Climate Week NYC 2025: Heard Off-Stage
Each year, Climate Week NYC provides a pulse check on the state of climate finance and the energy transition. This year’s headlines were predictable: resilience, adaptation, climate tech, and the growing role of AI. But the more interesting stories were revealed in side conversations, acknowledged off-mic, and shared in one-on-one meetings.
1. Green Hushing in Full Force
At Deloitte’s Climate Day, the message was clear: boards and executives are still acting on sustainability, but they’re talking about it less. We heard this echoed in multiple settings. Companies and investors are continuing with climate plans and transition strategies, but often in stealth mode—keeping a low profile to avoid political blowback. While this might sound concerning, there’s an upside.
This so-called green hushing isn’t necessarily negative. In fact, by depoliticizing sustainability, it frees firms to focus on execution—quietly improving efficiency, building resilience, and positioning for long-term value creation.
2. From Emissions Targets to Value Creation
At the ICE Climate & Capital Conference one theme stood out: the investment lens is shifting. Strict emissions-reduction targets have proven difficult to achieve and easy to politicize. Now the focus is moving toward the intersection of decarbonization potential, energy efficiency, and the bottom line.
This is not about abandoning emissions goals—it’s about embedding them in value creation.
Efficiency solutions that lower emissions while enhancing operating performance (whether HVAC systems, resilient infrastructure, or smarter water and grid technology) are attracting capital. For investors, the new question isn’t only “how much CO₂ can we cut?” but also “how does sustainability improve fund performance?”
At the Moody’s Adaptation & Resilience event, this shift was explicit; audience polling showed adaptation far outweighed measurement as the top priority. The focus on insurance innovation—from catastrophe bonds to parametric products—reflects the same pragmatism. Investors want solutions that close the $150 billion protection gap between economic damages and insured losses, not just better climate models.
3. Scaling Climate Tech: A Reality Check
At nearly every event and in investor discussions throughout the week, climate tech funding was the hot topic. But beneath the optimism, a more candid reality was the “missing middle.”
Venture capital funds early-stage innovation, but once a climate tech company needs tens or hundreds of millions to build its first commercial plant, VCs typically won’t write checks that large. Infrastructure investors, meanwhile, want proven cash flows, not deployment-stage experiments. Promising technologies get stranded between funding stages.
At Heatmap House’s “Up Next in Climate Tech” session, Dawn Lippert of Elemental Impact put it bluntly: “We are trying to finance the energy transition with venture capital. It’s a total mistake.” Companies are “trying to deploy, trying to build their first plants…It takes quite a lot of capital, and there’s no one to hand it out.”
Our view—reinforced by conversations during the week—is that the claim “investing for impact guarantees better returns” oversimplifies reality. Climate tech won’t scale on good intentions alone. What’s needed are first-loss investors—those willing to take the early hit so mainstream capital (including investors indifferent to climate) can come in at scale. Without that bridge, too many solutions risk stalling before they can be deployed.
“Climate Week NYC 2025 reminded us that the energy transition is still moving forward—just more quietly, more pragmatically, and often in directions the official agenda didn’t anticipate.”
4. The China Factor: Climate Progress and Risk
China loomed large across sessions. At Heatmap House, Tom Steyer opened with the statement: China’s fossil fuel use has already peaked—a potential inflection point for global emissions.
At the same event, Dawn Lippert highlighted the structural disadvantage facing U.S. firms: while American climate tech struggles with the financing “missing middle,” China methodically supports companies from pilot to scale with state-backed capital. At the ICE Climate panels, participants acknowledged that China dominates large parts of the clean energy supply chain, from solar to batteries.
The climate benefits are clear, and the geopolitical risks are equally real. With the U.S. administration rolling back renewable support and the EU struggling to keep pace, China’s dominance in supply chains and manufacturing is driving a reshuffling of global economic power.
The question isn’t whether to celebrate China’s climate progress or fear its industrial dominance. It’s whether the U.S. can develop financing models competitive enough to keep pace—or whether it will cede leadership in the defining industry of the next decades.
5. AI: The Elephant in the Room
No session at Climate Week escaped the AI conversation. Even when it wasn’t on the official agenda, it dominated hallways and one-on-one meetings.
At Deloitte’s Day 2 keynote, the question was posed directly: “Does AI give us the best chance of solving climate change?” Most said no. The New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells argued we already have the technology we need—the solar capacity waiting to connect to the grid exceeds the grid’s total capacity. The bottleneck is political will, not innovation.
The KPMG event framed AI as both accelerator and liability: it can optimize energy systems and improve ESG reporting, but large language models consume massive computing power. AI can drive sustainability only if its own resource demands are managed responsibly.
At Heatmap House, this paradox came into sharp focus. Rick Needham of Commonwealth Fusion Systems discussed the race to commercialize fusion energy—in part to meet the massive power demands AI itself is creating. Meanwhile, Christian Anderson of Watershed showcased how AI-powered sustainability platforms are enabling companies to track emissions and identify efficiency gains that deliver real cost savings.
Agentic AI—autonomous systems capable of integrating sustainability data and making operational adjustments without constant human oversight—was floated as the next frontier in sustainability integration.
But the tension is real: AI is positioned as the solution to climate complexity while simultaneously creating new energy demands and deployment challenges. AI wasn’t the story of Climate Week—but it was the subtext of nearly every story.
6. Markets Move Faster Than Politics
The political backdrop—particularly President Trump’s return to the White House—was impossible to ignore. Yet the consensus across events hosted by Moody’s, ICE, Deloitte, KPMG, and Heatmap House was that markets are moving faster than Washington.
Senator Brian Schatz captured it at Heatmap House: the global fight to decarbonize is proceeding “with or without the U.S.” Steyer added that the energy transition is “in full swing,” and no administration can stop it. The more telling insight came from private conversations: investors are already repositioning capital around resilience and efficiency. Policy noise may slow timelines, but it isn’t reversing direction.
The Real Story of Climate Week
Climate Week NYC 2025 reminded us that the energy transition isn’t linear. It’s messy, uneven, and often contradictory. But the transition is still moving forward—just more quietly, more pragmatically, and often in directions the official agenda didn’t anticipate.
