We need a new big tent—where common sense and problem-solving are the show.
Each September, the breathless promos for yet another Climate Week arrive: From Forbes to Reuters to Economist Impact, it’s billed as critical, can’t-miss, and career-defining.
So why, for those of us working across energy and climate divides, has Climate Week lost its relevance? The sad truth is, not even climate insiders believe that it can deliver on its promises. That’s because Climate Week no longer brings people together to create solutions. Instead, it’s become a performance art festival—rewarding virtue signaling and shoring up the crumbling consensus for The Myth of an Easy Energy Transition.
Both of these things are true:
- Climate Week once served an important role. It helped elevate carbon as a financial, regulatory, and reputational risk—prompting companies to set targets, track progress, and report emissions.
- Today, it’s polarizing—and therefore counterproductive to any actual progress on climate. You couldn’t design a better event for alienating the constituencies that climate activists need to attract to do the real work of climate progress. It burns political capital while producing little practical progress.
How Climate Week Looks from the Outside
Climate Week once mattered. When it launched, in 2009, the whole lollapalooza raised awareness of climate change as a set of threats to business, inspiring a broad set of financial institutions and companies to treat carbon emissions and intensity as regulatory and social risk factors. Companies set targets, built documentation systems, and reported on emissions-reduction progress.
But Climate Week has grown into a sprawling, citywide street festival of events—hundreds upon hundreds of sessions with no single through-line beyond “climate.” Supporters tout hundreds of happenings, from glitzy plenaries to niche sidebars. The scale is impressive, the outcomes … not so much. For the problem-solvers—policymakers tasked with implementing climate ambition on the ground—activity without outcomes is a time and credibility tax.
During the Biden years, attending Climate Week was a way for banks, energy companies, and industry associations to signal “We’re in.” In 2025, with politics more angry and zero-sum, the roll looks more like “Who’s left?” Each climate-action-friendly subgroup hosts its own micro-events—all telling themselves their own stories.
And that would be fine—it could be a Woodstock for the true believers—if the stakes were lower. But climate action isn’t happening at the pace or scale required to make a dent in carbon emissions, which means Climate Week is less a catalyst for and more an obstacle to the hard work required to decarbonize an energy system that is already strained, increasingly expensive, and set to grow—dramatically.
The biggest of Climate Week’s oversimplified, alienating stories is what I call The Myth of an Easy Energy Transition. The Myth holds that a few policy changes paired with technological breakthroughs will catalyze a huge drop in greenhouse gas emissions—and result in a painless, eminently affordable transition to net zero for everyone. The Myth promises that where the political will exists, a quick and easy energy transition is imminent.
The Myth is colliding with real physical and political roadblocks. The energy transition, it turns out, will be neither easy nor fast. And it certainly won’t be delivered by the members of a single political tribe talking among themselves in Midtown during the UN General Assembly. But The Myth still animates Climate Week, which too often indulges in apocalyptic warnings instead of advocating for realistic trade-offs. The focus on urgency blunts candor about reliability, affordability, timelines, siting, supply chains, and the messy politics of permitting. Meanwhile, cross-sector contact—the sort that can reduce animosity and build enough trust to do deals—remains rare and tenuous.
Where You Come In
The very people who need to be persuaded, engaged, and partnered with to make progress on climate—like you—not only don’t see themselves reflected at Climate Week; they see a cringy spectacle that makes them want to look away.
In a world where voters have clearly deprioritized climate in favor of affordability and reliability, policymakers are navigating divided legislatures, and energy companies are facing growing power demand with known challenges to keeping the lights on, Climate Week looks like an out-of-touch circus.
For climate action to succeed, we need a new big tent—where common sense and problem-solving are the show. That’s where you come in.
From Carnival to Convening—Your Call to Action
What’s required is much harder. We need curated, cross-sector conference tables. We need small, purpose-built gatherings that include representatives from government, industry (legacy and new), NGOs, communities, labor, and capital. The constituencies that avoid the spectacle of Climate Week need seats at these tables, not a circus. Energy policy and climate policy are difficult, demanding a clear-eyed understanding of trade-offs and the widest possible range of tools and solutions.
We make progress when we have to hash out the trade-offs: emissions versus reliability, pace versus permitting, local impacts versus global benefits. That happens not at amen corners but at gatherings where disagreement is a given, agreement is hard, and a wide range of expertise is valued. Such gatherings create partnerships that cross the usual lines—utilities with data centers and conservation NGOs, oil and gas with transmission developers and tribes. That’s where breakthroughs happen. Deals get signed, shovels hit dirt, and, eventually, emissions actually fall.
Who can start those conversations? We can. You can. Host one within the next 60 days designed to give your Problem Solver stakeholders two things they desperately need: (1) permission to be pragmatic and (2) political cover.
Ensure you have a credible convener and a balanced, uncomfortable roster. Expect and embrace friction. Name and explore trade-offs: Put real siting maps, reliability curves, and budget constraints on the table.
I value the ambition that birthed Climate Week. But The Myth of an Easy Energy Transition has lulled too many into thinking that catastrophizing + buzz = progress. This moment calls for the opposite: fewer stages, more uncomfortable rooms; fewer hashtags, more unconventional partnerships; fewer plenaries, more permits.
If climate is a crisis, we should demand more from our gatherings. So good riddance to Climate Week. It’s time for us to restart the conversations that will take us forward.
