We’ve closed the books on another New York Climate Week, in all its congenial, productive, and exhausting glory. And more than ever before, all eyes were on the power sector.
Before we settle in for a restful — and in the Northeast, very, very rainy — weekend, we’ve rounded up a collection of takeaways from the Latitude Media team who were on the ground in New York. Coincidentally, our thoughts clustered around two main themes:
Techno-optimism is overriding climate fears
Lisa Martine Jenkins, news editor:
The most striking moment for me came at a lunch populated primarily by VCs and entrepreneurs. Two founders of companies looking to solve the problem of speed to power chatted onstage with an investor about their approach to the space. Most of what they said were things I’d heard before: unprecedented demand is bringing enormous opportunity for novel technologies, data centers are now willing to sacrifice a little reliability for faster connection, etc.
But then came a “would you rather” question, asking them to choose between the data center boom continuing at its current pace but fueled entirely by gas, versus slowing down and fueled by renewables. Neither founder hesitated: They want it to continue at pace. And despite myself, I was surprised.
The data center boom, yes, has spurred rapid innovation that will surely benefit the energy transition. And it’s a boon for the many financiers pouring money into the space, some of whom were in the room. However, it’s also creating huge problems: for local communities, the climate, and the increasingly strained grid. Even though this was a New York Climate Week event, no one unpacked the emissions implications of that first path. Their rationale was that the solutions the cleantech sector is building will meet the moment so completely that even locking in gas infrastructure for decades more won’t be a problem.
Especially compared with the somber mood that overtook last year’s Climate Week — held eight months after the second Trump administration came to office — it was an almost startling return to faith, not in the government or international cooperation, but in the markets.
Nicola Phillips, chief of staff:
New York Climate Week is always, and increasingly, a collision of techno-capital-optimism and the desperate energy that existentialism fuels. It can feel, from one moment, panel, conversation to the next, depending on the room you're in, like whiplash. Is AI going to destroy the planet, or save us? If this week is any indication, the jury is very much still out.
One example came at an event that Lisa moderated on Wednesday, where panelists made the case that the benefits of AI data centers will “trickle down” to consumers, a Reaganomics-era capitalist party line that — at least in economics terms — has been widely disproved. Another: Illinois Gov. Pritzker illuminated the particularly strange moment we are in with the benefits of AI versus the risks: The AI labs “tell us AI can kill us all, but they are also going public. So…this is 'you're rich! But you're dead.'”
