---
title: "At Climate Week, the Word They Stopped Saying Was Climate"
description: "One hundred thousand delegates came to New York to talk emissions; they ended up talking about electricity for machines"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-09-28T17:36:30.019Z
modified: 2026-09-28T21:22:01Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/at-climate-week-the-word-they-stopped-saying-was-climate-99aff7
language: en
tags: ["ai", "climate", "energy", "data-centers", "infrastructure", "tech", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# At Climate Week, the Word They Stopped Saying Was Climate

*One hundred thousand delegates came to New York to talk emissions; they ended up talking about electricity for machines*

By Jan Sokol · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/at-climate-week-the-word-they-stopped-saying-was-climate-99aff7

## In brief

- About 100,000 people attend New York’s Climate Week each mid-September, alongside the UN General Assembly
- This year’s talks centered on powering AI data centers without new fossil fuel plants rather than on emissions targets
- CNN’s Andrew Freedman reports the word “climate” was absent from many panels, replaced by talk of grid electricity
- A bipartisan backlash to data centers featured on panels with governors, mayors and other officials
- Freedman sensed resigned acceptance that the Paris 1.5°C target will be missed, with talk shifting to resilience

Every year in mid-September, some 100,000 people — climate activists, journalists, tech entrepreneurs, diplomats, funders — descend on New York City for Climate Week, timed to coincide with the UN General Assembly that brings leaders from nearly every nation to the same crowded island. The whirlwind of panels and receptions is a kind of seismograph; it registers what the climate world fears now and what it has quietly stopped fearing. Andrew Freedman of CNN, who has attended consistently for about a decade and watched trends come and go, reports that this year the needle jumped off its old track entirely.

Previous Climate Weeks revolved around climate targets, timetables, emissions reductions and the scaling up of promising solutions. Some of that continued this year. But the center of gravity moved to a different question: how to power the AI revolution and its electricity-hungry data centers without relying on newly constructed fossil fuel plants.

Most telling of all, Freedman writes, the word “climate” was curiously absent from many panel discussions and one-on-one conversations. In its place came an overflow of events devoted to a single urgent problem — getting more electricity onto the grid, as soon as possible.

Freedman moderated two panels at the Electricity Innovation Initiative’s summit on electrifying the economy — an important goal, he noted, since renewable energy is electric — and the discussion kept drifting to data centers and AI’s thirst for electrons. When a village’s well runs dry, people stop discussing the weather and start discussing the well; something of the same logic has seized the climate caravan.

The political ground is shifting under the delegates, too. The growing backlash to data centers was a prominent topic on panels featuring a bipartisan group of governors, mayors and other officials navigating the rapidly changing politics of the issue. It is a backlash already visible far beyond Manhattan: [in North Carolina, regulators recently rejected a $500 million gas plant meant for an Amazon data campus](https://rews.cc/a/in-north-carolina-a-500-million-gas-plant-for-amazon-meets-t-2ac3b1).

## Resilience without the name

A second theme ran beneath the first, climate-related but dressed in different clothes: the need for businesses, countries, cities and even individuals to become more resilient in the face of the quickening pace and increasing severity of climate disasters. In sit-down meetings, Freedman reports, professionals from a variety of sectors — the insurance industry, major food producers, among others — spoke of resilience rather than using the word “climate.”

What struck him most after a decade of these gatherings was a shared recognition, bordering on resigned acceptance, that the world is missing its climate targets — particularly the 1.5-degree warming target of the Paris Climate Agreement — and that serious consequences must now be dealt with even if emissions are slashed quickly and drastically in the near term.

Here lies the week’s unspoken bargain. Climate change has shifted from a future problem to a present-day crisis, yet at the same moment an economic need to scale up data centers for the AI revolution has stripped the climate challenge of its sense of urgency. The emergency and the surrender now share the same conference halls. We are, as Freedman puts it, firmly in the era of climate change consequences — and the language of theDelegates has adapted faster than the atmosphere has. When a word becomes impractical, bureaucracies do not mourn it; they simply stop saying it.