A niche space based on dodgy science doesn’t belong in a new, high-end Midtown tower.

D oes New York, or, for that matter, anyplace, need a Climate Museum? Not a planetarium, not a natural history museum, not a tsunami museum or a national weather museum, all of which we already have. I’m writing about a proposed Climate Museum, set for a development near the Javits Center in Manhattan and dedicated to what the museum calls “the climate crisis and solutions,” all linked to abandoning oil, coal, and natural gas in favor of who-knows-what — wind-powered iced patooties — and, of course, reparations. Does New York need a Climate Museum? Not to be monosyllabic, but the answer is no.

The Climate Museum has been with us for a few years but as a pop-up, or itinerant, art space at Governor’s Island, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Rockefeller Center, on illuminated billboards, in storefronts in SoHo, and at lectures and indoctrination sessions for children. Two or three years ago, I saw David Opdyke’s Someday, all this, a Climate Museum montage of 400 old, color, 1920s tourist postcards that Opdyke altered to show skyscrapers burning, reptiles pulling bridges down, butterflies turned into monsters, and slogans such as “get into the ark.” I thought it was very cute atrocity propaganda.

The museum describes itself as “a home for climate art, learning, and action.” It was founded by Miranda Massie (b. 1966), a civil rights litigator whose causes include defending affirmative action, rights of the disabled, and children affected by toxins in the public schools, and I don’t mean unionized teachers. After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Massie started to focus on climate change through the lens of social and political activism.

I don’t know her and don’t dispute her sincerity. That said, I also don’t know whether Mother Earth is hotter than it was a hundred or a thousand years ago, and no one else does, either. Satellite climate measures are only 50 years old. Temperature records, unreliable and random as they might be, started around 1900. The planet is 4 billion years old. The climate is always changing.

Is climate change a boutique derangement? People, after all, believe all sorts of crazy things. “Weapons of mass destruction,” the Russia Hoax, Bat Cave Covid — a slander on the only mammals who can fly — those “mostly peaceful” BLM riots, the laptop that wasn’t Hunter’s but Vlad’s, cages for immigrant kids, whippings for immigrant moms and dads, all castles in Spain. At worst, climate change is a multitrillion-dollar fraud, so much bulldust. It’s also the best way imaginable to impoverish the most Americans. The only good thing to come from the wretched, overwrought Watergate scandal is “follow the money,” the ultimate guide to American civics. Lots of people — and corporations — have made millions and billions from dodgy science.

The planned new building is 24,000 square feet at 418 Eleventh Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, across the street from the Javits Center and spitting distance from New Jersey. At first, I hated going to that part of town, and so did much of the art-fair crowd. It’s grown on me, though, and I’m curious about how the neighborhood will evolve. FXCollaborative, a New York architecture firm, is designing the new museum. They designed the very nice Statue of Liberty Museum and have done lots of work for schools and religious institutions. The museum is part of a $1.35 billion mixed-use development that will include a hotel, homes, offices, an observation deck, and a ballroom.

The complex was to be anchored by Affirmation Tower, planned to be a 1,663-foot pencil building, the tallest building in the world owned by “black-controlled companies,” and who knows what that means, and constructed by a woman-led contractor. Women-owned and black-owned companies would get 30 percent of the construction contracts. Affirmation Tower would include a museum of the civil rights movement in collaboration with the NAACP.

This seems to have been scuttled. The State of New York is involved since it owns the lot. It’s a public-private partnership, which means it’s political. In January, Hochul announced a smaller complex, with the Climate Museum front and center. Whether the museum is a good or bad idea, I think it will at least look great. The space can always be repurposed.

The Climate Museum isn’t really a museum, though art will be in it. It’s not preserving and interpreting heritage. It’s an advocacy operation. According to the architect’s renderings, it won’t have a collection. It’s mostly driven by didactics. “Fossil fuel pollution drives the climate crisis,” reads one wall-sized panel. “Environmental Justice” headlines another. “The Climate Museum’s programming centers justice and educates the general public in the connections between climate change and social equity.” That’s from Jacqueline Patterson, founder and director of the Chisholm Legacy Project, which is “a resource hub for black frontline climate justice leadership.” She’s a trustee of the museum as well.

I read three of the Chisholm Legacy Project’s research reports. It blames climate change, in part, for anti-black hate and violence; food, housing, water, and energy insecurity among black people; economic devastation; the prison-industrial complex; intersectional, multilayered discrimination; spousal abuse; cancer; asthma; ADHD; and heat stroke, and that one I tend to believe. The reports are deadening and revelatory. What a spider’s web of grievance. It’s pure DEI — blame everything on race.

