Thank you for joining us at Covington during New York Climate Week. We were delighted to welcome more than 625 attendees to our New York office for 20 events and meetings, convening leaders from government, business, civil society, and the legal and policy communities.
The breadth of the week was reflected in the conversations held at our offices. We explored subnational climate policy and California’s cap-and-invest experience, brought together chief sustainability officers and senior business leaders for exchanges among peers, hosted candid discussions with senior U.S. legislators and a range of climate action leaders, examined the implications of the forthcoming U.S. midterm elections for energy and climate oversight, and hosted international stakeholders for discussions of the evolving global regulatory landscape.
We leave Climate Week energized by the quality and candor of these discussions, and grateful to everyone who contributed their experience and perspective. While Climate Week NYC presents an important public platform for engaging on these challenging issues in advance of the United Nations Climate Conference of the Parties in Antalya, Türkiye – with some 1500 events across the city – we at Covington are convinced of the importance of creating opportunities for targeted, thoughtful conversations to grapple with climate-related challenges and advance solutions. We look forward to staying in close touch, and to welcoming you back to Covington’s New York offices for Climate Week next year.
We close with three substantive themes that stood out for us.
The AI boom is rapidly reshaping the energy and sustainability agenda. As one technology leader noted, this year’s Climate Week perhaps could have been dubbed, “Get Energy Faster Week.” The expansion of data centers is driving demand for electricity, infrastructure, land, and water. Although AI’s deployment is global, many of its most immediate physical consequences are distinctly local. Communities, utilities, regulators, and policymakers are confronting questions about grid capacity, energy costs, permitting, reliability, and the allocation of infrastructure investments. The sustainability of data-center growth is front and center and many hyperscalers are themselves driving innovation. One recurring theme is that the pace of technological innovation may equally affect new clean energy generation opportunities, off-grid energy management, grid capabilities, and the underlying regulatory and policy structures.
Businesses continue to operate amid significant policy crosscurrents. An overarching theme for the week was the benefits of finding durable policy solutions. Climate-related regulation such as sustainability reporting and carbon markets rules is evolving across jurisdictions, while companies face continuing and variable expectations from investors, customers, regulators, and other stakeholders. Looming over the week was the possibility of some kind of bi-partisan U.S. legislative agreement on permitting reform – offered as a way to unlock advances in infrastructure development. Climate policy is increasingly connected to trade, industrial strategy, supply-chain resilience, tax, finance and economic security. This creates both complexity and opportunity for companies seeking to develop strategies that are credible, commercially grounded, and adaptable across markets.
The underlying technical frameworks for corporate sustainability continue to evolve. Reporting methodologies, emissions-accounting standards, market design, procurement structures, disclosure frameworks, and the rules governing energy and infrastructure investment may receive less attention than major policy announcements, but they often shape real-world outcomes. The week’s conversations underscored the importance of engaging early with these underlying frameworks and of connecting legal and policy analysis with operational and commercial realities.
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