MAY 19, 2021 | 12:00-1:30 pm EDT | How should US-based Green New Dealers—and other advocates of ambitious climate policy—understand, respond to, and engage with climate politics in other parts of the world? That question is particularly fraught when it comes to Chinese climate politics, especially in the current moment, where a number of political elites in both of the United States’ leading political parties are casting China’s economic rise as a fundamental threat to U.S. interests.

We worry about the prospect of a new Cold War. How can progressive forces in the U.S. counter the bellicose Cold War rhetoric and mobilization, without reflexively defending all that China does? How could a constructive U.S.-China relationship on climate fit into a broader Global Green New Deal vision? What would progress look like?

Speakers:

Tobita Chow is the founding Direc­tor of Jus­tice Is Glob­al, a spe­cial project of People’s Action to build a just and sus­tain­able glob­al econ­o­my and defeat right-wing nation­al­ism. He is a leading progressive strategist regarding the US–China relationship and the rise of Sinophobia in the US. He has co-authored a number of essential texts on U.S. engagement with Chinese climate politics, including “U.S.-China: Progressive Internationalist Strategy Under Biden” and “Trump Is Trying to Put Us on War Footing with China. It’s Up to the Left to Stop It.”

Dr. Kevin P. Gallagher is a professor of global development policy at Boston University (BU), where he directs the Global Development Policy Center in its mission to advance policy relevant research for financial stability, human wellbeing, and the environment on a global scale. Dr. Gallagher is the author or co-author of The Case for a New Bretton Woods: Reforming Global Economic Governance for Prosperity and the Planet, The China Triangle: Latin America’s China Boom and the Fate of the Washington Consensus, Ruling Capital: Emerging Markets and the Reregulation of Cross-border Finance, and The Dragon in the Room: China and the Future of Latin American Industrialization.

Joanna Lewis is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Energy and Environment and Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA) at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She has two decades of experience working on international climate and clean energy policy with a focus on China. At Georgetown she runs an active, externally funded research program and leads several dialogues and joint study groups facilitating U.S.-China climate change engagement. Lewis is also a faculty affiliate in the China Energy Group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is the author of the award-winning book Green Innovation in China, and was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report.

Tim Sahay has worked over the past decade across physics, cleantech, climate adaptation & consulting. During his Physics PhD at MIT he was part of the fossil divestment movement. As the Blue-Green Cities fellow at the Charles River Watershed group he organized housing advocates to lobby for climate resiliency in Boston. He has worked as a consultant on projects ranging from pollution in India to energy transition in China. He is currently the senior policy manager at Green New Deal Network.

Moderator: Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic, and a former fellow at the Type Media Center. Her work has appeared in The Intercept, The New York Times, The Nation, Dissent, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian, among other outlets. She is the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet–And How We Fight Back.

Host: Daniel Aldana Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019).

MAY 11, 2021 | 12:00-1:30 pm EDT | Is there a possible Pan-American Green New Deal that centers workers and communities, while deconstructing centuries of American imperialism in the region? Any move toward continental climate justice will require policymakers, social movement, researchers, and others in the United States to face a Big Question: How should US-based Green New Dealers—and other advocates of ambitious climate justice action—understand, respond to, and engage with climate politics in other parts of the world? “A Pan-American Green New Deal? Green Investment, Extraction Battles, Reforestation” considers our Big Question in the broad context of climate politics in the Americas.

Speakers:

Camila Gramkow holds a PhD degree in economics of climate change from the University of East Anglia, UK. She has a master’s degree in economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ in Brazil) and a degree in economics from the University of São Paulo (USP in Brazil). She has been working in the sustainability area for more than 10 years. Currently, she is Economic Affairs Officer at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) at its Office in Brazil.

Thea Riofrancos is an associate professor of political science at Providence College, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020-2022), and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2020-2021). Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America. These themes are explored in her book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), her co-authored book, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019), and academic articles in World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Cultural Studies. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Boston Review, The Baffler, n+1, Dissent, Jacobin, among others. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and serves on the organization’s Green New Deal Campaign Committee.

