What happens to our ‘awareness’, ‘conversation’ and ‘action’ during the other 51 weeks? Can Climate Weeks avoid being emissions hypocrites, greenwash victims and complacency conspirators?

This article questions the effectiveness of holding special climate events, asks how they can be designed to do more good than harm, and makes some suggestions.

Bold calls to action

Climate weeks, like ukulele orchestras, are suddenly everywhere.

Here are the three pioneers, with the year they started and their aims, copied from their websites:

• New York Climate Week (2009) ‘will focus on the energy, the impact, and the action that we drive together.’
• London Climate Action Week (2019) ‘harnesses the power of London for global and local climate action.’
• UNFCCC Climate Week (2021) ‘supports the implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement by connecting intergovernmental processes with practical climate action’.

These are the Grand Slam Climate Week events, but they’ve inspired many other regional, national and local Climate Week circuits.

Search for ‘climate weeks near me’ and you’ll find your own lower-league event, each with its own twist.

32 Flavours: A Climate Week Taxonomy

Not all Climate Weeks are created alike. Here are the approaches of the Big Three, each with a general observation about the potential downsides:

• The pioneering New York event has a top-down business focus. Getting too chummy with money carries clear risks.
• The London one is more bottom-up community engagement. Herding cats risks wasting energy and resources.
• The roving UN event is one of a global cycle of staging post events culminating in the better-known annual COP meetings. Big Oil has captured COP meetings so comprehensively, it’s triggered a breakaway group of countries serious about emissions reduction.

Supporting Climate Week circuit events emulate or combine these basic approaches with their own particular emphases.

As they proliferate, certain Climate Week categories are emerging. 

This range of local flavours might be unkindly categorised as:

• Boffin: conferences for scientists to update new research, develop better models, network and compare notes.
• Wonk: policy-driven meetings for think-tanks, academics and civil servants, disbursers and recipients of climate funding.
• Tree-hugger: grass-roots, deep-greens, nature-lovers and off-grid practitioners share ideas on sustainable lifestyles.
• Woo: gatherings linking environmental issues to personal development, spiritual awakening, and faith-based causes.
• Suits: impact investors, green financiers, carbon traders and others operating in a world where money mediates carbon reduction.
• Beret: artists using their painting, sculpture, music, dance, drama, poetry, novels etc. to promote environmental consciousness.

Climate Week mission statements contain recurring themes and phrases, familiar to all climate and environmental activists, such as:

• Raising awareness
• Education
• Outreach
• Inspiration
• Motivation
• Empowerment
• Action

Confusing Means with Ends

As the See Through Audience Taxonomy and Engagement Journey models pinpoint, only the last item on that list of objectives – action – actually reduces any carbon.

Everything else is a means, not an end.

To put it another way, such goals carry an unspoken assumption that Knowing, being Empowered etc. is near as dammit the same as Doing.

This is untrue. 

These days, few are unaware of our climate crisis. We’re all too familiar with the causes of human-induced climate change. 

We just, for one reason or another, don’t do anything about it. If awareness isn’t the problem more awareness is unlikely to make any difference. Rather than empower, awareness might deepen despair, and justify inaction. Even being ‘empowered’ is meaningless unless it results in action.

This focus on motivation, rather than outcome, can be justified, but Climate Weeks tend to skim over this logical flaw.

Ignorance and impotence are not good. Yet the ignorant and impotent can still take actions that measurably reduce carbon. Equally, the knowledgeable and empowered can take no action, or take actions that don’t reduce emissions.

The See Through Together YouTube Playlist Room From A View is testing this assertion. It presents as a standard home improvement property show, but is actually a case study in Transparent Trojan Horseplay.

The protagonist, has an unconventional plan to build an extension for a third of the price local builders are charging, by using materials he can see from his front door. 

Unmediated by a know-it-all presenter, the burden of knowing whether this homeowner is deluded or inspired falls on the viewer. The homeowner talks only about saving money. He, and the video editors, are scrupulous about never letting him drop a C-bomb (where C = Carbon, Climate or any other ‘green’ trigger word). 

What looks at first glance like a property show, it actually a disguised climate call to action. Its stretch goal is to nudge a climate denier into building a zero-carbon house. 

Being motivated by saving money, or being the smartest person in the room, has nothing to do with ‘green’ awareness. But if it works, such approaches can measurably reduce carbon in a way Climate Weeks can’t. 

