New York City offered a week of cool, beautiful days for Climate Week 2026. It was the quiet before the storm, as a fossil-fueled Nor’easter barreled into the Northeastern seaboard, bringing the ocean into the boroughs of the Big Apple.

Most of the participants in Climate Week events—barring the carbon end-times utopians like Energy Secretary Chris Wright and White House National Energy Dominance Council Executive Director Jarrod Agen—openly recognize that the cascading catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change is a failure of the global industrial economic order.

But there is no consensus on how to proceed. Sure, there’s global geophysical existential market failure, but is the market failing us, or are we failing the market?

Democratic socialists are unequivocal that we can’t solve the climate crisis until “we kick the investors out of the picture.” On the other hand, private-sector climate-finance advisors call for fixing corporate failures by doing a better job of “putting ecosystem services onto the balance sheet.”

The insurance industry is failing its fiduciary duty to protect businesses and households from climate disasters, even as its profits increase. The argument at World Wildlife Fund’s event “Mind The Gap” was that this failure can only be solved by further financialization to “mobilize private capital” for greater “investment in nature.”¹

This market fundamentalism—that we can only solve market failures with more market could be found at Semafor panels Supported By ExxonMobil, Clean Air Task’s session on “How Philanthropy Accelerates Innovation in Next-to-Abate Sectors” or “Unlocking Market Mechanisms to Scale Livestock Methane Mitigation” or J.P. Morgan and Propeller Ventures’ “How the Ocean Anchors American Re-industrialization” or Jupiter Intelligence’s “How Leading Investors Are Building Climate-Resilient Portfolios,” to name but a few.

Climate Week also featured many proponents of a democratic, public approach to the climate crisis. Critical thinkers like Sean Sweeney, Margot Brown, Brian Kamanzi, Johanna Bozawa shared a common vision, whether it was dubbed public energy internationalism, green economic populism, ecosocialism, or environmental justice.

A common thread is that solidarity can emerge from the decision that no people and no places are disposable—and how essential and difficult the maintenance of that solidarity is. The fight for human survival against the political corruption and pollution of Big Oil has led to the creation of the Permian Gulf Coast Coalition, a network of grassroots environmental-justice groups fighting the petrochemical industry—and now the fracking-powered AI hyperscalers—from New Mexico to Louisiana, supported by mainline groups like Oil Change International. Similarly, the ongoing fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline has bound the Standing Rock Sioux to multinational environmental organizations like Greenpeace International and BankTrack, who are still engaged in mega-million-dollar lawsuits with Energy Transfer. And the Trade Unions for Energy Democracy are connecting Europe, Africa, South America, and the United States with a common fight for public power.

Scholars of the American and global right like Alan Lichtman, Kevin Phillips, Naomi Klein, and Andreas Malm have worked hard to explain the alliance between Big Oil, Wall Street, and right-wing fundamentalism. We’re now seeing the emergence of a modern technofascism in which the carbon-fueled industrialization is driven by a self-accelerating need for computation.

Venture capitalists and private equity investors are pushing hard for Big Data systems to manage “climate risk” to global commerce, be it shipping lines or transmission cables… or the Big Data systems themselves! These are fascinating and complex problems for software engineers, so it’s very tempting for technologists to apply their talents to where the money is, as long as there’s a veneer of morality.

But there are still many technologists who resist the siren song of concentrated capital, who are tackling the even greater intellectual challenges that lie in dismantling corporatism for distributed public power.

I don’t know the way forward, but I do know that it is not inevitable that all societal decisions be consigned to market mechanisms. It simply isn’t the case that the only way to protect wetlands is by moving them onto the balance sheet of venture capitalists and multinational reinsurance corporations. We don’t have to coordinate electricity generation and transmission planning in the boardrooms of private utilities after guaranteeing them ever-rising profit streams. We don’t have to concede the supremacy of wealth over political decisions. We don’t have to solve industrial destruction through ever more inhumanity.

We can instead celebrate our humanity, care for each other, rebuild public power, and even have some fun along the way.

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky and @[email protected].