The hidden side of New York Climate Week

The conversation on climate grand strategy is happening, softly

There was a lot to feel good about in New York Climate Week. The projects to get landowners in the Northeast paid for storing carbon in their forests, the hybrid buses for the developing world, the people working to honor indigenous knowledge, the mangrove restoration folks, the people protesting industrial krill farming, the finance bros thinking up new green bond structures and the chief sustainability officers looking to offset their emissions with nature-based projects.

That’s the bread and butter of climate week, and I’m glad it is. There are a lot of awesome projects in this space, and I’m 100% sure that if all of them succeeded, we’d live in a better planet than we do. It is also true that even if they all succeeded, our climate trajectory would change not at all.

I think of them as the Climate Feels, projects that may, theoretically, nibble away at the outer edges of the climate crisis, but that deep down are motivated by very normative concerns about the values humans embody as we interact with the living world more than with the climate as such.

There’s another climate week too, though it’s much less visible.

It takes place mostly in off-the-official-program closed-door sessions, over drinks at the bar, or in private homes.

Its focus is on Climate Grand Strategy. It treats climate as a strategic issue. It sees rising greenhouse concentrations as a systemic risk factor for geopolitical order and stability.

Climate grand strategy doesn’t usually make it onto the big public stage; it’s too scary. It sees the problem with a changing climate as the wars it provokes, the state breakdown it accelerates, the migration flows it sets in motion. You’re talking climate grand strategy when you’re talking about the insurability crisis real property faces in the U.S., and the implications for financial markets when trillions in real assets become stranded by extreme weather. You’re talking climate grand strategy when you’re considering India’s possible response to a go-it-alone solar geoengineering program from China, or when you’re discussing the political implications of pushing for an all-renewable grid in Germany, or California, or Britain.

I’ve always been more of a climate grand strategy guy, so I was heartened to find out that serious people at climate week tend to skip the Climate Feels. They’ve figured out ways of sussing out the quieter, but more transcendent debate.

Quietly, but seriously, people are discussing how a Solar Radiation Modification program could be structured to compensate countries that end up losing out from such an approach. They’re discussing how markets can be used to hedge against climate losses in a way that neither bankrupts the insurance industry nor makes housing even more unaffordable. Others are evaluating ways to scale up carbon dioxide removal so it can grow to geostrategic dimensions within, let’s say, a decade (and by “others” I do mean me.)

The Climate Feels is virtually all the public hears about the climate conversation. And I understand why. Climate Grand Strategy is complex, and for the most part, it doesn’t feel good. People join environmental causes for mostly spiritual reasons: something feels off in the way capitalism treats the natural world, and we want to heal that. Climate Grand Strategy is too coldly analytical to scratch that itch.

My private theory has always been that the Climate Feels is a uniquely First World phenomenon. People from developing countries don’t have enough affluence to feel afflicted by it. I think growing up in a poor country sort of innoculates you against the Climate Feels. When you’ve seen poverty —real, grinding, poor-country poverty— up close, you have a hard time getting worked up about plastic straws.

When I tell people I work on climate projects, the default assumption is that I’m on the Climate Feels side of the divide — because that’s the only side that the public has any real visibility into. Climate Grand Strategy feels niche, elitist and…well just not very green, if you see what I mean.

How you bridge the divide between these two worlds I really don’t know. I’m not even sure you’d want to. What I do know is that the balance between the two feels off. The more serious, less comfortable discussion is rendered almost invisible by the torrent of people on the Feels side of the divide. And that doesn’t strike me as healthy.