The climate movement has been captured by a professional managerial class that prefers charity galas and virtue hoarding to building power.
“Eat, drink and be merry…for tomorrow we die.” - Dave Matthews Band
According to Climate Group, who are the lead hosts of the annual New York City (NYC) Climate Week, this year’s gathering will attract over 100,000 people to the Big Apple who will be attending over 1,000 events throughout the week. Climate Group proclaims that NYC Climate Week is, “the world’s leading and most dynamic climate platform, “ and further notes that this year’s main focus will be, “the energy, the impact, and the action that we drive together.” There’s no doubt that we are in perilous times when it comes to a climate crisis that is only being accelerated by the praxis of late stage capitalism and increased militarism, largely driven by the United States and its rapacious appetite for natural resources necessary to sustain a capital dictatorship and U.S. empire.
The consequences for this quest of unlimited growth, or what some neoliberals are insouciantly characterizing as “Abundance,” include 2026 being the hottest summer ever recorded in the U.S. and global emissions rising fast enough for the United Nations (UN) to issue a sobering report confirming that the earth will inevitable warm by at 1.8 degrees Celsius (exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold set during the Paris Climate Agreement - which is all but dead). The UN report also concludes that the inevitable 1.8 degree overshoot will result in cataclysmic, adverse impacts to human life/health, water systems, infrastructure, and entire economies - and we also know that those in the intentionally underdeveloped global south as well as the most marginalized and dehumanized communities of people in the global north will experience the worst of these impacts. The recent devastation in Nepal where a massive flood, the result of a massive glacier collapse due, in large part, to global warming, took the lives of over 1,000 people with more than 5,000 still missing, is a harbinger for what awaits us as the planet continues to warm and the capitalist status quo continues to flow.
With these material conditions in place, which is to say nothing about the increased proliferation of water, land, energy and emission-intensive hyperscale data centers to power artificial generative intelligence (AGI), you would think that NYC Climate Week 2026 would act as a collective hub to determine the collective ethos, collective action steps, and collective organizing necessary to prevent planetary entropy and self-inflicted ecocide. Unfortunately, NYC Climate Week will be anything but what is actually needed to vanquish a planet-killing climate crisis that is driven by a climate-killing economic system like racial capitalism. There isn’t even agreement on the scale of the crisis, much less the requisite steps to confront it. For instance, NYC Climate Week lead host Climate Group claims, “The context is shifting fast. Energy systems are being redesigned, supply chains are under pressure, and demand for electricity is rising, driven by electrification, AI and digital infrastructure. At the same time, the transition is unlocking new sources of growth, investment and long-term competitiveness.” The contradictions in this proclamation alone set the stage for why climate week is likely going to be climate weak when it comes to emerging from NYC with a collective and concerted policy, organizing, and mobilizing praxis that is scientific more than metaphysical. And it also reminds us of what economist Kenneth E. Boulding meant when he said, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” It appears as if NYC Climate Week 2026 is being hosted by a bunch of madmen (and women).
Do we really believe that the madmen and women of Climate Group are the best people to host a week’s-long event for developing climate change solutions when their primary partners include Big Tech and Big Tech-adjacent corporations like Google, AirTrunk, and Princeton Digital Group? These groups are currently in the midst of building some of the largest hyperscale data centers the world has ever seen that are projected, by some estimates, to add as much as 44 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year by 2030, which is the equivalent of adding 10 million new cars to U.S. roads. Clearly, enough people and organizations that make up and uphold the U.S. climate “movement” believe that it’s okay to attend climate conferences that are hosted and sponsored by climate killers, because they will all be in NYC for Climate Week - and we need to ask ourselves why that is.
Understanding what Climate Week is and what it isn’t is essential to comprehending why it’s effective only at being tawdry. Hundreds of thousands of people will descend into the Big Apple from across the nation and world, with their accompanying carbon footprints, where organizations that make up the climate “movement” (that, as we have previously established, is nothing more than a climate industry) will be waiting for them and convincing them that their panels will prove that they have the ultimate set of solutions to address the climate crisis at scale…just like they did last year and the year before that, and the year before that. The price tag to fly all those people to the Big Apple, feed them, house them, and wine and dine funders and other “important” climate personalities has to be in the millions of dollars. Compare that amount to what has been spent to organize for the liberation of communities like Cancer Alley, Gary, Indiana, and numerous fights throughout Indian Country and the truth becomes lucid - attendees aren’t attending Climate Week as much as showing the world how climate weak this “movement” is.
