Hill Heat

A Symposium in Preparation for the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit 2014

Emissions markets are already operational from Europe to California to China, and many countries are likely to include market programs in pledges for the new international climate agreement in Paris in 2015. Over 60 countries and regions are currently using or seriously considering carbon markets and pricing instruments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent World Bank report.

This panoply of actions is laudable, but it presents challenges for business if systems are disparate and disconnected. How can international policy encourage market systems to grow, mature, and link together? How might emerging systems fit together in a coherent system that enables large-scale change fueled by major investment in new technology? And what does the 2015 agreement need to do to facilitate, rather than impede international linkage?

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements is leading new research into international market architecture for the Paris 2015 Agreement, in collaboration with the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA). This research is focused on policy linkage as a potentially important element of an emerging bottom-up international system to address climate change—linkage not only between emissions-trading systems (ETSs), but among ETSs, tax systems, and non-market regulatory systems (“heterogeneous linkage”). The research is highly relevant to the ongoing UNFCCC negotiations.

3:00 Welcome and Introductions

• Dirk Forrister, President and CEO, IETA

3:10 Pricing Carbon: Trends and Lessons from California, China, and Europe

• Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action
• Mary D. Nichols, Chairman, California Air Resources Board
• Joseph Martens, Commssioner of the New York State Department of Environmental

Conservation

• Tang Jie, Vice Mayor of Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China
• Amber Rudd, Parliamentary Under Secretary for Climate Change, United Kingdom

3:50 Carbon Pricing, Linkage, and the 2015 Agreement

• Robert Stavins, Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements and IETA will release an Executive Summary of a paper on this topic that will released prior to COP 20 in Lima, Peru.

4:10 What are the essentials for markets in the 2015 Agreement?

• Amy Ericson, US President, Alstom
• Steve Lennon, Group Executive Sustainability, Eskom
• Jim Rogers, Former CEO, Duke Energy*
• Anna Lindstedt, Ambassador for Climate Change, Sweden
• Anne Chassagnette, Director for Environment and Social Responsibility, GDF Suez
• Ted Roosevelt, Managing Director, Barclays
• David Hone, Chief Climate Change Advisor, Shell
• Nat Keohane, Vice President-International Climate, Environmental Defense Fund

CEOs and senior executives from major industries will discuss their views on carbon pricing, how pricing policies have affected their businesses – and what they hope to see in future domestic and international climate policies. The companies will release Statements highlighting their views.

4:40 Discussion

Government officials and representatives of the private sector will take questions from the audience.

Open to the Media.

The Harvard Club of New York City

27 West 44th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues)

09/22/2014 at 03:00PM

#FloodWallStreet

Wear Blue.

As world leaders meet in New York for a historic summit on climate change, communities across the globe will flood financial centers to confront the corporate and economic systems that are causing the climate crisis.

Join a united global movement to attack the root causes of the climate crisis and build an economy based on justice and sustainability. We need climate justice. Take action in solidarity with communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis for a day of:

Massive Coordinated Direct Actions Against Climate Profiteers.

9:00am – Gather at Battery Park for Breakfast and Music from Rude Mechanical Orchestra

9:30am – Speakers including frontline community leaders of the Climate Justice Alliance, Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, and Chris Hedges

11:00am – Non-violent Direct Action Training and March

12:00pm – Flood Wall Street and Mass Sit-in at the New York Stock Exchange

09/22/2014 at 09:00AM

The Climate Justice Alliance, together with our friends and allies, is hosting the People’s Climate Justice Summit, featuring the voices, strategies, and solutions of climate-affected communities around the world.

On September 23, political and corporate leaders will meet at the United Nations in New York City for Climate Summit 2014. This summit represents yet another step towards the corporate takeover of the UN climate negotiations and the privatization of land, water, and air resources under the guise of a global climate compact. The climate crisis is a symptom of a deeper problem: an economy based on extraction and exploitation of resources and people. This economy benefits a few at the expense of communities and the planet.

While heads of state meet at the UN, communities across the country are united for a just transition away from an economy based on fossil fuel extraction and other dirty industries, and towards clean community energy, zero waste, public transit, local food systems and housing for all.

Schedule:

09/22/2014 at 09:00AM

The People’s Climate March is scheduled for Sunday, September 21, just two days before world leaders attend an important Climate Summit at the United Nations. President Obama and many of the world’s presidents and prime ministers are expected to attend.

The People’s Climate March will be the largest single march on climate change in world history and the first major street protest of Mayor DeBlasio’s administration.

More than, 1,100 organizations have endorsed the march, ranging from the NAACP to SEIU, the second largest labor union in the country and the largest in New York, to Hurricane Sandy survivors and Maine fisherman joining the march by boat.

The march will begin at Columbus Circle, proceed over on 59th Street to 6th Avenue, down 6th Avenue to 42nd Street, then right on 42nd Street to 11th Avenue. The route passes by some of New York City’s most famous landmarks, from Rockefeller Center to Times Square.

Simultaneous events are planned in dozens of countries around the world, with major marches in London, Berlin, Paris, Delhi and beyond.

March Route & Climate Alarm

11:30 am – March Begins

Location: Marchers will assemble on Central Park West, between 65th and 86th streets.

