Two Questions at Climate Week

Billed as “the largest annual climate event of its kind,” Climate Week NYC is the biggest climate gathering outside of UN COP summits, cramming some 900 panels, presentations, and other events into seven days spread across the city’s five boroughs.

Beyond the media spectacle and pitch decks, the week is a chance to unscientifically take the temperature on climate action and clean energy, both in the US and globally.

Taking place in parallel with the UN’s climate summit – which this year served as an unofficial second-chance deadline for new national climate plans ahead of COP 30 in Brazil – Climate Week NYC is also often where the conversation starts focusing on the big-picture questions for COP. Where we are. How far we need to go.

Officially, the theme of this year’s event was an assertive “Power on.” Unofficially, it was much closer to a question: Where do we go from here?

After all, you don’t need a headline to tell you the past eight months have been absolutely brutal for the climate movement. Especially in the US.

Relentless attacks on clean energy and climate action and science by the new administration literally from Day One. A swaggering fossil fuel industry repackaging do-nothing climate denial as “energy realism” and executives boasting that you’re more likely to see Elvis than see the energy transition succeed Years and countless hours of public pressure campaigns, policy analysis, legislative wrangling, and more to finally pass the biggest investment in clean energy and climate action the world has ever seen (aka, the Inflation Reduction Act) largely undone by one presidential pen stroke on one hideous budget bill in July.

So where do we go from here?

Especially because it's not just the political will for climate action that’s slipped away. Prestige think pieces and polling now say the same thing: Americans don’t want to hear about climate right now. No wonder, perhaps, with millions grappling with a cost of living crisis, that in a recent Yale survey of top public worries in the US, climate doesn’t even crack the top five. Not even for “the concerned” on climate segment.

None of this, though, has shifted nature’s position. Even as Trump labels climate change a “con job” in front of the UN, warming continues to accelerate.

You don’t have to look far to see what this means. Witness the recent rapid intensification of Hurricane Humberto from a Category 1 to full Category 5 house-smashing, life-changing strength with 160mph-plus winds. All within 24 hours. While the storm ultimately spent its fury heading east into the Atlantic instead of smashing into the Eastern Seaboard, this is a bullet momentarily dodged, not a crisis finally averted. Odds are, we’ll see more of its kind.

LOOKING FOR HOPE? LOOK AT THE ENERGY TRANSITION

For all the real political challenges and the media hand-wringing, the fundamentals of the clean energy transition have – outside of the US, at least – never been better.

There’s a reason “Clean energy is cheap energy” is fast becoming the climate movement’s catchphrase. Not only is clean energy increasingly the cheapest form of new power almost everywhere, but it’s the fastest-growing source too, with a staggering 93% of the new electricity capacity last year coming from renewables.

Put aside the fossil press releases and look underneath the hood of global energy systems and there is a clear sense of a snowball beginning to roll down a mountainside. A new report from UK thinktank Ember, “The Electrotech Revolution,” spells out the how and why.

Per Ember, electrotech – roughly, renewables, battery storage, and electric technologies – has three built-in superpowers that give it a market-winning edge over climate changing-fossil:

1. Efficiency: Electrotech is three times more efficient than fossil energy, with the sun alone offering 100 times more energy potential than fossil fuels.
2. Cost to Scale: Fossil fuels get more expensive as extraction continues and existing source dry up. Clean energy meanwhile keeps getting cheaper, with costs falling 20% every time deployment doubles. Clean energy is cheap energy.
3. Energy Independence and Security: Clean energy is a technology you buy once. Fossil fuels are a commodity you keep paying to resupply. In a world where 92% of countries have 10 times the renewable potential necessary to meet their current demand, this creates a path to true energy independence.

Together, these three factors lead to a conclusion as inevitable as gravity: “Electrotech is set to push fossil fuels into terminal decline by 2030.”

Needless to say, this is very, very good news. But the pace of this decline matters immensely. Turning this momentum, however, into on-the-ground progress quickly enough to avert the worst of climate change requires a kind of leadership now in short supply. At least at the highest levels.

THE SECOND BIG QUESTION: WHO WILL LEAD?

The challenge now is to change that.

As Climate Reality CEO Phyllis Cuttino put it, kicking off “Who Will Lead?”, a special Climate Week event with former Vice President Al Gore on September 24: “Our job as civil society and climate leaders is to encourage the leadership we want and that the climate crisis demands.”

Speaking with government leaders – Rachel Kyte, UK special representative for climate and Tina Stege, Marshall Islands climate envoy – and youth activists – Lily Morse, head of the Green Schools Campaign, and Vittoria Horch, project management director with Brazil’s EmpoderaClima – Vice President Gore used the event to explore what climate leadership means today and how we move forward in these challenging times.

For anyone concerned about the future of climate action in 2025, the two panels offered plenty of reason to believe that the movement obituaries may be premature. Six ideas in particular stood out.

Momentum for clean energy transition is on our side – the only question is how fast it happens.

“What I see is a big wheel turning in the right direction. And inside that big wheel, there are little wheels turning in the wrong direction. But they, too, are being moved tectonically, you could say, in the right direction. We are going to win this struggle. We are going to be successful. The remaining question is whether or not we will win it in time to avoid the terrible, negative tipping points that are out there.”

– Vice President Al Gore