 Are we ready? Hello, hi. I'm Reinhold Martin, and I speaking to you, welcome. Speaking to you from the shadows of the Temple-Hoyne-Buhl Center for the Study of American Architecture here at Columbia University. And we're here to speak about this. Perhaps you can see, whoop, overheated. How capitalism broke the planet and how we fight back. The author is Kate Erinhold, who's going to be joined by a panel of distinguished colleagues to discuss this very important recent book just out on both type books in 2021. So, you know, it's actually thinking about how to frame this discussion. I was reminded, I have to say, this brings back some fairly recent memories, but distant enough to recall. For you that in December 2018, you know, kind of in the before times, Kate Aranoff published an essay in The Intercept, the title of which was as direct as that of this book that we're here to celebrate and think about this evening. The essay, that one from The Intercept in 2018, declared, quote, with a green new deal, here's what the world could look like for the next generation. So when my Buell Center colleagues, Jacob Moore, Jordan Steingart, and I read that essay, we knew that this was exactly the kind of thinking and writing that we were hoping to connect with and encourage with the Buell Center's project called Power Infrastructure in America, the website for which we had just launched. And here I want to take the opportunity, once again, to thank Jacob and Jordan for making that project what it is, along with everything they've done to make the Buell Center what it is. And I say that because it was they who then worked with Kate and The Intercept editors who were kind enough to allow us to republish that essay on the Power website where you can still find it. I think Jacob's just put it in the chat. There the essay links up with dozens of other contributions of various types from scholars, activists, journalists, and students, all concerned with thinking critically and equally important in many cases, these propositionally about justice, inequality, and equity as these converge in the climate crisis. Kate Aronoff's direct propositional writing, like here's what the world could look like or here's how this happened, here's how to change it is of particular interest, I think, to the arts and sciences of the built environment, which given their proximity to the professions the practitioners in a sense of the built environment, like architects, architecture and urban planning, for example, landscape architecture, many other fields sit precariously poised, these fields sit precariously poised between explanation, which is to say, accounting for what happened and maybe how it happened and action, which is to say, proposing what to do about it. So that's basically what we're here to discuss tonight. What is happening with respect to the climate crisis and its multifarious social impacts and dimensions, how it happened, and perhaps most urgent, what is to be done? To help us then to return to this eternal question, the meaning of which changes each time we repeat it, what is to be done, and to celebrate the publication of Overheated, Overheated. We have a group of four extraordinary colleagues beginning with the author herself. Kate Aronoff is, I would say, among the most uncompromising, most demanding, and sometimes as in that early intercept piece, most optimistic even, writers asking and answering that question, what is to be done working in today's public sphere? A Brooklyn-based journalist, her writing on American politics and climate change has appeared in Harper's, The Guardian, The Nation, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Descent, Jacobin, The Intercept, and The New York Times. Since 2020, Kate has been a staff writer at The New Republic where you can read her regular dispatches from the front lines of the climate wars. Equally relevant to our discussion this evening, she's also the co-editor of A Planet to Win, why we need co-author, co-author of A Planet to Win, why we need a Green New Deal, which is on Verso, and the co-editor of We Own the Future, Democratic Socialism American Style on The New Press. Kate will be joined in discussion by first, Alyssa Battastoni, who's a political theorist and now we're very happy to say, assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, just across the street here, where she works and teaches on topics related to political economy, environmental politics, feminism, and the history of political thought. Working like Kate in what we can call the climate counterpublic sphere, Battastoni has written for publications including The Nation, Descent, N Plus One, Boston Review, and Jacobin, in addition to her scholarly writing. She's the author of A Planet to Win, co-author again, of A Planet to Win, why we need a Green New Deal, with in fact, as I said, Kate Aranoff, but also Daniel Aldana Cohen and Thea Rio-Frankos. Following Alyssa will be Kian Go, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA, and associate faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, where she researches and teaches on urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilization in the context of climate change and global urbanization. Her current research investigates the spatial politics of urban climate change responses with fieldwork sites in cities in North America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Dr. Go received a PhD in Urban Environmental Planning from MIT and a master of architecture that I personally remember well from Yale University. And indeed, Kian is the author of another important contribution that we should really be celebrating as well, to knowledge in this area, form and flow, the spatial politics of urban resilience and climate justice, just out from MIT Press. And then finally, Patrick Houston will sort of have the last word in the first round of this conversation. Patrick is the Climate and Inequality Campaigns Associate with New York Communities for Change. There, he engages black and brown and low income communities in climate justice advocacy campaigns. Originally from North Philadelphia, Patrick is an alum of Community College of Philadelphia and he holds a BA from Swarthmore College in Political Science and Environmental Policy. And as I said, Patrick will in fact have the last word during the formal portion, this is kind of the script for the evening, the formal portion of the evening in which Cape will begin by offering a brief presentation of the book itself, which I have to warn you, checks in the 359 pages, so this will just be a small sample of its many layers, all of which reward further scrutiny. Our respondents will then respond, as respondents do, each in turn in alphabetical order, Alyssa, Kian and Patrick, after which, this was conveniently both first names and last names, alphabetical. No, yes, and they're gonna respond in that order and after which we'll then open up to a more general discussion and to enable the audience. So with that, I'm just gonna hand the screen, I'm going to disappear into the shadows here and hand it over to Kate, who will tell you about this extraordinary book that we're here to discuss. Thank you so much, Reinhard. And to everyone for being here, I mean, I've learned so much from every other person on this panel. And so it's a real pleasure just to get to talk about it with everyone here. And I think the sort of downfall of book events is you get a little sick of hearing yourself talk about the same thing. So it's good to be genuinely in conversation. I'm not just sort of holding forth. That said, I will not, as Reinhard sort of said, present the full nearly 400 pages of this book. But to start off a conversation about it, just wanted to give a little bit of context for kind of where this project came from and the different kind of life as led from sort of conception to realization but now being out in the world is a real thing you can hold in your hand, which Reinhard just did. So this book was conceived in a very, very different time than the one that it came out in. I wrote the proposal and was pitching what became overheated to publishers in the summer of 2018. So at that point, Republicans controlled every branch of government. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had not been elected yet. There were no socialists in the House of Representatives. It seemed like Democrats might possibly win back the House but if they did sort of the peak of the climate conversation we could expect seemed like it would be some sort of mild carbon pricing regime that probably wouldn't go anywhere. There were starting to be some conversations about a federal job guarantee but the Green New Deal really wasn't sort of on the agenda and in a meaningful way outside of me and a couple of friends and folks on the climate left who were sort of excited about these ideas that had been raised several years ago. So writing an eco-socialist book effectively felt like a pretty strange thing to be doing but that's what I did. And over the course of writing the book things obviously changed dramatically, right? AOC was elected to Congress that summer after Democrats did win back the House in November the Sunrise Movement sat in an Nancy Pelosi's office sort of calling out the disconnect between this committee that was being proposed on climate change and the stark reality of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes report on the difference, the catastrophic differences between 125 degrees of warming and two degrees. One point, not long after that it looked like a socialist Bernie Sanders might be elected president of the United States. There was a global pandemic that we are still living through. There were uprisings in the summer of 2020 for Black Lives one of the biggest waves of protests in US history. Congress spent trillions of dollars to expand the safety net and the Federal Reserve effectively propped up the global economy. So a lot sort of shifted and the book changed sort of along with that and was inspired by the sort of movements or putting the ideas onto the table and tried to move with the times. And I hope I was somewhat successful in that. And since it's come out, I have had the sort of displeasure of reporting on this infrastructure fight which people have probably been following, right? The basic situation of which has not changed dramatically since the spring, since April, April of 2021 Democrats are fighting for this entirely inadequate piece of climate legislation. It's being blocked within these inter-party fights by these two very idiosyncratic, strange corporate funded politicians, Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema who wield an outsized amount of power thanks to our very antebellum constitution. And it's been a bit of a frame shift to go from writing about the Green New Deal and imaginative futures of what our climate changed but more leisurely and democratic world could look like like I was attempting to do it overheated to back into the muck of sort of beat reporting and following the ins and outs of Congress. So in thinking about what I was gonna say tonight, I thought a lot about this conversation