What are the most useful frameworks to help the Left to organize our climate justice movements? What demands should we prioritize, and what strategies can we borrow from history and from other social movements? How can utopian thinking expand our horizons in what must be a massive fight for a more sustainable future?

Centering class struggle, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, anti-capitalist economic alternatives like degrowth and socialist planning: can all of these ideas (and more!) be woven into a clear message and a blueprint for change?

Join a panel of environmental thinkers to discuss left climate strategy and to assess where we are and what could be possible.

A conversation with Drew Pendergrass, co-author of Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics, Matthew Huber, author of Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, Andrea Vetter, co-author of The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, author of Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture. Moderated by Thea Riofrancos.

Speakers:

Drew Pendergrass is a PhD student in Environmental Engineering at Harvard University. His current research uses satellite, aircraft and surface observations of the environment to correct supercomputer models of the atmosphere. His environmental writing has been published in Harper’s, the Guardian, Jacobin, and Current Affairs. He is co-author of Half-Earth Socialism.

Matthew T. Huber is Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is the author of Lifeblood and Climate Change as Class War.

Andrea Vetter is a transformation researcher, activist and journalist, using degrowth, commons and critical eco-feminism as tools. She is co-author of The Future is Degrowth.

Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College. She is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019), and currently writing Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism for W.W. Norton. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian, among others.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is the author of the book Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). He has published in academic journals ranging from Public Affairs Quarterly, One Earth, Philosophical Papers, and the American Philosophical Association newsletter Philosophy and the Black Experience. Táíwò’s theoretical work draws liberally from the Black radical tradition, anti-colonial thought, German transcendental philosophy, contemporary philosophy of language, contemporary social science, and histories of activism and activist thinkers. His public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism, has been featured in The New Yorker, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, The Appeal, Slate, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, Aeon, and Foreign Policy.

This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Verso Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.