Treating raised awareness as an end in itself, without directly linking these with emissions-reducing outcomes, risks being performative.

This raises an awkward question for any Climate Week organizer, funder, participant, speaker or attendee.

Might they do more harm than good? 

What’s Wrong With Climate Weeks?

The answers fall into three broad categories:

• Emissions climate weeks generate themselves
• Greenwashing for businesses who fund them
• Complacency for individuals attending them

Emissions

Climate activists lobbying for systemic change via government policy, regulatory change and other top-down mechanisms, are rightly frustrated by Whatabouter critics.  

Whatabouters flight-shame experts attending international conferences. They crow at celebrities for their hypocrisy at eating meat. They discredit ‘green’ festivals for using diesel generators.

Such critics may be acting in bad faith, but they do have a point. It’s just not the point they intend to make.

What if, instead of the standard ad hominem rebukes, or ignoring such criticism, Climate Weeks were to pre-empt it by embracing them head-on? 

What if Climate Week websites featured a detailed, accurate, methodologically sound carbon report of their environmental impact?

This won’t change the minds of those determined not to have their minds changed. The usual suspects would treat it as more grist to their disinformation mill, but they’re a lost cause anyway. 

Consider the advantages such transparency might bring in making the climate inactive, active.

Being upfront would move the ‘debate’ from sterile name-calling to real-world detail.

Contestable data would shift the goalposts from the familiar territory of polarized, binary ding-dong, towards the realm of evidence-based decision-making. 

The nuances of emission reporting methodology might offer firmer ground, to gain a foothold in effecting real change.

Brave, yes. But transparency would acknowledge the inconvenient truth that any large-scale human activity – including Climate Weeks – creates some level of greenhouse gas emissions. 

This offers a way out from the Net Zero cul-de-sac. Do the sums. Make them transparent. Invite robust critisicm. Offer and ask for practical, granular suggestions to reduce emissions. Keep the passion, but create a scientific debate, not an online pile-on.

No need to defend indefensible bullshit ‘offsets’. ‘Carbon credit’ claims side of the balance would be released from the murky smoke-filled rooms of finance, into the bright sunlight of physics.

Proving your Climate Week contributed to the large-scale yanking of top-down emissions-reducing levers is difficult, and fuzzy. But it’s surely better than claiming a 10% carbon credit surcharge absolves ticket-holders emissions sins.

Such transparency would shift the focus from individual citizens to governments and corporations. 

Forget going vegan two days a week, taking the train instead of flying, or buying a hybrid car. Rather, compare the impact of such trifles to what big emitters, and the governments who permit them to emit, can do if their claims to sustainability were sincere.

Big Oil invented the individual carbon calculator in 2004 to shift the focus to individual behaviour. It has helped them dodge accountability ever since. Being accurate and transparent about their own emissions would help Climate Weeks wrest control of the spotlight. It could swivel it to illuminate the big players lurking in the wings – governments and businesses.

The Music Business: Cynically Greenwashing? Obtusely Native? unwraps the awkward and inconvenient truth of the carbon emissions from live music events. 

Gigs might not be big emitters in the grand scheme of things, but are high-profile examples of a broader hypocrisy. This same hypocrisy applies to any gathering of humans for any reason and any activity – including Climate Weeks.

From a carbon accounting perspective, concerts, football matches, religious services, anti-vaxx rallies and Climate Weeks are identical.

They are all events where people gather for a common purpose, in the process generating emissions that would not otherwise have been emitted (mainly in the form of transport emissions getting to and fro).

So holding Climate Weeks to the same standard they seek to apply to commerce is not nit-picking.

Being opaque about their true emissions is no reason to ban Climate Weeks, but if the climate activists who hold them expect ‘others’ to be held to account, their credibility would be greatly enhanced by modelling best practice.

Credible, meaningful estimates of the number of tonnes of greenhouse gases emitted are not hard to calculate. The biggest obstacle is the reluctance of organizers, events, and businesses to voluntarily publish them. 

If Climate Weeks don’t model transparency about carbon emissions, why should any of the businesses and governments they’re lobbying to take urgent climate action to follow their lead?

Greenwashing

The least obvious, but most insidious, risk, is corruption. 

Climate events that allow greenwashers to hijack their events, convincing themselves the money is somehow worth it, are kidding themselves.

If you can’t beat them, buy them. It’s a subtle, relatively cheap manoeuvre for big emitters. Their strategy would be familiar to Sunzi, author of The Art of War, Machiavelli, and other go-to references for Big Oil PR shills.

