Columbia Roundtable Tackles Future of the Climate Crisis and Democracy

Luisa Neubauer, the lead organizer of the Fridays For the Future climate movement in Germany, illustrated the hold that a fossil fuel future has on the psyche of young people. "James Bond wouldn’t arrive on a bicycle,” she put succinctly to Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero in the UK Government, and Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia and a noted economist. The three debated on Friday, September 27 in a packed hall of students, activists, and scholars. The event was co-hosted by the Columbia Climate School, the Institute of Global Politics, Columbia Global, the Committee on Global Thought, and the European Institute.

A deep dilemma facing the climate movement is how to ask people, particularly the young, to stop dreaming of bigger and more lucrative futures.

For many, the climate crisis is associated with grief, of losing an imagined future. Neubauer believes this grief is one of the root causes of the Far Right’s increasing support in Germany.

Miliband explained his vision: the green transition would revitalize local economies and could therefore serve as the answer to populism and the Far Right. The citizens of his parliamentary constituency voted 92 percent for Brexit because, he believed, the economy was not working for them. He joined the Labour government in 2024 for his second time spearheading climate change policy, and as former leader of the Labour Party, with the intention of doing big things – decarbonizing the power system, establishing Great British Energy, a publicly-owned energy company that invests in renewable energy and nuclear power. Most importantly, unlike his Conservative Party rivals, he regards this as an issue where government intervention is necessary to ensure the outcomes are fair to citizens – a crucial misstep in other countries.

Despite the discussion on grief, the mood was celebratory. Neubauer praised that climate is now an issue you can win elections with, as the Labour victory showed. Yet, at the same time, she lamented unprecedented climate breakdown and entrenched fossil fuel lobbies.

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Though both from different generations, Neubauer and Miliband were propelled into climate politics by their upbringing. Neubauer recounted how her 92-year old grandmother had grown up in a family of Nazi resistance and became a fervent climate activist. She would take Neubauer to climate rallies and publicly challenge the (often male) leaders in government and politics.

Miliband’s parents fled the Holocaust to the U.K. just before the Second World War, and they passed along their ardent conviction that countries are capable of reorientation and politics had to be about the biggest causes, prioritizing the needs of citizens rather than managers in the government.

Audience members engaged on an array of topics from chronicling climate to the role of China and international negotiations. Miliband defended the success rate of COP negotiations - which is often thanks to the pressure generated by activist movements, but without them there would be no change. Neubauer reflected that the 2016 Paris Agreement on Climate was made possible by joint efforts from British and Chinese universities to chart rising pollution, highlighting that societal change requires dynamic partnership at the grassroots and government level.

Tooze concluded that those partnerships are a form of resilience that stretches beyond adapting to worsening climate conditions. “We need to examine how to get peace in communities,” he said. “Social and political resilience is as important as resilience to climate."