Hill Heat

Join us for the second teach-in of our series leading up to Earth Day 2025. This month, we plan to highlight the impact of U.S. war, militarism, and imperialism on people and the planet. This second teach-in will cover the cost of the physical launching pads of war and the imperialism, militarism, and colonialism: US bases, military exercises, and other aspects of its global presence. The US has over 800 bases around the world, which act as testing sites, mini-terriorites and colonies, and are extremely poisonous and dangerous to those around them.

In order to combat the climate crisis, we need to confront US militarism and imperialism. The U.S. military is the #1 institutional polluter in the world, with over 800 poisonous bases around the world, consistently building up pointless escalation and presence in every hemisphere. In moments of crisis at every level, we need to center our movements toward common targets and our collective futures.

Speakers list in formation including:

• Nodutol for Korean Community Development
• O’ahu Water Protectors
• David Vine

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The engines of green capitalism are on shaky ground. In the US, the Trump Administration has pledged to “terminate the Green New Deal,” putting an immediate freeze on all federal climate spending as part of its targeted “war on woke.” In Europe, policies designed to encourage sustainable energy investments are being rolled back, signalling a rapid decline in state support for the green energy transition after two decades of ESG (“Environmental, Social, and Governance”) investing. Yet as state incentives crumble, fossil fuel industry giants and the private sector in the US are continuing to build out renewable infrastructures, reminding us that for the energy sector, energy transition has always meant energy addition. Meanwhile, China’s push into renewables is hastening the dawn of an Age of Metals alongside the era of Fossil Capital.

Livestreamed from the People’s Forum in New York City, this free roundtable discussion brings together organizers, political theorists, and environmental policy analysts to make sense of the crisis in green capitalism. Can the green energy industry in the US and EU survive the aggressive withdrawal of state support, or are we witnessing the end of green capitalism? How is the political-economic landscape transforming with the reconfiguration of carbon markets, green finance, and infrastructure subsidies? And how might new alliances between communities, environmental movements, and the working class emerge from this contradictory landscape—to fight not only against retrenchment, but for a liveable climate future for the global working class?

RSVP: Zoom

RSVP: In Person

SPEAKERS

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. He has written for The Guardian, The Nation, The Baffler, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues. Ajay’s book on the politics of climate change, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (2024) outlines the politics and the power needed to alter the course of our burning world.

Alyssa Battistoni is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Boston Review, n+1, Dissent, The New Statesman, Jacobin, and New Left Review. Her forthcoming book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (2025) explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature and imagines how we might live freely while valuing nature’s gifts.

Brett Christophers is professor of human geography in the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University in Sweden. He is also the author of The New Enclosure (2019), Rentier Capitalism (2022), Our Lives in Their Portfolios (2023), and The Price is Wrong (2024), all published by Verso Books.

Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor of postcolonial studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the College of Staten Island. His recent books include Environmentalism from Below (2024), Decolonize Conservation (2023), People’s Power (2020), Extreme Cities (2017), and Extinction (2016). A member of the Social Text Collective, founder of the Public Power Observatory, and a Red Natural History Fellow, Dawson is a dedicated climate justice activist. His work focuses on global people’s movements and Indigenous self-determination, aiming to address environmental challenges through grassroots activism and scholarly research.

Kai Bosworth is a geographer and Assistant Professor of International Studies in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, and a Red Natural History Fellow with The Natural History Museum. His first book, Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century (2022) investigates how contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles.

This event is curated by Kai Bosworth and Ashley Dawson as part of Natural History for a World in Crisis, a programming series organized by the 2023-2025 cohort of Red Natural History Fellows with The Natural History Museum. Made possible with support from the Henry Luce Foundation and 4Culture.

The in-person event is hosted by The People’s Forum.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, will convene a full committee hearing titled “If I Could Turn Back Time: Should We Lock the Clock?” The hearing will examine the various issues around whether the country should continue “springing forward” and “falling back” each year with time.

Witnesses:

• Scott Yates, Founder, Lock the Clock Movement
• Jay Karen, Chief Executive Officer, National Golf Course Owners Association
• Dr. Karin Johnson, Practicing Physician and Professor of Neurology at UMass Chan School of Medicine Baystate, on behalf of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine
• Dr. David Harkey, President, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

Full committee nomination hearing.

Witnesses:

• Andrew Hughes, to be Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
• David Woll, to be General Counsel, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Michelle Bowman, to be Vice Chairman for Supervision, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
• John Hurley, to be Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Crimes, Department of the Treasury
• David Fogel, to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce for global markets and Director General of the United States and Foreign Commercial Service, Department of Commerce
• Landon Heid, to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce for export administration, Department of Commerce

Andrew Hughes is the former Chief of Staff for Ben Carson at the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) and Executive Director of the American Cornerstone Institute. Hughes worked on Ben Carson’s presidential effort, and then served in a similar capacity for three months with Trump’s first presidential campaign.

John Hurley is currently the Managing Partner of Cavalry Asset Management and Managing Member of TGK Ventures. Hurley has also been a long-time Lecturer in Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), where he teaches the GSB Investment Course. From 2018-2021, Mr. Hurley served on President Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board. He also serves on the Board of Governors of the Middle East Institute, the Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution, the Board of Trustees of the American Enterprise Institute, and the Board of Directors of America’s Frontier Fund. Hurley graduated with honors from Princeton, where he was Chairman of the Daily Princetonian, and now chairs the History Department Advisory Board. Upon graduation, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. During the First Gulf War, he served as a battalion fire direction officer for the First Cavalry Division, and was awarded the Bronze Star. After receiving his MBA from Stanford GSB, he was an analyst and portfolio manager at Fidelity Investments and Managing Partner of Bowman Capital Management before founding Cavalry in 2003.

