As Climate Week NYC comes to a close, let’s set aside for a moment the self-congratulatory backslapping for corporate commitments to incrementally reduce carbon emissions. The theme for this year’s event was ​“getting it done.” To do that, world powers will need to put money in the right places, while taking it away from the entities doing the most harm — and fast. It is an imperative outcome for COP26. 

This is an unfair fight, but it doesn’t have to be. In Thursday’s panel, ​“Cutting the Crap on Climate Finance Access: A Commitment to the Global South,” experts from across the globe welcomed the title because they’re sick and tired of the empty promises from the same wealthy nations that have contributed the most to global warming. 

“I really like the titling of all of this because the system of balance for access to climate finance is all crap,” said Diann Black-Layne, Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador for climate change and lead negotiator on climate change for the Alliance of Small Island Developing States. ​“We are now six years beyond the Paris Agreement, and we have a tremendous amount of financing for the fossil fuel industry, which is the largest emitter, by far, for subsidies. They get over $680 billion a year. So the governments that provide so-called climate finance to us are giving them over $600 billion. And on the high side, we get about $2.4 billion.”

Even with additional commitments from the EU this week, developed nations are still far short of their 2009 pledge of directing a total of $100 billion annually in climate finance to developing countries. 

Others on the panel, which was sponsored by RMI, were equally blunt. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)

“Access to finance means survival,” said Una May Gordon, principal director of climate change with the Jamaican Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation. ​“Let us stop talking and put the money on the table. Survival it is for us.”

And finally, if you’re going to catch up on this informative panel on a Friday afternoon and you’re feeling feisty, you could turn this into a game by taking a drink every time someone says the word ​“crap.” Depending on your beverage of choice, Canary Media does not take responsibility for your condition by the end of the viewing. If you do go this route, please be sure to let us know what your drink of choice was @canarymediainc.

I’m not sure anyone needed a Seth Meyers rewrite of Billy Joel’s ​“We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but that’s what the first Climate Night gave us. 

On Wednesday night, seven late-night show hosts aligned to deliver segments on climate change as part of Climate Week NYC. Despite the coordination that went into planning Climate Night, the treatment of this weighty topic was all over the place, with only a minority calling out fossil fuel interests as a key problem in addressing the crisis. 

Jimmy Kimmel brought on Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist who is co-director of the Climate Center at Texas Tech University and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy. 

“Ninety companies produced two-thirds of all the heat-trapping gases that have caused climate change since the dawn of the industrial era,” she told Kimmel. ​“You could fit all their CEOs in three buses.”

Kimmel wasn’t the only one to address the fact that the primary problem is our reliance on fossil fuels and the entrenched interest of fossil fuel companies, in particular. 

“Chevron, Exxon, Shell and BP are responsible for 10 percent of the world’s carbon emissions,” Stephen Colbert said during his monologue. ​“There has to be systemic change backed up by government action to make everyone make the right choices, not the easy ones. If it weren’t for government intervention, we’d still be eating lead paint chips dipped in fresh asbestos hummus.”

Hats off to Colbert for providing a way for people to encourage government action. The Late Show​’s bandleader, New Orleans native Jon Batiste, spoke about that city’s long recovery after Hurricane Ida, whose strength was in part driven by climate change. Batiste noted the #CodeRedCongress initiative, led by Climate Power, via which constituents can email their representatives in Congress to urge them act on climate change by passing the Build Back Better Act. (Read more about why this legislation is so important in Canary’s coverage here.) Bill Gates also mentioned the importance of this legislation when speaking to Late Late Show host James Corden, but he didn’t explicitly ask the audience to engage with their politicians. 

From there, it was kind of a mixed bag. Samantha Bee took a deep dive in another direction, into a very unsexy element of basic infrastructure: sewage. She spoke about the problems of combined sewer overflow, especially in the face of increasing storms and the racial inequity in sewage services in the U.S. She also had a call to action that does not require a majority in Congress: Stop throwing wipes into the toilet (yes, even the ones that claim they’re flushable). 

Jimmy Fallon provided some actionable advice via his guest Jane Goodall, who spoke of her new initiative Trees for Jane, which has a mission of broad-scale, community-based forest protection and restoration. And yet, while forest and ocean health are both key to mitigating climate change (Jeff Bezos just dropped $1 billion on efforts in this area), hyping the notion that planting trees can significantly mitigate climate change without mentioning the need to drastically slash fossil fuel use made it feel like a segment that could have been sponsored by Chevron. Fossil fuels also didn’t merit a mention from The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah as he spoke about the myriad ways climate change is affecting our planet. 

But back to Seth Meyers for a minute. He spent more than seven minutes talking about the effects of climate change we’ve seen this year in powerful weather events before he got around to something meatier in his monologue (and he later brought on John Kerry to talk about climate change action). 

“How is it acceptable that a guy who profits personally from coal is writing our climate policy?” Meyers asked, referring to Joe Manchin (D-WV), chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who earned nearly $500,000 in dividends last year from a coal brokerage firm he founded in the 1980s. ​”It’s like if instead of hiding his gambling, Pete Rose is calling his bookie from second base.”

Kimmel and Meyers arguably had the most comprehensive approaches, and yet they still only scratched the surface of the complexity of the climate crisis. The question now is whether these television hosts will turn Climate Night into regular, ongoing climate coverage.