that I had for the book with this woman named Betty Sue Flowers who sort of a funny character. She was formerly the director of the LBJ Institute, LBJ Presidential Library in Texas. And as a young PhD in English Literature PhD, she was recruited to work for Royal Dutch Shell at this new division called the Group Planning Team later known as the Scenarios Team. And she led the sort of process alongside a very strange character named Pierre Beck who was the chief economist of Shell France. And she would go to these very strange gatherings called going into the green. And the idea was to gather this planning team to come up with these really imaginative visions for what the world would look like. And the goal was to upend these executives mental models for what would happen over the next 10, 20, 30 years. And the point was to shake the sort of foundations of how the higher ups at Shell, the people who are making these planning decisions to signing what the company would be doing down the line, how they interpreted the world, right? And Flowers's job as an English Literature PhD who wrote stories for a living was to upend these these these mental models was to really give a sort of new foundation from which these executives could understand the world and needed to break down these sort of old conventions that really held a lot of sway in their mind in order to make these sort of new scenarios as they called them seem possible. And so she was charged with sort of writing down these reflections that these planners at Shell would come to after long afternoons over wine and long dinners and fierce discussions in the South of France and would condense these into reports that for a long time were sort of proprietary to Shell. She told me they were kept under lock and key there. And the idea really was to present this alternative, right? To present this alternative to what companies broadly did at the time which was traditional business forecasting. So projecting out the saying, projecting out what was happening in the immediate horizon, right? Sort of what was the reality in here and now projecting that out into the future and hoping that history would persevere along some linear timeline that everything would sort of be now but more in the future. So that really sort of struck out to me as a sort of different way to think about what might be possible, right? I shall imagine there were many, many scenarios before us and sort of in the muck of this terrible infrastructure site it's really nice to imagine that a different future can be possible and that's a hard thing, right? Has been a hard thing through what can be a really sort of dismaying all-encompassing dread about the climate crisis and just the sheer magnitude of what needs to change. But I found the shell scenarios sort of inspiring along that front. And part of why I look at them in the book and why I keep thinking about them is that those are the places where planning happened. Those are the places where people are allowed to dream about new futures in the second half of the 21st century. And roughly the first half of the book is describing why it became so impossible to think about new scenarios, right? How white supremacy and neoliberalism came together to divide working people against one another, crushed labor unions and insulate capitalism from the threat of democracy by solidifying the kind of minority rule that's already baked into the US Constitution. And how these decades of right-wing organizing had been largely successful by the time climate change enters the national conversation here in 1988, the tail end of the Reagan administration when there's a new common sense established about what it is that the government owes to its people and the relationship between the public and the private sector. And so partially inspired by the scenario planners, the second half dives into the ideas that this very successful process took off the table, right? That aren't strange ideas in US history and in a pragmatic sense are the most practical ways for dealing with the climate crisis, right? So bringing electric utilities under public ownership, making sure that solar and wind power and zero carbon power is a right that is given to everyone and not a luxury that can only be accessed by the 1%. A federal job guarantee to account for the many, many people whose livelihoods are bound up in the fossil fuel economy, nationalizing fossil fuel assets to enable and manage decline on the sector where workers are at the table deciding how these fuel sources and industries which have built communities are wound down, rather than leaving those decisions up to either fossil fuel executives or the private equity vultures who are coming in to snap them up, repaying the debts owed to people on the losing end of US imperialism, both abroad and in its carceral elements here at home and the sort of scourge of mass incarceration that's encouraged the rise of white supremacists like Donald Trump and many, many others and a four-day work week to allow people the time for lower carbon and more enjoyable kinds of consumptions and make sure that even if the world is a hotter one it can be a more democratic and enjoyable world. So I wrote the second half of the book sort of thinking through the scenario planning and trying to fight back against what Mark Fisher described as capitalist realism that is sort of all around us in the last few months it's seen. So that's capitalist realism less than excitement for neoliberalism and these sort of no-strings about free markets and government than a cynical moralizing that anything else, any alternative would be just unrealistic and kind of foolish. Analogous Fisher writes to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state any hope is a dangerous illusion. But, the last several years are a pretty good rebuke of capitalist realism, right? Many, many things have changed many things have been on earth that certainly none of us could have predicted a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, certainly and obviously not all of those things have been for the better but these stark sort of breaks really can offer a vision for what a different world can look like and can be a terrain a sort of contestation around what is possible and the kinds of futures that we can imagine together. So, the irony of a multinational oil company being the inspiration for a book that suggests euthanizing them isn't lost on me but I think the scenario team basically had the right idea, right? We don't know what's going to happen we probably can't know what's going to happen but we can be prepared with ideas with dreams with organizing with the tools to make that future a better one and prevent the sort of scenarios we don't want to see. So, I'll just wrap up this sort of opening presentation with one of the quotes from Betty Sue Flowers that has sort of stuck with me. She said, the point of scenarios is to make you flexibly oriented toward the future. If you didn't write entirely new futures you weren't doing your job. So, my hope with this book is that maybe there are a few more scenarios sort of in the mix for what the next couple of decades can look like. Okay, great. Thanks, Kate. And I'm going to now invite Alyssa to join and respond. We'll just kind of go like this through the group. Yeah, thanks. Great. So, first of all, well, hi, I'm also about a Stoney. I'm really excited to be here and talk about Kate's fantastic book. Rikita, get your copy now. So, I'm going to just, you know I want to start by just congratulating Kate on this really important book that I think brings together a really impressive range of reporting, analysis, argument, vision. And it's a really, you know there's nothing like it that I think draws on that on both the kinds of range of material she's working with, the kinds of ideas and also the kind of getting into the nitty gritty as well as the big vision. I'm going to say a little bit more about all of that but it's really terrific. And if you haven't already yet the 359 pages I think Rainhold said it was, they fly by. So, I'll start off with that. But so what I'm going to do is just lay out a little bit. Kate has said some of this on the vision piece especially if I just wanted to just give a short, you know run through some of the overarching political arguments and visions that I think are really important that Kate lays out. I'm a political theorist. So that is more my area. I know probably a lot of people here are in the architecture urban planning built environment type world. But I'm going to talk about some of the political arguments that I think are really great and important and then ask a couple of questions. So, first of all, you know there really are these two parts kind of diagnosis and vision and they're intertwined but you know, we start off with a real diagnosis or a problem. And you know what I think is really powerful about the book is that is the way that Kate shows deeply I think the fossil fuel industry goes in a sense. You know, we all know the fossil fuel industry is the bad guy on climate or at least so we think although as Kate points out the fossil fuel industry often hasn't been at the heart of our political conversations about climate policy. It wasn't even that in the Green New Deal resolution it's often kind of something we put to the side and talking about all of the great green jobs that we're going to see and that we haven't necessarily, you know that we sometimes don't come to face with this industry is power and what it's done to our politics. She goes certainly beyond the fossil fuel industry to talking about as she's discussed the longer, you know, situating that our struggles to respond to climate change and a longer history of neoliberalism of anti-democratic strategies of racial capitalism but also shows that the fossil fuel industries reach goes a lot deeper than we tend to think showing how deeply entrenched fossil fuels are not only in our built environment and, you know, our trans systems are, you know our daily life, but also how entrenched the ways of thinking promoted by fossil capital are and the ways we think about climate and how we could address it. So I think it's really compelling the way the way that Kate shows how climate denial persists in the economic models we make used to make sense of climate policy and proposals for carbon pricing that are promoted as a solution to climate change and yet backed by the oil industry and power utilities that receive very little attention in political discussions. You know, even in programs that claim to be climate programs that aren't really facing up to the scale the problem as she argues, plenty of Democrats say that they believe in science and yet are actually effectively climate deniers. And I think that's a really important thing to just reiterate these are, as Kate points out the challenges that we're going to be facing increasingly are the kind of political challenges of diagnosis and what is the root of the problem as, you know, as the kind of official climate denial of people who just say climate change is not happening. Fade to the margins even though they seem to never really go