Dean's Hour: "Climate Risks & Opportunities"
Bard High School Early College, Manhattan
Wednesday, Oct 22, 2025, 2:43-3:28 pm
Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) Auditorium
525 East Houston Street
New York, NY, 10002
Climate change is bad, really bad. It's worse than most of us know. Tackling climate change costs a lot less than doing nothing, but there are indeed costs. Meanwhile, the flipside of cost is opportunity. Solving climate change means trillions of dollars of investments to guide the world onto a low-carbon path. Sadly, there's still plenty of money to be made wrecking the planet, but last year, twice as much money globally went toward investment in clean energy as it did toward investment in fossil fuels. This talk will address both climate risk and opportunities in our time. Our speaker, Gernot Wagner, is a climate economist at Columbia Business School and faculty director of its Climate Knowledge Initiative. He has written six books, including Climate Shock and, most recently, Geoengineering: the Gamble. Gernot’s research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks, technologies, and policy. He is a research fellow at CEPR, faculty fellow at CESifo, board member of CarbonPlan, Project Syndicate columnist, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere. Gernot holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard, and an M.A. in Economics from Stanford.