David Fogel is currently CEO of North Country Collocation Services (NCCS), a crypto mining data center subsidiary of Coinmint in Massena, N.Y., and an Adjunct Professor in Entrepreneurship at Georgetown Law Center. Previously, Fogel was a two-time successful entrepreneur in the FinTech sector and a corporate attorney. From 2019-2021, Fogel served as Chief of Staff at The U.S. Export-Import Bank and then as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth in the U.S. State Department, where he was also nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs.

Full committee hearing.

Nominees:

• William Kimmitt, of Virginia, to be Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade
• Kenneth Kies, of Virginia, to be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy

William Kimmitt is a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. During the first Trump administration, he served as Counselor to the United States Trade Representative, where he advised the U.S. Trade Representative on trade policy and legal matters.

Ken Kies, a tax lobbyist who has advocated for big corporations such as Microsoft and Hess, has advised Trump on his own taxes.

Full committee nomination hearing.

Nominees:

• Preston Wells Griffith III to be Under Secretary of Energy
• Dr. Dario Gil to be Under Secretary of Energy for Science
• WITHDRAWN: Kathleen M. Sgamma to be Director of the Bureau of Land Management, Department of the Interior

During the first Trump term, Wells Griffith served as the Senior Advisor to the CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, Senior Director for Energy and Environment on the National Security Council, as well as Acting Assistant Secretary for International Affairs at the Department of Energy. Previously, he was executive director of the Mississippi Republican Party.

Gil currently chairs the National Science Board and is the director of IBM Research, and co-chairs the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. In its present form, the role of under secretary for science and innovation oversees DOE’s applied R&D programs and the Office of Science, which is the steward of 10 national labs.

Kathleen Sgamma has been the head of the Western Energy Alliance since 2006, working to protect the interests of oil and gas producers amid an international embrace of cleaner energies. Sgamma and the Western Energy Alliance have been a vocal critic of former President Joe Biden’s increased regulation of the oil and gas industry. Her nomination to helm a 10,000-person agency responsible for vast swaths of the country’s landscapes sent shockwaves through Western environmental groups. Sgamma was a contributor to the interior department section of Project 2025.

In 2009, after natural gas production caused a spike in smog in Wyoming’s Upper Green River Valley that exceeded air quality standards, Sgamma complained that proposed ozone regulations under consideration by the state “would create undue burdens and complexities for industry.” In the winter of the following year, the smog in Pinedale, Wyoming exceeded the worst air pollution in Los Angeles, and local residents were warned to stay indoors to protect their health.

Sgamma’s nomination was withdrawn at the last minute because she criticized the January 6th insurrection.

Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he’s using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it. We are taking nonviolent action against Musk’s illegal coup.

Dance Against DOGE will be outside the General Services Administration building, where DOGE workers are (illegally) sleeping. We thought we’d throw them a Slumber Party!

General Services Administration, 1800 F St., NW, Washington DC

We’ll be there in our PJs, with stuffed animals, as we dance the night away.

Tesla Takedown is a peaceful protest movement. We oppose violence, vandalism, and destruction of property. This protest is a lawful exercise of our First Amendment right to peaceful assembly.

RSVP

While we would love to know how many people to expect, there’s no need to sign up. Let’s Dance!

Full committee hearing entitled “Reducing waste, fraud and abuse through innovation: how AI and data can improve government efficiency.”

Witnesses:

• Dr. Brian J. Miller, Nonresident Fellow. American Enterprise Institute
• Dr. Sterling Thomas, Chief Scientist, Government Accountability Office
• Neil Chilson, Head of AI Policy, Abundance Institute
• Andrew Cannarsa, Executive Director, Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency

Prior to joining GAO, Thomas was Chief Scientist at Noblis, a nonprofit research institute. He managed the institute’s applied research programs and conducted his own research projects, which included creating new methods for synthetic biology and methods for using artificial intelligence to detect sophisticated cyberattacks. Sterling also served as a principal investigator where his research was funded by the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, and other intelligence community partners.

Subcommittee hearing.

Witnesses:

• Jessica Pescatore, Clinical Director, Alabama Poison Information Center, America’s Poison Centers
• Jennifer Carroll, Assistant Director, Community Action Partnership of North Alabama
• Michelle Sie Whitten, Executive Director, The Global Down Syndrome Foundation
• Christopher Frech, Co-Chair and Senior Vice President, Alliance for Biosecurity
• Christopher M Kramer, President, American College of Cardiology
• Rey Saldaña, President and CEO, Communities in Schools
• Theresa Sokol, LA State Epidemiologist; Board Member, Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists
• Sara Schapiro, Executive DIrector, Alliance for Learning Innovation
• Dr. Scott Harris, State Health Officer of the Alabama Department of Public Health; President, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials
• Dr. Colleen Kelley, Chair, HIV Medicine Association

Subcommittee hearing.

Witness:

• Dave Marroni, Director, Physical Infrastructure, U.S. Government Accountability Office