Alec Baldwin to Host Panel on Climate Change
The disconnect between the science of and policy on climate change in the United States, particularly in the Trump era, will be the subject of a Hamptons Institute panel talk Tuesday at Guild Hall.
The 7 p.m. program, “Climate Change in a New Environment,” will be introduced by the actor Alec Baldwin. The panelists are Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Alex Soros, the founder of the Alexander Soros Foundation, and Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. David E. Rattray, the editor of The East Hampton Star, will moderate the conversation.
Tickets are $25, $23 for Guild Hall members. Mr. Baldwin will host a reception with the panelists with informal discussion afterward at the Maidstone Hotel, for which tickets are $500.
Ms. Oreskes was featured in the Sony Classics documentary “Merchants of Doubt,” which was based on a book she co-authored about how industry sympathizers have used classic tools of propaganda to spread confusion about everything from toxic chemicals to climate change. Her 2014 book, “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future,” imagined the year 2393 and the planet unrecognizable due to soaring temperatures, sea level rise, and widespread drought.
Mr. Soros’s foundation helps fund cutting-edge social justice and educational organizations around the world. These include Global Witness, which aims to counteract natural resource exploitation and poverty, and the Rainforest Foundation, which supports front-line environmental defenders in Panama, Peru, and Guyana.
Under Ms. Suh’s leadership, the Natural Resources Defense Council has continued to be a guiding force in pressing for remedies to climate change, including helping steer high-level talks that led to the Paris climate agreement, which President Trump has said he will scrap. She was formerly assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget in the Department of the Interior under President Obama.
Other programs in the Hamptons Institute series this month will be “The Trump Presidency and the Constitution” on Aug. 14 and “The New Normal in News: Ideology vs. Fact” on Aug. 21.