As the global debate on climate change and energy transition intensifies, there is growing recognition that progress cannot be driven by ideology alone. The conversation must return to fundamentals with outcomes, pragmatism, and the ability of industries to sustain communities and nations. Speaking on a recent panel, Michelle Manook, CEO of FutureCoal, offered a timely and grounded perspective on the risks of allowing ESG frameworks – particularly environmental metrics – to overshadow broader economic and social realities.
Manook reflected on a presentation she delivered to a Tier 1 global insurance organisation in 2020, where she warned that an overly narrow focus on decarbonisation could stall decision-making rather than enable progress. “The myopic focus on the ‘E’ – and not just the E, but only the decarbonisation bit – would actually form a paralysis of thought,” she said. “And I think we’ve seen that as time has gone by.”
At the heart of her argument is concern about how complex ideas such as ESG, sustainability and responsibility have become “jargonised,” losing their practical meaning. In doing so, businesses and policymakers risk losing sight of why these concepts exist in the first place.
“In my career, I was always told this is about licence to operate,” Manook explained. “It’s about the ability to sustain communities and the ability to sustain business.” She emphasised that sustainability is a lived outcome measured in jobs, reliable energy, and long-term prosperity.
While Manook acknowledged the importance of frameworks, road maps and reporting structures, she cautioned against allowing them to constrain progress. “Of course, we need frameworks and road maps,” she said, “but we can’t be in a place where we’re paralysing businesses and communities from moving forward.”
For Manook, the ultimate measure of success must be nation-building. “The outcome here has got to be prosperity for the nation,” she said. “It’s got to be about nation-building.” This perspective reframes ESG not as a compliance exercise, but as a tool to enable economic resilience and social stability – particularly in regions where energy access remains a critical challenge.
Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the global energy debate. As countries seek to combat climate change, energy policy has become a focal point of political and social contention. She emphasised that the pendulum is beginning to swing back toward pragmatism. “What we’re seeing now in many aspects of our world is a return to pragmatism, particularly around energy,” she observed. “Reality has to come back into every aspect, and that’s necessary.”
Mining, she added, is inherently practical and cannot be driven by ideology regardless of whether that ideology comes from environmental activism or rigid ESG interpretations. “Mining is a very pragmatic thing,” Manook said. “It cannot be absorbed by ideology in any way, whether that’s ESG or anything else.”
As CEO of FutureCoal, Manook represents the entire coal value chain globally, and she noted that perspectives vary significantly by region. In major coal-based economies such as India and China, the conversation is less about elimination and more about improvement. Across these regions and increasingly through leadership from the Southern African chapter, there is an emphasis on sustaining economic development while improving performance across environmental, social and governance dimensions.
“The focus is really on our ability to sustain,” she said. “And in that regard, how do we become better—in environment, in our social contribution, in our governance? How do we be better?”
Ironically, Manook suggested, prolonged anti-coal sentiment has accelerated modernisation across the value chain. “Because we’ve had so much anti-coal sentiment, that’s put us on a path of modernisation,” she noted. Rather than resisting scrutiny, the industry has been compelled to improve standards, adopt new technologies, and elevate performance across all aspects of ESG – giving each equal weight.
“We’re very much focused on modernising everything in that acronym,” Manook said. “It all has an equal distribution of thought and process.”
She concluded by noting that these efforts are now laying the groundwork that should have existed from the outset: a balanced, outcome-driven foundation to support honest conversations about energy, climate risk, and economic development.
