Club Lunch: Who Really Cares About The Environment – China or the U.S.?

The international community was dismayed in June when President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Accord, a landmark 2015 pact to fight climate change. That move put the United States at odds with the 195 other nation signatories. China took the opportunity to criticize Trump, and to reaffirm its own commitment to becoming a world leader in green energy. In this talk, U.S. academic Robert Gottlieb and Hong Kong environmental researcher Simon Ng will look at both sides of the issue, from the American and Chinese points of view.

Robert Gottlieb is the founder and former Director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, and has been engaged in American social movements for more than 50 years. Simon Ng is a Fellow and former Chief Research Officer for Civic Exchange, a Hong Kong public policy think-tank. He is known for his research on air quality, urban transportation and sustainability issues, and for his ground-breaking work on ship emission inventory and control in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. Robert and Simon recently co-authored a book “Global Cities: Urban Environments in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China”, published by MIT Press in 2017.