The Absurdity I Saw At Climate Week NYC Deserves A Response

You can be forgiven if you didn’t know Climate Week NY just happened. Nine days, hundreds of events, and an official schedule somehow includes a session on “free writing” and poetry to reconnect with “a shared climate-conscious community” before pivoting to a workshop on turning old clothes into upcycled fashion. Somewhere in Manhattan, grown adults are processing their climate grief with slam poetry before repairing a torn shirt as an act of planetary healing.

It’s all funny. But it’s also politically dangerous. The uncomfortable truth is that mocking Climate Week is easy, but this extravaganza of left-wing social theory and radical environmentalism is backed by billions of dollars of philanthropic spending — and it will continue to radicalize young people until conservatives start fighting back.

Capital Research Center found that environmental groups spent a record $2.4 billion in 2019 alone. By 2020, nearly 200 environmentalist nonprofits collectively raised $3.2 billion, up half a billion dollars from the year before, with just seven top funders responsible for $1.8 billion of that. The Sierra Club alone brought in $255 million that year. This isn’t a scrappy grassroots movement. It’s a financial apparatus the size of the Soros empire with the fervor of a cult.

The Sunrise Movement — the activist group whose co-founder William Lawrence just won a Democratic congressional primary in Michigan on a platform of banning AI data centers outright — has laid out an internal four-phase plan stretching to 2032, aiming explicitly for what its leadership calls a “political revolution” and a “new system.” Its executive director has said publicly that “there is no serious way to think about stopping the climate crisis under a fascist government.”

That is not an environmental movement. It’s a revolutionary one painted green while being sold to a generation of young Americans as the only serious response to a warming planet.

And it’s winning converts. When Gallup asked Americans last fall what they like about each political party, environmental policy ranked among the top reasons people cited for favoring Democrats. Gallup has also found the widest partisan gap on record over whether to prioritize the environment or the economy — 78 percent of Democrats now say the environment should come first, compared to just 20 percent of Republicans.

Now, this is a false dichotomy. Economic growth and environmental protection go hand in hand. But it reveals a real problem: one party has a near monopoly on voters who care about the environment; the other barely has any.

That gap didn’t always exist. As recently as the 1980s and 90s, majorities of Republicans agreed with Democrats that the environment should be a priority. The left didn’t win this issue because their ideas are good. They won it because they were the only ones talking seriously about environmental concerns.

That’s what makes the conservative response to Climate Week so important. It’s not enough to ignore it or mock it while young voters are radicalized by far-left zealots. If we do that, the next generation won’t simply care about climate change. They’ll think the only way to care about the environment is to destroy the American economy, nationalize industry, reject abundance, ban data centers, and outlaw fossil fuels.

Conservatives should respond with solutions that protect the environment without destroying our country in the process.

First off, we can counter China, the largest emitter on Earth by far. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Climate Week Warrior condemning the communists in Beijing. But those who actually care about the Earth could easily support policies like imposing tariffs on China for its pollution.

Likewise, any reasonable climate-concerned voter should revel in American natural gas, which has replaced much dirtier fuel and brought down global emissions. Other conservative policies include deregulating emissions-free nuclear power, reclaiming the American-made solar industry from China, and greenlighting AI development, which is driving the largest private-sector renewable energy buildout in history.

In fact, we already have a winning message on the environment: our policies actually reduce emissions while also promoting a future of energy abundance and technological innovation. Our problem isn’t that conservative policies harm the environment. We’re just not making the case for how conservative governance helps.

Climate Week is easy to laugh at, and it deserves ridicule. But when the unintentional comedy show is done, the billions of dollars in left-wing philanthropy, youth organizing infrastructure, and political operations behind the environmental left will still be there. If conservatives don’t invest in the fight and make our case, the green radicals will continue to win the next generation — and they will have the last laugh.

Chris Johnson is the founder and president of the American Energy Leadership Institute.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.