome back. If you’re new - thanks for joining, I’m glad to see you here.

This is the first official issue of The Ledger - a weekly briefing at the intersection of business, sustainability, technology and systems thinking.

Why now?
Because the noise is rising.
Because the climate transition is getting more urgent - and more tangled.
Because I want to build, and this is a space to do the work in public, alongside others who give a fig.

Each Tuesday, I’ll send:

• One big idea from the edge of the transition

• A signal-rich roundup of what’s worth paying attention to

• The occasional tool, provocation, or question to sharpen your thinking

Let’s begin The Big Idea

The Loneliness of the Sustainable Leader

Something odd is happening to the leaders who care most.

They’re exhausted. Not just from long hours or tough markets, but from the dissonance of caring in systems that don’t.

I’ve spoken with founders who want to build carbon-negative businesses but can’t raise from funds still stuck in late-stage SaaS dopamine loops. Corporate leaders who talk about scope 3 emissions by day and oversee extractive business models by night. Designers building tools for wellbeing while ignoring their own.

They’re not hypocrites. They’re human. And they’re stuck between the future they want to create and the present they must survive.

The sustainability transition isn’t just technical or economic. It’s emotional. It’s deeply personal. And we need to name that, or risk burnout masquerading as realism.

So this newsletter isn’t just about what’s changing in business, climate and tech.
It’s about how we change with it.

And how to do so without losing the sharpness of our thinking or the depth of our humanity.

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Signals From the Noise

What matters, what works, and what’s worth watching

💩 Are offsets sh*t?

In its quest to decarbonise, Microsoft is investing in biomethane made from human sewage. Seriously. It’s a messy but telling example of how corporate climate commitments are colliding with the infrastructure transition - and how creative (or desperate) offsets are becoming.
🔗 Read in WSJ

🔋 China’s Quiet Climate Export Machine

In just the first half of 2024, China’s clean energy exports - from solar panels to EV batteries - are expected to cut over 1.5 billion tonnes of CO₂ overseas. That’s more than Japan emits in a year. Industrial policy is climate policy.
🔗 Read in Carbon Brief

🧵 Plastic absolutely not fantastic

A $1.5 trillion annual health cost. Microplastics in blood, lungs, sperm. The Lancet’s new review frames plastics not just as an environmental issue, but as a public health emergency. This should be unignorable - yet treaty negotiations remain divided and the US has now forcefully taken a side.
🔗 Read in The Guardian

💸 Just Exit for Coal

The $2.6bn deal to help South Africa transition away from coal has finally been approved. The Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) is one of the most important tests of whether climate finance can be trusted to work - or just sound good.
🔗 Read in Bloomberg

🌬️ Trump’s Hasn’t Got Wind

The former President is laying rhetorical groundwork for dismantling clean energy incentives - particularly offshore wind. It’s a reminder that industrial decarbonisation progress is not linear, and that policy whiplash is one of the biggest threats to long-term transition planning.
🔗 Read in Heatmap

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🎯 From the Ground

A former colleague now working in a new industrial behemoth told me this week:

“Our board gets nervous when I say sustainability too often.
But gets excited when I say AI.”

The work is still real. The language is a negotiation.

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💬 The Ledger Line

You can’t build regenerative systems from a place of depletion.

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🌀 End Note

Thanks for being here. The Ledger is an experiment in building clarity and courage in a time of complexity - for people like you who still give a fig.

If this issue resonated, please forward it to someone who’s trying to lead wisely through all this noise. And if something struck a nerve, why not reply - I read every one.

Here’s to what’s possible.
— Dom