Susan Hendershot spent years building the rare federal architecture created for environmental justice communities looking to reduce their energy burdens: a seat on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC), the presidency of Interfaith Power & Light, and now her role directing climate community engagement at Self-Help, a community development lender. That architecture was designed to ensure that the benefits of the clean energy economy—lower energy costs, cleaner air, new infrastructure—reached the communities that had been disproportionately excluded from them. In early 2025, Hendershot and advocates like her watched much of it disappear: the WHEJAC was dissolved, and the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the $27 billion “green bank” meant to funnel private capital into disadvantaged communities, was frozen by the Trump administration.

But the dismantling didn’t end there. The Biden-era Justice40 Initiative, a directive steering 40 percent of the benefits of federal climate investment toward historically overburdened communities, was rescinded, and hundreds of environmental justice grants across the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were frozen or canceled outright.

With the federal government’s position on climate and environmental justice reversing itself every four years, the current moment calls for a different kind of institutional commitment—one with the capital and the staying power to survive a change in administration. Clean energy developers have both. The question is whether they will use them to fund a fair transition, or simply a fast one.

A Sector with a Dual Role

The private sector’s relationship to environmental harm long predates this moment. Coal extraction in Appalachia, oil and gas transport through rural and underserved communities, and petrochemical production in the Gulf South are not relics of history—they are the industrial backbone of the US economy today. Manufacturing and industrial production are already among the largest sources of US-produced greenhouse gas emissions, and unlike transportation or electricity generation, industrial emissions are projected to keep climbing even as other sectors decarbonize. That trajectory carries a price tag: one University of Chicago analysis estimated the long-term social cost of corporate carbon emissions could exceed $87 trillion—more than the entire market value of the US corporate sector. Climate disasters alone cost the global economy roughly $145 billion last year, and one estimate from Boston Consulting Group projects global economic output could shrink by 15 to 34 percent if average temperatures rise 3°C (37.4°F) by 2100.

Read the full article about private sector support for the energy transition by Haydn Smith, Aileen Ayala, Sophia Sung, and Bella Pires at Nonprofit Quarterly.