Climate Week Begins

Kushan Avedar (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Kushan Avedar filling in for Brian today here on WNYC.

So some listeners know that when I'm not hosting at WNYC, I co-host a national radio show called Climate One. It's a show about climate solutions.

And this week is particularly jam-packed for those of us in the climate world because it is New York Climate Week or its official name, Climate Week NYC. It's organized by the international nonprofit Climate Group. And it includes, get this, more than a thousand events all around the city hosted by different organizations all to tackle climate change. Here to help us preview what this week could mean for the state of climate change is Amy Westervelt. Amy is a climate journalist. She hosts the Drilled Podcast, which has now turned into a newsroom that co-publishes places like ProPublica and Rolling Stone. Amy is also the author of the new book titled BROUGHT TO YOU BY How Corporations Warped the Truth, Calm the Public and Broke Democracy. Amy, hi, welcome to the show.

Amy Westervelt (1:10)

Hi, thanks for having me.

Kushan Avedar (1:12)

So the UN General Assembly is happening this week. We just talked about it at the top of this show. And Climate Week is happening this week. It's not a coincidence, right?

Amy Westervelt (1:20)

Right, that's how it was originally conceived. Back in 2009, I think it got started. And Mayor Bloomberg was a big fan and organizer of it.

And it's now grown to be huge, which is maybe good and maybe not. Who knows?

Kushan Avedar (1:38)

Right. Victim if it's on success, maybe.

Amy Westervelt (1:41)

Yeah.

Kushan Avedar (1:42)

On Wednesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is convening a high-level event on climate action and the just transition. Can you tell us what the priorities are for UNGA this week regarding climate?

Amy Westervelt (1:57)

Yeah. I mean, it's a weird time understatement of the year.

And it's especially strange for this to be happening alongside the high-level event because you have Marco Rubio being sent to this event and the State Department press releases like he's going to discuss the primacy of nations, which is it's like a real like we're not into multilateralism statement, right? And the UN's approach to dealing with climate has always been a multilateral approach. So they are trying to kind of reframe what that means in today's world and how to kind of hold the line on that and how to talk about climate solutions in a way that is not just, you know, we're going to buy this many solar panels, but also how are we listening to civil society groups? How are we really thinking through how people will be impacted and are already being impacted by the climate crisis? And what can we do in a situation where, you know, one of the world's superpowers is kind of like, you know, sticking its fingers in its ears and saying, no, no, no.

Kushan Avedar (3:10)

So a big priority this week will be to preserve multilateralism in a world where it seems that that is going by the wayside.

Amy Westervelt (3:20)

Yeah, that's a big undercurrent of the week. And we did have, you know, just a few months ago, the US was trying to block the UN from kind of bringing on board and operationalizing this unanimous ruling from the International Court of Justice last year, which said, very explicitly, governments have a legal obligation to protect their citizens from the worst impacts of the climate crisis. And that includes regulating the corporations headquartered in those nations. And they also explicitly said, this applies whether the government in question, you know, agrees or not. It seemed written for a particular government. Oh, I see that, right, right.

And, you know, that came out in 2025 And then the, there was a big push, mostly spearheaded by Pacific Island nations, to get the UN General Assembly to kind of adopt a resolution saying like, we're going to take this on, we're going to operationalize. Like, what does this look like? And how do we enforce it in a way? Because it's, you know, it's a weird situation where it's the International Court of Justice, it's a ruling, it has a lot of weight, but it doesn't necessarily have teeth in terms of like, you know, holding people to account. So the US tried really hard to block that resolution. They were, you know, threatening trade partners with like, we're not going to renew a trade agreement with you if you go along with this resolution. So it obviously was threatening in some way, and it managed to get through anyway, with I think it's the US, Saudi, and a couple of other nations voted no, but it still passed. So that was actually a big win for multilateralism. There was a lot of talk at that time about like, this is going to be a real test. Like if this one kind of rogue nation can tip over the apple cart here, it's going to be really hard for us to keep going.