away they're always kind of hanging on. So it's really, it's a really, it's really I think wide ranging and bracing and it's diagnosis of again, the problems we face how deep they go and it connecting this, the blow by blow of a lot of political fights over climate policies like cap and trade the last kind of big battle over climate policy back in 2010 to again, this longer history of neologism, of really capitalism as the book title points out and just the ways that the struggle between capitalism and democracy really but it's also just as wide ranging and inspiring I think is this vision of alternatives. So Kate draws not only on the many of the most inspiring aspects of the new deal but also many other less frequently reference or projects that are less frequently referenced in the kind of Green New Deal vision the new international economic order reconstruction the US freedom budget and bringing in particular and many ideas that come out of the block radical tradition that again, bring this kind of wide range of vision or foundations together into a really powerful vision Kate has outlined some of the policies but I will just reiterate some of them. So a very exciting argument for naturalizing the fossil fuel industry, which is something I think we should be talking about a lot more I think this is something again, back to the we've been focusing on the good and probably need to be talking more about how are we gonna get rid of the bad I think are really important argument to be making especially unfortunately the oil industry is rebounding a little bit right now but they were not doing so well last year and they will escape points out go bust again so how can we be ready to take them on but really the, you know and talks about a public option for energy utilities a cold debt jubilee, a federal job guarantee abolishing ice and welcoming climate migrants and many other really important policies but the really overarching argument is for a new political economy where government works for the public good rather than for fossil capital or capital at all. She argues that the new deal for all its flaws and contradictions quote reimagined what the US government could do what it was for and who it served. I think that's a really just, you know one of the key ways that I think we should be thinking about certainly the Green New Deal climate policy this political economic reconfiguration that goes beyond like the issue of climate change and Kate is really compelling on that. So that's my really brief like overview of a bunch of highlights and key points so there's so many details that it's hard to even summarize what's happening in the book like every chapter is jam packed with a lot of stuff that you will learn about so don't miss the details but I am gonna start to go to the questions and so one, I guess one they're both kind of political questions about like where we are now and where we're going forward and I'm sorry that they're gonna take us back into like the infrastructure debate some things like that but unfortunately that is where we are. So one is kind of but one is kind of focused on the domestic and one on the international or global picture and so on the domestic question so one thing that's been exciting is in seeing sort of how the Green New Deals evolved since that 2018 moment when the resolution was launched and it really became part of the big conversation or the national conversation is seeing how much it's become it seems like really useful as a organizing tool in local and state elections in particular or where there are like progressive or you know, left liberal or DSA backed candidates running for election the Green New Deal has been this rallying cry and kind of organizing tool and that's been very exciting to see. So I'm curious, I mean, first like what you think about the prospects for that but then also I guess how we can bring I think the flip side of that is that the Green New Deal has become identified almost exclusively with the left and is maybe not, it's probably a harder sell for people who don't identify as at least progressive. So I'm curious, how do we win over other people who can benefit from the Green New Deal to the vision that you lay out here what's the sort of, you know what are your thoughts on what that looks like? Now that the, you know, I think Fox News has been a lot better on branding the Green New Deal than like any left or I shouldn't, you know whatever any democratic affiliated media organizations but be that as it may. Second, you know, I think while I'm hopeful that we'll get at least some climate infrastructure funding and the various infrastructure bill debacle that we are currently going through. I am not terribly hopeful as I'm sure you're not that we will get the kind of both scale of funding and kinds of projects that we need and that you lay out the need for in this book. So I'm curious what you see as sort of the path forward for Green New Deal organizing especially if we're in a situation where federal funds and legislation seem to be stuck maybe are not like an immediate future possibility. How can we keep organizing around this vision without I guess fully retreating to that kind of state and local model that we saw as the kind of main vehicle for climate policy or have seen in all of the kind of moments, you know really since that 2020 moment of cap and trade failure or how can we, you know how can we connect those projects up to something that can have that kind of federal purchase that we need. So one question and others just to hear I'm curious about the kind of vision of the break. You mentioned, you know I appreciate your comment on climate realism and then maybe that we're in a break with the climate realism. And I feel like I'm up two minds of the on the one hand it seems like obviously we have had this like incredible break with like what is possible with what, you know just the amount of again like federal spending that flowed forth during COVID that suddenly like the lifting of all of the rules and you talk about, you know all of a sudden it seems like, you know the old economic rules no longer apply. And yet the realism seems to be like rushing back with full force or at least some people are trying to reimpose the realism with like the you know, scolding about inflation and the, you know and the need to not move too fast in the direction of full employment and things like that. So are we in a break? Are we not? You have that Gramsci quote about the interregnum where the new cannot be born is that just where we are. And then, okay international and then I'll stop talking so that our other great panelists can say things. So I really love your discussion of emergency internationalism and your invocation. You know, you reach all these moments of like internationalist history and possibility and you say towards the end of this chapter on emergency internationalism that there is a strange comfort in the fact that the US failures to curb the climate crisis doesn't have to be the worlds and suggesting that for example, the fact that, you know, the rest of the world might look to the US failure on COVID and say, well maybe that's like what kind of really prompts people to give up on the US as a climate leader as maybe there are probably a lot of them already have because we have not been leading the way on climate. But this was I think a really, you know the sort of, I guess, vision of action whether without the US, I think is a really important one. At the same time, obviously the US remains very powerful and full of politics, not least via the power of the Fed. And so I'm curious what you think sort of what you think the prospects for, I guess attacking the climate crisis, leaving the US behind what that might look like. Maybe what a post, what the, you know what cop looks like this year post COVID with a kind of maybe different view of the US and the world with different expectations about what the US is going to do and where we might see things going. So okay, I'm going to stop there. I thank you again for this great buck, Kate and I look forward to the rest of our discussion. Thanks. Okay, great. I must say I'm tempted to ask Kate to respond but as Alyssa said, we'll maintain the momentum and we'll try to gather these questions too and return. I think you're going to be muted. Mute didn't know. Can you hear me now? Yeah, sorry, I don't know what happened. Anyway, sorry, I apologize. Yeah, I was saying I was tempted to ask Kate to respond but we should maintain the momentum as Alyssa said and but I'm noting these down and I hope that we can return to all of the above and more so with that I hand it to Keon. Thank you, Reinholt. And first thanks to Reinholt, Jacob, Jordan, Laila and the whole team at Buell and Columbia GSAP. It's a real pleasure to be here. Kate, congratulations. This is a tremendous book and it's a real honor to be part of this discussion. I really think, so it's a monumental book because of what we see as you said in your initial remarks what we see happening in DC right now and I think it's a monumental book because what we're seeing in factories and warehouses at the same time and in shipping yards at the moment we see the continual denialism, we see the break we see things that are perhaps at a kind of precipice and we see coming up in a couple of weeks international climate negotiations which for anyone who's been following not that optimistic about so your book really comes I think at a really critical time and I think it's just a necessary thing for us to have right now. So one thing I would note to I think it's really important that you wrote it as a strong left voice in journalism and really like a very clear strong left voice. You're not stepping away or taking or hiding your political position here and I think it's important both of that and also if I may ask a key left journalist of your generation like you talk about in the book essentially your life being the mirroring the UN cop process this is how long that these things have been going on and I think it's really important to have you be a strong commenter on that. So what I'll do here briefly is I'll make four main points that I think stood out for me some will echo what Alyssa said so I won't spend too much time on that and then maybe like four points that it made me think about that I would want to explore either here or even in my mind like these are things that just got me thinking. So the four points that really resonated with me and I think this one is clear to anyone who picks up this book how you point so well to this different notion of climate denialism. I think we're also aware of the main kinds of denials like the Koch Brothers, the Heartland Institute but you point to how denialism runs through the system. So not only for center and even like left of center politicians who might claim to believe in climate change but their denialism is so clear in their continual refusal to take meaningful action about it. In some ways like that is, to me it strikes me as totally being in denial like you see it but you're not, you're refusing to take action and I think it's so important to point out what that denialism