I'm working through what I saw, heard, and learned at New York Climate Week. This is the first of a multi-part series. See the end of this newsletter for a quick aside on what Climate Week is like.
If you've been around long enough to remember last year's writeup, New York Climate Week 2025 was all AI, all the time. 2026 was... different.
Suddenly, AI isn't the answer. Don't get me wrong: there wasn't a single event, panel, speaker, or ad that didn't reference AI in some way. But instead of "hand over all of your personal information, professional data, and general operations to our AI overlords," that dominated 2025, in 2026 the vibe was "yeah, we can all agree that AI sucks, but my AI thing is different." There was a massive distancing from last year's narrative. As I said to a friend, it felt like there were cracks that were letting the light through.
So what changed? The public pushback on hyperscale datacenters — which also influences the construction of any datacenter — was top of mind for everyone. Now, there was a wide range of opinions about this. Organizations like the Southern Environmental Law Center saw this as a good opportunity to stand their ground and protect the health of people and environment in the U.S. South. On the flip side, the financial and consulting orgs talked more about how they now need to "rewrite the playbook" for getting datacenters approved. Apparently, it used to take little more than a gift of a park or a fire truck to get signoff. Now there's an entire PR campaign necessary.
But it's not just the energy it uses, it's what it's being used for. It's also increasing enabled emissions from additional fossil fuel production. Turns out that one of the things that it's really, really good at is making fossil fuel production more economically feasible because it's easier to find new reserves, cut costs for extraction, drill faster and extract even more oil from existing wells. “If you drill a well and you capitalise on AI and digitalisation, you can increase the productivity two times as much.” Awesome.
AI is absolutely taking jobs. Well, maybe not "taking" them. But the perception that AI can replace people has definitely led to unemployment in nearly all sectors. This has created an unprecedented shift in employment. But if you listen to grumblings from middle management, they're now realizing that they are wildly understaffed and AI can't do it all, but upper management isn't giving them the budget to hire humans. There does seem to still an infinite budget available for tokens as they keep on doubling down.
The fancy people all assume that everyone is using AI for everything. This was kind of wild to me. It seemed like the highest profile people with the biggest titles were the ones using AI for everything: work summaries, work creation, travel planning... even family scheduling, monitoring kids' homework completion, and (god help us) as companions for the kids. And they assume that everyone else is doing the same thing. It is absolutely incomprehensible that there might be people who aren't handing over everything to ChatGPT.
This comes at the same time as AI organizations voicing concerns about existential threats. As one hallway conversation went, "Yeah, there's an existential threat: even if used 'the right way,' they're actively destroying the planet."
And content pros aren't on board. Button coincided with Climate Week this year, which meant that I was seeing the macro trends outside my hotel room, and the industry-specific trends through my computer. An AI Support Group chat in Slack gathered quite a bit of traction as "A place to scream into the void about AI." General consensus: if it's not doing a great job with the work itself, and it's killing the planet in the process, then WTF?
But the economy.... But here's the problem: at one financial session, they ran through graphs on the state of the U.S. economy. If you take out AI-related industries — tech giants, chip makers, construction services, raw materials suppliers, etc. — the economy is flat-out tanking. This is the only thing holding it all together is the AI economy. So, uh, that's not concerning at all.
Tune in next week when we talk about energy. Because really, that was the theme of the year.
What is Climate Week? It's a massive, decentralized set of events happening in New York City in conjunction with the U.N. General Assembly meeting, so the city is simultaneously clogged with motorcade diplomats and NGOs heading to the United Nations building, and reportedly 100,000 Climate Week attendees. Events are held by every type of organization imaginable, covering grassroots movements, climate tech startups, Big 5 consulting firms, and loads of Wall Street finance. My interests generally lean towards consulting and finance because they see where the money is going. Unsurprisingly, everything follows the money.