Take the OG of Climate Weeks, New York Climate Week, which inspired London and others to create their own events. 

NYCW has become a case study in capture by corporate interests who favour profit over the planet. 

NYCW takes money from dodgy sponsors and partners, and gives platforms to polluters:

• Microsoft, now abandoning its once-vaunted clean energy policy in its haste to keep up in the data centres gold rush
• Gold Standard, a carbon offsetting player whose methodologies follow the same principles as Verra, a NYCW partner until 90% of its ‘credits’ were exposed as being bogus.
• Drax, launching its attempts to rescue its emissions credibility at NYCW after the PR disaster exposing its ‘sustainable’ wood pellet energy plant

How long can you give such an approach the benefit of the doubt? 

Climate Weeks claiming to work ‘inside the system’ do not serve the greater good when they take money from such climate hoodwinkers.

NYCW is a sad case study – and cautionary tale – in the short, steep, slippery slope that separates ‘impact investing’ from greenwash.

Complacency

The most concerning, and unmeasurable, risk of climate weeks, is being complicit in a culture that rewards words and ignores actions.

This is an existential issue implicit in all activism. It’s a challenge to anyone seeking to address the urgency of the climate crisis via short-term, time-limited calls to action. How can you get people motivated, without promising the impossible or giving them false comfort?

Here are some uncomfortable questions for climate activists involved in marches, protests, festivals and Climate Weeks aspiring to catalyse meaningful action:

• What happens for the other 51 weeks? COP meetings have demonstrated how a fortnight of grandstanding can give the impression of sincerity, offset by the intervening 50 weeks of inaction.

• What measurable difference do they make? Great claims require great evidence. The more touchy-feely the mission (‘inspiring’, ‘awareness’, ‘conversations’), the fuzzier the metrics to judge success/failure become.

• Does ineffective ‘action’ let participants, as well as polluters, off the hook? We’re all vulnerable to cheap, quick fixes. If we can claim to have ‘done our bit’ in a way that doesn’t demand too much of us, we’ll take it.  Unless challenged, we’ll return from Climate Weeks ‘inspired’, but actually only with a better green story to tell ourselves and others.

Such questions are not easily answered. The risks of ignoring them, however, are clear:

• Raise expectations too high, and you risk disillusion when they inevitably fail. Extinction Rebellion found out when they were unable to sustain their action-based movement. XR now urges ‘Love, Rage → Action’, when they’re not asking for money.
• Place expectations too low, and you risk being captured by greenwashers, as NYCW discovered.

What can climate weeks do?

Asking awkward questions is not always a bad-faith attack. The issues raised in this article are intended as constructive criticism.

Events can generate momentum, create human bonds, inspire and motivate. That’s good. 

What can Climate Week organisers do to ensure these babies are not thrown out with the greenwash-tinged bathwater?

Some suggestions:

1. Prominently publish a ruthless, accurate estimate of your carbon footprint, and make it a focus of your activities. At worst, this will help keep you honest. At best, it will shift the ‘conversations’ to practical, real-world challenges and issues and keep everyone grounded. Place accurate transparent carbon footprint calculations of your events front and centre of your website. Explain the methodology behind your inevitable carbon liabilities. Lay out the truth of potential carbon assets to offset them. Your calls for others to do the same would gain credibility and gravitas.

2. Foreground sessions where journalists can publicly, transparently, freely, and forensically challenge sponsors’ emissions actions and words. Sunlight is a great disinfectant. If you’re worried you’ll lose funding, listen to your own mission statements about putting profit over planet.

3. Require participants, NGOs and individuals, to publish their own carbon reports. Emissions reduction isn’t the only lens through which to view meaningful environmental action, but it has the merit of being the most easily measured. Confronting the carbon reality of your own activities may help focus your energy on more effective outcomes.

The ‘buts’ are probably already forming in your mind.

Bad actors will doubtless attempt to game any system Climate Weeks implement. But they will anyway.

Financial reality will doubtless require some compromise and softening. But not at any price.

But if Climate Weeks don’t practice what they preach, why should anyone listen to them?

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See Through Carbon provides accurate, free, open-source, transparent carbon footprint calculations for any business, as a basis for their verifiable emissions reduction.

See Through Together uses sophisticated storytelling to target Unwilling Inactivists to speed up carbon drawdown by helping them become active.