is doing and all these figures who continue to be part of it. So that's one, I think it's really helpful how you illustrate, so this is the second point carefully the long-term opposition to regulation in this country. Before the New Deal and after the New Deal how at so many levels politicians and corporations have been going out of their way to make sure that the kinds of meaningful regulations are kept at bay in the, to keep the avenues open for profit. So, and I think for those of us who have not followed this story quite as closely it's just really productive for us to be able to see how that has happened in our legislative chambers. So number three, so on the flip side I think it's also really exciting how the book offers in so many moments these concrete examples of the alternatives that challenge the orthodoxy. And sometimes like with the story of the jobs guarantee sometimes the book points out how we did not get there but throughout it points to these moments where we can see clear opportunities and those opportunities may have been foreclosed in the past but they're right for us to explore hard now. And I think these concrete examples are important because oftentimes especially with like a subtitle like how capitalism broke the planet it's hard for so many people it's hard for them to think well, how do I think outside of this system that we have all been part of for so long? Well, the concrete examples are here. And then for alongside I think you really articulate the rationale for transformation like why we have to do big things and it's because of this continual denialism. If the system as we know it in its best form was able to do something then we wouldn't see the rising urgency in the scientific reports and just like literally outside our windows. Like we know like the proof is in the pudding so to speak like things have not worked out and even through some really, you know like maybe some people who would like to have who tried to do things. So you articulate this rationale for transformation and also I think tantalizing questions because you make a point that the original new deal was a transformation of society and state relationship something I really agree with and you pose this possibility for a new world for a kind of new world like quote from you what sorts of societies can no carbon energy build? That's just one example in the book and I think it really opens our minds that what can they be? We haven't seen them quite yet and they could be amazing. So those are the four things and then four things that this makes me really think you know, question. One, I think this idea of the new moment and Alyssa brought this up too how COVID-19 has really reset our expectations of what the state can do. And it's also really exposed neoliberalism for this kind of like multi-headed monster that it is. You know, there are new fissures everywhere and I think about the now I think maybe somewhat cliche Leonard Cohen quote about like cracks everywhere that's where the light gets in but I think that's what we're seeing we're seeing cracks everywhere. And I think it just should, you know besides the doom and gloom stories it should make us excited or at least like passionate about what we can do about it. So for me, you know, as an urban planning professor and trained as an architect I wonder what are the openings? So this is second thought. What is the opening for urban planning architecture or landscape architecture professionals of the built environment? You know some of them in the book but I would also say that the things that are brought up are fairly like those of us within the research and practice worlds of the built environment should take the cues that you bring up things like green infrastructure dense urban living and sustainable retrofits public transit, these are well known things that, you know, ostensibly many of us like what are the new ways that we can push forward these kinds of ideas in planning architecture design and landscape worlds? They cannot 90 years on from the original new deal they can't be the same things but the scenario, like you talked about Shell scenario planning as in some ways this thing that made you think about possibilities and that kind of planning in some way, you know talking from my own research field in urban planning we've seeded that kind of transformative planning in many ways and we need to reclaim it it's time that planning professionals planning students and researchers need to get on with that and then a couple of things just to end that like I can't help but smile at the end of the day like you say you write an eco socialist book and so it's eminently transformative yet it's eminently reasonable and I'm so curious about the fact that at the end it sounds so reasonable to me that you acknowledge that the U.S. will have to be part of this in a well that we envision the U.S. being part of this that we envision the U.S. using its power using its global hegemony in a way that would help climate action so in some way and you're not like continually to public ownership and yet to private investments and you know also note a continual belief in nationalization like these are things that in some ways like when I see the history of this country like it's you're not necessarily posing an overturning of so many of the structures and systems you're pointing to working with in many ways parts of it and pushing it along in ways that we've already seen hinted in the past. And I think that that's important too that in some ways for let's say those in the audience who are like well I don't see a socialist revolution coming in the next 10 years well that's not necessarily the plan that is being sketched out here from the start there are key transformations like the nationalization of the fossil fuel industry and what you call the managed decline but in other ways you're appealing to the power in some of these existing structures to do the right thing. And so I would note that and I would love to have a conversation on the global aspect and internationalism as well I'll just make that note. So thank you very much, it's a real pleasure. Thank you so much, my gosh. Okay, well yes indeed a lot to talk about and we will do so and before that I invite Patrick to respond, Patrick. Great, thank you everyone. My name is Patrick Houston really glad to be here with all of you. Also want to reiterate and thank everybody who's worked behind the scenes to assemble this convening and who are working right now to keep it rolling smoothly. A few thoughts in my remarks, I first provide some context about the work of the organization that I work with New York communities for change that I think is it will be necessary to understand the second part of my remarks and that second part is how a couple of the key points and overheat it really do play out in one of the ground organizing. And how some of those key points can help advance on the ground organizing if deployed effectively. So first on that context about New York communities for change. So NYCC, it's a grassroots public advocacy organization. We organize predominantly in low income black and Latinx folks in New York city and in Long Island. And we organize on a range of issues of social, economic and climate justice. As some of you may be aware or some not aware some of the most notable fights include the fight for 15, the no HQ two, no second headquarters fight against Amazon in New York and the fight to pass local law 97. That was the bill in 2019 that requires New York's biggest source of climate pollution buildings to drastically cut their climate pollution through energy efficiency retrofits. More recently we've been engaged in council rent pushes during to alleviate tenants from rent obligations during COVID, a fund excluded workers campaign to get financial relief to undocumented folks who were originally excluded from all aid during COVID and a fight in New York city to move all new buildings and got renovated buildings off of gas. So the reason I mentioned all these is to give the context and because all of these fights either were or for the current ones are fueled by the base of people that NYCC and our allies are able to deploy and support of them, the power that we're able to demonstrate. And so NYCC has been an allies have been able to be to have been able to successfully challenge some of the most powerful interests in New York state from others campaigns that's the real estate lobby the fossil fuel industry and other large corporations and that's only because of the popularity of some of the demands and the effects that the campaigns have on real people who are engaged. And so the theory of change promoted throughout overheated is fundamentally aligned with that which NYCC works to execute. One quote, there'll be several quotes that really stood out to me that I wanna share from the book. One is a Green New Deal isn't just about Kate writes a Green New Deal isn't just about subbing out one form of energy for another as all else stays equal. It means rooting out the deep power and balances that have made the fossil fuel economy possible and that will keep toxic and deadly extraction humming along if they remain in place. And so that can be end quote and that can be that same thing can be extended to all of the campaigns mentioned above climate and otherwise that if you chip away at the power held by the few you can secure and you're working to secure wins along the way that tangibly improve the lives of the most vulnerable. Then you begin to really change the power and balances and they fundamentally enable the fossil fuel industry or the real estate lobby to continue with the status quo. So that's some context on NYCC. Now I wanna jump into the part of my remarks with two components of the book that particularly stood out to me where there's this strong alignment with some of the key points in overheated. First, to be clear there's lots to be gleaned from the book. So if you haven't read it yet, I feel like all of us are doing bits and pieces because so much is packed and there's 359 pages. But to be clear the book, it names the culprits of the climate crisis. It explains the history that got us to this point. It reminds us the scale of the change that climate science demands. It illustrates how whites supremacy and neoliberalism repeatedly fuel, quote, society where capital is freer than people, end quote. Overheated acknowledges the consistencies between the injustices born upon communities of color here in the US and the global South. And very interestingly, it also warns of what could happen with a Republican party that acknowledges climate change, but responds with proposals that are still rooted in white supremacy and xenophobia. So there is lots of gold. But just to, I want to jump to this, two things that really stood out to me because as an organizer and with some of that work that I just mentioned about NYCC. The first is the clear diagnosis of power and of power imbalance and how it can and must be changed. So one is the power imbalance that we have in our society. Two is the vision that the book provides for the future. Quick side note, a planet to win. Kate's other