Description: See here for more on the march lineup

1:00 pm—Mass Alarm Action Coinciding with Church’s Ringing Bells

Location: Throughout the entire march

Description: After a moment of silence, the entire march will ring out with trumpets, bells, drums, whistles as more than 100,000 people sound an alarm for climate action.

2:00 pm—March End

Location: 11th Ave. in the streets between 34th Street and 38th Street

Description: The march will end with a block party. At the center of the close will be a massive tree installation created by Brooklyn-based artist Swoon. See more details here

09/21/2014 at 11:30AM

The Natural History Museum at the Queens Museum

New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens

What happens when BP, Shell Oil, and the Koch Brothers fund museums of science and natural history? Or when market pressures influence operational and curatorial decisions?

Corporate sponsorship of museums and science education can compromise the basic idea of museums as reliable sources of common knowledge. By considering historical as well as contemporary examples of museum funding, we look at the ways in which power structures and marketing logic are embedded in practices of collecting and display.

With Dr. Alice Bell, Kert Davies and Stephen Duncombe, and a recorded video address on museums and climate change by Robert R. Janes, editor in chief of Museums Management & Curation, and author of “Museums and the Paradox of Change” and “Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse?”

• * * * * * * * * *

BIOS Dr. Alice Bell is a freelance journalist, specializing in the politics of science and technology. She writes about innovation for How We Get to Next and climate change for the Road to Paris. She’s a science policy blogger for the Guardian and columnist for Popular Science UK, and is working on a short history of the radical science movement for the Wellcome Trust’s Mosaic magazine. She previously worked as an academic, lecturing in science communication at Imperial College, where she also set up an interdisciplinary course on climate change, and acting as Head of Public Engagement at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex. Before that, she worked extensively in science education, including at the London Science Museum, and completed a PhD on children’s science media.

Robert R. Janes is Editor in Chief of Museum Management and Curatorship. He has worked in and around museums for the past 35 years as a director, consultant, author, editor, archaeologist, board member, teacher and volunteer. He is the past President and CEO of the Glenbow Museum, Art Gallery, Library and Archives in Calgary, Alberta, and was the founding Director of the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre and founding Executive Director of the Science Institute of the Northwest Territories. Robert is the author of “Museums and the Paradox of Change”, and “Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse?”. He has a PhD in Archaeology and he teaches at the University of Calgary.

Kert Davies is the Founder and Executive Director of the Climate Investigations Center. He is a well-known researcher, media spokesperson and climate activist who has been conducting corporate accountability research and campaigns for more than 20 years. Davies was the chief architect of the Greenpeace web project ExxonSecrets, launched in 2004, which helped expose the oil giant ExxonMobil’s funding of organizations and individuals who work to discredit the validity of climate science and delay climate policy action. More recently, Davies established the PolluterWatch program at Greenpeace, which launched the report Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine

Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communications of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author or editor of six books, including Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. He is the creator of the Open Utopia, an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, and writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications. Duncombe is a life-long political activist, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of the international direct action group, Reclaim the Streets. In 2009 he was a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he helped organize The College of Tactical Culture. He co-created the School for Creative Activism in 2011, and is presently co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism. Duncombe is currently working on a book on the art of propaganda during the New Deal.

09/20/2014 at 03:00PM

A public hearing on the EPA’s draft rule for greenhouse pollution from existing power plants will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at the William S. Moorhead Federal Building, Room 1310, 1000 Liberty Avenue.

The hearing will convene at 9:00 a.m. and end at 8:00 p.m.

Please contact Ms. Pamela Garrett at 919-541-7966 or at [email protected] to register to speak at one of the hearings. The last day to pre-register in advance to speak at the hearings will be Friday, July 25, 2014.

07/31/2014 at 09:00AM

A public hearing on the EPA’s draft rule for greenhouse pollution from existing power plants will be held in Denver, Colorado, in EPA’s Region 8 Building, 1595 Wynkoop Street.

The hearing will convene at 9:00 a.m. (local) and end at 8:00 p.m.

Please contact Ms. Pamela Garrett at 919-541-7966 or at [email protected] to register to speak at one of the hearings. The last day to pre-register in advance to speak at the hearings will be Friday, July 25, 2014.

07/29/2014 at 11:00AM

A public hearing on the EPA’s draft rule for greenhouse pollution from existing power plants will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Sam Nunn Atlanta Federal Center Main Tower Bridge Conference Area, Conference Room B, 61 Forsyth Street, SW, Atlanta, GA 30303.

The hearing will convene at 9:00 a.m. and end at 8:00 p.m.

Please contact Ms. Pamela Garrett at 919-541-7966 or at [email protected] to register to speak at one of the hearings. The last day to pre-register in advance to speak at the hearings will be Friday, July 25, 2014.

07/29/2014 at 09:00AM

Witnesses

• Dr. Richard S.J. Tol, Professor of Economics, University of Sussex
• Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Department of Geosciences, Princeton University
• Dr. Daniel Botkin, Professor Emeritus, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., Senior Research Scientist, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, and Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

05/29/2014 at 11:00AM

Senators Barbara Boxer and Sheldon Whitehouse — co-chairs of the Climate Action Task Force — will kick off the Capitol Hill Climate Action Rally to wake up Congress to climate change. At the rally, they will literally sound the alarm on climate change, by setting alarms on phones, tablets, or hand-held devices to ring at 5 p.m. EST.

05/21/2014 at 05:00PM