We must realize that the main reason why Climate Week is so climate weak is that it has become a trade show and an annual virtue-signaling/virtue-hoarding competition of the professional managerial class (PMC). In her book, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, Professor Catherine Liu explains,
“The PMC as a proxy for today’s ruling class is shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue: whenever it addresses a political and economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of “giving back” or reified forms of self-transformation.”
This not only describes NYC Climate Week adroitly, but also the entire U.S. climate industry that uses events like Climate Week as a platform to collect more philanthropic checks than muster the organizing muscle to check the climate crisis and its root causes. And as Liu names, the PMC has little to no concern for poor and working class people, but does like to speciously virtue signal on their behalf,
“They [the PMC] still believe themselves to be the heroes of history, fighting to defend innocent victims against their evil victimizers, but the working class is not a group they find worth saving, because by PMC standards, they do not behave properly: they are either disengaged politically or too angry to be civil. Liberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word empower when they talk about “people,” but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them.”
Climate Week does nothing to increase the power of poor and working class people nor put them in a better position to survive an increasingly severe climate crisis. By not centering poor and working people and recognizing the need for their leadership, urgency diminishes. This may be the reason we have observed greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures increasing since last year, while the sense of urgency has decreased. During Climate Week, urgency, instead, will be replaced by anodyne panels and talking points followed by expensive happy hours and after parties funded by the same people - bourgeois nonprofits, corporations, and philanthropists - who are facilitating our collective demise. Everyone will be partying like it’s 1999 [emissions levels] instead of embracing the attitude that we have 99 problems and climate change is a b^tch of one. Because lacking this attitude at Climate Week contributes to the rollback of climate policies like New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) rather than progress. The CLCPA, once viewed as the “nation’s leading climate law,” can now be characterized as a cautionary tale of what happens when “movements” capitulate for access to power, and then realize that the “access” is nothing more than the illusion of inclusion.
Even grassroots Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led groups are participating in, and contributing to, the charade of Climate Week as certain organizations have willingly allowed themselves to be elite-captured such that they can emerge as a new cadre of an environmental justice (EJ) bourgeoisie who are not at all different than the Black bourgeoisie described by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, "When the opportunity has been present, the black bourgeoisie has exploited the Negro masses as ruthlessly as have whites. As the intellectual leaders in the Negro community, they have never dared think beyond a narrow, opportunistic philosophy that provided a rationalization for their own advantages." And Frazier reminds us of the ultimate outcome when the once grassroots allows itself to be captured, “Living in a 'world of make-believe,' this class clung 'to the values of a white elite world that would never accept them." In the context of the climate crisis, Frazier is basically admonishing us all that “never accept them” is a death sentence for non-white and poor folk - because the PMC and the bourgeoisie will not be pulling strings for their token EJ bourgeoisie when material conditions deteriorate to the point of climate barbarism, they will be cutting them.
So the question that emerges, the question we must, as oppressed and colonized people, answer, yet again, is What is to be Done?
Some years ago, when I attended my first NYC Climate Week, I remember leaving one of the many panels I attended that day extremely frustrated and consumed by a feeling of despondency. As I was walking to my favorite pizza joint in the city, I recognized a friend - a rural organizer from Alabama- who herself looked less than thrilled. We grabbed a slice and went to a nearby bar to get a beer. It was there that she told me of a time when she somehow was granted access to an annual conference held by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - the right wing’s state-level policy and organizing arm. My friend explained to me that during ALEC conferences, there were only a few daily panels, and the rest of the day was spent with state caucuses who were, in real time, writing policy and organizing plans to ratify and implement their policies in their respective states. She also explained that they drafted contingency plans for scenarios when a given policy didn’t pass in a given year, and provided a hotline to assist with neutralizing impediments to a given ALEC initiative in almost every state.
That right there is what separates a robust and functioning conservative movement fighting, in part, to kill climate policy from a dysfunctional climate industry that allows itself to be steered and defined by neoliberal forces who hold positions that are too often indistinguishable from those of the likes of ALEC. Only a kinetic organizing and mobilization strategy can confront a challenge as kinetic as climate change. We simply cannot allow the PMC to reduce this crisis to weekly carnivals and trade shows where the goal is to raise more money rather than raise more awareness and more power that delivers the masses to a position of climate and environmental liberation (CEL). This will only occur when we collectively see climate change for what it is - a direct affront on the self-determination and people(s)-centered human rights of poor, oppressed, and colonized people, who must be the ones leading CEL initiatives. This will not occur this year’s Climate Week, which means that even though it will be hotter next year at this time, we, the masses, will still have to turn up the heat and seize the means of organizing the climate “movement” from the PMC, the bourgeoisie and the EU bourgeoisie in the same way that we need to seize the means of production from the capitalist dictatorship as a means for survival.
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
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