book that she co-wrote with some other folks also provides a really clear vision. So let me start with that, setting a vision. As an organizer, a significant chunk of our work is understanding what people are struggling with, understanding what they want to change and then working with them to build a vision and a plan about how they're gonna go about achieving those changes. And this book does just that, especially in the second half, it feeds the imagination of a whole another world that's possible. And in doing so, it provides general hope but it also provides clarity on what it is that we're marching towards with an issue as all-encompassing as the climate crisis. It's easy to get lost in the source of just how many things need to change. And so the book sets this vision that I think is very important is the type of vision that when you're in a training, in a teaching with a bunch of activists that can really provide some clarity and inspiration for folks. The second thing that really stood out to me is the first one that I mentioned, the former, and that is the power imbalance and how it can be changed, emphasis on the half. So another quote, it says in a repeated quote, third decarbonization means a truly economy-wide transformation and the government that factors a changing climate into every decision it makes. Territory, making that politically palatable means pairing it with a credible promise, with credible promises to improve the lives of ordinary people. I've observed this play out time and again in organizing, those on the margins seldom get held up with the questions of what appears technically possible. Rather, way more frequently, the thought seems to be, look, everything sucks, let's change everything. When your community is an overpoliced police under-resourced polluted food desert with few job opportunities, you could care less about pushing policies that fit neatly into the status quo, you get much more motivated. In most cases, I don't want to overstate it, you get much more motivated when you're pushing for a big change that directly affects your lives and changes things more fundamentally. And of course, with the growing climate crisis, with growing economic inequality, and with more and more evidence, as has just been alluded, that neoliberal policies aren't going to save us, there is plenty of appetite. Of course, I'm speaking from a perspective as an organizer in New York City and New York State, but there's plenty of appetite for these big radical fights that directly improve lives for people. A final note and a final quote that I just really wanted to include along this same line about adjusting power and balances and the motivation for it. The quote is, we may be living in the America neoliberalism built, but the architects are dead, the foundations are sinking, and the dwellers are pissed off and dying of whatever toxic asbestos concoction was injected into the walls decades ago. I love that quote. It's so great. But I think that to this point, I think that we've seen evidence of this, that is that the dwellers are pissed off and are being affected by the system as it exists. I think we see that growing angst in the political protests that we saw just last year, some of which that continued into this year and increasingly more and more seem to be sharing the sentiment of Fannie Lou Hamer, that they are sick and tired of being sick and tired. And so this is, as an organizer, when you see this, this is fuel for the sorts of big, bold visions that the book proffers. And so for us which organizing in large part is organizing of people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired, it's translating that anger into action. And so those things just really stood out to me, that vision setting and then tapping into the majority of people who are being screwed over right now has so much potential to change both the Democratic Party, as Kate argues, but also democracy. So I'll stop there and I'm really excited for the discussion. Thank you so much, Patrick. All right, well, we can invite all to turn back on and reappear as we do magically on these screens. And I think Kate, I can try to put a few of these questions together, but I have a feeling that you're doing something similar in your head and maybe already have some responses. So maybe I'll just ask you to take it from here and I'll maybe jump in with a few interjections here and there. Oh, and I should add, sorry, program note, we will do this for a while, for some time we'll go around the table, so to speak. And then meanwhile, we encourage our audience members to think about questions of their own and to enter those in the Q and A function in their Zoom. So, Kate. Well, first I'll just thank you so much to everyone for reading the book and just engaging so deeply with what's in there. It's very gratifying after spending a year and a half of my life to let people are reading the book and getting something out of it. And I think particularly, Patrick, it's really just great to hear that this aligns with sort of things that you're seeing on the ground as an organizer and I've definitely been inspired by NYCC's work and it was an inspiration for the book and I think talking to you and other housing organizers as an inspiration for that quote about asbestos and sort of toxic things in walls, which is not uncommon, unfortunately. So I guess maybe I can start, a couple of things that came up, but maybe as the starting point, sort of Alyssa, your question about domestic politics and the kind of life where we go from here in the kind of Mac of the infrastructure debate. And in some ways, I feel like unfortunately, that the answer probably hasn't changed very much from the ideas we lay out in a planet to win with Daniel Donacoan and Theoria Frankis, which is the sort of virtuous cycle that Patrick really laid out so well. Giving a reason for people to think that climate policy will make their life better and using that as a basis to build democratic constituencies and coalitions and in the sort of crudest articulation of that to elect Democrats who are accountable to movements who are not climate attires, are not another class of Christian cinemas to fight for these things in the halls of power and be accountable to people who are living through the effects of fossil fuel infrastructure in their backyard, who are living through decades of horribly unequal housing policy through just the ravages of the fossil fuel economy directly related to coal, oil and gas and the many, many other sort of tentacles that leads into everyday life. And I think my big worry and what's, I think has been keeping up at night a little bit about what's happening in Congress right now is that the thing I heard from organizers in climate spaces and with the sort of emphasis on the sort of NGO world, people who are pushing for climate policy in DC mostly was that we had learned the lessons of 2009 and 2010, right? We looked at what happened during the Obama administration the sort of turn back to austerity, the fact that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act really did not make a lasting impact on many people's lives prolong this recession in really sort of painful ways for many, many people coming into January, 2021 that seemed to be the sort of consensus that I was hearing as a reporter was that we understood the lessons of the Obama administration, we're not going to repeat them, we're in a pandemic, the stakes are high, the rate is very strong. And so what has to happen is to make policy that is going to make people's lives better and then it's legible to the American public in a way in regards to climate change in a way that the cap and trade bill which I go into in the book was not, right? The cap and trade fight was just not really legible to a lot of people. And I still struggle to explain kind of what cap and trade does with that bill did and there was not an organizing strategy around it. There was not sort of an attempt to do anything other than say climate change is bad we should do something about it. So vote for this pricing mechanism that also includes other sorts of investment. And what's been so sort of disturbing to watch happen is to sort of regress back to this model of climate policy which seems very opaque, right? Both the process of how the infrastructure playing out and infrastructure fight is playing out is extremely opaque involves knowing things about what the parliamentarian does and these really obscure sort of parliamentary processes that are just really tough to follow even if it's your job. And the climate policies that are included within the reconciliation package I mean, certainly within the bipartisan infrastructure package are in many senses, these sort of technocratic tweaks what's true, right? Is that these are the most historic investments that have ever happened. This is the biggest climate policy if it passes that the US has ever embarked on that bar is so low, right? What's being talked about is tens of billions of dollars essentially per year when leading economists are saying we need a trillion dollars of investment for the next 10 years in order to take on the climate crisis and do the bare minimum, right? To transform the US economy to get it off of fossil fuels and to do our fair share, right? And taking account of the historical responsibility the outsize historical responsibility of the United States bears for this crisis. And that is not really on the table like one would hope, right? That even if that were not possible that there would be something in the bill something that Democrats were messaging on that was being sort of talked about that could be presented to people as a program which will this really improve their lives a climate program which will this really improve their lives because as we've seen from the cap and trade fight and climate fight sense there is such a well-worked over playlist that industry has to fight anything called climate policy, right? No matter what it is. And the clean energy payment program the clean energy tax credits are in the bill my fear is that those are not going to be the anecdote, right? To those, those attacks, right? Those are not going to be the thing that convinces ordinary people that climate policy is for them and is anything other than a giveaway to solar companies and wind companies, right? Is anything other than this very technocratic venue of policy that is for experts by experts and not sort of reaching down to the masses for either any sort of democratic decision-making or to extend benefits, right? Or to make people's lives tangibly better in the here and now. And that to my mind is kind of what climate policy has to do, right? Is as we've been talking about is to really give people reason to support it, right? To not just say, well, the planet's burning parts for a million in the atmosphere, yada yada but to really connect on a really human material level about electricity bills, right? About power shutoffs, about poor housing stock about all of these very sort of visceral things. And I think there's really important sort of pushback to that at the federal level, right? Proposals for a Green