Kathryn Hochstetler is Professor and Head of the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She has been researching and publishing on environmental politics in South America for three decades. Her work includes studies of social movements, environmental policy, trade agreements like Mercosur, development finance, and participation in international environmental negotiations. Her most recent book is Political Economies of Energy Transition: Wind and Solar Power in Brazil and South Africa (Cambridge, 2021), which pays particular attention to the relationship between economic and environmental aims in the electricity sectors of these emerging powers.

Beto Veríssimo is a co-founder of Imazon, a think-and-do tank organization based in the Brazilian Amazon founded in 1990. He holds a master degree in Ecology from The Pennsylvania State University (USA) and graduate degree in Agriculture Engineer from the Federal Rural University of the Brazilian Amazon. His work has helped created about 25 million hectares of Conservation Units in the Brazilian Amazon and support forest management for more than 7 million hectares. In the last years he has work on different strategies to reduce the level of deforestation and forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon. He received several awards including 2010 the Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship. In 2015 he received the Brazilian Award on conservation by Globo Newspaper. He is also co-founder of Amazon Center for Social Entrepreneurship and Affiliated Scholar, Brazil Lab at Princeton University.

Moderator: Michael Weisberg is Senior Faculty Fellow and Director of Post-Graduate Programs at Perry World House, as well as Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Host: Daniel Aldana Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

MAY 3, 2021 | 12:00-1:30 pm EDT | The politics of the climate emergency are inextricably entwined with public and private investment at a planetary scale. There can never be adequate climate policy in one country alone; and there can certainly never be climate justice in one country alone. So how can one link domestic and global climate politics in 2021? More precisely, policymakers, social movement, researchers, and others in the United States currently face a Big Question:

How should US-based Green New Dealers—and other advocates of ambitious climate justice action—understand, respond to, and engage with climate politics in other parts of the world?

This panel, “Global Climate Justice Against Neo-Colonialism: New Concepts and Priorities for Just Cooperation,” considers our Big Question in the broad context of climate politics across the regions of the planetary economy. The panel is also part of a broader series, called Democratizing Global Green Investment: Aligning Domestic and International Policies around Green New Deal Principles, which will also feature discussions focused on Latin American and Chinese climate politics. So the age of global climate politics has arrived. But will these economic blocs invest enough to reach their targets? Will they invest in ways that promote equity? And how will great power competition shape these dynamics? In the US and around the world, advocates of a Green New Deal, or climate justice more broadly, cannot afford to focus only on domestic climate politics—or only on interstate climate politics, as if the dynamics within countries were wholly separate from global politics. It is all interconnected.

Speakers:

Dipti Bhatnagar coordinates the Climate Justice and Energy program for Friends of the Earth International. She has been in the role since March 2012. She is hosted by JA! / Justiça Ambiental / Friends of the Earth Mozambique where she also works on climate justice and dirty energy. An activist for 20 years, with a deep-rooted sense of justice, Dipti worked with the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada movement) to fight destructive dams, and in California she worked on immigrant rights and safe drinking water for disadvantaged farmworker communities of colour. An environmental scientist by training, Dipti was born in Kolkata, India. She lives in Maputo, Mozambique, with her partner whom she met whilst campaigning against dams.

Richard Kozul-Wright is Director of the Globalisation and Development Strategies Division in UNCTAD. He has worked at the United Nations in both New York and Geneva. He holds a Ph.D in economics from the University of Cambridge UK. He has published widely on economic issues including, inter alia, in the Economic Journal, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, The Journal of Development Studies, and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. He is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook on Industrial Policy and a co-author with Kevin P. Gallagher of A New Multilateralism for Shared Prosperity – Geneva Principles for a Global Green New Deal. Mr. Kozul-Wright is one of the members of the Commission on the Rights of Future Generations, an initiative based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

Kian Goh is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She researches the relationships between urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilization in the context of climate change and global urbanization. Dr. Goh’s current research investigates the spatial politics of urban climate change responses, with fieldwork sites in cities in North America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. More broadly, her research interests include urban theory, urban design, environmental planning, and urban political ecology.

