 Thurs, April 10, 2025 | 6pm ET / 3pm PT
The engines of green capitalism are on shaky ground. In the US, the Trump Administration has pledged to “terminate the Green New Deal,” putting an immediate freeze on all federal climate spending as part of its targeted “war on woke.” In Europe, policies designed to encourage sustainable energy investments are being rolled back, signalling a rapid decline in state support for the green energy transition after two decades of ESG (“Environmental, Social, and Governance”) investing. Yet as state incentives crumble, fossil fuel industry giants and the private sector in the US are continuing to build out renewable infrastructures, reminding us that for the energy sector, energy transition has always meant energy addition. Meanwhile, China’s push into renewables is hastening the dawn of an Age of Metals alongside the era of Fossil Capital.
Livestreamed from the People’s Forum in New York City, this free roundtable discussion brings together organizers, political theorists, and environmental policy analysts to make sense of the crisis in green capitalism. Can the green energy industry in the US and EU survive the aggressive withdrawal of state support, or are we witnessing the end of green capitalism? How is the political-economic landscape transforming with the reconfiguration of carbon markets, green finance, and infrastructure subsidies? And how might new alliances between communities, environmental movements, and the working class emerge from this contradictory landscape—to fight not only against retrenchment, but for a liveable climate future for the global working class?
SPEAKERS
Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. He has written for The Guardian, The Nation, The Baffler, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues. Ajay’s book on the politics of climate change, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (2024) outlines the politics and the power needed to alter the course of our burning world.
Alyssa Battistoni is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Boston Review, n+1, Dissent, The New Statesman, Jacobin, and New Left Review. Her forthcoming book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (2025) explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature and imagines how we might live freely while valuing nature’s gifts.
Brett Christophers is professor of human geography in the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University in Sweden. He is also the author of The New Enclosure (2019), Rentier Capitalism (2022), Our Lives in Their Portfolios (2023), and The Price is Wrong (2024), all published by Verso Books.Â
Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor of postcolonial studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the College of Staten Island. His recent books include Environmentalism from Below (2024), Decolonize Conservation (2023), People’s Power (2020), Extreme Cities (2017), and Extinction (2016). A member of the Social Text Collective, founder of the Public Power Observatory, and a Red Natural History Fellow, Dawson is a dedicated climate justice activist. His work focuses on global people’s movements and Indigenous self-determination, aiming to address environmental challenges through grassroots activism and scholarly research.Â
Kai Bosworth is a geographer and Assistant Professor of International Studies in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, and a Red Natural History Fellow with The Natural History Museum. His first book, Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century (2022) investigates how contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles.
This event is curated by Kai Bosworth and Ashley Dawson as part of Natural History for a World in Crisis, a programming series organized by the 2023-2025 cohort of Red Natural History Fellows with The Natural History Museum. Made possible with support from the Henry Luce Foundation and 4Culture.
The in-person event is hosted by The People’s Forum.
