Penn Climate, the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, welcome Heather Boushey, Professor of Practice at the Kleinman Center and former Chief Economist to President Biden’s Investing in America Cabinet, for a conversation during Energy Week.
One of our nation’s most pressing economic challenges is embracing decarbonization as a strategic opportunity for shared growth and security. There is a need to rapidly transition from a carbon-intensive economy, to adapt to the real-time physical damages incurred from a changing climate, to bolster American competitiveness through technological innovation, and to reverse decades of rising economic inequalities. Too often, policymakers seeking policies that deliver both economic and climate benefits find themselves constrained by frameworks that assume decarbonization is a simple tradeoff between higher costs and lower emissions.
For the United States to maintain its role as an economic powerhouse, it cannot be economically “blind” to the financial hazards of climate change and the economic upsides of decarbonization. The fundamental gaps in technical knowledge, tools, and communities of economic practice leave economic policymakers with outdated frameworks and capacities that fail to account for the requisite scale and speed of the energy transition, which, in turn, results in people and places being left behind.
In this Penn Energy Week seminar, Dr. Heather Boushey, professor of practice at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, will debunk old dogma on the economics of climate change and map out the necessary principles to deliver on our future, which sets the table for a forward-looking plan where decarbonization delivers shared growth for people and places and bolsters national security.
Following the seminar, students, faculty, and staff are invited to a networking reception to continue the conversation with Heather Boushey, Vice Provost Sanya Carley, and other attendees.
Heather Boushey is one of the nation’s most influential voices on economic policy and a leading economist who focuses on the intersection between economic inequality, growth, and public policy. She served in the Biden administration as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist to the President’s Investing in America Cabinet. She is a Professor of Practice at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. She is also a nonresident senior research fellow at the Reimagining the Economy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. Boushey co-founded the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and served as the President & CEO and a Steering Committee member from its launch in 2013 until she joined the Biden-Harris Transition Team in 2020. Her latest book, Unbound: How Economic Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It (Harvard University Press), which was called “outstanding” and “piercing” by reviewers, was on the Financial Times list of best economics books of 2019. She is also the author of Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict, and co-edited a volume of 22 essays about how to integrate inequality into economic thinking called After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality.
The New York Times has said that Boushey “is at the forefront of a generation of economists rethinking their discipline” and called her one of the “most vibrant voices in the field.” Politico twice named her one of the top 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics.” Boushey writes regularly for popular media, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Democracy Journal, and she makes frequent television appearances on Bloomberg, MSNBC, CNBC, and PBS. She previously served as chief economist for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential transition team and as an economist for the Center for American Progress, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute.