Friday, February 3, 2023
12:00pm – 1:00pm
Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street
The United States is the largest producer of oil and gas in the world. It has a welfare state that is riddled with holes and leaves vulnerable people behind. We have infamously never ever passed a climate bill due to the power of Big Oil and fossil-dependent states. We have not had active industrial policy in generations. The failures of the neoliberal era, ratcheted up by Covid and Trump, brought our political system to the brink. Bidenomics, labor and grassroots movements pushing and shaping it from the left, sought to alter this trajectory, and climate action was at the center of it. How did this effort to transform the US economy fare in its confrontation with the US political system? What can we learn about the political economy of the United States from this pivotal case?