A Question for Climate Week
Is it Time to Pivot?
Next week, New York City will be abuzz as leaders from government, business, nonprofits, and philanthropy (many of them friends and colleagues I deeply admire) gather for Climate Week 2025. It’s always an energizing time as we share ideas and collectively push for faster climate progress. That spirit of collaboration is worth celebrating.
But before we dive into another week of panels and announcements, let’s step back and ask ourselves:
How are we doing?
On the one hand, there is plenty to be proud of: accelerating clean energy investment, increased climate awareness, and new promising technologies — all signs of progress and reason for optimism.
On the other hand, there are many reasons to be discouraged: greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, public policy (especially—but not only—in the US) is moving fast in exactly the wrong direction, and overall progress is falling far short of what we expected.
When you look at the Climate Week agenda, however, it feels a bit like business as usual.
I’m a former Wall Street banker, so please indulge me in a metaphor you may not like at first. Pretend for a moment that the environmental movement is a publicly traded company. Call it Enviro Co. Its stock price would likely be way down right now. Shareholders would be restless. The board of directors would be thinking about replacing the CEO and shaking up management. Activist investors would be circling, demanding radical change. That’s what happens in the private sector when results fall short of expectations. Business as usual isn’t accepted.
We can’t take this metaphor too far. For the environmental movement, there is no stock price, no single board of directors, and no easy way to force change across such a diffuse movement. But I think the metaphor is instructive. We can—and I would argue, we should—try thinking in the same way about the environmental movement we care so deeply about.
How do we decide on what kind of change to pursue? In the business world, everybody speaks up. CEOs and management teams, shareholders, research analysts, journalists, hedge funds, customers, government officials, and employees all weigh in with their ideas on what the struggling company should do. This is good—especially for leaders. They don’t have to figure out what to do by themselves. Rigorous debate leads to new strategies and thorough consideration of all ideas. Eventually, decisions are made and new initiatives get underway. Can environmentalists do the same? I say yes.
So let the discussion begin. How do you think the environmental movement in general—or, individual NGOs in particular—should change?
I’ll go first. Here are some high-level ideas I’d submit to Enviro Co’s Board of Directors for their consideration. I’ll follow up with more detailed proposals in future posts.
Double Down on Ambitious Efforts to Build a Majority Voter Coalition for Pragmatic Environmental Progress.
This newsletter has long argued that the only time-proven strategy to address environmental challenges is regulation that requires better behavior from polluters. Yes, getting legislation like this passed today looks exceedingly difficult. But we can start now by engaging with the centrist voters who are not yet part of the environmental coalition. This would mean listening to them, addressing their concerns, and discussing how climate progress would benefit them directly. It would also likely require new policy ideas that yield climate progress without imposing immediate costs that they would feel are too high. Over time, this kind of dialogue would allow us to build a bigger coalition of voters, which would, in turn, enable us to elect leaders who will prioritize climate matters. None of this would be easy or quick work. But it would be doable, in my view, for at least three reasons:
We don’t have to convince everyone. We only need a majority coalition. We don’t have to engage with anti-climate zealots. We can instead focus on reasonable voters in the center.
We have something positive to offer voters. Most environmental challenges can be addressed with policies that create net economic gains—jobs, growth, stability, and— most importantly right now—affordability. Voters want that. Research shows, for example, that voters understand that clean energy is cheaper, locally available, and unlimited in supply.
Voters also care about securing a safe future for their children and grandchildren. They want to protect what they love. The environment is a key part of that.