New Deal for public housing have been really important, right? To start connecting those dots and to start to articulate what, when the book, I call kind of a low-carbon populism to really sort of lay out sort of a vision for what these sorts of investments can look like and how they'll make real change in communities. I, at this point, I think I'm a little skeptical that that will happen within the next year. But I think it's without sort of retreating back to the, okay, I'm thinking of two sort of like big contradictions. So in terms of where do you go from here, I think there is a sort of level in which state and local work is very important, right? And I think like local law 97 to my mind is like one of the best climate policies that's passed in the last ever maybe. And at the striking at the heart of the real estate industry, which is in my understanding currently freaking out about it. And those sorts of policies provide a sort of blueprint in the way that New Deal programs did in experiments sort of at the local level, at the state level that give sort of a framework for understanding what this could look like to scale up. And particularly, and I go into this in the book a little bit in a moment when sort of administrative capacity is so depleted after decades and decades and decades of neoliberalism, it's really important to have those sorts of frameworks that make this seem real, right? Cause I think for a lot of people and no less so than people serving in government in the White House and Congress, capitalist realism goes really deep. It's really hard to imagine anything outside of what currently exists. And so I think that local and state policies are hugely important to be able to start building in that vision and give 25-year-old congressional staffers who are most of the people who are writing up Green New Deal legislation at this point sort of a model to be working off of and feeding that to legislators and providing not only these ideas but also sort of organizing tools, right? To provide a sort of basis to say, this has changed my life to be able to point to people who have had their housing upgraded and to have real live examples of climate policy making people's lives better, which are few and far between, unfortunately in the United States. So I think that's one level and I think the danger is retreating totally into local and state policymaking and sort of not connecting those dots to national policy. The other which I think is maybe a bigger contradiction is given how bleak and gets a little bit into the question of internationalism, I mean, given how bleak some of the congressional mathematics what can come out of Congress realistically in the next several months, what are these other tools that the US has by virtue of being a very powerful country, right? By virtue of being an empire, control over veto power over the IMF and World Bank still really have he say over bilateral and international trade agreements, really power over the World Trade Organization. There are these very anti-democratic tools that could be leveraged potentially in ways that are good for the planet. And I think that's, it's a good thing to feel uncomfortable about that because these are not sort of the tools that we might hope to exist, right? And these are the remnants of a fundamentally undemocratic world order which was built in no small part to fight off visions that Alyssa mentioned, right? From the new international economic order from the non-aligned movement for a more democratic world order in which we might have had a situation in which there was one member, one vote in the UN at which point we probably would have had a climate agreement in 1992. If every country which is vulnerable to climate change was allowed to have a say over that and the US could not come in as it has done repeatedly and wreck international agreements and take us back, right? The US pulling out of the Kyoto Protocols in 1997 took climate progress back years and years and years whether or not the UN has ever been the body that was going to carry out international climate diplomacy I think is up for grabs but our very undemocratic world order has created the situation where the US which effectively has a government which is controlled by fossil fuel companies and some way or another is very affected, influenced by what fossil fuel companies have to say what 40, 50, 60, 70 years of sort of neoliberal organizing has had to say that the US House still has so much power despite all of this evidence from COVID from the last year and a half of how bad we are at planning, how bad we are at dealing with crises that we still are a block in many ways to doing anything about climate change in the here and now is really awful. And so I think that's just like a tension that I yeah, it's not resolved in the book certainly but I hope comes up is that like we do have the US that does have all this power but is that power is bad, that power is like not something that we should hope for in a sort of democratic world and that's something to sit with that I don't have any real answers to unfortunately. And I think we'll probably be an interesting next month as the US goes to Glasgow to COP26 and we'll see. I mean, there's no real good reason for the rest of the world to trust the US at this point. We don't have a climate law and yet John Kerry is sort of going around lecturing other countries to bring down their emissions with literally nothing to show for himself at home. Even these sort of basic, basic tools that we could use to constrain fossil fuel production are just being left on the table. These financial regulatory tools that are right there if the SEC might be getting the agency wrong wanted to raise capital requirements for financial institutions that have holdings in fossil fuel companies to make it, to penalize financing fossil fuel infrastructures, financial regulators could do that, right? If Joe Biden wanted to reinstate the crude oil export ban he could do that tomorrow, right? And we're not, there are more sort of tools at the president's disposal at the executive branch's disposal that are being used right now. And it seems absurd to me that the US administration would go in and sort of lecture and to get to the question about what climate action looks like at the US. I mean, one thing I'll be watching at COP is just whether that sort of is a possibility that's raised, right? I mean, the US has been such a sort of veto type power within the UNFCCC negotiations for so long that maybe after the last year and a half maybe with the sort of collapse of the infrastructure right there will be an attempt not just at the UNFCCC, right? Which is structurally just has such limited powers to think beyond what US involvement might look like over the long term to sort of accept the fact that we have this political system with oscillates between people who sort of want to do something about climate change and people who are viscerally opposed to doing anything about climate change but also in other international institutions which do you have more power, right? Whether there will be any sort of coordinated movement at the Bretton Woods institutions within trade agreements within the European Union whether there will be some sort of shift to think about a sort of like post-US hegemony world. So I'm not sure. I'm very curious to see what happens in Scotland but yeah, and I can stop there and sorry. No, I suppose. Responses or questions? Yeah, no, I mean, there are questions already in the chat and I actually to sort of bridge to that a little bit had some thoughts that build on some of the other points that some of our colleagues have made. And also if you folks want to jump in please, please do. But I just was quickly thinking about the point that Patrick made about the clarity and boldness of relatively speaking of the comparatively I should say speaking of the vision that you and some of your colleagues working in this particular kind of area of the public sphere that I was, I've come to think about as a kind of counter-public sphere, a sphere that has its own publications, its own podcasts, its own voices. And yours is certainly among the most, I think the strongest and clearest. This is what I'm trying to say is that Patrick I think made the point that the clarity then has this seemingly paradoxical consequence or at least counterintuitive effect of empowering and maybe emboldening action on the ground among those who are second tired of being second tired in particular. And so who should have the least to expect really of such visions. But on the other hand, maybe are sort of paradoxically involved. So as a journalist, this is the question, as a journalist in particular, you do certain things, right? And here we are, we're kind of like, we have on our screen here and we're in an academic space. So we have academics, we have activists as well or people who sometimes move in and out of these spaces. What do you think the specific contribution of a journalist is anticipating a little bit the question from Sarah Rosenberg also about the kind of examples that you can see in the chat that we can offer. A book like this, the readers of this book, who do you want to read? Who should read this book? I mean, in some sense, it shouldn't just be people like us, right? So, and how then might you, might be you, we reach these readerships. Alyssa asked a question like this as well and so on. So you see where I'm asking you to speak almost as a journalist in translation to others. Yeah, that's a great question. And I wish I had a like sort of developed answer for it other than that, I think about this a lot. It's like when you spend your day's writing, takes it out US politics and occasionally sort of longer reported pieces and occasionally bucks. I think there's a real question of, is this useful? Is this something that people can grab onto that is useful for organizers that is sort of informing other debates that are happening whether in academia or other parts of the sort of like magazine intelligentsia. I think that's, I sit with that a lot. And I think the answer that I've sort of come to is just to try to sort of be in conversation with as many people as possible to make sure I'm like writing things that feel legible, right? To people who are doing the work of climate organizing who are really trying to change things in a way that journalism sort of splits this funny line between being at once very removed institutionally and involved in some ways in the work of politics. Like journalism does have a sort of opportunity to sort of change policy discussions. Sometimes surprised when I find like congressional staffers or whoever like read things I've written just because I spent so long running for tiny left outlets in that corner that you're talking about where you sort of fire things off into the ether and never know when they land. Yeah, I mean, I like being a journalist in part because it's a very dialectic profession. Like I get to be constantly checked on things that I understand and sort of go into conversations as kind of a professional dilettante and ask very dumb questions in a way that I'm institutionally