S&P Global’s CERAWeek was an event seemingly designed for a different point in history. History, of course, has moved fast in recent weeks. The green color scheme and sea-foam carpet welcoming attendees to registration reflected an industry eager to show a climate-friendly face to a world that, until a few weeks back, seemed preoccupied with rising temperatures. But by the conference’s opening on March 7, both politicians and fossil fuel executives were fully focused on sticking it to Russia. A more apt design decision might have been red, white, and blue.
“The conference was designed to have a heavy emphasis on climate,” says George David Banks, a member of the State Department’s negotiating team at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change under Trump and now an affiliate fellow at the Atlantic Council. “With the events around Ukraine, that’s shifted back to kind of a traditional geopolitical energy security conversation.”
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