We’re all feeling the effects of the fossil-fueled climate crisis, but young people will not let this threat to their future go unchallenged. They’re taking it to the courts. In the last year, youth plaintiffs have had notable legal successes in Montana and Hawaiʻi, challenging that those states were violating their constitutional rights in continuing to burn fossil fuels. In Hawaiʻi, the ruling compels the state department of transportation to quickly move to a zero-emission system. 

But the biggest victory may have been outside of the U.S. The small island nation of Vanuatu led the charge to ask the International Court for Justice to grant a judgement on the legal obligation of countries to fight climate change. The judgment, released in late July, stated that countries do have a responsibility to address the climate crisis. Beyond their specific claims and remedies, these numerous cases ask: What do we owe our future generations, and how will we make good on those promises?

Guests: 

Vishal Prasad, Director, Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change

Julia Olson, Co-Executive Director & Chief Legal Counsel, Our Children’s Trust

Rylee Brooke Kamahele, Youth Plaintiff, Navahine v. Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation

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While much of the focus in Washington is on fiscal debates, there’s another growing challenge with far-reaching implications for the United States and the global economy: the “youth deficit.” 

A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) finds that declining birth rates and aging populations could undermine productivity and living standards around the world. Unless leaders take action, “younger people will inherit lower economic growth and shoulder the cost of more retirees, while the traditional flow of wealth between generations erodes,” the report warns. 

MGI director and report co-author Chris Bradley will discuss the challenge and what the public and private sectors can do to prepare for these changing demographics. Join us for this timely conversation.

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Join us for a lively discussion of Christina Hillsberg's book Agents of Change: The Women Who Transformed the CIA. Hillsberg is a former intelligence operative who has written a narrative exploration of the agency’s history, told through exclusive interviews with current and former female CIA officers, many of whom have never spoken publicly until now. The book fills a necessary gap in the agency’s history and takes a critical view of the agency’s indisputable record of suppressing the women who would become its most valued trailblazers—and its most vocal troublemakers. 

These were women who sacrificed their personal lives, risked their safety, defied expectations, and boldly navigated the male-dominated spy organization, routinely passed over for promotions, recruiting assets, and managing clandestine operations. 

Terry Shames, who worked at the CIA and is an acclaimed, award winning mystery writer, will provide additional energy and knowledge of both the CIA and writing. 

You won't want to miss this program and a chance to ask questions to both writers.

About the Speakers

Christina Hillsberg of Chicago is a former CIA intelligence officer and writer. While at the CIA, she wrote analytic assessments for the president, his cabinet, and other senior-level policymakers. Hillsberg specialized in African politics and leaders and was one of the intelligence community's few Swahili and Zulu linguists. She later worked in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, clandestinely collecting intelligence from the field. She is the recipient of multiple CIA Exceptional Performance Awards. After leaving the CIA, Hillsberg worked in information security at Amazon, where she stood up the company’s first insider threat program, created a new global framework to analyze cyber risks, and established new processes to utilize intelligence tradecraft to analyze information security threats.

Terry Shames is the award-winning, best-selling author of 11 Samuel Craddock mysteries. As well as winning the Macavity Award for Best First Novel, her first book, A Killing at Cotton Hill, was also shortlisted for the Strand Critics Award. She has been short-listed for the Left Coast Crime Lefty Award, and in 2016 won the RWA Editor’s Choice award for The Necessary Murder of Nonie Blake. The eleventh in the series, The Troubling Death of Maddy Benson, October 2024, was an Amazon Editor's Pick. In April 2024, she debuted the Jessie Madison thriller series with Perilous Waters. In March she published Out of Control, her first domestic suspense novel. After graduating from The University of Texas, Shames worked for the CIA for three years in the China division. After she left the CIA she went into computer programming and analysis for 10 years, during which she began writing fiction. Shames lives in Southern California with her husband, her dog Monty and her cat Max. She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers and the Texas Institute of Letters.

An International Relations Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

Photos courtesy the speakers; main image DALLE commons, Scott Snibbe, Hugh Leeman, Gerald Harris.

ORGANIZER Frank Price

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Due to major cuts to Medicare, wildfire season, looming earthquakes, public health needs, and the increasing number of Californians without health insurance, now is the time to strengthen local health ecosystems statewide. 

Join us to hear from leaders of social impact organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area about how they are building partnerships to address these challenges by working together and leveraging technology to build creative solutions to improve lives.

About the Speakers 

Isabel Navarrete is a sustainability analyst at UCSF Health; she has a deep passion for advancing sustainability in healthcare. Navarrete oversees the organization’s municipal waste program and has led impactful diversion initiatives, including launching a blue wrap recycling program, expanding medical donation efforts, and enhancing the collection of reprocessed materials. Navarrete received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, San Diego. She currently co-chairs the UC Health Zero-Waste Working group.

Katelyn McMeekin-Jackson is the new executive director of Clinic by the Bay, a free volunteer-powered health clinic serving the medically underserved in the San Francisco Bay Area. She brings over a decade of nonprofit leadership across healthcare, education, and faith-based organizations. Currently pursuing her MBA at UC Berkeley and serving as a resource family for children in foster care, she is dedicated to creating nurturing, safe spaces where all of our neighbors can receive the care they deserve.

