Making a Mess of Climate Week

On the first day of Climate Week this September, I joined two dozen people at an event in a downtown Manhattan loft. It was hosted by a public relations firm called Wythe Futures, a partner of ExxonMobil, whose representatives bid us take our seats in rows of folding chairs before a stage that consisted of a lone mic stand.  

A projector displayed the ExxonMobil logo on the wall before us. The message: “Climate change is a market. ExxonMobil is the solution.”   

Beneath each of our seats was a gift bag, in brown paper, containing a portable breathing tube that affixes to the nose, the kind through which sufferers of lung disease get their oxygen. The woman seated next to me, Linda Schmid, the well-coiffed director of the Coalition on Carbon, Trade and Technology, in Washington, D.C., looked confused. 

But before she could say anything, a tall handsome fellow in a suit took the microphone and addressed us. This was Darren Redd, ExxonMobil’s chief of sustainability. His hands trembled as he moved through cue cards.  

“The old mantra that the business of business is business no longer applies,” Redd began. “Things have changed. It’s a scary time. There’s protest. We’re positioning ourselves for unfriendly administrations.” He paused, scanning the room. “I’m scared. I’ll tell you that. I’m scared for our shareholders.”  

Next to me, Schmid was dutifully taking notes. The man seated next to her was texting on his phone: “I’m here at Climate Week at an ExxonMobil event and the greenwashing is unbelievable.” He followed it with a vomit emoji. 

Redd introduced two ExxonMobil employees, managers of what he said was the company’s longstanding and much-celebrated program of diversity, equity and inclusion. One of the men, nattily attired in an eggshell blue sweater and pressed slacks, had a breathing tube at his nose, fed from a portable oxygen machine at his shoulder; the other, a South Asian man who looked demented, was confined to a wheelchair.  

The two talked about DEI “preconceptions,” or how we judge people for their appearances. Then the South Asian man, brightening, stood up from his wheelchair and said, “You judged me for thinking I can’t walk. But I can walk.”

Schmid turned to me. “This is so bizarre,” she whispered, and stopped taking notes.  

The man in the eggshell blue sweater then made his “big ask”: that we spend Climate Week in New York wearing the oxygen tubes we’d been gifted.  

“Not a chance,” Schmid muttered. She turned to me: “I think this is a farce. Do you think this is a farce?”

A gorgeous brunette in stiletto heels — introduced as ExxonMobil’s head of insect protein management — next appeared and began handing out bags of barbecued cockroaches. At this point, the jig was up. Bright-eyed young journalists, dressed in their best, marched from the room with the sour faces of people who’ve been played. Schmid stood without ceremony and followed them out, not bothering to take her oxygen tube.  

The performance in the SoHo loft was, indeed, a farce. It was the work of a group called Goofballs, one of a constellation of direct actionists that use guerrilla protest to underscore the climate crisis and mock its enablers. 

The real joke is Climate Week itself. Now in its 17th year, this pageant of meetings, symposiums and presentations has long been derided as a seven-day greenwash, sponsored by businesses otherwise engaged in planetary arson. In the words of The New Republic’s Liza Featherstone, it’s the “closest thing the climate movement has to a trade show […] a week of fancy lunches and private drinks and flashy presentations announcing new investment funds, new green pledges from businesses and states, and thought leaders taking the opportunity to show their climate bona fides.” 

The chief organizing sponsor of Climate Week, the nonprofit Climate Group, says its goal is “a world of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, with greater prosperity for all.” But its corporate membership is a more honest indicator of its agenda and promise than its rhetoric. 

The members include General Motors, which in 2024 paid $146 million in fines to the Environmental Protection Agency after it was discovered that millions of its vehicles were emitting more carbon dioxide than the company claimed on its compliance reports; multinational banking giant Barclays, Europe’s leading financier of fossil fuel development, with $235 billion invested in the 11 years since the 2015 Paris Agreement; insurance group Allianz, which holds $26 billion in fossil investments as one of the largest of the industry’s underwriters; Goldman Sachs, which has directed at least $185 billion into coal, oil and gas projects since 2015; and Microsoft, whose carbon emissions increased 25% last year due to its breakneck build-out of energy-profligate data centers, a build-out that shows no sign of letup. 

For groups like the Goofballs, Climate Week serves only to assuage the public with the lie that corporations can organize and implement effective climate action. As humanity hurtles toward a catastrophic 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the urgency of disrupting business as usual has never been greater. 

