MADISON – Like many environmental calamities, global warming may pose its greatest societal threat to groups that are already disadvantaged. But to Michel Gelobter, responding to global warming presents a golden opportunity to set the world on a more sustainable path where everyone wins, including those traditionally left behind.
A prominent champion of environmental quality and human equality, Gelobter will give a free public lecture, “Environmental Justice and Climate Change,” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 9, in 1121 Mosse Humanities Building, 455 N. Park St. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Gelobter’s unconventional career has taken him from the halls of government and academia to non-profit work and, now, to the hypercompetitive business world. As founder and CEO of Cooler, Inc., he has enlisted hundreds of national retailers in a novel scheme to make the heart of the free enterprise system itself carbon neutral.
Cooler is an on-line, for-profit venture (at climatecooler.com) that enables consumers and retailers to buy and sell millions of everyday goods and services while offsetting their global warming impacts. The California-based firm has partnered with companies including Wisconsin’s Holsum Dairies to promote “carbon offsets” that reduce the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
But Cooler is only Gelobter’s latest venture. As executive director of Redefining Progress, a public policy think tank, he helped develop measures of sustainability including the “ecological footprint” and the Genuine Progress Indicator – an alternative to the Gross National Product. He also led in the design of California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.
Earlier in his career, Gelobter was a Congressional Black Caucus Fellow with the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee; director of environmental quality for the City of New York and an assistant commissioner for that city’s Department of Environmental Protection; and founder and director of the Environmental Policy Program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.Educated in conservation and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, Gelobter focused his graduate studies on the environment and the poor in industrialized countries. His doctoral dissertation addressed race and income distribution of air pollution in the U.S. He has written broadly about environmental justice, lead poisoning, global warming, sustainability, commons management, and the relationship between environmental protection and tourism in developing countries.
Gelobter was the founding chair of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council Subcommittee on Air and Water. He currently serves on the advisory board of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection and the on the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council, among others.
His UW-Madison talk, part of the Gaylord Nelson Lecture Series, is sponsored by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies with support from the Holstrom-Kineke Environmental Studies Fund and the Ho-Chunk Nation. Additional sponsors include the Environmental Studies Club, La Follette School of Public Affairs, Net Impact, and the Letters & Science Undergraduate Honors Program.
For more information about the lecture, contact Molly Schwebach, 265-6712, mayoung3@wisc.edu.