I learned a lot about this first-hand when I led The Nature Conservancy. TNC operates 50 chapters in the US, each with a board of trustees that, to a large degree, lines up with the prevailing political flavor of the state—i.e., red or blue. But members have a shared desire to protect nature in common-sense ways, and the organization operates in a non-partisan manner. Every now and again, I would screw up on this front. I would say or write something that would come off as partisan to red state trustees. They would be angry, and they would be right to be. My response would be to fly to their state to meet with them in person and to apologize for my mistake. But then I would switch back to TNC’s mission and remind everyone that we agreed on much more than we disagreed on; that the stakes were high; and that we had to stay focused on making progress. And then I would do my best to do the hardest thing of all—just listen. What strategies did they think would work? Where could we find common ground so that most TNC stakeholders could get behind an idea? It always seemed to work—it’s actually not as difficult as you might think. I’m not saying it will be as easy to build a majority voter coalition for climate progress across the US, but I am saying it would be foolish not to try.
Ask Business to Do More—But Ask for Things That Make Sense for Business to Do
There is nothing wrong with asking business to address climate on a voluntary basis. Great things have occurred as a result. The mistake is concluding that such efforts will ever truly scale. Business leaders don’t really have the option of prioritizing environmental outcomes over business results—they are hired hands who work for owners, and owners demand the best financial results.
Also, environmentalists shouldn’t try to tell business what to do. For the most part, environmentalists don’t know what businesses should do. Running a business is harder than it looks. But we can ask questions and push toward positive policy recommendations. The main question to ask: How might more ambitious climate policy benefit a company? There are many levers here—any policy that would lead to higher revenues, lower costs, more confidence for long-term capital spending, reduced risks, more innovation, or greater engagement with customers or shareholders is fair game.
Some examples:
At least behind closed doors, most CEOs would acknowledge that they are worried about securing all the energy and electricity they will need over the years ahead. They know that demand for energy is up and increasing sharply with activities underway like AI and data center growth. They also have concerns about volatile fossil fuel prices. They don’t just talk about energy security the way politicians do—they really need it.
Many CEOs will share that they want full access to the emerging and attractive business opportunities associated with renewable energy. They don’t want the US to cede that market to China.
CEOs would likely favor trade policy that ensures less clean or more carbon-intensive operators from overseas don’t have cost advantages selling their products in our domestic market.
CEOs—especially ones who are doing as much climate positive stuff as they can—want a level playing field. They want policy that will hold their competitors to the same high standard.
CEOs would also favor policy that is strongly supported by voters, so it would not change wildly from election to election.
CEOs of global companies would like policy in the US to be as aligned as possible with the other major markets in which their companies compete.
And so on. That’s a lot to work with.
On the other hand, the same CEOs will be unenthusiastic about climate policy that raises costs or introduces a lot of new red tape but doesn’t really improve climate outcomes. We shouldn’t want policy like that either. And—apologies if this sounds obvious—CEOs don’t want to be criticized or blamed for all bad climate outcomes to date. They generally believe that they and their teams are working hard to deliver in the best way the products and services that their customers (including us) want.
If we have a dialogue along these lines, the most important thing that we could ask business to voluntarily take on would be to put their prodigious lobbying capabilities to work designing and pushing for the climate policies that will lead to the outcomes we seek.
Be Inclusive. Be Kind.
When I was trying to figure out how to transition from Wall Street to the environmental sector, most of the experienced environmentalists I reached out to encouraged me. There was so much I didn’t know, but they didn’t care. They were kind to me, and they acted like they believed that the environmental movement would benefit if it were to draw in more players with different backgrounds and capabilities, including people like me. I would never have been able to do any of the things I’ve done over the last 20 years without their help.
I hope that same spirit prevails today. It’s not always easy in these divisive, polarized, and sometimes mean-spirited times to remain open-minded about building the most diverse coalition possible. But we’ll have more success building dialogue and coalitions with diverse voters and diverse business leaders if our team is similarly diverse. Right now, we should particularly lean in on welcoming young people into the environmental community. Why? First, we’re leaving them a mess. Second, we’ll benefit from their fresh way of seeing things anew.
If Enviro Co prioritized these three big picture initiatives noted above, I think our metaphorical stock price would go up.
Our goal in this newsletter is to generate the broadest and most open-minded brainstorming possible about how we can best reset in order to accelerate progress. What do you think?
Onward,