The group that made the most trouble during Climate Week this year was Climate Defiance, which emerged out of Washington, D.C., in 2023 under the leadership of a disillusioned environmental campaigner named Michael Greenberg. Greenberg, 32, spent his 20s in the mire of enviro nongovernmental organizations before abandoning them as hopelessly conventional, worthless in the face of crisis. 

Instead, he took up the banner of absurdist protest theater, a tradition that goes back to the 1960s with the Motherfuckers and the Diggers, whose targets ranged from the warfare state, imperialism and police oppression to big business and consumer capitalism.  Like its ’60s antecedents, Defiance is bipartisan in its loathing of elected officialdom, based in the conviction, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, that the parties in the U.S. represent two wings of the same fossil-fueled bird of prey. 

The group’s protests typically involve a combination of anarchic direct action and scripted set pieces in the style of the culture-jamming hoaxers the Yes Men (one of whose members helped craft the ExxonMobil spoof).

The disrupters, as they call themselves, buy tickets to lavish fundraisers and galas and speaking tours, only to make a mess of the proceedings with shouting, cursing, accusations and snarky pranks, forcing security to drag them away. These actions have attracted over 70 million views on social media since 2025 and garnered significant financial support. Greenberg says that his two tax-exempt entities, Climate Defiance Action and the Climate Defiance Foundation, will top $1 million in revenues this year. 

Disrupters have crashed a celebration of President Donald Trump’s EPA head Lee Zeldin, where one of them was attacked by an audience member waving a chair in the manner of a lion tamer. They have forced Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar to flee the stage during her book tour, after they railed at her for supporting expansion of the Midwest’s Line 3 oil pipeline, source of millions of gallons of toxic spills. They have heckled and cursed the CEOs of oil companies, including ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil.  At a breakfast where President Joe Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, was giving the keynote address, the disrupters chanted, “Fuck you, Jennifer, you’re killing me.” At a rally for billionaire-funded New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, in a wild bravura performance, a Cuomo impersonator — actor and Defiance volunteer Zivon Toplin — rolled on the ground “to eat the shit of the billionaires” while devouring a substance that looked remarkably like feces. 

“Let me eat the shit! Let me eat the shit!!” cried Toplin as goons hauled him off while Cuomo and family stood by, aghast.

At an event at Drew University in New Jersey last April, Climate Defiance unleashed a “popcorn action” on high-ranking Democratic politico Rahm Emanuel. A popcorn action is when multiple disrupters, scattered in a crowd of attendees, pop up one after another as each in succession is manhandled out of the room by security officials. 

The first disrupter castigated Rahm for prioritizing the economy over climate policy when he was chief of staff to President Barack Obama, and for volunteering with the Israel Defense Forces in 1991. The second popped up to defend with sincere sympathy Emanuel’s decision to join the IDF because it “teaches great skills as a leader — including how to kill 70,000 Palestinians.”

The third, a young woman in a red dress, appeared to put a stop to the attacks. “Shut up!” she cried. “Shut! Up! You obviously don’t know anything about Rahm Emanuel. He stands up to Netanyahu. I mean, sure, it’s all lip service.”   

Puzzled looks all around. 

“Hey, you shut up!” cried a fourth actionist. “Climate change is an antisemitic conspiracy theory —” and he was cut off by a fifth, who shrieked, “Hey, will you stop attacking Rahm Emanuel? When he was the mayor of Chicago, he did the best job covering up the police killing of young Black men!” 

In a well-designed and properly timed popcorn action, just when the coast looks clear and the crowd breathes relief, out comes another howling banshee. Of all the strategies in the groups’ arsenal, none sow more chaos or make the targets as enraged. 

“There’s fun in watching someone like Joe Manchin become unhinged and want to clock one of our people,” said Nate Smith, an actor who co-founded Goofballs with Toplin. “If you can get down to the core of unhinging someone, that’s cool.” 

The group’s approach during Climate Week was to attack any person they designated a “climate criminal” who appeared as part of a speaking tour, hosted an event or otherwise engaged in public relations. 

When the head of sustainability at Amazon Web Services, Alexis Bateman, attempted to make Amazon’s case at a roundtable, Greenberg was on hand. He let her talk for several minutes, then stood up in his powder blue suit and forced the Amazon event to an abrupt end after shouting about how Amazon’s new fracked-gas power plant in Pecos, Texas, will be the single largest greenhouse gas emitter in the country when completed. 

