Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World

Stopping climate change will require reinventing today’s energy and industrial systems without falling victim to the same technocratic hubris that caused it. In their book, Fixing the Climate, Charles F. Sabel and David G. Victor propose an experimentalist system of governance and incentives for the incremental but cumulatively transformative redirection of the economy and democracy that allows us to construct a sustainable alternative. Experimentalism uses the very uncertainty that frustrates standard forms of rational decision-making through plans and markets to uncover new possibilities, allowing for the emergence of new coalitions to challenge entrenched interests.

Experimentalism is thus suited to the long and fraught transition from a world that has become unworkable to a more sustainable one. Evidence is mounting that deliberate redirection of the trajectory of development is achievable. Whether this redirection can be made consensual by subjecting it to widely inclusive and democratic control is an open question that will be addressed in this talk.

Speakers: Charles Sabel, Columbia University; David Victor, UC San Diagy; Inês Azevedo, Stanford University, Moderator