From "Say What?" To "Hell No!"

Anti-sustainability measures in the USA are limiting American freedoms.

If some Kansas state legislators had their way back in 2013, no public funds could have been used in Kansas “either directly or indirectly, to promote, support, mandate, require, order, incentivize, advocate, plan for, participate in or implement sustainable development,” including “any materials prepared or presented as part of a class, course, curriculum or instructional material.”

But the same day that anti-sustainable-development bill was introduced to the full legislature, it was referred back to the same committee that proposed it. 470 days later, the bill died in committee.

Had the bill become law, Kansas public school teachers would have had to break state law to share, for example, recent research important to Kansas’s economy: lessons from use of rootworm-resistant (Bt) maize, the overuse of which is estimated to have collectively cost U.S. corn farmers $1.6 billion.

Photo by Julian Schöll

“Say What?”

This week, the same anti-sustainable-development influence behind the 2013 Kansas bill reappeared again, this time in the Prevent Regulatory Overreach from Turning Essential Companies into Targets (P.R.O.T.E.C.T.) Act of 2025. The Act was introduced by U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and states “no entity integral to the national interests of the United States may comply with any foreign sustainability due diligence regulation.”

In explaining the proposed act, Senator Hagerty said the legislation would shield U.S. companies from new European Union regulations.

“American companies should be governed by U.S. laws, not unaccountable lawmakers in foreign capitals.” 

“The European Union’s ideologically motivated regulatory overreach is an affront to U.S. sovereignty. I will use every tool at my disposal to block it.”

--Senator Bill Hagerty, 12 March 2025 

But those regulations do not govern U.S. companies. Rather, the regulations introduce new sustainability requirements for companies wishing to do business in the EU. The reasons published for implementing the new requirements sound rather democratic:

A broad range of stakeholder groups, including civil society representatives, EU citizens, businesses as well as business associations, have been calling for mandatory due diligence rules. 70% of the businesses who responded to the public consultation sent a clear message: EU action on corporate sustainability due diligence is needed.
...
EU rules will provide a uniform legal framework and ensure a level playing field for companies across the EU Single Market.

-- From the European Commission's "Corporate sustainability due diligence" page (emphasis in original)

So if any large non-EU companies — defined in the regulations as companies with over 1000 employees and at least €450,000,000 in annual sales (“net turnover”) — want to continue to do business in the European Union, then they have to comply with the new sustainability requirements starting in the year 2029.

Senator Hagerty’s Act, though, would prevent large U.S. companies deemed “integral to the national interests of the United States” from complying with those new EU regulations and hence prevent them from doing business in EU markets after 2029. But there’s an escape hatch in the Act: the company can petition the President for an exemption if the company “believes it will experience particular hardship in connection with the prohibition.”

The U.S. government picks winners and losers all the time. But Senator Hagerty’s Act calls for Congress to place additional power in the hands of the President to decide which of America’s largest companies get those exemptions to compete in EU markets. That is concerning to anyone who subscribes to the ideology of capitalism (note: in framing sustainability, SustainLab names ideologies).

“Hell No!”

One way of reacting to unexpected behavior is to try to understand it.

Looking into Senator Hagerty’s history, from 2011 to 2014 he served as commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. During that time, Tennessee’s government passed House Joint Resolution 587. Introduced on 19 January 2012, the resolution is a direct descendent of the 12 January 2012 Republican National Convention’s winter meeting resolutions, one of which was titled “Exposing United Nations Agenda 21.”

"...whereas this United Nations Agenda 21 plan of radical so-called 'sustainable development' views the American way of life of private property ownership, single-family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms all as destructive to the environment..."
-- Tennessee's House Joint Resolution 587

The non-binding agreement known as Agenda 21 says nothing of the sort. There wasn’t anything to expose, either: it was publicly signed by President George H. W. Bush in 1992.

President George H. W. Bush signs the United Nations accord on climate change in 1992 along with 177 other world leaders collectively representing ~98% of the world’s population.

So why the 2012 attack on the then twenty-year-old UN’s Agenda 21?

In a lengthy report, The Southern Poverty Law Center explained the attack as “baseless propaganda” and “conspiracy theories” from a loud few including the John Birch Society, Tom DeWeese, Glenn Beck, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and neo-Nazis. Beck even wrote a dystopian novel titled Agenda 21 complete with a UN logo on the cover. (One wonders if Beck or his publisher requested permission as use the UN logo, which is otherwise prohibited “without the United Nation’s prior written consent.”)

From “Say What?” To “Hell No!”

Those who spread conspiracy theories have the advantage that it is far easier to elicit a “Hell No!” than a “Say What?” response.

But transitioning from “Say What?” to “Hell No!” often means overcoming what psychologists call “information bias,” an umbrella term that includes the belief that the more information that can be acquired to make a decision, the better, even if that additional information is irrelevant. (So no, I’m not going to try to find out whether Beck or his publisher requested permission to use the UN logo. If I lived in Tennessee, it would be irrelevant to my next step.)

Overcoming the information bias isn’t easy. Indeed, it often stops people not only from contacting their elected representatives to tell them “Hell No!” but also stops sustainability programs from moving forward (i.e., transitioning to “Hell Yes!”).

---

In your habitat, are there sustainability programs stuck in the transition between “Say What?” and “Hell Yes!”?