Tuesday Discussion with John Barry: “‘Behind Enemy Lines’ and ‘Running Out of Time’?: The Necessity For, but the Need to Transcend, Conventional Climate Politics and Policy”
26.05.2026 16:30 – 17:45
Location: Rachel Carson Center, fourth floor, Conference Room, Leopoldstr. 11a, 80802 Munich, Germany
This Tuesday, John Barry, RCC Alumni Fellow, former Green Party politician, co-chair of the Belfast Climate Commission, and professor at Queen's University Belfast, will join us for the Tuesday Discussion to talk about the core concerns of his work.
For over 30 years we have had the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the annual Conference of the Parties (COPs), and yet greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. This presentation will outline why there is no capitalist solution to our planetary crisis, yet in defence of the economic status quo we see more attention (in politics, policy, business, the media and academia) being given to, i.a. climate adaptation (rather than mitigation), risky and unproven techno-optimistic proposals from geo-engineering to carbon capture, and frankly ‘mythic’ thinking around ‘green growth’, GenAI visions of a ‘circular economy’, the technological decoupling of growth from resource, energy and pollution, and the electrification of everything as decarbonisation of economy and society. The central claim is that there are now science-based reasons for why we need a revolution beyond capitalism, as opposed to a low-carbon transition within it. You can find the full abstract of the talk here.
The Tuesday Discussions are free and open to the public.
For more information on the Tuesday Discussions series, please click here.