Updated March 11, 2020:

The Cadario Lecture on Public Policy on “Energy and Climate Change Geopolitics in the Digital Age” featuring Amy Myers Jaffe on April 6, 2020, has been postponed owing to travel restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We intend to reconvene in the next academic year and continue the important conversation about global energy policy and climate change.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.

Lani Krantz

In recent years, the world’s financial leaders have been converging on a single message: we ignore the economic risk of climate change at our peril.

On April 6, the 2020 Cadario Visiting Lecture in Public Policy & Governance, taking place at Isabel Bader Theatre, will explore that very topic. Amy Myers Jaffe, the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations, will share her perspective on Energy and Climate Change Geopolitics in the Digital Age.

Experts agree that it is critical to become a carbon-neutral world by 2050. But despite advances in technology, without a radical shift in approach, the planet is on track to miss that key target. Failure to shift thinking, scientists and investors agree, will be catastrophic. Energy use and production patterns need to change, and quickly.

The 2020 Cadario Lecture will explore ideas about energy transition, the financial risk of building new infrastructure and Canada’s unique role in North American energy security.

“Eminent scholars and experts such as Amy Myers Jaffe are critically important voices in the public discussion of how we can achieve a global transition to sustainable futures,” said John Robinson, Munk School professor and U of T presidential advisor on Environment, Climate Change and Sustainability. “We need innovative ideas, and we need to find ways to implement and test such ideas in the real world. Given the urgency of climate and sustainability issues, we need to take an ‘all hands on deck’ approach.”

Myers Jaffe is a leading expert on global energy policy, energy and sustainability and geopolitical risk. Prior to her position at the Council on Foreign Relations, she advised senior administration and taught on energy and sustainability at multiple universities including University of California Davis, Columbia University and Yale. Her research focuses on the oil and gas sector, corporate investment strategies in energy and energy economics. She is also the co-author of Oil, Dollars, Debt and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold with Mahmoud El-Gamal and co-editor of Natural Gas and Geopolitics From 1970 to 2040.

The Cadario Lecture, named for Paul Cadario, former senior manager at the World Bank and a distinguished fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, is one of the premier events at the University of Toronto and attracts policy leaders in the public, business, academic and non-profit communities in Canada.

“I am pleased and honoured that Amy Myers Jaffe accepted the Munk School’s invitation to speak with informed urgency on the most important political and public policy issue of our time,” said Cadario. “Evidence from scholars should persuade — we need more of it in the public square. And we welcome it, particularly in universities, where controversy and informed ‘difficult conversations’ drive knowledge and should help build public consensus.”

Last year’s Cadario Lecture featured Dani Rodrik, Harvard’s Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, on “Globalization’s Wrong Turn,” which was later published in Foreign Affairs. Previous speakers include U of T’s Daniel Trefler, Deirdre McCloskey (University of Illinois at Chicago), Harvard’s Robert Putnam and Pippa Norris and Atif Mian (Princeton).

March 2, 2020