On November 23rd 2009 at Norwood Club in New York, JANERA and InterConnect Events present the great debate:
Will Green Put us in the Red?
Details:
6PM cocktails
7PM Debate and Q&A
Norwood Club, 241 W 14th St, New York
Tickets—only available in advance—are $45.
For Live Streaming, in case you cannot make it to the debate, please click here.
President Obama wants America to save the world from itself by capping carbon emissions and imposing “greener” demands on carmakers and utilities. As the richest country in the world—and the earth’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases—the U.S. must lead the way, supporters say.
But this green crusade has sparked a rising cry of outrage and opposition. Doubters warn of draconian measures that would slap a huge carbon tax on our own economy and hurt U.S. competitiveness. Furthermore, while Obama’s goal to reduce carbon emissions by 80% over the next 40 years is admirable, how are we going to wean ourselves off fossil fuels in just four decades?
China and India, meanwhile, balk at Obama’s big push and may simply keep growing and polluting, unrestrained by any restrictions. One looming dilemma: Is “climate change”—which activists had called “global warming” until that trend abated in recent years—a threat imminent enough to require drastic measures now, when the world’s still-ailing economies can least afford it?
We chose this topic leading up to December’s Copenhagen Climate Conference, intending to highlight some of the issues that will be addressed there, here in New York. We hope to raise awareness and ignite a lively conversation. This is an important issue and we bring both sides together to foster dialogue.
The debaters will be tackling questions like:
- How are we going to achieve these ambitious targets given that our entire economy has been built around the use of fossil fuels?
- Is climate change really a threat imminent enough to require drastic measures now, when the world’s still-ailing economies can least afford it?
- What timeframes should be used, and are realistic, to measure the impact of environmental policy changes?
And should you not be able to make it, watch the debate live online on FORA.tv. Remote viewers can also participate in the conversation and submit questions. Spread the word too! The more people who watch the debate and learn about the most pressing climate change issues, the better!
The dialogue will spark new ideas and—as in any debate—there will be a winner, chosen by the audience. Which team will prove most persuasive?
The passionate environmental defenders:
Ralph Cavanagh, Senior Attorney and Co-Director, Energy Program, NRDC
Eric Roston, Author and Senior Associate, The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Duke University
Or
The fearless climate change skeptics:
Steven Hayward, F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Ronald Bailey, Author and Science Correspondent, Reason magazine and Reason.com
Dennis Kneale, Anchor of CNBC’s Power Lunch will moderate.
This event is held in partnership with:
-Global Nomads Group, an international non-profit organization that fosters dialogue and understanding among the world’s youth, discusses these issues each year, with more than 15,000 young women and men from around the world.
-Tablet Hotels, Hotels for Global Nomads, represents exclusive, hand-picked luxury and boutique hotels worldwide.
Monday’s salon on “Empowering Women and Girls in the Developing World” was a big success.
As I milled about the bar at Norwood Club, I said hello to a few of our guests. Constance DeCherney, associate director of new media at Planned Parenthood sat at the bar chatting with Michael Short, a dealer at Sperone Westwater art gallery about the strange saga of Annie Leibovitz’s financial meltdown. I said hello to filmmaker Peter Mattei and shook hands with Terry Culver of Global Nomads Group. Before long, I was introducing myself to Gabrielle Bernstein, a motivational speaker, author, and life coach who is president and founder of a social network called HerFuture.com and her friend Kelsea Brennan, who blogs for HerFuture.com (and also works in ad sales).
What drew them to this particular JANERA salon? I wondered. Gabrielle said the topic of investing in women and girls’ education resonated with her, since she spends her days helping to empower highly-educated women; she was interested in finding a way for these women to partner with less fortunate women in the developing world. As she spoke, I suddenly realized I’d just read about Gabrielle and her uncanny ability to manifest her goals in the Sunday Styles section.
