A group of organizations and individuals, including Leonardo DiCaprio, recently announced plans to divest their financial holdings from fossil fuels. Photograph by Bebeto Matthews / AP

Last week, a coalition of environmental and financial groups announced that more than two thousand individuals, four hundred institutions, and Leonardo DiCaprio had agreed to divest their financial holdings, which total 2.6 trillion dollars, from fossil fuels. The high-profile announcement was part of the seventh annual Climate Week N.Y.C., organized by the Climate Group, which aims to create both economic coöperation and political momentum on the environment. Many of the panels took place in government buildings or banks, and it was easy, in such anodyne and khaki-colored settings, to forget that the problem under discussion poses existential risks to island nations, coastal cities, and, ultimately, civilization as we know it.

But the news wasn’t all doom and gloom, and some of it was even downright sunny (especially if you happen to be a solar-panel manufacturer). According to “Turning Point,” a study published by the German Institute for Economic Research, a nonprofit think tank, and presented at one panel, 2014 was the first year that global economic growth decoupled from an increase in global emissions. This is not to say that emissions peaked—in fact, world emissions grew by twenty-two per cent between 2004 and 2014—but the world achieved what the authors of the study call a “weak decoupling,” which they define as “a reduction of energy intensity… while absolute consumption still rises with economic growth.” “Strong decoupling,” which happens when total energy consumption falls with rising economic growth, has been achieved in some of the more developed countries. (Perhaps counterintuitively, according to the study, in China, “strong decoupling seems possible in the near future,” while the United States has been reverting back to a “weak decoupling” since 2012.) The panel’s message: a shift to renewables does not have to impede economic development and, in fact, might promote it.

Price parity between renewable energy sources, such as hydropower, solar power, and wind, and more conventional fuels, like coal and oil, has recently been achieved in many markets. In eighteen American states, solar is the same price as or cheaper than conventional energy sources, according to Thomas Van Dyck, the managing director for the socially responsible investing group within the Royal Bank of Canada. The anticipation of dramatic increases in battery storage power is further boosting confidence in the industry. “We are in the world of 'and,' not 'or,’ ” Van Dyck told me. It is possible, he added, to be “sustainable and economic.” Several Fortune 500 companies, including Goldman Sachs and Walmart, took the occasion of Climate Week to announce that they were joining RE100, a campaign asking companies to commit to procuring a hundred per cent of their energy from renewable sources by a specified date. Companies that had already signed on to the campaign include Nestlé, Mars, and H&M—not your usual environmental suspects.

To spur the massive and historically unprecedented shift of global capital deemed necessary to pay for a transition away from fossil fuels, the international business and diplomatic community has been pushing for a price to be levied on carbon. “Policy frameworks that recognize the costs of carbon are among many important instruments needed to provide greater market certainty, accelerate investment, drive innovation in low carbon energy, and create jobs,” read a printed statement—signed by Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo—that was set out like a coffee-shop flyer. The number of companies that put a price on their emissions for planning purposes nearly tripled this year, with G.M., Google, and even ExxonMobil pricing their internal emissions. “This is the time to bite the bullet, streamline the tax code, and put a price on carbon,” Rachel Kyte, the World Bank special envoy for climate change, told me. “We all agree now that we need low-carbon growth, we need resilient development, we can end poverty, and we’ve got to do it whatever the economic conditions are.” China has announced that it will set up a national carbon-trading market by 2017. (Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about the announcement last week.) Even Royal Dutch Shell has requested that the international community price carbon. Accelerating climate change is, apparently, also bad for the fossil-fuel business.

It can be reassuring, but also uncanny, to listen to investors speak in a capitalist patois about solutions to an existential problem. (“Climate change [is] a material risk to capitalization and share value,” Mark Kenber, the C.E.O. of the Climate Group, told me.) Many speakers on the panels—from C.E.O.s to high-ranking diplomats to public-sector officials—highlighted the profit opportunities that a shift to a low-carbon economy presented. “I have seen the bad face of capitalism and the problems it causes, and I have seen the beautiful face of capitalism,” Mark Wilson, the C.E.O. of the insurance provider Aviva, said at an event welcoming the United Nations’ new Sustainable Development Goals, which also included Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, and Anne Simpson, an investment director at CalPERS, the largest American pension fund. At several of the week’s events, it was clear (at least if the number of times the phrase “win-win” was uttered is any indication) that, in the business community, the financial implications of climate change have already, for many companies, been transformed into a set of liabilities and assets on the balance sheet.

Other than climate change itself, the big villain of the conference was global energy subsidies, which, according to the International Monetary Fund, are projected to amount to 5.3 trillion dollars, or six and a half per cent of global G.D.P., in 2015 alone. This figure mostly "arises from countries setting energy taxes below levels that fully reflect the environmental damage associated with energy consumption," including climate change.* “Subsidizing fossil fuel construction and consumption does not pass … the reality test!” Angel Gurría, the secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, exclaimed in a keynote at the week’s closing event (titled, financially enough, “Securing a Paris Dividend”). Or, as the former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg put it at the same event, “You get what you pay for.”

The moral and economic dilemmas that climate change poses to the international community can make for strange bedfellows, and the conference presenters and attendees mirrored the diversity of people who are—for good or for ill—financially invested in the problem. The United Nations-hosted breakfast panel, “A Rising Tide Sinks All Boats,” was co-sponsored by the Small Island Developing States, which include the gravely threatened Tuvalu and Maldives, and the United Arab Emirates, which works in partnership with them to finance renewable-energy projects. (As of August 1st, the U.A.E. had cut the seven billion dollars a year in fuel subsidies it was providing to its citizenry.) Around tables that featured glistening pinwheeled lox and effete parfait glasses filled with yogurt and fruit, more than a hundred people from the diplomatic community listened as Anote Tong, the President of the Republic of Kiribati, a small island nation devastated by Cyclone Pam, described his anger and frustration. “We don’t need a boat. What we’re looking for is a Noah’s Ark,” he said. His speech was a stirring indictment of the capital that was sinking his sovereignty into the ocean. It would seem that the rest of us have little choice but to hope that this same capital can keep us afloat.

*This post was revised to clarify how the I.M.F. calculates global energy subsidies.