This is an excerpt of the Sustainable Switch newsletter, where we make sense of companies and governments grappling with climate change, diversity, and human rights on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
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Hello!
We're continuing with the theme of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rollbacks in the United States this week, but this time, I’ll also be looking beyond government actions to examine developments in the corporate sphere.
Let’s start with anti-ESG executive orders from President Donald Trump’s administration.
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Trump's administration to implement his ban on transgender people in the military. The president's directive was one of a series of steps he has taken to curb transgender rights.
The ban will allow the armed forces to discharge the thousands of current transgender troops and reject new recruits while legal challenges play out.
The court granted the Justice Department's request to lift a federal judge's nationwide order blocking the military from carrying out Trump's prohibition on transgender people serving in the military.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices - Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson - publicly dissented from the decision.
Detaining students
Elsewhere, the Trump administration urged a U.S. appeals court to allow immigration authorities to continue to detain two students – Rumeysa Ozturk from Tufts University and Mohsen Mahdawi from Columbia University – who were arrested after engaging in pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus.
The administration wants their deportation challenges to be handled exclusively in immigration courts, not federal district courts, while the students' attorneys argue that their clients were unlawfully detained for making constitutionally protected statements critical of Israel's actions during the Gaza war.
Mahdawi, born in a refugee camp in the West Bank, said he was arrested last month upon arriving for an interview for his U.S. citizenship petition in Vermont in retaliation for his advocacy against Israel's war and role in student protests.
Lawyers for Ozturk, a Turkish national and PhD student, say she was arrested in March for co-authoring a pro-Palestinian opinion piece in Tufts' student newspaper. "She has been held behind bars for six weeks while her health deteriorates for writing an op-ed," said Esha Bhandari, her lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Judges have expressed concerns over the legality of their prolonged detentions without court access, highlighting tensions between immigration enforcement and First Amendment rights.
What about corporate?
Reuters sustainable business correspondent Ross Kerber explored what some companies have been doing since the Trump administration’s campaign against federal and corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
He found that U.S. companies are reporting fewer race and gender details about their directors.
Kerber spoke to Josh Ramer, CEO of New Jersey company DiversIQ which tracks disclosures for investors and corporate clients who was shocked by the extent of the pullback.
Among S&P 500 companies making proxy filings this year, 54% gave fewer director demographic details than in 2024; last year only 7% of those companies gave fewer details. Click here for the full column.
Berkshire Hathaway, ABA and Novo Nordisk
This week, Berkshire Hathaway shareholders rejected a resolution requiring the company to report on risks from its subsidiaries' race-based initiatives, one of seven proposals tied to diversity, artificial intelligence and other issues that were voted down.
Shareholders also voted against a resolution that Berkshire report on how its business practices affect employees based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin and political views.
Meanwhile, the American Bar Association will extend the suspension of its law school diversity and inclusion rule through August 2026.
The ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar will consider a recommendation to further defer enforcement of its longstanding diversity rule, which was first suspended in February after Trump’s series of anti-DEI executive orders.
Elsewhere, the obesity drugmaker Novo Nordisk said it will drop gender representation requirements for senior leadership positions in its U.S. business due to the executive orders by Trump to stop DEI initiatives.
In its first-quarter earnings statement, the company said that its U.S. operations will be excluded from meeting its global minimum 45% representation for each gender by the end of 2025.
ESG Lens
Factories in China, mostly shut out of the U.S. market for over a decade by high import duties, have been boosting solar panel sales to Asia and Africa, data from energy think-tank Ember showed.
Asia accounted for 37% of all Chinese exports in the first quarter of 2025, up from 25.4% in 2024, while Europe's share declined to 34% from 41% in 2024, Ember data showed.
Total Chinese exports have remained steady despite lower demand due to high stockpiles in Europe - its biggest market.
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