Before long, Ann Cotton, the British founder and executive director of Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education) arrived. Brooke Hutchinson, the director of Camfed USA, introduced us to Cotton, who has very busy week before her. Not only was she speaking the following night at President Clinton’s dinner, but she is slated to speak on a panel later in the week at the Clinton Global Initiative. She is not a woman who tires easily.
I asked Brooke about Penelope Machipi, the resilient young woman from northern Zambia who stars in a movie about her own life called “Where the Water Meets the Sky” (produced by Camfed and co-directed by Ann’s daughter Helen Cotton) and who just won the Goldman Sach’s Global Women Leaders Award in San Diego. The award includes a $25,000 grant for Penelope to reinvest in her community in Samfya, Zambia. Penelope, who lost both her parents to AIDS when she was 14, is also—thanks to Camfed—a graduate of Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women program, which trained her in Information Technology. (She has already started an IT lab in Samfya.)
“She’s very analytical,” said Ann, with obvious pride. “She’s only 22 and she’s got this incredible wisdom. It really was a cathartic process, making the film.” She apparently gave a moving speech at the Goldman Sachs summit in San Diego.
On my way upstairs I saw our second speaker, Sheryl WuDunn, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who with her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, reported on the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989. The two have a brand-new book out called Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.
Educating women and girls is a no-brainer to most of us: teaching a girl a marketable skill gives her freedom from poverty and the ability to make a living without resorting to prostitution or worse. Also, and unsurprisingly, education has a salubrious effect on population growth: a girl who has four years of primary school has one fewer kid than her peers.
WuDunn started the discussion by asking Cotton the first (provocative) question: “What if you build the schools but the teacher doesn’t show up?”
“There needs to be a major investment in teacher training,” replied Cotton.“It’s true, you can buy good grades in some of these communities,” she said, referring to the practice of bribery (and in some instances, sexual favors). Yet, encouragingly, communities are rising up in protest when they see their girls and women being hurt or mistreated, said Cotton.
One of the most revealing moments of the evening was when Ms. WuDunn admitted that she and her husband had to relinquish some of their journalistic distance while reporting “Half the Sky.”
“Journalists are taught to be balanced, distanced, and so on,” said WuDunn. “It’s very hard to walk away from what we saw. We are journalists, but after all—we are human beings.”
One of the things that kept her going as she reported this book, witnessing atrocities such as sex trafficking, acid attacks, and obstetric fistulas, was that alongside evil, she also saw the good in people. “Women are part of the solution,” she said.
Cotton seconded WuDunn’s sentiment: “There is a real commitment to education among mothers. It’s very touching to me that women especially show such support when girls are sent to school.”
(A video of the entire discussion will be available on FORA.tv next Tuesday; we will post it on the JANERA.com home page.)
The question and answer session began with a pointed question from a woman in the back of the room named Kelly Hoey, who is on the board of two area non-profits that help women and girls who have either been victims of domestic violence (inMotion) or who are trying to exit the commercial sex industry (Girls Educational & Mentoring Services). After thanking the speakers, she asked WuDunn, “So how do we get more men in the room?”
Janera and I had wondered this same thing when the RSVPs began to trickle in: about 80% of the guests for this particular event were female.
Sheryl’s reply was telling. First, she said, there are obviously men who care about these issues—“in fact, one co-wrote this book with me,” she said. (The dozen or so men in the audience seemed to be nodding in solidarity.) And WuDunn and Kristoff are working to get the book’s message(s) out to a mainstream audience with a huge social action campaign (see here) using gaming techniques.
“But frankly, on a practical level, investing in women and girls just makes sense,” said Sheryl. She pointed out that even Larry Summers (“male of all males”), when he was chief economic adviser at the World Bank, said, “Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.”
When guests finally dispersed around 8PM, they were left with a two-pronged call to action: make a direct micro-loan to a woman or girl in the developing world (through Kiva.org) or donation to Camfed.org (or one of the many other fantastic organizations doing important work in Africa and elsewhere) and get the message out—to men and women—that helping a girl get an education is the best thing you can do to fight poverty, disease, and the inequality of the genders worldwide.
