Date and time

Tue, Mar 25, 2025 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT

Location

Online

Refund Policy

Refunds up to 1 day before event

About this event

• Event lasts 1 hour

Co-presented by:

Lee Chin Institute and part of "RBC x Rotman Sustainable Finance Week"

Book Synopsis:

The social cost of carbon: The most important number you've never heard of—and what it means.

If you're injuring someone, you should stop—and pay for the damage you've caused. Why, this book asks, does this simple proposition, generally accepted, not apply to climate change? In Climate Justice, a bracing challenge to status-quo thinking on the ethics of climate change, renowned author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein clearly frames what’s at stake and lays out the moral imperative: When it comes to climate change, everyone must be counted equally, regardless of when they live or where they live—which means that wealthy nations, which have disproportionately benefited from greenhouse gas emissions, are obliged to help future generations and people in poor nations that are particularly vulnerable.

Invoking principles of corrective justice and distributive justice, Sunstein argues that rich countries should pay for the harms that they have caused and that all of us are obliged to take steps to protect future generations from serious climate-related damage. He shows how “choice engines,” informed by artificial intelligence, can enable people to save money and to reduce the harms they produce. The book casts new light on the “social cost of carbon,” the most important number in climate change debates—and explains how intergenerational neutrality and international neutrality can help all nations, above all the United States and China, do what must be done.

Speaker:

Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard Law School

Moderator:

Kenneth S. Corts, Vice-Dean, Research, Strategy, and Resources & Academic Director, Lee-Chin Institute for Corporate Citizenship, Rotman School of Management

About our speaker:

Cass R. Sunstein is the nation’s most-cited legal scholar who, for the past fifteen years, has been at the forefront of behavioral economics. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Since that time, he has served in the US government in multiple capacities and worked with the United Nations and the World Health Organization, where he chaired the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. His book Nudge, coauthored with Richard Thaler, was a national bestseller. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. He lives in Boston and Washington, DC, with his wife, children, and labrador retrievers.

About our moderator:

Kenneth S. Corts is the Vice-Dean, Research, Strategy, and Resources, and Academic Director of the Lee-Chin Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School of Management, where he holds the Desautels Chair in Entrepreneurship. He specializes in the Economic Analysis and Policy area. At the University of Toronto, he has held several leadership roles, including Interim Dean at Rotman and Acting Vice-Provost, Academic Operations. As a microeconomist, Professor Corts explores industrial organization, competition policy, organizational economics, and energy policy and his research has been supported by prestigious organizations such as the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has published in leading academic journals like the Rand Journal of Economics and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, and authored widely-used Harvard Business School case studies. In addition to his academic contributions, he has provided expert testimony in competition policy cases before the Competition Tribunal and Ontario Superior Court and advised on antitrust issues in the U.S.

Event Logistics:

This event is available to attend via livestream only.

Rotman Events is committed to accessibility for all people. If you have any access needs or if there are any ways we can support your full participation in this session, please email Mandi Gosling [events@rotman.utoronto.ca] no later than 2 weeks in advance of the event and we will be glad to work with you to make the appropriate arrangements.

General Admission: Livestream Details

Rotman Events will email registrants a link to the livestream.

30-day Catch-up Viewing

Unable to attend the event due to scheduling conflicts? Not to worry. All registrants can access the full recording on-demand for one month after the live event.
 

Questions: events@rotman.utoronto.ca, Mandi Gosling