Adam Lake returns from Mexico City Climate Week and sits down with Katie Lanegran to unpack what sticks after the stage lights go off. Fresh from a panel with leaders of Climate Weeks in Mexico City and Toronto, Adam argues that these gatherings only matter if cities share lessons and build something larger than any single calendar week. Mexico City’s second-year event, held at a children’s museum with a strong youth focus, is flagged for a full episode soon.
The centerpiece is a Climate Week NYC conversation with Doreen Harris, president and CEO of NYSERDA, recorded at The Hub Live. Climate Week has grown to about 1,500 events, up 50 percent from last year’s record. Harris explains NYSERDA’s role as New York’s energy agency, created in 1975 during the energy crisis: statewide energy planning, policy, and roughly $3 billion a year in programs, including about $100 million for innovation. She points to a thriving ecosystem from Brooklyn’s New Lab to upstate incubators, universities, and accelerators that turn research into companies as well as cleaner power.
Community partnership is the through-line. NYSERDA’s 13 regional clean energy hubs work through trusted local organizations, and a dedicated siting team helps host communities plan solar, wind, and batteries. Harris ties clean energy to health: the Champlain-Hudson Power Express, nicknamed “Chippy,” (CHPE) is already improving air quality in Astoria’s “asthma alley,” and building decarbonization can cut indoor pollution from gas appliances. She prefers plain language—reducing pollution—over jargon. On housing, she notes Governor Hochul’s statewide building push and alignment with the mayor’s office, with a warning that speed only works if projects are built with communities, not around them.
Back in the studio, Adam and Katie connect those points to multi-family buildings, where heat pumps, induction cooking, better windows, and insulation can cut costs and emissions for hundreds of families at once. They also mark CHPE as newly energized hydro power from Quebec, a project Adam remembers being announced on a Climate Week stage and now delivering real electrons and cleaner air. The episode closes on the Climate Week movement itself: NYC as the Super Bowl or Burning Man of the circuit, smaller city weeks as places where relationships form faster, and the real work living in the months between the celebrations.
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