In the fall of 1975, shoppers stormed New York's department stores to pay $45 for a new ring that promised to reveal how the wearer was feeling: blue for calm, black for stress, amber for anxiety.

Liquid crystals in the ring changed color with the temperature of your skin, paired with a paper chart mapped that to your emotion. The Mood Ring’s inventor, a former stockbroker, did $15M in the first year, including a gold-encased version for Barbra Streisand.

The physics were simple and the story was intriguing, but the actual mood reading was ambiguous and flawed.

A cold room could make you “stressed.” A hot cup of coffee could make you “calm.” By 1977, the inventor's sales had gone to nearly zero, undercut by the false claims and cheap copycats while the world moved on to buying a million Pet Rocks.

Climate change is also simple physics, but it’s been mistaken for a mood ring.

Every conversation seems to open with some version of: "How do you feel about the climate?" The word "climate" became an ideology of beliefs, feelings, and politics. As soon as the political winds changed, startups shifted their pitch decks, funds changed names, and allocators moved on to their next Pet Rock.

The mood shifted, but the physics did not.

CO2 will average 429 parts per million this year, rising too fast for a path that holds warming to 1.5 degrees.

Losses from insured catastrophe topped $100 billion for the sixth straight year in 2025. Insurance nonrenewals ran ~80% higher in the highest-risk zip codes, and California's insurer of last resort has grown from 140,000 policyholders to nearly 700,000. The most objective risk-pricing industry on earth has booked climate as an input similar to how it prices in interest rates. Actuaries don’t price based on their emotions.

In March, the Strait of Hormuz closed and Brent went from $61 to $118. In June, Americans paid near record highs for gasoline despite record high domestic production and tapping the strategic reserves. Drilling more creates more volume but it carries permanent fuel-price exposure when a barrel is priced globally.

Manufactured energy, a solar farm, a geothermal well, a battery, has a fixed capital cost and no fuel cost: its price is locked the day it is financed. Once it is standing, it needs no fuel, no political favors, and no open waterways. US developers will add a record 86 gigawatts this year in spite of tax credit repeal. And the king of energy capitalist, Texas, holds the most battery storage on any US grid to support their nation leading wind and solar output.

On the other side of the world, China barely flinched from energy shocks. It restricted high priced energy imports, drew down from its secret oil stockpiles, and benefited from more than half of their new car sales being EVs, displacing a million barrels a day. Nobody would call China a climate champion; but with 2,200 gigawatts of localized, clean energy capacity and unquestionable dominance of renewable energy supply chains around the world, it’s clear they read the data rather than the hype cycle.

The fundamental truth about abundance, reindustrialization, resilience, or whatever you call economic prosperity… is that it all carries the physical reality of climate change and it doesn’t care how you feel about it.

New York Climate Week is the largest annual climate gathering on earth, and it has grown year over year regardless of the mood swings. On September 24, Newlab's New Climate Futures will rally around the front lines of climate: 75 startups commercializing technologies that aim to mitigate, adapt and evolve industry for a world with a changing climate. Join us alongside 1000+ leaders of industry, investment, policy and the community to dig into how their physics work. Your mood might improve as a result.