The politics of the climate emergency are global. 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 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 especially 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? After all, there is a lot to oppose. How can U.S. based climate movements push a more cooperative relationship with Chinese climate politics? What is the best way for U.S. progressives to push China to decarbonize more rapidly—at home, and in its world-spanning infrastructure projects? What would progress look like?
Speakers:
• Tobita Chow, Director, Justice is Global, People’s Action
• Kevin Gallagher, Professor and Director of Global Development Policy Center, Boston University
• Joanna Lewis, Associate Professor and Director of Science, Technology and International Affairs Program, Georgetown
• Arpatim Sahay, Senior Policy Manager, Green New Deal Network
Moderator: Kate Aronoff, The New Republic, author of Overheated
Host: Daniel Aldana Cohen, Director of (SC)2, Penn (PSC)
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? Could it be possible to forge a “Pan-American Green New Deal” that centers workers and communities, while deconstructing centuries of American imperialism in the region? Certainly, 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?
This panel, “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. 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 global climate justice struggles across regions and Chinese climate politics.
The overall context is changing rapidly. This year, we’ve entered a new age of climate geopolitics. The United States is once again committed to massive green investment and some measure of low-carbon ambition. President Biden has outlined four ambitious targets for the United States: carbon neutrality by 2050, a 50% cut in emissions by 2030, a carbon-neutral electric grid by 2035, and 40% of climate investments benefiting disadvantaged communities. As a result of all these measures, the world’s three great economic blocs—the United States, China, and the European Union—which together comprise nearly two thirds of the global economy, are now all committed to carbon neutrality—by 2050 for the US and EU, 2060 for China. And all are committed to prioritizing massive amounts of green investment.
What about Latin America? One idea is the “Big Push” for sustainability framework that is being studied by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, or CEPAL in Spanish and Portuguese); this investment-first approach to a green transition has been developed by panelist Camila Gramkow. We know that Brazil, green industrial policy has had some important successes, especially in the wind industry, as our panelist Kathryn Hochstetler has shown. But the question of green transition must also consider the question of extraction, a massively contested process—and discourse—across the continent, on which our panelist Thea Riofrancos has written. And of course, it is impossible for Latin America to slash its greenhouse gas emissions without reversing deforestation in a socially equitable way with Indigenous leadership, especially in the Amazon, which is the life’s work of Beto Veríssimo, co-founder of the great Amazonian organization Imazon.
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.
The overall context is changing rapidly. This year, we’ve entered a new age of climate geopolitics. The United States is once again committed to massive green investment and some measure of low-carbon ambition. President Biden has outlined four ambitious targets for the United States: carbon neutrality by 2050, a 50% cut in emissions by 2030, a carbon-neutral electric grid by 2035, and 40% of climate investments benefiting disadvantaged communities. As a result of all these measures, the world’s three great economic blocs—the United States, China, and the European Union—which together comprise nearly two thirds of the global economy, are now all committed to carbon neutrality—by 2050 for the US and EU, 2060 for China. And all are committed to prioritizing massive amounts of green investment.
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.
In this panel, researchers engaged in both US and global climate politics will take up these questions, in the context of all the political changes of this year, and of the aftermath of the April 22-23 climate summit hosted by the United States. Join us.
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.
Today, nearly a third of Vienna’s city’s population lives in city-run housing, while another third lives in housing that is also subsidized and insulated from market pressures. But to learn all the lessons from Vienna’s social housing model, we must dig beneath the surface to uncover what’s most promising—and what isn’t working. How does Vienna currently fund new social housing, and the maintenance of housing that already exists? How is it incorporating climate and sustainability issues into its projects? And how well is it doing in terms of housing immigrants and refugees, who suffer racism and processes of stigmatization in Austria?
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, and a leading researcher around housing and climate justice will moderate.
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? 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.
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?
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.
Speakers:
Moderator:
Further Reading on Via Verde
Via Verde, Domus, 2012
Via Verde–The Green Way, Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence, 2013
Via Verde–The Green Way, Dattner Architects
In a Bronx Complex, Doing Good Mixes With Looking Good, The New York Times, 2011
A Sustainable Home in the South Bronx, The New York Times, 2018
Join us for a session on grant writing for the Quartet Pilot Competition. The PSC and PARC directors will provide information about the Quartet Program and available grant writing mentoring for junior faculty. Prior awardees will share experiences with the Quartet Program, provide advice on writing an effective grant, and outline how the pilot grant funding and research has facilitated subsequent applications to NIH or NSF. Finally, Kevin Volpp will give a presentation on grant writing and career strategies.
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Hal Caswell is a mathematical biologist and demographer. He received his Ph.D. in zoology from Michigan State University. After a long stay as Senior Scientist in Biology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, he moved to the University of Amsterdam as Professor of Mathematical Demography and Ecology. He studies the demography of plants, animals, and humans with equal enthusiasm. He has an inordinate fondness for matrices. Hal's research interests include stochasticity, heterogeneity, evolutionary demography, sensitivity analysis, and health demography. He is the author of a number of books, including Matrix Population Models (2001), Applied Mathematical Demography (2005; third edition, with Nathan Keyfitz), and Sensitivity Analysis: Matrix Methods in Demography and Ecology (2019).
His main current research focus is on the formal demography of kinship, developing a new analytical framework that greatly expands the ability to explore the factors determining kinship networks