After a tumultuous summer of change and refocusing, we are thrilled to move forward with a new look and an exciting lineup of timely and provocative salons. Our first salon for the fall, on Monday, September 21st is on “Empowering Women & Girls in the Developing World.”
The New York Times Magazine recently dedicated an entire issue to the global concerns facing women and girls; award-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have been writing about these subjects for years and their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide was published this week; the Campaign for Female Education (Camfed), a non-profit that fights poverty and AIDS in rural Africa by educating girls and investing in their economic independence, produced the award-winning movie “Where Water Meets the Sky”; and the Clinton Global Initiative is dedicating a panel to “Investing in Women & Girls” on September 23rd.
We, too, are focusing on this vital issue. Please join us for an intimate conversation between Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheryl WuDunn, and Camfed executive director Ann Cotton. The two will discuss the issues that women and girls face in the developing world and what we can do to improve their situation.
Details:
Monday, 21 September 2009
6PM cocktails
7PM-8PM Conversation and Q&A
9PM Screening of “Where the Water Meets the Sky”
Our June 2 salon, The Persian Paradox: Understanding Iran and its People, proved a bustling, gregarious evening with leading pundits and professionals from across the Iranian American community– and well beyond. Early evening light streamed through the Victorian-era windows of New York’s Norwood Club, as guests milled about with glasses of wine and champagne.
Hossein Khiabanian, a scientist completing his post-doc work in genetics at Columbia, leaned against a wall with his friend and fellow Iranian-born brain Huss Banai, a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Brown University. Not far away, Atossa Leoni, the lead actress in The Kite Runner and dear friend of Shohreh Aghdashloo, sipped a glass with Sudhir Kandula, a software entrepreneur and restaurant investor. Leoni recounted some of her recent projects.
“I read for Three Cups of Tea and A Thousand Splendid Suns,” the actress said, referring to her recently completed audio book projects. “I define myself as a global nomad,” Leoni continued, tipping back her glass. “This is a great way to connect with other like-minded people.”
Newsweek foreign editor Nisid Hajari called the evening to order, sitting down with Hooman Majd, author of the “The Ayatollah Begs to Differ” to discuss the current political landscape in Iran just ten days before the June 12th elections. “I don’t like hyphenated names,” opened Majd, still jetlagged from his Saturday flight back to the United States. “Over there I am Iranian, over here I am American.”
Majd wasted no time delving into Iran’s current political landscape. Most recent developments include the increasing power of candidate Hussein Moussavi’s once-wan campaign, which came to fill a stadium with 25,000 people just two days prior to his speech. The candidate, billed as the greatest threat to incumbent Ahmadinejad, has found strong support among the nation’s youth (75 percent of Iran’s 70 million people are under 30).
During elections, the Iranian government has typically eased social restrictions, leading to boisterous scenes of “partying” in the streets of Tehran: “Green fingernails and green-painted faces, dancing, shouting, signs for Moussavi… there are currently only two billboards advertising for Ahmadinejad, hundreds for the other candidates,” Majd said. “This time is extremely crucial to the elections in Iran.”
When asked how important normalizing relations with the U.S. is to Iranian citizens, Majd responded it is “second” priority given Iran’s having accustomed itself to thirty years of U.S. multilateral and unilateral sanctioning, which has given rise to a cash-only society void of foreign investment and a low 20% GDP from oil (compared to Saudi Arabia’s 80% GDP from oil). “Iran could save General Motors,” Majd joked. “But that’s not going to happen.”
As the floor opened up to more questions from the audience, talk of Iran’s human rights situation spurred brief reflection on journalist Roxana Saberi’s recent release, likely the result of “media and international pressures,” said Majd.
