With Election Near, the Political Climate Looms Over Climate Week NYC

New York will be the center of global climate action this week as the annual Climate Week NYC brings thousands of business, government and citizen leaders together for more than 900 climate-related events around the city.

That’s a new record number of events, according to organizers at Climate Group, who launched Climate Week 16 years ago as a side event to the United Nations General Assembly.

As clean tech and renewable energy have expanded, Climate Week has since grown into an important milestone on the calendars of activists, politicians and executives who use the showcase as a platform to announce new initiatives and reports and to set the stage for the annual U.N. Climate talks that come later in the year. This year, the petrostate Azerbaijan hosts the U.N. Conference of Parties, or COP, slated to begin on November 11.

Anticipated announcements for this week include calls to turn the pledges for renewable energy expansion made at last year’s COP28 into reality, a report on the need to address emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane and a survey of the net-zero emission pledges made so far by companies, states and cities. The U.N. will host a “Summit for the Future” exploring the connections between climate change, biodiversity loss and conflict, and a separate session on risks from sea-level rise.

However, even with COP29 on the horizon, another November date looms especially large for this year’s Climate Week participants: Election Day.

“The election provides the undercurrent through Climate Week,” Climate Group CEO Helen Clarkson told Newsweek.

The major party candidates for president, former Republican President Donald Trump and current Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, present a striking contrast on issues of climate and energy policy.

Early in his presidency, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the U.N.-negotiated Paris Agreement, which commits countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid the most dangerous warming levels. Trump has also called climate change a hoax, and frequently disparages climate solutions such as wind and solar energy during his campaign rally speeches.

Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature legislation on climate change and the single biggest climate action in U.S. legislative history. The IRA’s tax incentives and public funding for clean energy have unleashed billions of dollars in private investment for renewable energy, EV manufacturing and battery supplies. Early in his presidency, Biden also restored U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement.

At Climate Week gatherings, Clarkson said, people will be wondering which of these policy frameworks U.S. officials and businesses will be working with.

“The climate world is looking at the U.S. election and thinking, ‘You know, we can’t really afford another rollback,'” she said.

‘China will be looking’

As the special envoy on climate change for President Barack Obama, Todd Stern helped to negotiate the Paris Agreement to its successful conclusion in 2015, only to watch President Trump pull the U.S. out of the agreement two years later.

“It made me really angry,” Stern told Newsweek. Stern will speak at a Climate Week event on Monday and has also written a history of the Paris Agreement negotiations, titled Landing the Paris Climate Agreement, which will be released next month.

Stern said other countries were angry about the U.S. withdrawal as well. “A lot of the structure of the Paris Agreement reflected things that the United States kind of had to have, and so people had accommodated us,” he said. The negotiations involved some painful concessions to reach consensus, and when the U.S. suddenly pulled out, other countries “were furious,” he said.

Even with the U.S. back in the agreement, Stern said, that history colors international attitudes about climate commitments now that Trump is again close to the White House.

“They know that Trump will do what Trump does, and they’ve been through it before,” Stern said.

The Paris Agreement’s real-world results rest on climate target plans from each country, Stern explained, and a new round of those commitments is coming soon. A strong plan from China is especially important, Stern said.

“China is responsible for 30 percent of global emissions right now, so more than double the U.S.,” he said and predicted that China’s approach to the next round of Paris commitments will be heavily influenced by U.S. leadership.

“China will be looking for sure to see who the American president is going to be,” he said.

A Need for Certainty

Climate Group’s Clarkson said that when the U.S. reasserted its leadership on climate action, it sent ripple effects internationally, spurring a sense of national competition. U.S. policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act don’t just aim to boost clean energy in general, they aim specifically to grow clean energy jobs in the U.S. with domestic production of solar panels, EVs, batteries and more.

“There’s a lot of ‘America first’ stuff in there,” Clarkson said. “It has been interesting to see that competition with other countries responding.” For example, she said, the U.S. move to create a new industry of “green” hydrogen production has moved other countries to try to match it.

“Other countries are responding, ‘Hang on, if America thinks it’s going to corner the market in green hydrogen, well, we want to do that.'”

A repeal of the IRA or other White House U-turns on climate policies, she argued, could undermine both U.S. and international action, as well as creating disruption in the private sector by adding uncertainty to business decision making.

“What companies want—and we hear this everywhere—is legislative certainty,” she said. “Investors, particularly, want to know, ‘What does the next five years look like? Because then I can put my money in there.'”

Regardless of the outcome of the election, she said, the fact remains that the world is not on track to meet science-based targets needed to avoid dangerous warming.

During Climate Week, Climate Group is releasing a new edition of “The Global To-Do List” calling for seven climate actions across key sectors. Those include paying workers in the coal industry when coal operations close, taxing oil and gas operations to fund clean energy sources and using technology mandates to hasten cleaner steel production.

“Everything we do has to be about that urgency,” Clarkson said. “Whoever wins
the election, there’s a lot of work to do.”

A look at the events on tap for this week also reveals emerging issues in the climate fight. For example, several events focus on artificial intelligence and climate. Salesforce is hosting a “Summit on AI and Climate” and several panels feature companies applying AI to clean tech and climate problems.

Newsweek is a media partner for Climate Week NYC this year and will host an event focusing on business efforts to rein in emissions along their supply chains. While many companies are working to cut carbon pollution arising from their operations and energy use, what are called Scope 1 and 2 emissions, most greenhouse gases for many companies come from their supply chains, known as Scope 3 emissions.

Despite the uncertainty over the election and its implications for climate policy, Clarkson said she has not seen evidence of business leaders retreating from their sustainability goals.

“We’ve even seen an increasing number of commitments,” she said. “They’re plowing on.”