Dear John,

This message was supposed to be a wrap up, detailing the experiences we had at New York Climate Week. It was going to start off with the excitement from a long week where we amplified the demands of the frontline communities in the city, came together in celebration, and challenged the failing mainstream approaches to addressing the climate crisis that are prolific throughout Climate Week’s official programming. 

On Saturday; however, at the very end of Climate Week, although far removed from our communities in the southeast, we felt the impact of Hurricane Helene as we gathered to close the week with the community of Sunset Park in Brooklyn for their Climate Justice Lives Here Festival. Despite the wind blown rain in our faces we smiled, and laughed, and huddled together under tents dancing while the musicians blessed us with their rhythms. Children flew kites in the biting wind, people shared knowledge in workshops, and we ate some really good food. 

At the time, many of us didn’t know the full extent of what was happening in the south, but that doesn’t mean this community didn’t understand. Brooklyn is no stranger to hurricanes having endured the loss and devastation brought by Hurricane Sandy twelve years ago. 

The flights out of New York on Sunday were more turbulent than usual. 

So, right now we ask you to turn your attention to those in the south and hope you can join us by sending anything you can to folks on the ground. Our members at North Carolina Climate Justice Collective put together these four steps to support Just Recovery in Western NC, and Florida Rising is asking for funds to be directed to the Florida Grassroots Recovery Fund made up of groups who have “built trust through [a] track record of support and [their] proximity to the pain.” 

Keep reading to learn more about how frontline communities, including those from the south, engaged with Climate Week. 

We're trying something new this month and sharing articles about the important work our members are doing and issues that impact them. If you have any feedback about how we can make the Temp Check better feel free to reach out to [email protected].

National / International

• Permitting reform’s false choice
• Stories from the White House Summit on Environmental Justice in Action
• Climate workers reclaiming ‘just transition’

Northeast

• New York Supreme Court Denies Motion to Dismiss by Gov. Hochul on the Congestion Pricing Block Lawsuit
• ‘Climate Justice Lives Here!’: UPROSE marks NYC Climate Week with action and art
• Training Western New York’s new sustainability workforce

West

• Governor Newsom Signs SB 1420, Hydrogen Project Streamlining Bill That Could Harm Communities and the Environment
• Environmental advocates call on Newsom to sign 'make polluters pay' bills
• Judge strikes down city of LA's ban on new oil drilling

Pacific Northwest

• Groups seek reinstatement of Oregon’s Climate Protection Program
• Solar project offers low-income Portland residents relief from high energy bills
• Responding to Anchorage police shootings, local group hosts public safety conversation

Midwest

• Michigan Can Get Solar for All Right With These Steps
• DTE customers slam rate hike request at MPSC public hearing in Detroit
• NWI residents oppose permit renewal for Tradebe waste management 

Southeast

• Kentucky public school advocates flex endorsements, opponents are not surprised
• Florida Rising Brings the Fight to State Legislature
• Miramar threatens lawsuit over controversial trash incinerator site

South by Southwest

• OPINION: Beware large election reform ‘gifts’ from out-of-state donors we don’t know
• Company Operating Exploded Pipeline in Texas Has Faced Major Climate Protests

Mid-Atlantic

• Residents say Pennsylvania has failed communities after state studies linked fracking to child cancer
• Pa. voters can cast provisional ballot if mail ballot is rejected

CJA board members Dwaign Tyndal (left) and Elizabeth Yeampierre (right) during the opening plenary for Realizing the Just Transition funder briefing on 9/24.

“When you come in and you think that you’re here to go to the United Nations, or to come to Midtown, you may forget that we live here. We breathe here, we struggle here, we fight here,” Elizabeth Yeampierre, UPROSE’s Executive Director and CJA Co-Chair, reminded us at Realizing the Just Transition on 9/24. This event brought together nearly 100 people from foundations and movement groups to better understand the moment we’re in and our vision for the future. Climate and Environmental Justice leaders shared about their work – from fighting developers in Brooklyn to winning a huge settlement against Chevron in California. Foundation allies also had important conversations about what it means to advance a Just Transition in the roles they hold.

This took place while we were reminded by Samir Doshi, Director of Just Transitions at CS Fund, that a half mile away power brokers were determining all of our futures at the UN General Assembly. While our movement groups are talking in terms of millions and billions of dollars with allied foundations to make our vision a reality, nation-states and non-governmental organizations are negotiating the movement of billions and trillions of dollars.