Climate Week NYC coincides with the U.N. General Assembly in New York — and for good reason. Many influential leaders are in town, some of whom will make appearances at Climate Week events across the city (assuming they don’t get snared in the insufferable midtown traffic created by the U.N. being in session). 

As the world confronts the climate crisis, it also means that big energy and climate-related announcements are amplified by these concurrent gatherings. That is certainly true of Chinese President Xi Jinping announcing that the country will stop financing new coal plants outside of China. Within China, however, coal capacity remains the dominant source of power. 

This summer, Bill Gates promised to drum up $1 billion to help drive down the ​“green premiums” for technologies that could bring hard-to-decarbonize sectors of the economy all the way to 100 percent zero-carbon. 

This week, Gates closed the deal, landing $100 million apiece in charitable donations from BlackRock and Microsoft, as well as commitments from General Motors, Bank of America, American Airlines, Boston Consulting Group and ArcelorMittal to cover the remainder. The latter companies are pledging a combination of equity investments and offtake agreements for the green hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, long-duration energy storage and direct-air carbon-capture projects the funds will seek to bring to commercial-scale operations. 

These technologies aren’t commercially viable today, Gates explained in a Tuesday talk at Climate Week NYC. That’s why Breakthrough Energy Catalyst — the latest iteration of his Breakthrough Energy umbrella organization — is putting its money into reducing the risk for majority investors, working with the European Union, the U.S. Department of Energy and private-sector backers to bring them the rest of the way there. 

“We have kind of a deadlock unless we can use innovation to bring that green premium down very, very dramatically,” Gates told Climate Group CEO Helen Clarkson. ​“Why would a middle-income country commit if the costs are just so incredibly high?” 

“The rich countries have a lot of that power to innovate. But we not only have to invent things in the lab — we [also] have to demonstrate that these things work reliably so that over time, the price of things like green hydrogen can come down.” 

Surrounded by soaring views of Manhattan, with the Empire State Building lit green in honor of Climate Week NYC, Jeff Bezos took to the stage at the event’s opening day reception, along with John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, and Amina Mohammed, deputy secretary-general of the U.N. and chair of the U.N.‘s Sustainable Development Group.

While many who work in climate solutions refer to the 2020s as ​“the climate decade,” Kerry’s focus was much more on the short term. ​“We are in the race of our lifetime in the next 40 days,” he said of the lead-up to the COP26 talks in Glasgow. 

“Every bit of the science tells us we can do this. It isn’t a question of an absence of capacity; it’s a question of an absence of the will and political decision-making to make it happen,” he added. ​“It is far less expensive to invest in this now than it is to wait and clean up the damage…storm after storm after storm.”

Bezos matched that call for investment with his announcement of $1 billion for conservation from Bezos Earth Fund, with an initial focus on the Congo Basin, parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean and the tropical Andes. This move is in line with an international push known as ​“30x30” that seeks to conserve 30 percent of the planet’s land and water area by 2030. 

“The loss of nature and the changing climate aren’t two separate problems,” he said during the announcement. ​“They are two sides of the same coin. We cannot reverse climate change without addressing the loss of nature and vice versa.”

Gloria Walton, CEO of The Solutions Project, discusses why carbon-neutral goals aren’t enough and how this energy transition can — and must — do better when it comes to delivering a more equitable energy system than the one we have now that has its roots in colonialism. 

New York Governor Kathy Hochul snaked her way through midtown traffic to join the opening day of Climate Week NYC and brought a few goodies for the crowd. Just four weeks (minus one day) into the job, Gov. Hochul (D) announced that New York is upping its solar goal, increasing it from 6 gigawatts of installed capacity by 2025 to 10 gigawatts by 2030. 

Additionally, she said, ​“We’re bringing extension cords down through New York,” she announced. ​“This is exciting.” New York will build two new transmission lines from upstate and Quebec to the borough of Queens, allowing New York City to end its reliance on fossil fuel power plants, according to the governor. Referring to the climate crisis, Hochul added that she never wants her yet-to-be-conceived grandkids to ask her, ​“How could you let his happen?” 

The European Union has proposed directing an additional 4 billion euros annually to developing nations for climate finance through 2027, according to Reuters. Even though that’s on top of about $25 billion the EU already commits annually, developed nations are still far short of their 2009 pledge of directing a total of $100 billion annually in climate finance to developing countries. ​“Some [African] economies will be devastated,” Vivienne Yeda Apopo, director general of the East African Development Bank, said at the opening day of Climate Week NYC, speaking of countries whose chief exports are fossil fuels. Her focus going into the COP26 talks in Glasgow later this year is developing ​“pragmatic solutions” and a clear roadmap for the next 24 months. 

Good morning! It’s the first day of Climate Week NYC, and even before the official events have kicked off, corporate pledges are already rolling in. Amazon and Global Optimism have added 86 new signatories to The Climate Pledge, which has companies commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — 10 years ahead of the target set by the Paris Agreement. That means new and existing signatories, including consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, truck maker Scania and Norwegian fintech startup Enfuce, will have to focus on slashing emissions or paying for offsets instead of fundamentally reshaping their businesses. If the pledges from the more than 200 participating companies are met, it would amount to nearly 2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions reductions from a 2020 baseline, or 5.4 percent of global annual emissions.