This week INET Oxford's Executive Director Eric Beinhocker joined Genevieve Bell, author Kim Stanley Robinson and Arun Majumdar to discuss ways of re-centring the environmental alongside the human in service of understanding, devising, and implementing systems to help us deliver our future safely and sustainably.
The struggle against climate change relies on a toolkit of scientific innovation, harnessing economic markets in new ways, and building new forms of global governance and cooperation. But such tools, and the thinking underlying them, are not enough. They operate within the constraints of an outdated paradigm. Recent scientific forecasts, as well as imaginings of possible futures based on them, paint a visceral picture of large-scale catastrophe averted only by larger-scale transformation. A zero-carbon, economically sustainable civilization will require fundamental political and economic power shifts between those who are heavily invested in the existing energy economy and those demanding a different, and new, moral political economy.
With this backdrop providing the foundation of their conversation,
discussion ranged across the following topics: How do we inform and
design a new moral political economy of climate change? What new
institutional arrangements will reflect values friendly to a thriving
earth while reducing inequality for its billions of inhabitants?
This event was produced by CASBS in partnership with the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking at
the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, and the Precourt Institute for Energy at
Stanford University.
Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
