Follow the Carbon

Can a new perspective on climate change helps us see where the political bottlenecks are, and who is capable of breaking through them? Carbon and consumption are typically associated with an old-fashioned, moralizing, and individualistic approach to climate change. In this talk, however, Daniel Aldana Cohen argues that a more sophisticated consumption perspective reveals key structural fault lines in climate politics and spotlights invisible (and sometimes accidental) collective climate actors, from women of color leading anti-gentrification campaigns in New York and São Paulo to blue-collar workers in suburban Long Island.