The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change
Part of the series: Climate Change Conversations: Taking Action against Shock, Silence, and Stupidity
This first event in our Climate Change Conversations series will feature multiple perspectives on the economic implications of climate change. How can we understand climate change (as well as shifting policy responses to it) as an economic threat, an economic opportunity, or something else? How do the answers to these questions look different at the scale of the region, the nation-state, and the globe?
Series Description:
This series of events aims to re-energize interdisciplinary conversations at Columbia about climate emergency, at a moment when confronting the urgent and ever-growing challenges posed by global warming feels extraordinarily difficult. In the context of diminished funding for climate science and other federal actions that aim to roll back or obstruct climate action, it’s easy to be shocked into silence and despair, or to be burned-out to the point of wondering, what’s the point? In this difficult moment, what are we not talking about, and why? Given the scientific consensus about human-caused climate change, this war on climate action seems, at best, extraordinarily stupid. How can we counter arguments that climate concern is “woke” or that climate action is “radical” or economically harmful? What can we learn from previous environmental setbacks? How can we reckon with climate change without being overwhelmed by climate anxiety? What modes of intelligence—in the university and beyond—can help us to counter these tendencies toward silence, stupidity, and despair? How can we forge a new common sense about the necessity and possibility of climate action?
Speakers
Matt Huber is a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University. He is the author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Climate (Verso Books, 2022).
Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School and faculty director of its Climate Knowledge Initiative. He has written six books, including Climate Shock and, most recently, Geoengineering: the Gamble. Gernot’s research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks, technologies, and policy. He is a research fellow at CEPR, faculty fellow at CESifo, board member of CarbonPlan, Project Syndicate columnist, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Financial Times, among others. Gernot holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard, an M.A. in Economics from Stanford.
David Wallace-Wells is a columnist and staff writer at The New York Times, where he writes a weekly newsletter on climate change, technology, and the future of the planet. He is the author of the #1 New York Times-bestseller, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019), a travelogue of the near future and meditation on how it will look to those living through it. Wallace-Wells was previously the deputy editor at New York magazine, deputy editor of The Paris Review, and a national fellow at the New America Foundation.
Climate Change Conversations: Taking Action against Shock, Silence, and Stupidity series events aim to re-energize interdisciplinary conversations at Columbia about the climate emergency, at a moment when confronting the urgent and ever-growing challenges posed by global warming feels extraordinarily difficult. Learn more and see the full roster of events here.
