Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Climate Solutions Lab

Kelly Gallagher ─ The Politics of Climate in China and the United States

Thursday, November 5, 2020

4:00pm – 5:30pm

Register here for the webinar.

Drawing from the recent book, Titans of the Climate (The MIT Press) by Kelly Gallagher and Xiaowei Xuan, this talk will explore how the politics of climate change differ in China as compared with the United States.  Can there even be a politics of climate in a one-party state?  How do the politics differ at the federal/central level as compared with the state/local level in the two countries?  How do politics influence policy outcomes?

Kelly Sims Gallagher is Academic Dean and Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy at The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She directs the Climate Policy Lab and the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Fletcher. She served in the second term of the Obama Administration as a Senior Policy Advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and as Senior China Advisor in the Special Envoy for Climate Change office at the U.S. State Department.

Gallagher is a member of the board of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, serves on the Board on Energy and Environmental Systems of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and also serves on the board of Energy Foundation China. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Broadly, she focuses on energy innovation and climate policy. She specializes in how policy spurs the development and deployment of cleaner and more efficient energy technologies, domestically and internationally. She is the author of Titans of the Climate (The MIT Press 2018), The Global Diffusion of Clean Energy Technologies: Lessons from China (MIT Press 2014), China Shifts Gears: Automakers, Oil, Pollution, and Development (The MIT Press 2006), and dozens of other articles and book chapters.