We have just lived through Earth's hottest summer on record, with heat waves baking large parts of our planet. Scientists have also confirmed that our oceans reached the highest recorded surface temperatures this summer, bleaching corals and super-charging storms. Millions of us choked on smoke from unprecedented wildfires, and we watched, horrified, as fire ravaged a Hawaiian Eden.
It was the sort of summer that could lead those concerned about climate change to a sense of despair. Many factors affect floods, fires and extreme weather, but the science is clear on the ways climate change contributes to them all, and this summer provided ample evidence of the risks we face.
And yet, as climate scientists, advocates, business leaders and elected officials arrived in New York for the annual gathering called Climate Week, the overwhelming mood is one of—dare we say it—optimism.
"We have to believe that we can overcome, right? And that optimism drives action," Angela Barranco told Newsweek. Barranco is the North America executive director for Climate Group, the international nonprofit that organizes Climate Week, which is now in its 15th year.
In that time, Barranco said, Climate Week has grown from a small side-event coinciding with the United Nations General Assembly to a global nexus for policymakers, academics and corporate leaders attending some 400 sessions around New York City, all organized under the theme "We can. We will."
Climate Week's growth and positive tone match changes in the economics of climate action over the past decade and a half. Sustainability is no longer just a department title within a business, it is creating entirely new businesses.
"It's the 'green economy' becoming the economy," Barranco said.
That green growth was accelerated by the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden's signature legislative achievement on clean energy and climate, which stimulated about $110 billion in clean tech manufacturing investments in just its first year. That has spurred other countries to keep pace to remain competitive in thriving sectors.
All of that, however, is not yet enough to meet the level of reductions in CO2 emissions that scientists say we need to hit in order to avoid the most dangerous climate change. Many of this year's Climate Week events focus on how to scale up and accelerate the deployment of clean energy and transportation, ways to decarbonize heavy industries like cement and steel, and how to direct financing for those efforts.
"We have the technologies, we're starting to build the political will," Barranco said. "Really, what we need to do is just move a lot faster."
Less Doom, More Do
The mood at Climate Week mirrors a shift underway in the larger conversation about climate change, a switch from climate doom to can-do.
Online discourse has tackled the downsides of "doomerism," as it's called, and the past year brought the publication of a shelf's worth of books making the argument for climate optimism. Among them is Saving Us by Climate Week panelist Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and distinguished professor at Texas Tech University. Her book carries the subtitle "A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope."
"People who feel helpless and hopeless need to hear what is already happening" to address climate change, she told the Climate Week audience of business and civil society leaders gathered at the Times Center in midtown Manhattan, "so they know how they can make a difference."
Optimism alone won't solve things, Hayhoe said. People must have reasons to believe that their actions will actually have an impact.
"Hope is not just positive thinking, it's not just assuming things will be okay," she said. "It is a vision of a better future and a path from point A to B on how to get there."
Another panelist, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, suggested that the world's city leaders can help chart that path by linking climate change to the immediate impacts on their constituents' health and well-being.
For example, researchers at Imperial College London found air pollution in the city was contributing to about 4,000 premature deaths each year. Since the city launched its ultra-low emissions zone targeting tailpipe pollution from heavy trucks and buses, Khan said, the toxic pollution has been cut in half and greenhouse gas emissions are down as well.
Addressing the overlap between air pollution and climate change is "the best two-for-one deal in the world," Khan said.
California Governor Gavin Newsom used his Climate Week appearance to tout his state's new efforts to hold climate polluters accountable.
Newsom, a Democrat, said at the event that he plans to sign two new pieces of legislation that will apply to more than 5,000 large companies doing business in California. One bill requires companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and the emissions that arise from their supply chains. Another requires them to make public their exposures to climate risks such as how extreme weather events or fires might affect their business, or how many of their outdoor workers might be exposed to heat waves.
California also filed civil suit on Friday against five major oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Shell—as well as the trade group that represents them, the American Petroleum Institute. The state's suit claims that the companies misled the public for decades about what they knew about climate change and its coming impacts, and it seeks a fund to pay for the state's climate-related damages.
"The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis, and these guys have been playing us for fools," Newsom said.
Climate March
A few blocks from the Times Center venue for Climate Week's opening event, tens of thousands of people marched through midtown Manhattan's streets to rally near the U.N. building.
The March to End Fossil Fuels was the most visible part of a globally coordinated weekend of 650 actions in 60 countries supporting U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in his call to phase out fossil fuel use. The marchers also called on Biden to declare a "climate emergency" and to end federal approval for new fossil projects and production on public lands and waters.
Guterres is hosting a Climate Ambition Summit at the U.N. on Wednesday, intended to spur countries to greater action, and in December the U.N. will convene its 28th annual climate change conference.
A U.N. report earlier this month showed that most countries are not on track to hit the emissions reductions goals set in the 2015 Paris agreement. The report's authors said much more aggressive action is needed if the world is to remain below the target of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming above pre-industrial levels.
Aya de Leon, a novelist and activist from Berkeley, California, made her way to the march staging area on Broadway along with fellow members of the Black Hive, an environmental justice group. The effects of climate change are hitting communities of color "first and worst," she said, but she had no time for talk of climate doom.
"You know, people talk about the apocalypse or act as if the fight is lost. But actually, it's not," de Leon told Newsweek. "We just have to move quickly, quickly, quickly, to divest from fossil fuels and make these changes."
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