MIT Sloan Management Review spoke with Kristina Wyatt, chief sustainability officer at Persefoni, a carbon accounting platform that works with activists, politicians, and regulators to redistribute corporate profits. We asked about the crisis facing sustainability professionals and the fading prospects for the industry.

What challenges are sustainability professionals facing in 2025?

Kristina Wyatt: Our worst nightmares have come true. We were sure the Green New Deal was in the bag. Now most of us have our resumes on the street. C-Suite support has evaporated. Even the EU is backing away from NetZero, just because it’s bankrupting member countries! The only professionals with dimmer prospects for employment are fired DEI deans.

How does your carbon accounting platform work, and what challenge is it meant to solve?

Wyatt: Carbon footprint numbers are about as accurate as Michael Mann’s hockey stick. Accounting for the hundreds of thousands of activities a company is engaged in, incorporating millions of input factors that have carbon footprints of their own, is an exercise in futility. That’s why smart companies hire consultants like Persefoni. We bury the mess under opaque layers of confidential spreadsheets. Then we give clients a nice virtue story to tell our collaborating activists who own three shares of stock and would otherwise file a shareholder’s suit and call their buddies at the New York Times to run a hatchet job exposing the evil millionaire CEO despoiling the planet.

How are you using and thinking about AI in the context of sustainability?

Wyatt: It’s a double-edged sword. AI certainly helps us make stuff up that sounds good. On the other hand, critics use the same tools to expose the fact that we made stuff up. Yet from a competitive perspective, any company that doesn’t call itself AI-powered isn’t going to get the time of day from cutting edge journalists like yourself. So rest assured, everything we do is AI based. And because AI is so energy intensive, we buy carbon indulgences to sustain our virtue story, just like all our clients.