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The Global Climate Crisis and the Climate and Social Justice Movements for a Just Transition
Language: English
In December 2015, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change convened in Paris to finalize a global climate treaty. The resulting "Paris Agreement" is inadequate to the task of addressing the unpfrecedented global climate crisis, based as it is on non-binding voluntary national pledges, which even if all met would take global warming into the catastrophic range.
Simultaneously, a sprawling climate justice movement has been growing in numbers, reach, and strength, interlinked in a vast network of networks. After Paris and now in the wake of Donald Trump's administration in the United States, these movements are trying to scale up their efforts to put in place alternatives to both "business-as-usual" global neoliberalism and the "capitalist reformist" hopes placed in the Paris Agreement. The new social movements seek both a fair and binding global climate treaty and pathways toward deeply sustainable societies.
This session asks whether it remains possible to “change everything,” as Naomi Klein puts it in her best-selling book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
Consisting of prominent public intellectuals, climate activists, and interdisciplinary scholars, the panel will collectively address the question: how can the global climate and social justice movements work creatively to craft action plans that address the root causes and future impacts of climate change?
In doing so, we will be rethinking the most important global social movement of the 21st century, and how humanity’s response to the problem of climate change will define the conditions of life as the century wears on.
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