Hertog Global Strategy Initiative

08/16/2013

The video of Jason Bordoff's lecture, "The North American Energy Boom and Climate Change," is now available online. You can watch it on our website or on YouTube.

Global Strategy Lecture Series, Summer 2013 Each summer, the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative brings renowned experts and policy makers to Columbia Universi...

08/16/2013

As part of a public lecture series on "The History of Climate Change and the Future of Global Governance," the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative Presents:

Bill McKibben
Author, Journalist, Founder and Chairman of 350.org, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College

"Report from the Front Line of the Climate Fight"

Wednesday, August 7 at 6:00 p.m.
Altschul Auditorium, Room 417
International Affairs Building
Columbia University

This event is free and open to the public. For more information and a full schedule of events, visit http://globalstrategy.columbia.edu/lectureseries/.


Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him 'the planet's best green journalist' and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was 'probably the country's most important environmentalist.' Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, he holds honorary degrees from a dozen colleges, including the Universities of Massachusetts and Maine, the State University of New York, and Whittier and Colgate Colleges. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In late summer 2006, Bill helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation's history. A guide to help people initiate environmental activism in their community coming out of the Step It Up 2007 experience entitled Fight Global Warming Now was published in October 2007 and a second day of action on climate change was held the following November 3.

Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine. Bill has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He has honorary degrees from Green Mountain College, Unity College, Lebanon Valley College and Sterling College. Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1993, in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

08/16/2013

As part of a public lecture series on "The History of Climate Change and the Future of Global Governance," the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative Presents:

Eric Pooley
Author, Journalist, Senior Vice President for Strategy and Communications, Environmental Defense Fund

"The Changing Politics of Climate Change: We’re Suddenly in a New and More Hopeful Place. Here’s Why."

Thursday, August 1 at 6:00 p.m.
Second Floor Common Room
Heyman Center for the Humanities
Columbia University

This event is free and open to the public. For more information and a full
schedule of events, visit http://globalstrategy.columbia.edu/lectureseries/.


Eric Pooley is senior vice president for strategy and communications at the Environmental Defense Fund. An award-winning writer and editor, he has served as chief political correspondent of Time, editor of Time Europe, managing editor of Fortune, and deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek. Eric began his journalism career as a freelance reporter in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was an award-winning feature writer, political columnist and senior editor for New York magazine. He joined Time in 1995 as its White House correspondent and went on to serve as the magazine’s chief political correspondent and national editor. In 2002 Eric was named editor of Time Europe, the London-based international edition of Time, and three years later he became managing editor of Fortune, responsible for all global editorial operations of the magazine. In 2007 he left Time Inc. and began work on The Climate War. In 2009 he began writing a climate and energy column for Bloomberg News, and in February 2010 he was named deputy editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek.Eric’s work has been recognized with many awards and honors, including a 2001 National Magazine Award (for Time’s single-topic issue on the September 11 attacks, which he helped edit), the 1996 Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency (for his coverage of the Clinton Administration), and four Henry R. Luce awards from Time Inc. He is also a three-time finalist for the National Magazine Award in categories ranging from General Excellence (for his editorship of Fortune) to Public Service (for a Time cover story that temporarily shut down an unsafe nuclear power plant in Connecticut). Eric has written about climate politics for Time, Slate, Bloomberg News and other publications. In the fall of 2008 he studied press coverage of the issue at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he was a Kalb Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. He was a featured commentator in Heat, the 2008 PBS Frontline global warming documentary, and has appeared on Nightline, Charlie Rose, The CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper 360, All Things Considered, and many other programs. He is a magna cm laude graduate of Brown University and lives with his wife and two daughters in New York.

08/16/2013

As part of a public lecture series on "The History of Climate Change and the Future of Global Governance," the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative Presents:

Jason Bordoff
Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs, Director, Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia University

Former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Energy and Climate Change on the Staff of the National Security Council

"The North American Energy Boom and Climate Change"

Thursday, July 18 at 6:00 p.m.
Kellogg Center, 15th Floor
International Affairs Building
Columbia University

This event is free and open to the public. For more information and a full schedule of events, visit http://globalstrategy.columbia.edu/lectureseries/.


Jason Bordoff joined the Columbia faculty after serving until January 2013 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Energy and Climate Change on the Staff of the National Security Council, and, prior to that, holding senior policy positions on the White House’s National Economic Council and Council on Environmental Quality. One of the nation’s top energy policy experts, he joined the Administration in April 2009. At Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Bordoff is a professor of professional practice and serves as Director of SIPA’s Center on Global Energy Policy. Bordoff’s research and policy interests lie at the intersection of economics, energy, environment, and national security. Prior to joining the White House, Bordoff was the Policy Director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative housed at the Brookings Institution. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a consultant to the National Intelligence Council, and serves on the board of the Association of Marshall Scholars. During the Clinton Administration, Bordoff served as an advisor to the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department. He was also a consultant with McKinsey & Company, one of the leading global strategy consultancies. Bordoff graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, where he was treasurer and an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He also holds an MLitt degree from Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA magna cm laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University.

