A Conversation on Climate Week

Climate Week NYC is a unique forum to discuss the future of climate and energy policy, make connections, and reflect on the changing centers of climate action. In this blog post, several Climate Week attendees from Resources for the Future discuss what they learned.

Kristin Hayes: Thank you for being with me, everybody. There were many of us at Climate Week this year—more than we’ve sent in quite some time—which I think speaks to the importance of Climate Week.

Katarina and Beia, this was your first Climate Week. As people who are seeing the show for the first time, what were your initial impressions?

Beia Spiller: I didn’t really know what to expect, and I ended up going to such a mixed bag of events. There was one on careers and investments in climate. There was a Jain Family Institute event on critical minerals. There was an engineering presentation at Columbia University. I went to the Harvard University Salata Institute event, which was all about climate financial risks. I approached these gatherings wanting to meet people, to hear what the sentiment was, to know where the conversation was going, and to see if there were similar threads across all these conversations.

A common thread I found was that, given that the US federal government is out of the climate change–mitigation game and is producing significant headwinds for decarbonization pathways, people were focused on solutions at a very local level. For example: How can companies make money? How can communities benefit locally from continuing to participate in the energy transition? What can we as individuals do to continue to fight against climate change? And, alternatively, looking toward the international community—what can other countries do to step up, now that the United States is out of the game?

I went to this really cool event on Thursday night. It was run by this brand-new NGO that was focused on reducing our food waste. The organizers talked about how one of the largest impacts we as individuals can make when it comes to reducing our environmental impact is to reduce food waste. They had prepared all these different vegan foods with things that we normally would throw away, like carrot tops—what we would otherwise call waste. It was very much about what you can do as an individual. The event was really uplifting, and it felt like a bright shining way to end Climate Week.

Katarina Nehrkorn: Full disclosure, I was only there for our events. So, one thing I learned is to book an extra day next year!

We had two events that we co-hosted with the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. The first event was a bit higher level. We presented our modeling results for both the Republican and Democratic border measure proposals. And that was followed by a panel which included someone who is working on border measure proposals in Congress. There was a lot of interest in the room to learn more, and a lot of bipartisan interest was expressed. So, that was positive.

We also had a private roundtable which was about the nitty-gritty implementation details. I thought it was a really helpful and informative conversation. The roundtable included a lot of different representatives from industries you wouldn’t think are necessarily on the side of climate but are really trying to figure out a lot of these technical questions. There were also a lot of different government representatives.

I do think events that focus on climate and trade have the advantage of being both bipartisan spaces and international spaces. There is interest on both sides of the political aisle and across the business community. So, I would even say that bipartisanship on a congressional level is still alive here. But there is this block, that even if we saw a Republican-supported climate and trade bill, the administration wouldn’t support it. I thought that sentiment was kind of interesting.

It was great to see that there are a lot of people thinking about this issue outside of the federal government. I think we all got a lot out of it.

Kristin Hayes: By virtue of being in Washington, DC, RFF does a lot of work related to federal policy. And federal policy is a space where climate action is least likely to occur, like you said, Katarina.

I came to Climate Week with a very RFF-centric lens, and I was actually pleasantly surprised when I looked outside of that lens. For example, I sat next to a guy at one of our events who works for a reinsurance company in Miami. And he told me that, for his company, the politics don’t really come into play because the issues that they’re dealing with, they have to deal with, anyway. The flooding is real, and they deal with it. And thinking like that keeps the conversations going.

I felt the same way about the business community. Climate Week is heavy on business for lots of reasons, heavy on finance because it’s New York. And folks in those industries are thinking that, whatever the policy landscape is, we’re making decisions for a longer time horizon, and we can’t really afford to not think about that longer-term time horizon.

It was definitely a broader set of conversations than I necessarily think of in my day to day. And in that way, I actually found it kind of uplifting.

Dallas, what about you? What was your overall experience? You’ve been to Climate Week many, many times. You were largely attending and thinking and presenting on state-level issues. What was it like for you?

Dallas Burtraw: I’ve heard people say that Climate Week is sort of like a sorority or fraternity rush. You don’t know where to go, events are happening, and there’s no map. But maybe a better metaphor is the blind person and the elephant. I think the mood you get depends on what part of the elephant you’re touching—so, which events you go to.

What was different this year, I thought, was that there wasn’t this big, central messaging from the main speakers. I will say that there was bad news coming out of the United Nations at the same time, so the media landscape was a bit overshadowed, but there just wasn’t messaging like, “This is the new purpose.”

But I want to say that, with the events I attended—the parts of the elephant I was touching—I was somewhat uplifted, also. There’s no doubt that there’s a hole in terms of US federal climate policy leadership, but things are happening internationally; with business, as you’ve already said; and at the state level. States are looking out for themselves, and businesses are planning for the future.

And to this point, what I saw become clear—even if it wasn’t communicated generally—were the important developments in California. Its legislative package that came together conveys a newly coherent vision aligning state climate policy with industrial policy. It is explicitly looking at affordability, especially with respect to electricity prices, which is the pathway to a decarbonized economy. So, the package that passed in California embodies the idea that, in the absence of federal policy, the states are where progress is being made.

