Events Detail

Climate Policy Holy Wars

Clashing Secular Religions and Stubborn Economic Realities

Tuesday, December 13

11:45 AM - 2:00 PM

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              Lane, Nelson, and Garreau

Last month, President Obama gave environmentalists a rare climate policy victory by shelving, at least for now, the Keystone XL Pipeline. Yet this month's UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa, is widely expected to fail—perhaps allowing the Kyoto Protocol to expire without a replacement.

For 20 years proposals to make deep cuts in fossil fuel use have dominated the world's climate policy agenda; and for 20 years emissions have gone on rising. What are the alternatives, and on what basis should we assess them?

Hudson was pleased to host three experts to address these issues. Robert Nelson, Professor at the University of Maryland; Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, and author of The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion Vs. Environmental Religion commented on the clash of economic and environmental approaches to climate. Lee Lane, Hudson Institute Visiting Fellow and author of the report, History, Ideology, and U.S. Climate Policy: Beyond the Orthodoxies of the Left and Right, compared the political economy of halting emissions with that of learning to live with them. Joel Garreau, Fellow at The New America Foundation and author of Radical Evolution, discussed reason and values as factors in the public discourse on climate.

Hudson President & CEO Kenneth Weinstein moderated the discussion.

Betsy and Walter Stern Conference Center

Hudson Institute

1015 15th Street, NW

Sixth Floor

Washington, DC 20005