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.
It takes a while for me to synthesize the things that I learned at Climate Week. How are they relevant to us as humans? As citizens? As content professionals? There are so many events, so many layers, and so many perspectives that have to simmer and come together. My brain becomes a red string board, making connections to seemingly unrelated things.
The first two post-Climate Week issues of the newsletter were easy. Everyone wants to hear about AI and energy. But what about the other stuff?
Everything is interconnected. It's really interesting to me when I see the villain narrative surface. Who is the villain at this particular talk or event? Is it the politicians? The datacenters? The environmentalists who delay "progress" to protect esoteric flora or fauna? The billionaires? (Ok, yeah, it's probably the latter.)
But in all seriousness, there's a fascinating element at play, which is the perception that if we overcome Thing X, then all the other Things will fall into place.
This, of course, is nonsense. Everything is interconnected.
How so? Ok, we talked about how hyperscale datacenters need a metric shit-ton of energy in order to operate. Ok, so they're the villain, right? Well... the rise of the datacenter (villain!) coincides with the rise of electrification (hero!), which reveals the antiquity of the electric grid (crisis!) which requires massive investment from wealthy individuals (heroes?) who also are invested in AI (villains?) and want to make sure that the datacenter buildout goes forward unimpeded. This requires buy-in from politicians (villains!) but also community activists (heroes!), both of which have historically been able to be swayed with gifts both monetary (bad!) and infrastructure-based, like schools and parks and fire trucks (is this good? I'm confused).
Take away the datacenter and you're still left with an aging electric grid and no one willing to pay for it. So now there are new villains in new and slightly different battles.
But are there more people in sustainability jobs? No. In fact, a lot of sustainability jobs — jobs with sustainability in the title — have gone away.
What??
But here's the thing: I talked with a guy from LinkedIn who says that more jobs than ever have sustainability themes embedded into them. They're not going away, they're just becoming part of the normal operation. It's the "every job is a climate job" mentality. So this thing that appears bad on the surface is actually a sign that sustainability and resilience are just maturing.
That's a good thing, right? Everything is a "yes and no" answer. Yes, because we want these kinds of decisions to be part of normal workflows, not the domain of one person. But... we all know that we're understaffed and overworked, so if sustainability is one of 80-billionty responsibilities, it's getting only one eighty-billionth of their attention.
So what do we do? If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that there's a lot of top-down push to do Things that Benefit Few and Harm Many. And the only way to counteract that is from the bottom-up. We need to band together collaboratively to build the world we want.
And no, I don't naively think that I will singlehandedly stop a datacenter, but we've seen that together we can stop a datacenter. We can feed our community even when the official safety net is gone. We can band together in a natural disaster. We know how to be good, collaborative people working towards common goals. We know how to be good neighbors and colleagues and collaborators. We need to put that to use.
One last thought: don't confuse information with knowledge. There was a repeated refrain at Climate Week: we have all of the world's knowledge at our fingertips, so we should be able to accomplish XYZ.
No.
We have the world's information at our fingertips. Information is facts and data. Knowledge, on the other hand, is the application of that information. It's taking experience and context and taking information to the next level.
AI can give you information. It can't give you knowledge. You have to work for knowledge.
Any questions? At the end of the three-week recap, are there any outstanding questions? What's missing? What did you want to know about? Reply to this email and I'll answer if I can.
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.