The years when I don’t go to Climate Week, I kind of think, “Oh, you know, I don’t really need to go.” But then when you go there, you actually feel reenergized because you see there’s so much going on.

Kristin Hayes: I mean, it is overwhelming, right? Climate Week is notoriously overwhelming. But in some ways, it reflects the scale of the problem and the number of players who have to be involved. It’s kind of the perfect encapsulation of all these different little levers that we need to be pulling.

Katarina, can I go back to you for a second? Can you say just a little bit more about the audiences? Is there something different about having people together in a room instead of communicating on conference calls?

Katarina Nehrkorn: I think there definitely is. I had a similar takeaway when I went to COP29 last year in Azerbaijan. You may see some of these people at random events, but having a dedicated time to bring everyone together, even if many of them are normally in DC, is helpful. And a lot of the international community came to Climate Week. People are really excited to chat outside of the official events, too, which is where I think a lot of the most productive conversations happen.

And these opportunities where you see industry, states, and countries all coming together show how much momentum there actually is in the climate space, despite significant changes on the US federal level.

Kristin Hayes: Beia, you went to a number of events on different subjects. If you had picked a track and did a bunch of things on that track, how do you think your experience would have been different?

Beia Spiller: I like what Dallas was saying about the elephant. Because I went to such a diverse group of meetings, many of which were totally outside my area of research, it was hard to get a clear sense of where we are headed in the research community.

I work on critical minerals a lot, so I really enjoyed the Jain Family Institute event because it was up my alley. I also got to see a spectacular presentation from a mining representative at Columbia University. Both of those really contributed to my understanding within my area of expertise and provided me with important networking opportunities.

Perhaps if I had gone to more critical minerals–focused events, the week would have been more informative for my own research. But maybe this is the interesting thing about Climate Week—to get you out of your comfort zone and expose you to new and different ideas, approaches, and people.

Kristin Hayes: I feel like every year, the more intentional I am about seeking things out, the better the experience. It’s great when things come your way, but the more intentional you could be about crafting that track for yourself—I think that helps a lot.

So, Dallas: Any final reflections on your Climate Week experience?

Dallas Burtraw: I missed our public event that you spoke at, Katarina. I really wanted to go, but I accidentally took the wrong train and ended up in Queens.

Kristin Hayes: Carlos [Martín] and I did the same thing! We ended up on Roosevelt Island before we realized that we were definitely not going in the direction we needed to be going.

Beia Spiller: Oh, that happened to me too! I went uptown instead of downtown. I was reading, and I looked up and thought, “Why am I on 45th Street? I should be in Brooklyn!”

Dallas Burtraw: But, anyway! I feel like you can live the whole rest of the year in the virtual world, but once a year, you get this chance to revisit and refresh your personal connections with people that are international or in other cities. And then you feel strong again.

Beia Spiller: I agree. At the food waste event, I was chatting with someone who turned out to have just graduated with a PhD in chemistry. He had just joined a new start-up that innovated around rare earth processing, which is related to my areas of research. It turns out he had read some of the work we had produced on minerals at RFF. So now we’re connected on LinkedIn. You never know who you’re going to meet; you’re at this event, and then suddenly, you’re chatting with someone who’s innovating in the field you care about.

Kristin Hayes: That seems to be the theme. The connections are all worth it.

Beia Spiller: Yes. And then, one of the things that I found most valuable was how people were asking, “Okay, we’ve got all these headwinds. How are we going to move forward? What are the approaches? What are the solutions? What can we actually do to make our lives better?”

I did get the broad sense that people have shifted to thinking a lot more about climate adaptation rather than mitigation. There’s this idea that climate change is now upon us.

Katarina Nehrkorn: I would echo a similar sentiment. I think it was helpful to talk more about implementation issues with the people responsible for complying with policy. I think in the policy world, things can feel a little abstract. I liked how, at our roundtable, we heard from the business community. It was good reinforcement that we’re thinking about things the right way. It was good to hear about the more technical things and how people are actually thinking about them.

But also, there are a lot of new things we took from the roundtable, too. And I think it makes our work more grounded, as well.

Kristin Hayes: You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about trust recently. Gatherings like this come around once a year. How can we utilize them most effectively to deepen relationships? Yes, we use Climate Week to make connections, but we also deepen relationships in a way that allows for more trust over time. Trust is the foundation of all this stuff, right? It leads to better decisions. It leads to better flows of information.

As I look ahead to a future Climate Week and think about what RFF should be doing, I think, How can we make the most of these opportunities when so many people come to one place? I’m going to try to think about it through that lens of what actually helps people build relationships that lead to more trust, which leads to better outcomes.

Dallas Burtraw: This is all very true. In closing, I’ll say that I was lucky enough to go to the International Carbon Action Partnership meeting, where people went around the table reporting for each jurisdiction about recent events—three-minute updates from Canada, from the European Union, from various places around the world. And it reminded me that, while the United States is a very important piece in this puzzle—perhaps the most important—it’s not the whole ball game.

So that, coupled with the stuff that’s coming out at the state level that I already mentioned, reminded me that it’s a big world out there … even if it’s heating up.