The turbulent issue on how much money Iran puts into nuclear and scientific research arose toward the end of the discussion. Majd denied that there was nuclear funding of any sort. “There are no 747’s or nuclear submarines but technologically speaking there is a lot of effort.” Iran is surprisingly the number one country for stem cell research and for conducting transsexual operations, he noted, continuing to emphasize the widespread access to satellite T.V, internet blogs and programming.
The night closed out with a brief performance by Iranian singer Haale, who delivered enchanting Farsi verses. My particular favorite was “Off-Duty Fortune Teller,” in which Haale sang: “When the fortune teller stops looking into the future, she breathes and checks out the river and realizes that’s where it’s at.”
As some started to depart, others returned to the bar for more champagne and cheese and to talk of the broader region. Blair Blackwell of International Crisis Group provided guests with ICG’s latest policy briefing on U.S.-Iran relations, while Maryam Ishani stood talking to Pakistani writer Abid Shah.
Ishani described her work as the founder of the Journalist Connection, an organization that seeks to train and support independent journalists in conflict situations. “I’ve worked in this field a lot in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Ishani said.
“They weren’t looking to become journalists but I found them,” she joked. “I went into their schools and classrooms and just said, ‘which one of you can speak English? Who knows how to work a computer?’ Sometimes, that’s what it takes.” When asked if she had set up shop in Iran yet, Ishani smiled. “That’s high on my list.”
Our latest salon, held on the top floor of New York’s Norwood Club, was a veritable Who’s Who of New York City’s green leaders. Before Zipcar co-founder (and founder of the savvy new ride share site GoLoco) Robin Chase and the Economist’s Vijay Vaitheeswaran, author of Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, took to the stage, I had a beer and checked out the crowd.
I said hello to Parag Khanna, author of The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-First Century and Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Global Governance Initiative of the New America Foundation and caught site of his wife Ayesha, a partner at strategic consulting firm Fitzgerald Analytics.
Janera was deep in a conversation with Shayne Macquaid, owner of Voltaic, a solar energy company that makes laptop-charging bags and Marissa Feinberg, a partner the environmental PR firm Green Spaces. The place was getting crowded and I looked around to see Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger.com, as well as frequent New York Times contributors Liesl Schillinger and Katherine Zoepf. I began a conversation with architect Cassim Shephard, director of Urban Omnibus, and artist and new media teacher Rachel Stevens about urban design consultant Jan Gehl and how he is helping to make New York City a more bike-friendly place.
At 8 P.M., Janera welcomed everyone and invited Tonya Muro Phillips, director of programs at the Global Nomads Group, to say a word. The Global Nomads Group, our sponsor for the evening, is an international NGO that creates interactive educational programs for students about global issues. Though our audiences are different, the subjects we cover are not—and we’re very excited about this collaboration. Phillips said the children GNG works with in developing countries will watch our Green Transportation salon later this week, as soon as FORA.tv posts it. (Check back on our home page—we will post it soon.)
Robin and Vijay had an illuminating dialogue. They talked about the great global challenge to curb environmental degradation, balance the collective good against individual mobility and why Robin is, in her words,“the queen of hypocrites.” My favorite moment was when Vijay asked Robin why we couldn’t have a melange of solutions to the oil-powered car problem? Why couldn’t we do a mix of car-sharing and carpooling, electric cars, hybrid vehicles, and a gas tax (for those stubborn or wealthy individuals who simply cannot give up their gas powered car)? Robin paused a minute, as if she had no answer. “Wow. I’d never thought of that before!” she said, looking bewildered.
And then: “Sure, why not? I’m a big fan of diversity.”
On November 23rd 2009 at Norwood Club in New York, JANERA and InterConnect Events present the great debate: 
Monday’s salon on “Empowering Women and Girls in the Developing World” was a big success.
After a tumultuous summer of change and refocusing, we are thrilled to move forward with a new look and an exciting lineup of timely and provocative salons. Our first salon for the fall, on Monday, September 21st is on “Empowering Women & Girls in the Developing World.”