supported in doing to be sort of, to not know things, right? That I think is as a good standpoint as a journalist and yeah, I feel that way about sort of circulation too, right? It's who is overheated or if it can be used in little organizing conversations. I really hope, I mean, that's maybe the best I could hope for is that that is something which organizers can pick up and sort of get inspired by. And I think I've been thinking about this a little recently and there does seem to be a sort of hunger for these sorts of like visionary climate futures things and it's been interesting and Alyssa mentioned this to see the Green New Deal being kicked up as an organizing tool in different, whether that's electoral campaigns at the local and state level in New York, that's been a big part of some of the DSA candidates who run successfully have run as Green New Deal candidates. And I think the Green New Deal is maybe like in, how do I wanna say this? In a way that like I think can gets ahead of certainly like the congressional resolution version of the Green New Deal is feeling this role that has historically been filled by socialists and by communists to put forward a vision for what a better world can be. And we have certainly a socialist resurgence in the United States and elsewhere that is starting to do that. But I think the Green New Deal, the sort of popularity of it at least among certain segments of the lab is in part, I think a product of just this hunger for having some sort of vision that is not just, we wanna lower prescription drug prices or do these very sort of modest reforms around the edges and to slot these sort of different policies into something that's more holistic, that's more enticing that sort of paints a picture for what the world could look like. And I think the best vision of the Green New Deal sort of does that, right? And that's part of what I was trying to do in the book and whether that's, I hope that it can be informed by folks who are doing organizing on the ground and thinking about some of these questions in sort of an academic setting. And it shouldn't just, it does not, this book does not sort of come from my brain but it comes from just hundreds of conversations basically. Yeah, well in a sense that's what you're bringing also is those conversations. And in fact, we have specific questions that are sort of asking all the panelists to respond with their own strategies. So maybe we can synthesize those that kind of go from the conversation to either organizing and or intervening in some way. So Sarah Rosenberg asks about a couple of best strategic public spaces in that can be, I think I'm assuming this, you're meaning kind of by messengers sort of examples and gathering places rather like libraries, public gardens and such. So extending this world out into the city. And then Anna-Marie-A-Leone asks, as a teacher, students are so eager to learn it, that's true. I mean, students really are constantly asking all of us who teach, I think, what to do. She's saying this, how best to organize what steps to make effectively contribute. So advice to students, to younger generations on this and Susan Frost and us, therefore for everyone too. So if anybody wants to jump in, I don't know if Kate if you wanna quickly add, but then we can ask everybody else as well. Sure. Well, I would maybe defer to other folks to talk a little bit about effective organizing and how to connect with students. Just not being either, I'm neither teaching nor involved in an active organizing project at the moment. But on the second question and getting to one of Kian's questions about like what the sort of design and landscape architecture professions can do on climate. I mean, something I've been really taken with and we talk about this a bit and a plan to win as well is this notion of public luxury. And I don't know if George Monbiot coined that, but is who I associate with that maybe incorrectly. But, you know, Eric Leidenberg is written, of course, about libraries as these palaces of the people these spaces where people can go and enjoy these sort of dignified amenities that are available to all. And I don't know how to design a library, right? Like, I think design professions are as important for actually being able to draw up plans, for literal plans for what these places can look like and reimagine what public spaces are for. And that was, there were sort of inspiring examples of that some in the New Deal and a planet to win wrote about Roland Wach, the lead designer for the TVA. Who, you know, envisioned these like magisterial public spaces, these sort of viewing decks for dams that you wrote up to in these really sort of majestic ways. Of course, I don't think, you know, TVA is a very complicated institution. The probability shouldn't be picked up as a model on mass given it's sort of glad-handing with white supremacy and, you know, current iteration which is doing that in different ways and fighting back against renewable power. But this idea of giving a government creating spaces for designers and architects to really dream, right? To not be sort of beaten down public servants who are, you know, on a shoestring budget and under scrutiny of public attack at any given point, but really thinking seriously about the work of design and kind of how that can feed a really, you know, robust public sphere in a big way. And that's why, you know, I think some of the work T-SAP is doing is, and other folks who are pushing back against some of the more sort of like market-driven impulses that my understanding is are, can take hold in some corners of the design field. I think it's really... You mentioned the real estate industry, for example. Yeah, all right, or I think Patrick did too, yeah. Yeah, for sure. I have a feeling also Keon's gonna have something to say about this, but on the organizing question, perhaps we should ask Patrick and Alyssa their thoughts, yeah. Sure, I could jump in with some thoughts there. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I mean, sure, you know, I have some particular responses, but then some general ones. I'll start with the general, and I guess the particular one is, where do you teach? Are you in New York? But anyway, what applies to wherever you're... And I'll send you a whole list, I'll give you my address. What applies broadly though, that I often suggest to folks is, the climate crisis is extremely overwhelming. The news is, is that there's tons of ways to engage, but finding out which one to start with can be overwhelming when you're unsure if it's an organization worth putting time or energy into. With that said, you know, I usually just suggest that folks, start by just following groups on social media. A lot of times groups are really active social media platforms where you can start to parse out who's doing what and what you wanna get engaged in. And then join an existing organization. Don't get me wrong. I think there's value and there's a lot of new ideas and fervor that comes from young people, starting new organizations. Look at summarized movement. Look at Fridays for Future. Look at New York youth climate leaders. But I think that there's also value in not rushing to create the wheel and for starters to observe and work alongside some existing organizations. Oh, the second and last thing I mentioned, then maybe I'll send you my email address if you're doing work in New York. The second one is frankly, not to be crass, give money to groups that are doing deep organizing. As much as, you know, the book makes such a strong argument for the need for that deep organizing in that building. But unfortunately a lot of organizations are constrained to a certain, to varying degrees of what they can work on. Contributions coming from individuals, freeze up organizations to be able to do a work. And the deep gritty organizing of doorknock and talking to people in the street often is not directly funded. And so there's all, often this dearth of resources to carry out that critical work to actually build the base. So those are the two things I recommend. I'll stop there, there's plenty more. Yeah, so Alyssa, what do you think? Well, I completely agree with everything Patrick said. So I would just reiterate his points. But I guess I would also say, one thing that I also often think is, I'd really agree with Patrick's saying is the feeling of being overwhelmed. And I think that one thing that is, can be helpful just to think about like, how does climate fit into maybe an organization you're already connected to or a part of your life in some way. So maybe you're in a union that is not currently engaged around climate. Like, are there conversations you can be having about that within, say your workplace or if you're in, I mean, not that you and Alyssa are going to organize your entire building, but is there like a housing group if you're concerned about your housing situation that you can link up to and think about how climate connects there? Because I really do think that the message of overheated and of really the green new deals that climate is everywhere, it's in everything. Everything is a climate issue and everything is part of climate politics. So like, how can you link up the organizing you may be already doing or interested in or on labor or housing or whatever it may be to climate even if it's not already, that's not already obvious. And that can be hard too, because like it's not like you individually are maybe going to like make your union sign on to the green new deal. But it is I think another potential way into things. But I also totally agree with Patrick's suggestion of looking for the organizations that are doing the kind of work that you think is important. And they're putting out the, it's probably easier to find out about organizations that are doing things now than it has been at many points in the mess, because they are online. They're on social media. You can like follow stuff and find out what's happening. I also had a thought on the public spaces question which I was thinking about in a, I guess the society for which I think, one place that my initial answer to that question were the best public spaces to be visible messengers in gathering places. I feel like the streets are the way like getting out into the streets with people and protests and movements. Right now there's a people versus fossil fuels action happening in DC at the White House, like, you know, calling on the Biden administration and Congress to, you know, to build back fossil free to like cut fossil fuels out of the sort of vision of the future. That's really exciting. And I think, you know, that's the kind of thing that, you know, Kate, you were talking about the kind of climate group saying, we're not gonna repeat the lessons of the past and how come, like, I think putting a lot of pressure on our representatives, however unrepresented they may be is an important part of that, like, learning from the mistakes of the past and not giving a pass to, you know, people who say they're trying hard or whatever it may be. So that's exciting. And then I think also there's obviously so much like design work we need to do around the streets. It's