Saint-Gobain and McKinsey are sponsoring Climate Week NYC… again
Saint-Gobain and McKinsey are sponsoring Climate Week NYC… again
Last year, we took a closer look at two of the prominent corporate sponsors of climate week. They’re back at it again.
Sunday marks the opening ceremony of Climate Week NYC, a major (and majorly hyped) event intended to bring corporate executives, NGOs, and government officials together to “to drive the transition, speed up progress, and champion change that is already happening.”
It’s also the second year in a row that Saint-Gobain, a materials and plastics manufacturer headquartered in France, is a top-tier sponsor of the event.
Saint-Gobain has a well-documented history of polluting communities’ public water supplies with cancer-causing PFOA, a “forever chemical” the company knew was toxic decades ago. They’ve been sued for it, and for misleading regulators and residents about the dangerous substance.
Last year, I dug into that sordid history and the company’s sponsorship of Climate Week NYC. Saint-Gobain was the event’s headline partner in 2023, allowing company representatives to host discussions about sustainability and tackling climate change. “Saint-Gobain sponsoring New York City’s Climate Week is a bit like a rat sponsoring city sanitation,” Bennington College professor David Bond told me.
This year — even though New York City got its first official trash bins to deal with the rats — Saint-Gobain is once again sponsoring the event as an “opening ceremony partner.”
The 2024 Climate Week NYC theme is “It’s Time” — “It’s Time to lead. It’s Time to act. It’s Time to deliver. Those who fail to act now risk being left behind financially and reputationally,” reads a description of the event on the opening ceremony page, where Saint-Gobain CEO Benoit Bazin is listed as a featured speaker.
Saint-Gobain isn’t the only company seemingly taking advantage of the opportunity to revitalize its reputation.McKinsey Sustainability, an arm of the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, is back again as a Climate Week NYC partner. Just months before last year’s event, Multnomah County, Oregon, sued McKinsey, along with major fossil fuel companies, for “assisting its fossil fuel and mining company clients in promoting themes to deny the existence and/or gravity of [anthropogenic climate change].”
Yet while McKinsey is facing an active lawsuit accusing it of helping Big Oil spread climate disinformation and denial, the firm is a “platinum sponsor” of this year’s Climate Week NYC, and claims on its profile that it has “been helping our clients decarbonize, build climate resilience, and address sustainability challenges for two decades.”
To get up to speed on those two sponsors, you can read our full coverage on Saint-Gobain here, and on McKinsey here.
P.S.: The sponsorship list this year includes some other questionable names — like the Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry’s major trade organization. The group spent decades spreading climate denial and disinformation before lobbying to obstruct action, documents show.
You won’t have to look far to find additional purveyors of disinformation and major contributors to the climate crisis sitting on panels and discussions at Climate Week events. What remains to be seen, in those cases, is whether interviewers and moderators will hold them to account — or let them run the show.