Narasimha D. Rao is Associate Professor in the Yale School of the Environment. His research examines the relationship between energy systems, human development and climate change. He is the recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2015-2018) for this project, the Decent Living Energy – energy and emissions thresholds for providing decent living standards for all. His research interests include investigating income inequality, infrastructure, and climate policy. His methods include household energy modeling, econometrics, input-output, and policy analysis.

Moderator: Billy Fleming is the Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center in the Weitzman School of Design, co-director of the “climate + community project” along with Daniel Aldana Cohen.

Host: Daniel Aldana Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

APRIL 13, 2021 | Co-Sponsored by (SC)2 and Population Studies Center | 12:00 pm EDT

To guarantee healthy, carbon-free homes across the United States, we need to build green social housing at scale. And there’s no better model than Vienna, the global capital of social housing—and a city frequently ranked as the best in the world to live in. Vienna has been building social housing for a hundred years. This housing is known for both its architectural innovation and quality, and for the financial sustainability of the model. Any discussion of building green social housing at scale in the United States must learn from the Vienna model.

To answer these questions, we have one of the world’ foremost experts on Vienna’s housing model. WOLFGANG FÖRSTER directs PUSH Consulting, a Vienna-based private consulting company in the areas of urban planning and housing which advises both policy makers and public, not-for-profit and private developers. Förster is also Former Deputy Director of Vienna Housing Fund, and Former Head of Vienna State Housing Research Department. He has organized a global exhibit on Vienna’s social housing model, is the co-editor of The Vienna Model 2: Housing for the City of the 21st Century (Jovis 2018), and is the editor of 2000 Years of Housing in Vienna: From the Celtic Oppidum to the Residential Area of the Future (Jovis 2020).

Those of us in the United States must also discuss which elements of Vienna’s model are most applicable, which errors are most relevant, and which ideas demand the greatest ongoing discussion.

To develop that debate, we will hear responses to Förster’s presentation from NIKIL SAVAL, the State Senator for Pennsylvania’s First District, who was elected in 2020 as a Homes Guarantee candidate committed to a dramatic expansion of green, affordable housing options in Philadelphia; and from ILONA DUVERGE, Co-Founder and NYC Director of Movement School, and the leading grassroots organizer for a Green New Deal for Public Housing.

Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2, will moderate. He has argued for a Green New Deal for Housing inspired by the Vienna model; he led the research for the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act introduced in 2019 by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernard Sanders.

March 18, 2021 | Co-organized by Daniel Aldana Cohen and Karen Kubey | 6:00 – 7:30 pm EST

The future of affordable housing must be climate-friendly, and it must provide a model for community living that’s splendid and racially just. How can the lessons of Via Verde, the lauded South Bronx housing development, help shape the future of green social housing in the United States? Join our panel, co-sponsored by the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

Join Karen Kubey, the co-organizer of New Housing New York; Via Verde architect William Stein and developer Jonathan Rose; and South Bronx community leader Jessica Clemente, in conversation with Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval and Director Daniel Aldana Cohen, director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2, at UPenn. They will discuss the lessons from the influential project, and what it would take to replicate the best elements of Via Verde in Philadelphia and other US cities. How can we make a downpayment on a Green New Deal for Housing with model projects like Via Verde? How can American public institutions provide climate-friendly, healthy, affordable housing for all? What can the United States contribute to the global rise of green social housing as a cornerstone of climate justice? Register here.

Via Verde, completed in 2012, was the result of New Housing New York, the city’s first design competition for sustainable below-market housing. Combining 222 affordable rental and home-ownership units, the award-winning project is a prototype for beautiful, green, healthy, anti-racist, and low-carbon housing. It includes dozens of solar panels, comfortable and energy-efficient apartments, and a range of lovely outdoor spaces, ranging from a playground to vegetable gardens. The project was designed in dialogue with local community members in the South Bronx. It’s one of the country’s more glorious examples of what the future of housing could look like. But this is a story that’s just beginning.

Sponsored by the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2, and the Population Studies Center (UPenn); co-sponsored by the Pratt Institute School of Architecture Desegregation Think-Tank; supported by the Pratt Nexus for Interdisciplinary Studies.

More details:web.sas.upenn.edu/sociospatialclimate/events/viaverde/