Does New York need a Climate Museum? Depending on how we count, New York already has 170 museums, ranging from the Met, MoMA, the 9/11 Museum, and two massive botanical gardens, all blockbusters, to lovely little places like Madam Jumel’s house in Sugar Hill in Harlem, Louis Armstrong’s house in the Corona neighborhood in Queens, and the Coney Island Museum. Aside from the grand institutions that are magnets for money, nearly all of the city’s museums tend to live on a starvation diet of nickels and dimes instead of gold bars and crypto.

Yet another multimillion-dollar capital campaign in New York takes money from the pockets of the worthy and needy, and for what? To bolster those who are, as the museum’s website tells us, “worried and powerless, resulting in a spiral of anxious silence.” But the true believers are no doubt rich, white liberals, often young, often befuddled by propaganda, ignorant of economics, history, and basic science, often too frightened to deploy common sense or think for themselves or reject received wisdom.

Why beggar struggling nonprofits to soothe these pampered souls? There’s a space planned in the new museum for an “Action Sticker Wall.” Visitors get a sticker as they leave. It reads, “I will vote for climate justice,” or “I will oppose the fossil fuel industry,” or “I will talk about climate justice,” but, please, not at a dinner party I’m attending. So much of the climate-justice movement is feel-good, change-the-world flapdoodle.

And who’s paying for the Climate Museum? It’s hard to say. Its budget is about $2.5 million. It has no backup cash. Is the museum renting space from the developer? Is New York State forcing the museum on the developer? I hear the museum is a culture hub for a new residential community, but, really, don’t culture aficionados want to be seduced by Monet and Renoir? A reading room featuring I’m Not a Plastic Bag, a book about a garbage island the size of Texas, just won’t do. As museums go, it’s ultra-niche. A fringe will go voluntarily. New York schoolkids will be herded in buses. They should be in their classrooms learning how to read, write, count, and add.

“Follow the money.” I hope the new hydrovac draining and disinfecting the Swamp reaches the dank, out-of-the-way corners where big money and climate charities play beach-blanket bingo. The Climate Museum tells us it’s not taking money tainted by oil, but it took $1 million from the Waverly Street Foundation, run by Laurene Powell Jobs, whose fortune descends from petroleum products and mined rare earth minerals essential to the production of smartphones, tablets, and computers. The foundation owns hundreds of millions of dollars in Apple stock.

The execrable Mellon Foundation gave the museum $800,000 in 2021. Its portfolio has enough Texas Tea in it to fill the Houston Astrodome. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Hilo Foundation, other big donors, are deep in oil money, too. It’s a case of hypocrisy, like when Leonardo DiCaprio flies to climate change junkets on a private jet, but these foundations pump millions into intersectional grudge-and-grievance groups breeding resentment, anxiety, and self-loathing among young people. Lots of nonprofit do-gooder types are making a nice living here, too.

Peter Knight is the chairman of the Climate Museum board. From 1977 to 1989, he was Al Gore’s chief of staff when Gore was a U.S. senator. He was also President Clinton’s campaign manager in 1996. Knight was involved in the Chinagate scandal, a pay-to-play fundraising scheme and an effort by the People’s Republic of China to influence the 1996 election. China is a giant polluter, an oil-and-coal addict, and a giant in solar-panel manufacturing. Nothing would make the CCP happier than the Green New Deal — the altar at which the Climate Museum worships — becoming America’s road to destitution.

The Climate Museum in its current form as an itinerant pop-up museum has a light, nimble footprint — which, if we’re thinking about environmental impact, is good. Building a permanent home means industrial production, mining, construction, and HVAC, for starters, all powered by Black Gold. Bricks and mortar are always more appealing than fly-by-night ephemera. A chunk of the climate change movement is, after all, about looking good. Still, guerrilla marketing seems better suited to a movement that touts sustainability.

The plans for 418 Eleventh Avenue have already been back and forth to the drawing board. I’d propose another visit. If the developers want a culture venue for a front door, why not a rotating, temporary exhibition supplied by New York’s great art museums, which have tens of thousands of wonderful things languishing in storage? The New York Historical Society and the Hispanic Society would benefit from a Midtown outpost, even one from which you can see Passaic.

Or entice an existing art museum to move there. In the past few years, the Folk Art Museum and the National Academy of Design moved. Fotografiska, the superb photography gallery whose Vivian Maier show I reviewed last year, is looking for a new home. The lovely Rubin Museum just closed. Goodness, put the Museum of Sex there. I’d stay far from the Climate Museum, which is a stump speech whose core, by the by, is pure PC. No one believes it, no matter how much a few megaphones blare it, and no one who’s not rich wants to pay for what it’s pushing.