Abstract:

This event was produced by CASBS
in partnership with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford, and the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.

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 They operate within the constraints of an outdated paradigm.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.

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? Join Eric Beinhocker, Genevieve Bell, and Kim Stanley Robinson in conversation with Arun Majumdar as they explore ways of re-centering the environmental alongside the human in service of understanding, devising, and implementing systems that may help us deliver our future safely and sustainably.