Scientific Consensus, Policy Stalemate: Climate Change, Values, and Politics

Event Details

This fall’s Great Issues program will focus on the political challenges of climate change. Our initial event, co-sponsored by the Miller Center’s First Year Program, features UVA faculty members Deborah Lawrence and Willis Jenkins. The panel will focus on the question of why the scientific consensus on the issue of climate change has thus far resulted in only limited policy action in the United States. Lawrence and Jenkins will draw on their essays for the First Year Project’s forthcoming volume on Science, Technology, and Values.

Willis Jenkins is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. His research works along intersections of religious ethics with the environmental humanities. He is the author of The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity, which won an American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence, and Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology, which won a Templeton Award for Theological Promise.

Deborah Lawrence is a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. Her current research addresses the challenge of understanding and minimizing climate impacts from forest use in the tropics and around the globe. She is the recipient of a Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Jefferson Science Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fulbright Scholarship.