08/16/2013

As part of a public lecture series on "The History of Climate Change and the Future of Global Governance," the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative Presents:

Roger Pielke, Jr.
Professor of Environmental Studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder

“Climate Policy for a High Energy Planet”

Thursday, July 11 at 6:00 p.m.
Kellogg Center, 15th Floor
International Affairs Building
Columbia University

This event is free and open to the public. For more information and a full schedule of events, visit http://globalstrategy.columbia.edu/lectureseries/.


Roger Pielke, Jr. has been on the faculty of the University of Colorado since 2001 and is a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). Roger’s research focuses on science, innovation and politics and in 2011 began to write and research on the governance of sports organizations, including FIFA and the NCAA. Roger holds degrees in mathematics, public policy and political science, all from the University of Colorado. In 2012 Roger was awarded an honorary doctorate from Linköping University in Sweden and was also awarded the Public Service Award of the Geological Society of America. Roger also received the Eduard Brückner Prize in Munich, Germany in 2006 for outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary climate research. At CIRES, Roger served as the Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research from 2001-2007. Before joining the faculty of the University of Colorado, from 1993-2001 Roger was a Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Roger is a Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute, and holds academic appointments at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and the London School of Economics. He is also author, co-author or co-editor of seven books, including The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics published by Cambridge University Press (2007). His most recent book is The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell you About Global Warming (2010, Basic Books). He is currently working on a book on technology, innovation and economic growth.

08/14/2013

The HGSI summer lecture series has concluded and we'd like to thank all our speakers: Geoffrey Parker, Deborah Coen, Paul Edwards, Mike Hulme, Michael Levi, Gavin Schmidt, John Topping, Anthony Janetos, Wallace Broecker, Roger Pielke, Jr., Jason Bordoff, Eric Pooley, and Bill McKibben.

If you missed any of the lectures this summer, check our website for videos.

Hertog Global Strategy Initiative at Columbia University is a research program that employs historical analysis to confront present and future problems in world politics.

07/29/2013

Did you miss the July 11 talk with Roger Pielke, Jr.? The video of his lecture, "Climate Policy for a High Energy Planet," is now on YouTube.

Roger Pielke, Jr.: Climate Policy for a High Energy Planet
Global Strategy Lecture Series, Summer 2013

07/22/2013

As part of a public lecture series on "The History of Climate Change and the Future of Global Governance," the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative presents:

Wallace Broecker
Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Climatologist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University

“Dealing with the CO2 Crisis”

Thursday, June 27 at 6:00 p.m.
Kellogg Center, 15th Floor International Affairs Building
Columbia University

Dr. Wallace Broecker joined the Columbia faculty in 1959 and since 1977 he has held the title of Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He began his scientific career with a study of the geological and oceanographic applications of radioactive carbon-14 – the beginning of a long path of research along which he has made many pioneering discoveries that have had a profound impact on our understanding of the ocean (past, present, and predicted), as well as of its role in global climate change. Broecker has also played an active role in the environmental policy debate. He has been a leading voice warning of the potential danger of increased greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. He has written articles for the popular press, testified before Congressional committees and briefed officials at the highest levels of government in an effort to bring scientific insights to bear on policy issues. Read more: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/vetlesen/recipients/1987/broecker_bio.html

07/18/2013

HGSI speaker . testified today before the Committee. Read his prepared testimony here: http://ow.ly/n6GD9

U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

07/10/2013

Couldn't make it to Anthony Janetos' lecture on "Policy Communication Successes & Failures"? It's now on YouTube: http://ow.ly/mPY14

Global Strategy Lecture Series, Summer 2013

June 20, 2013
Anthony Janetos, "Scientific Assessments: Policy Communication Successes and Failures"

07/09/2013

A recent post by . gives an up close look @ in Antarctica: http://ow.ly/mOdts. He'll speak @ HGSI on August 1.

On a trip to Antarctica, evidence that even an icebound continent isn't immune to ravages of climate change.

07/08/2013

Did you miss John Topping's lecture on "Slowing Arctic Melting"? Check out the video on YouTube: http://ow.ly/mLxQg

Global Strategy Lecture Series, Summer 2013 Each summer, the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative brings renowned experts and policy makers to...