Reforming Politics for an Age of Global Warming with Plato, the Confucians and Xi Jinping

	Prof. Graham Parkes, Visiting Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
	4:30 – 6:30 pm
	Room 220, Fung King Hey Building

Abstract: Two main obstructions are preventing us from meeting the greatest challenge facing humanity today, human-caused climate change. The first is the enormous financial power of the fossil fuel industries, and the second the remarkable political power of the Religious Right in the United States Congress. To neutralise these obstructions we need to reform democratic politics in the West by getting money and incompetents out of it. There’s also an urgent need for a substantive international dialogue, first and foremost between the US and China, that will lead to swift action on slowing global warming. This paper aims to lay out political grounds on which such a dialogue can take place.