been cool to see, you know, open streets here in New York and a lot of cities around the country, like COVID changing the relationship to the streets in a way or saying like, maybe we can use streets other for things other than cars. Like that's obviously been a, you know, a complicated thing and is temporary at the moment. But how can we like literally make the streets less of fossil fuel infrastructure and more infrastructure for like getting around and doing other things part of the public life. So, yeah. And then I can take it away on the, you know, the public spaces and design question and also organizing if you want. Yeah, so Ke'an, shall we talk design and planning? Thank you. Yeah, so first on some of the questions about students and what they can do. So I would know a couple of things. First, I feel often that some of our students are the organizers. They're the ones who are part of DSA, who are part of Sunrise, who are out there actually organizing. And I think what they come to us, like for instance here in a professional urban planning master's program is to learn how to use that organizing towards some of the ends that actually Kate's book is all about transform some of these institutional systems. And so in someone, so for those who are organizers, I think what we can point them to are the ways in which in the past, we did have people in these institutionalized positions. I mean, the book points out like Rexford, Tugwell a couple of times it looks at like, yeah. As you said, Kate, TVA and Roland Weng. Like these are architects, planners, economists who transform the way we saw what government should be doing. And they change the trajectory of the country in dealing with these kinds of problems. So oftentimes we're like, oh, the professions of the built environment have no power here. Nope, we have had power and we have changed the trajectory of the country in the past. We could do it in different ways in the future, right? Not to replicate the problems of New Deal institutions of the past, but to think a new about what they can be. And then I think if they're not organizers and like how they can most effectively be part of this, you know, last week or whether, yeah, it was last week, we had our ACSP Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Conference and our keynote speaker was Elizabeth Yampier, the Executive Director of Uproads in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. And, you know, one of the questions was, oh, how do planning students, you know, like start these movements or even just like be part of these movements? And Yampier's answer broadly was that, you know, you don't start the movement, you find ways to be part of already existing movement. So planning students, architecture students, how do you ask and listen to those on the ground who are already doing the work? And, you know, how can you take their lead in terms of how they are organizing? And so, and I think that's really important. Like, if I know anything about organizing, it's because I had the privilege of being on the board of an organizing group, the Audre Lorde Project. I'm not an organizer, but I learned from folks who have a cohesive idea about theories of social change. And so, like, that's not, like, that was like a real privilege to be able to get that peak into how activists and organizers do their work. And then just one more note about, I think, at least a little bit about Sarah Rosenberg's question about public space. You know, I'm skeptical about public space as like this big thing, but towards the public sphere brought more broadly speaking that Kate does talk about in this book. I would, I really wonder in a whole hope in places and initiatives like, for instance, there is a pilot project for stormwater happening in a couple of New York City housing authority projects in Queens right now. I think they're ongoing right now. And, you know, as problematic sometimes as NYCHA can be, you know, it is one example of a public housing system that still exists and is still serving so many thousands of people. And to hold, and I think it's a really productive idea to hold that space up. Public housing as a space where you have projects that take on, in this case, adapting to some aspect of climate change. And I think what we need to do is to keep on doing that, but then not have, you know, like public housing projects all be always under threat from privatization and all kinds of other shenanigans, but really lift them up as spaces that more of us should be part of. Public housing in the US should be an option for, you know, more than 50% of the country and not marginalized in the way that it has been for so many years. So I will stop there. Yes, well, Keon, you know, we're coming from here and it's very nice to hear this conversation, be part of it also, but to think around some of these questions as ones that have linked up like the housing question that Keon just mentioned, linked up with the climate question on the ground, like probably you could say more on the streets and in community board meetings and in other settings in which, you know, the right to housing is being demanded in relation and, you know, the legislation that perhaps can reinforce that ultimately. So we're entering our kind of twilight zone here and but I did want to, in the spirit of kind of the where we are here, we're here who are in at Columbia Abuse Center and in some sense, at least formally affiliated with, not necessarily responsible for the professions and disciplines of the built environment to sort of end on this and I'll give Kate the last word here. On, you know, first of all, on a note of gratitude to all of you, but in particular to Kate, for the, in a sense, the future tense in which this book is written and indeed that you began with also in your own opening comments that the sort of approach to thinking of crises in the present, longstanding and long in the making in the future tense through, you know, asking us, your readers, your interlocutors to exercise a critical imagination. This is a kind of realism that I think is different than the sort of capitalist realism that you were referring to, but the realism that recognizes that the imagination can be changed. And so I just wanna, you know, ask you to reflect in conclusion just a little bit more, shall we say in the future tense, about the future tense, if not about the future as such. Yeah, I mean, I just wanna thank everyone again so much for this conversation and for, you know, taking your evening to talk about this book and for reading it and yeah, for just coming in with such sort of thoughtful questions that, you know, it's really fun to get to sort of like think through these questions from like a different angle and, you know, to get outside of my own brain that is sort of encapsulated in these 359 pages. So just extremely grateful for that. And I mean, maybe to close sort of along the lines of thinking in this future tense and also in the present tense a bit, you know, the book focuses a lot on the US, you know, in large part because that's sort of what I know where I grew up, where I live, where I've been reporting for the most part. And there's so many sort of weird things about the US. And one is just, you know, relevant to this conversation about public space and public amenities is how low quality of life is here. I don't think that's fully appreciated, just how sort of indignified just being in this country is for so many people, basic things that just exist in very normal ways in other countries and in much smaller countries in some cases seem so utopian here. And, Reynard, you know, you brought up at the beginning that piece I wrote for the Intercept in December 2018. And some of the funniest feedback I got on that, which, you know, laid out, you know, a sort of generous welfare state, functional public transit, housing for all, these sort of, you know, demands which have become sort of, which activism and organizing around the Green New Deal has helped push into the mainstream. But, you know, it was very much just sort of like utopian blue sky vision for what the world could look like. And I got emails from people in like Norway, just saying, you know, this is, it's fine. You know, it's like, this is kind of what we have. It's just not so different than what we live in. And I mean, I think, you know, obviously the building, building that in the United States is a sort of different project. And obviously we want a multiracial democracy, right? Which is not, you know, the situation that Norway and Sweden find themselves in and to grapple with the sort of full weight of American history. But these things aren't strange, right? These sort of basic things like four weeks of paid vacation is very standard. And in Europe, there are 20 countries throughout Africa which offer 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. You know, parental leave is something which exists in other places. You know, these are sources of green jobs and, you know, investing in the care economy, investing in education, investing in healthcare. These are, you know, both ways to make life better and to deliver the kind of real quality of life improvements that Patrick was talking about, which we, you know, I talk about in the book and came up a lot throughout this conversation and it just doesn't seem that complicated. I mean, when, you know, I sort of, you know, reached this conclusion in the book and was kind of the place where I ended up is in sort of closing out the project. But, you know, these things exist, right? This isn't sort of total utopian thinking. There's a lot of questions to figure out. There's a lot of work to be done sort of figuring out what a low-carbon welfare estate looks like we don't have great examples for that. The economics profession doesn't really have a way of understaring prosperity that isn't premised on endless growth and cheap oil. And there's a lot of work to be done in terms of the sort of basic offer that decarbonization poses to ordinary people, that is all there, right? Those things exist and they're not so hard to get in the here and now and the wealthiest country that has ever existed. And it's, you know, a matter of fighting for them. But I think the idea that these are so far off is just really misguided. So I would just encourage us to sort of look around it. Things that already exist that have existed and sort of use that as a baseline to start imagining kind of what our low-carbon or post-carbon abolitionist democracy can look like. Excellent. So that is a wonderful note of which to end. And but also to begin reading, buy it, read it. I should say the only one who doesn't have a hard copy with me because I'm living in Providence and don't bring it with me in the strip, but thank you all for holding it up. And put it in the library, that's where it was. So thank you again, all and in particular, Kate, for doing what you're doing and doing what you all do. We here in our modest quarters very much appreciate the opportunities to have such conversations and to work with you all in different ways and look forward to more in the future. So with that, I think we can conclude.