Whoa! My NY Climate Week in a nutshell
Plus: Shocked podcast shows how baseball can help the environment.
First, a rapid fire recap of my dozen on-stage interviews at New York’s Climate Week + Axios’ revamped Future of Energy focus.
Then, a link to the latest Shocked podcast episode, which shows how Moneyball — the book and movie about baseball — can help protect the environment.
Let’s imagine the summation of each of my dozen on-stage interviews + panels at New York’s Climate Week this year were humans (or AI models) and could say in just ONE sentence what you should take away from each discussion.
Here’s what they would tell you in a nutshell because that’s all the time our attentions have:
➡️ Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island at Axios House: Fighting words, and debates lingering on winning the offshore wind battle but losing the war.
➡️ Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at the Dynamo Energy Hub: Questioning renewable energy and extolling nuclear, but don’t tell him he agrees with Al Gore about the latter.
➡️ Neil Chatterjee, of Palmetto, and former FERC chairman at Axios House: Worries about AI’s energy demand and let’s stop with the politics, man!
➡️ Mateo Jaramillo of Form Energy at Axios House: What politics? Demand and support for energy storage is (still) going strong.
➡️ Dr. Katharina Beumelburg of Heidelberg Materials at Axios House: Cement is all around us! And we’re doing unprecedented things to clean it up.
➡️ Hillery Hunter of IBM at Axios House: AI math is complicated, and hey ChatGPT help yourself clean up.
➡️ Amelia DeLuca of Delta Air Lines at Axios House: Economic times are actually forcing positive focus on sustainable execs.
➡️ Axios Expert Voices roundtable: We need LOTS of energy–and it needs to be affordable, and hopefully clean too.
➡️ Panel with Josh Parker of NVIDIA, Varun Sivaram of Emerald AI, Cully Cavness of Crusoe: AI is going to solve everything and its energy problem too!
➡️ Christophe Beck of Ecolab at Axios House: Water is the unsung ingredient in this whole AI thing.
➡️ Dynamo Energy Hub panel with Pedro Pizarro of Edison International, nick chaset of Octopus Energy US and Kim Hedegaard of Topsoe: Thank goodness for (some) government certainty, but we (still) need permitting.
➡️ Christopher Levesque of TerraPower at Axios House: AI is a major boost, and hey so is the offshoot medical product.
This is a record number of on-stage events for me at NY’s Climate Week, most of them at the Axios House in midtown. A huge thank you to my Axios journalist colleagues and the Axios live team for helping host an A+ series of conversations.
Bonus! Also this week, we relaunched Axios’ Generate newsletter to be the Future of Energy, where we’re even more focused on the people, tech and resources powering our future. Sign up here if you’re not already.
Here is some of our coverage from last week:
Data centers should be ready to bring their own power, Wright says
Exclusive: White House looking to ink oil and gas deals at Climate Week
Podcast: Moneyball for the Environment
The data-based strategy of picking a winning baseball team, as documented in the book and then movie Moneyball, is being applied to rooting out environmental violators, we report in the latest episode of the podcast Shocked.
Hot tip: I recommend reading the book, watching the movie and then listening to our podcast!
As a reminder: Shocked is a podcast hosted by yours truly and supported by the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. You can listen to our prior three episodes spanning AI’s energy use, geoengineering and vultures (yeah, those ugly-but-important birds!) by clicking here.
