Today, more than ever, climate change and its effects are in the news. One the one hand, what we learn is a constant cause for alarm: the number and the intensity of hurricanes is on the rise; forests the world over are being decimated by wildfires; and communities in low lying lands (like Bangladesh and Pakistan) are devastated by floods. Many countries are not keeping up with their carbon-zero commitments. But perhaps we should also draw comfort from news coverage on climate: it’s a sign that the threat of climate change is being taken seriously by an increasingly large part of the population. And there are some positive developments, too. The US is back in the Paris Agreement. The COP 27 recently led to a breakthrough on “loss and damage” funding to support developing countries suffering the worst effects of climate change. So, does this amount to a real shift? Have we finally reached a tipping point in our collective determination to fight climate change? Will historians of the future say: the 2020s was the decade where humanity started walking away from the precipice?
On March 13th 2023, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Alliance Program, we organized at Sciences Po, Paris a public discussion on these questions, bringing together Joseph Stiglitz, Professor at Columbia University; Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation; Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline, Professor at Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne; and Patricia Crifo, Professor at Ecole Polytechnique. This episode of Vis A Vis is an edited version of this conversation.
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Professor Joseph Stiglitz is a professor of Economics at Columbia University. He is the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2001. He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. In 2011 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is the author of numerous books including, most recently, People, Power, and Profits; Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy; and Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited.
Professor Laurence Tubiana is the CEO of the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and a Professor at Sciences Po, Paris. Before joining the ECF, Professor Tubiana was France’s Climate Change Ambassador and Special Representative for COP21, and as such a key architect of the landmark Paris Agreement. Following COP21 and through COP22, she was appointed UN High-Level Champion for climate action. From 1997 to 2002, she served as Senior Adviser on the Environment to the French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2013, she chaired the French National Debate on the Energy Transition. Professor Tubiana founded in 2002 the Paris-based Institute of Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI).
Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline graduated from École Centrale Paris. She is a professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and at the Paris School of Economics. Her research and expertise are in environmental economics: taxation and its economic effects, policies for curbing greenhouse gases, corporate social and environmental responsibility and the political economy of the environment. Professor Chiroleu-Assouline holds a senior chair at the Institut universitaire de France and she is a member of the Conseil économique pour le développement durable and President of the French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
Patricia Crifo, is a Professor of Economics at Ecole Polytechnique and researcher at CREST. She is also associate research fellow of CIRANO (in Montréal), of the Institut des Politiques Publiques and the Institut Louis Bachelier. At Ecole Polytechnique, Professor Crifo is the director of the MSC in Economics for smart cities and climate policy, the research initiative for Sustainable Finance and Responsible Investment (FDIR) and deputy director of the Energy4climate (E4C) interdisciplinary center.
Credits
Host: Dr. Emmanuel Kattan
Editor and Producer: Monica Beatrice Hunter-Hart
Producer: Abdibasid Ali