Steve, Wendy, welcome. Steve to you, first.
Tell me more, if you would, about the New York Climate
Exchange: how you started, the work you do, your ambitions.
Brand new, day six on the job.
So, cut me a little slack. The Exchange was really created over
the last two years.
It was the vision of the of the city of New York to create a
climate campus that would focus attention around the city.
It's going to be part think tank, part do tank, part
incubator for climate technology, part academic
institution. We'll actually host students on the island.
So we're going to cover a lot of territory.
We're going to focus both on New York, but what New York does or
focuses on, is relevant to the rest of the world.
So we have both a local and a global scope.
In the short term,
let's just look at the year ahead.
What are your priorities there?
It's a city with 520 miles of coastline.
That means I'm relevant to other coastal cities in the US, around
the world.
Some of the conversations I've been having here at COP, there
are folks who are saying, "if you're going to focus on coastal
resilience, we want to be a part of that conversation."
They're coming from island communities, not just big
cities, so that'll be one thing.
Technology incubation is going to be another key area for us,
but one of the things I'm really excited about: climate literacy,
helping to train middle school students, high school students
to think about the future.
This is relevant to their college choice, relevant to
their job choices in the future.
We want to build that knowledge base.
Wendy, why should the private sector be partnering with
organizations like the NYCE, in your mind?
Well, corporations are our route to scaling and commercializing
the technologies we need for net zero.
They are frankly our only route for getting the magnitude of the
technology in place that we need.
And so, what the New York Climate Exchange offers is a
very dynamic ecosystem where we are bringing business,
philanthropy, government, communities all together to
accelerate the pace at which we can scale the technologies that
we need.
It's a place where you've got access to those technologies.
You can facilitate access to the IP rights.
You've got access to the financing that's needed in the
right places at the right time.
And so it's a really unique ecosystem that can accelerate
everything we're trying to do for net zero.
Wendy, Steve, thank you so much.