Panelist speak during Realizing the Just Transition funder briefing on 9/24. From left to right: Mateo Nube, Valerie Boucard, Samir Doshi, and Raymond Ampil

In between the grassroots and nation-to-nation, the official New York City Climate Week brought together hundreds of events during the week aimed at influencing how those with power act on climate change. This programming often elevates unproven technological “fixes” – things like carbon capture and storage, solar radiation management, and direct air capture – and lends them legitimacy. It’s unfathomable that in a world facing the devastation by fossil fuel fueled disasters like Hurricane Helene, the “largest annual climate event of its kind” would invite people like Kevin Roberts, president of the climate-denialist Heritage Foundation, or the Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum, to peddle their narratives that place blame for the climate crisis on those most impacted by it, while dodging accountability for themselves and the industries they’re involved in.

Climate Week showed us once again that they’re fully invested in the mainstream environmental movement’s folly of trying to solve the climate crisis with the same worldview that got us here in the first place. 

The Grassroots Power Panel at the Tishman Center on 9/26. From left to right: Mateo Nube, Dwaign Tyndal, Juan E. Rosario Maldonado, Dr. Jennifer Santos Ramirez, and Shaheen Hasan. 

Mateo Nube clearly laid out the difference between that perspective and ours in this statement during Grassroots Power Panel, co-hosted by CJA, the Tishman Center, and NCRP: 

The climate crisis, for example, is the symptom of a much deeper problem. If your discussion begins and ends with parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you end up breeding what can be termed carbon fundamentalism, which in turn leads to a fetish for mega-sized techno-fizes, many of which are imbued with mystical and magical and speculative powers of sudden transformation. 

If instead your discussion and analytical rigor begins with a structural and historical understanding of extraction, and enclosure, resources, wealth, and power. Well then you appreciate that the throughline to this problem roots itself in the largest singular act of ecocide, committed by a group of humans in our history: a transatlantic slave trade, a massive act of theft of both land and labor, which in turn led to colossal disruption and terraforming of ecosystems on three continents at once.

Climate change and the climate crisis are a direct descendant of that disruption. In other words, the climate crisis is not a technological problem. It's a justice problem. It's a power & control problem. It is an enclosure problem. 

The dissonance between the conventional approach to climate change and ours inspired us to deploy mobile billboards throughout New York City during the opening events of Climate Week on the 22nd. Emblazoned with statements calling out the investment practices of foundations and the important reminder that there’s no just transition without us, the billboards circled Columbia University, the Times Center, the New School, and other landmarks throughout the city to drive home the fact that we need to forge a path forward that doesn’t leave anyone behind, doesn’t sacrifice any communities as collateral damage, and reinforces social and ecological wellbeing. 

CJA's mobile billboards circles various locations during the opening day of Climate Week. This was spotted in front of a Chase building.

CJA members Taproot Earth and The Chisholm Legacy Project, along with CJA's Black Caucus and others co-hosted the 2024 Black Climate Leadership Summit, Climate Week NYC's only Black-exclusive space. This event brought together emergent and established climate justice leaders for impactful conversations on the theme "Connecting Land + Black Liberation." After the Summit, Taproot Earth invited allies of the climate justice movement into the Liberation Lounge which was overflowing with joy and celebration.

Our leaders were on the ground throughout Climate Week, including CJA’s new interim deputy director, KD Chavez. Their powerful words opened up our Realizing the Just Transition funder briefing, “The underlying issue that we face isn’t the carbon emissions in the atmosphere, it’s the extractive economy that allows us to pull that carbon out of the ground and burn it into the atmosphere in the first place. And that economy is created by more than just the way we approach resources and labor, its about the purpose, governance, and worldview that underpins everything that we do… Think about the possibilities and the purpose in this room. The shared worldview that we have, that allows us to really see each other in this space as we align and uplift our frontline communities. As we continue to uplift and co-create solutions that are deeply rooted in the needs of our communities, our local ecosystems that are rooted in sacredness, based in cooperation. Solutions that value our livelihoods and ecological and social wellbeing.”

Public Money panel during Realizing the Just Transition funder briefing on 9/24. Left to right: KD Chavez, Dwaign Tyndal, Courtenay Barton, Shaheen Hasan, and Darryl Molina Sarmiento.

We created this landing page for people interested in learning more about the Frontline Climate Week. There were ten events we were directly involved in, with many more that happened throughout the week so there is plenty to read about, recordings to watch, and social threads to follow. We also want to shout out CJA member New York City Environmental Justice Alliance who released the New York Climate Justice Agenda. As the host city and state for this event, we echo their sentiment that it’s important to acknowledge that while there has been “some progress in implementing New York State’s landmark Climate Act and other climate justice initiatives over the past four years, we have also seen increased resistance from fossil fuel interests and State actors seeking to undermine climate mandates and co-opt climate justice rhetoric.”

That’s why community-led solutions and co-governance models continue to be needed now more than ever; and we’re excited that CJA members continue to lead the way.