Climate Week

What is the purpose of these meetings again?

“Congratulations! We saved the world?”

I attended Climate Week last week in New York. For those who aren’t familiar with Climate Week, it is meant to be a global gathering to drive climate action, foster collaboration among leaders and raise awareness about climate change issues. There is no one conference or event that people attend, but a series of events held around New York, from small personal meetings of a few people to big invitation-only conferences with corporate sponsors.

It is estimated that over 100,000 people attended Climate Week in some form, attending one of the 1,000+ events that focused on Climate in some way. Before you get all mad at 100,000 people flying to NY, note that most of the people attending tend to be local. Yes, people fly in and that causes pollution, but this is nothing like the scale of a yearly COP meeting where people fly in from all over the world and oil company lobbyists routinely outnumber country delegations.

I talked to a friend of mine who works for a large company, but one you probably haven’t heard of about the delegation they sent to Climate Week. He told me over 50 people attended Climate Week, and that a bunch of people wanted to go. I asked him if 50 people needed to go. He said no. That level of participation in Climate Week seems typical. People want to go to see and be seen and hang out in New York. The whole “saving the planet” nonsense is usually secondary.

I get it. New York is called “fun city” for a reason. It’s a great place to sit in a conference for a few hours and then go have fun in the evening. But we don’t need 100,000 unserious people gathering for Climate Week.

Any gathering of 100,000 is by definition unserious. We don’t need that many people to gather someplace and pretend to address a problem. We all know they aren’t.

Why are we still doing this?

Events like Climate Week and COP 30 later this year are not completely meaningless. They are not only to see and be seen. But they are mostly meaningless and mostly to see and be seen.

Climate Week and the events like them are at their essence celebrations of incrementalism and self-congratulations while a world is busy collapsing. Celebrating such small insignificant achievements and telling everyone about the wonderful incremental things your firm is doing seems obscene when the world is on fire. No one is talking about changing the system. That would spoil the party.

LinkedIn … ugh

Like any good businessperson, I have a LinkedIn account to let me know what others are doing and if I should pay attention to what they are doing. Checking on LinkedIn was painful at Climate Week.

These people are for the most part well intentioned. They have jobs with a focus on sustainability and want to do the right thing. But the things they are doing amount to painting a house while it is on fire.

Throughout the week I would check LinkedIn and it was nearly always populated with posts from people telling their followers that important things were happening at Climate Week, and that real progress is being made. Most of the posts I read talked about how their actions were:

Facilitating Climate Action, or

Bringing People Together, or

Raising Awareness, or

Influencing Policy, or

Showcasing Innovation

I’m sure they were facilitating some action, just not nearly enough. Sure, they met some new people and maybe introduced some people to each other who will work on incremental changes to climate policy. I’m sure they raised awareness, but not to an extent that matters. Maybe some people at Climate Week influenced policy in some small imperceptible way. And finally, I’m sure many companies and financial firms introduced products and services that their marketing departments will sell as innovative, but don’t actually do much of anything to address climate change.

Those talking points are the ones I saw the most. But there are many others like them. Nearly everyone on LinkedIn who posted about Climate Week spoke about “progress”, “renewed hope”, or some other bullshit they are telling themselves so they could justify their sustainability position, that in reality does hardly anything to move the needle.

That may sound harsh, but that’s the way I see it.

We have passed 7 of 9 planetary boundaries. That is our life support system. And LinkedIn is chock full of Climate Week attendees who are “inspired” to do more of the same that hasn’t gotten us anywhere.

Barely any of them said anything about changing the system. All of them implicitly or implicitly accepted that we need to keep our economies growing, and that any climate progress would have to come from an economy that would grow forever.

Here’s what I attended that I thought was worthwhile.

In case you were interested, I attended things that were very different from most of Climate Week.

I attended the last day of the Climate Film Festival, and I met with Ana Maria Camelo Vega from Columbia to learn more about the sustainability work she and her team are doing, primarily in the global south.

I attended an event hosted by The T25 2025 - Collective Action for Just Finance, which focuses on philanthropy and investment primarily for underserved communities.

I attended an event hosted by The Earth Law Center and Fordham about the evolving issues of legal rights for nature.

I also met with a few other people here and there, including some degrowthers who like me, were trying to find the needle in the haystack - Climate Week events that talked about degrowth. We didn’t find any.

How to do climate week right.

There is a simple way to solve this problem.

• Have climate week in a place in the center of the country that is not a tourist destination.

• Invite people from all walks of life.

• Limit the number of participants

• Have it be a week long with actual meetings where citizens discuss how to address the problem

• Publish the results and send them to the federal government.

• Do this every year.

Basically, what I’m proposing is to make Climate Week a Citizen’s Assembly in a place where a limited number of people from all walks of life spend a week in a boring place trying to solve a real problem.

What I am suggesting is the exact opposite of what goes on at climate week:

• Tourist Mecca

• Mostly only high powered corporate, financial, policy people

• 100,000 + people

• 1,000 different topics means there is no focus

• No results are published. Nothing meaningful is produced

If your conference to save the world is trending on Instagram - you are doing it wrong.

They just don’t get it.

The people that put on the events at Climate Week, and most of the people who attend the events at Climate Week are for the most part well intentioned. They realize climate change is a problem, and they want to address it.

If that is the case, why isn’t every week of the year devoted to addressing and mitigating climate change?

Currently, every week of the year is dedicated to running a successful business; whether that business is a for profit company, a financial firm, a consulting firm, or a government. As our culture is structured today, each of those businesses depends on growth. A company needs to grow to please shareholders, a financial firm needs to grow for the same reason and a government needs to deliver growth to keep their jobs. The jobs of nearly all the individuals attending Climate Week is to deliver or facilitate growth. This is their job 52 weeks out of the year.

Setting aside a whole week to focus on climate still has to be subservient to this 52 weeks per year job of delivering growth.

That is the insane and glaring contradiction of climate week.

If people were serious about addressing the climate - there would at first be a Degrowth Week - because that is what is necessary to address climate change.

Then after at most a few years - but hopefully after just one week - the people who were serious about climate change would realize that their jobs need to be dedicated to degrowth 52 weeks per year.

But not one of the events I attended this year talked about degrowth unless I brought it up. I went to places and talked to people that I was pretty sure would talk with me about degrowth, and I was right. I met some people who were already degrowthers, and I spoke to some people to whom the concept was new.

Everyone who attends climate week in the service of a corporation, a financial firm, a consulting firm or a government entity knows explicitly or implicitly that the unofficial title for every Climate Week is really: A Large Number of Meetings That Bring People From All Around the World Together to Make a Big Show of, and Congratulate Themselves on Ignoring the Problem; Because Addressing the Problem Would Require Us to Walk Away From a Self-Destructive Growth Cult to Which We Belong and From Which We Have Been Convinced There Is No Escape.

But that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like Climate Week.

Photo by Gabi Miranda on Unsplash