Part of Greenberg’s effectiveness is his high-pitched hectic tone when he lays out his indictments. Physically, he is small.  He has the look of a malnourished, raccoon-eyed philosophy student from a Russian novel. But his voice is outsized, his screechy pitch unforgettable. In his Instagram videos, he sounds like a bullhorn-wielding snorter of helium.  

“You are a climate criminal,” he howled at Bateman, who froze, attempting a smile.  

“Get that smile off your face!” 

A security official told him, “You need to leave, sir.” 

“No! She needs to leave!” And Bateman did.   

Greenberg turned to the stunned attendees. “Does nobody have any questions why a Climate Week event is platforming Amazon? We’re in a climate emergency and you all just sit here, like sheeple, with your coffees, talking about net zero by 2050, doing your roundtables?” 

Afterward, he stood outside the door of the building to address the irate attendees as they filed out. “That was my TED talk,” he told them. “Thank you for coming!” 

On another evening, the legendary major leaguer Cal Ripken Jr. sat down with billionaire David Rubenstein at the 92^nd Street Y before a crowd who paid $40 each for the privilege to hear them talk about baseball.

Today the principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles, an experience about which he wrote a self-congratulatory book, “Inside the Owner’s Box,” Rubenstein will be better known to history as co-founder and longtime board member of the notorious Carlyle Group, one of the world’s wealthiest investment firms. Implicated in corrupt dealings and arms profiteering in the post-9/11 rush to war under President George W. Bush, the Carlyle Group is also deeply enmeshed in the fossil fuel industry, its assets comprising some of the most polluting power plants in the United States.

According to a 2023 investigation into its “hidden climate impact,” the company has “invested billions of dollars in fossil fuel assets that have dumped at least 277 million metric tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere from 2011 to 2021, contributing to the global climate crisis, and harming low-income communities and communities of color on a disproportionate basis.”

“It’s a baseball event, it’s families there,” said a Climate Defiance volunteer who spoke anonymously as part of the six-person team that targeted Rubenstein. “We’re not going to change David Rubenstein’s heart. We want to let the families know he’s no different than Charles Koch, a renowned evil right-wing billionaire who wants to end democracy. Koch makes no bones about it. David Rubenstein? He owns a baseball team! He calls himself a philanthropist and a thought leader. He wants everyone to think he’s a good guy. He’s not.”

The Rubenstein disruption unfolded as planned — a classic popcorn action that whipped the crowd into a fury and ended with Rubenstein fleeing the stage. One of the disrupters was a diminutive 24-year-old named Dain Le, who shouted at Rubenstein that “there are no ethical billionaires” and told the attendees, “He’s not a leader you should look up to. He hoards billions of dollars.” Two other disrupters unfolded a banner that read, “BENCH THE BILLIONAIRES.” (Before the disruption, Rubenstein had told the audience, “’Tax the rich’ is antisemitic.”) 

As Le walked out amid the shouting and booing and cursing, escorted by a security guard down the aisle, one of the attendees, a well-dressed woman in her 50s, stood in the aisle, looked Le in the eye, kicked her shin and then punched her in the face. The woman said nothing, and no one stopped her, no one demanded her arrest. (During Climate Week, disrupters were physically attacked multiple times; one was punched in the stomach at a fundraiser in Brooklyn after he showered Sen. Chuck Schumer with dollar bills for his support of the Mountain Valley fracked gas pipeline in West Virginia.)

“Oftentimes in our actions you will see attendees react in these very violent ways,” said Le after she was ejected from the 92^nd Street Y. “We’re not violent. We’re speaking. It shows an unconscious thing deep within them that is violent, that allows them to support billionaires who engage in violence in the way they make money.”  

A civilization barreling toward ecological disaster and self-destruction needs more of these disruptions, growing in kind and number, at scale and en masse. Climate Defiance is showing us the path to follow: acting aggressively, without apology, in people’s faces, ceaseless and remorseless, but always peacefully. The Rubensteins of the world need to be hounded until, as Le put it, “they don’t feel comfortable anywhere.” The price may be a beating or two, but the people of Defiance say that’s nothing compared to what’s in store if we continue acquiescing to a suicidal system.