Jiwon Min is the chief technology officer at Every.org, a nonprofit platform that allows all nonprofits to accept all donations. She previously served as an engineering leader at a supply chain technology company focused on humanitarian aid logistics. She spent a summer consulting with the Private Sector Humanitarian Alliance (PSHA), supporting cross-sector efforts to improve coordination in humanitarian response through technology and innovation. Min recently earned her Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA) from NYU Wagner, where she focused on the intersection of technology and social impact.

Eric Talbert, CEO & co-founder of MedCycle Network, has over 20 years of nonprofit leadership experience as a philanthropic advisor, board member, and co-founder. He has worked with hundreds of organizations globally and locally to increase access to health and to protect our planet by addressing old problems in new ways that often involve new technology. In addition to philanthropic, development, and nonprofit governance acumen, Talbert has also been interviewed by international, national, and local news media as well as podcasts.

Moderator: Lila LaHood is executive director of San Francisco Public Press and has worked as a nonprofit consultant, freelance writer and editor. LaHood has an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. in international relations from Stanford University. She is a current member and past-president of the board of directors of the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

A Social Impact Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

OrganizerIan McCuaig 

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Why are activists in Thailand, Hong Kong and Burma willing to court danger to help one another?

Historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom met dozens of dissidents, including Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, known for his protests against compulsory Thai military service; Agnes Chow, co-founder of a political party now banned in Hong Kong; and Ye Myint Win (aka Nickey Diamond), who fled to Germany from Burma in the early 2020s, fearing reprisal from the junta for his human rights work.

Activists like these three express solidarity with one another online and in the streets, and sometimes refer to themselves as belonging to the “Milk Tea Alliance,” a nod to their shared opposition to nationalistic Beijing loyalists and the fact that their cultures’ iconic drinks contain dairy, unlike mainland China’s traditional tea.

The political situation in Burma, Thailand and Hong Kong are radically different. Only Burma is in a state of civil war. Only Hong Kong has changed in just a few years from a place with virtually no political prisoners to one with many. Only Thailand is a monarchy with lese-majeste laws.

How do these activists, each facing their unique situations, find common ground and sustain one another? Wasserstrom traveled globally to interview members of this loosely constituted alliance, meeting some in Asia and others in exile, finding them united by democratic values, shared concerns over autocrats, and the rising influence of a common adversary—the Chinese Communist Party.

An Asia-Pacific Affairs Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

In association with Dissent.

OrganizerLillian Nakagawa 

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On a 90-degree day in Los Angeles, bus riders across the city line up behind the shadows cast by street signs and telephone poles, looking for a little relief from the sun’s glaring heat. Every summer such scenes play out in cities across the United States, and as Sam Bloch argues, we ignore the benefits of shade at our own peril. Heatwaves are now the country’s deadliest natural disasters with victims concentrated in poorer, less shady areas. Public health, mental health and crime statistics are worse in neighborhoods without it. For some, finding shade is a matter of life and death.

Shade was once a staple of human civilization. In Mesopotamia and Northern Africa, cities were built densely so that courtyards and public passageways were in shadow in the heat of the day, with cool breezes flowing freely. The Greeks famously philosophized in shady agoras. Even today, in Spain’s sunny Seville, political careers are imperiled when leaders fail to put out the public shades that hang above sidewalks in time for summer heat.

So what happened in the United States? Bloch says the arrival of air conditioning and the dominance of cars took away the impetus to enshrine shade into our rapidly growing cities. Though a few heroic planners, engineers, and architects developed shady designs for efficiency and comfort, the removal of shade trees in favor of wider roads and underinvestment in public spaces created a society where citizens retreat to their own cooled spaces, if they can—increasingly taxing the energy grid—or face dangerous heat outdoors.

Bloch says that innovative architects, city leaders, and climate entrepreneurs are looking to revive shade to protect vulnerable people—and maybe even save the planet. 

Join us as Bloch shares his extraordinary investigation into shade, bringing together science, history, urban design and social justice to change the way we think about a critical natural resource that should be available to all.

Sam Bloch is an environmental journalist. Previously a staff writer at The Counter, he has written for L.A. Weekly, Places Journal, Slate, The New York Times, CityLab, and Landscape Architecture magazine, among others. Bloch is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and a former MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow and Emerson Collective Fellow. He is based in New York City.

A People & Nature Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

OrganizerAndrew Dudley 

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Climate disruptions and growing risk are upending insurance markets, leading many insurers to abandon parts of the country all together. Due to fires, floods and other extreme events, more and more homeowners are facing rapidly rising premiums or being dropped from their insurance plans altogether. Increasing numbers of homeowners are taking refuge in the state insurance plans of last resort, straining the program resources. For homeowners, whose house is often their biggest financial asset, this creates a huge financial risk. 

So what should people do to evaluate climate risks and insurance availability during their housing search? And how can governments help insurers weather the increasing frequency of climate-induced disasters so they can continue to underwrite our homes?

Guests:

Rachel Cleetus, Senior Policy Director, Union of Concerned Scientists

Claire O’Connor, Los Angeles real estate agent and homeowner

Dave Jones, Director, Climate Risk Initiative at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, UC Berkeley 

This episode also includes a news feature produced by Camryn Sanchez of KJZZ in Phoenix.

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For show notes and related links, visit our website.

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Iran has for decades been one of the most significant—and tricky—foreign policy challenges facing America and the West. Unfortunately, most people do not know much about the country’s true goals. Join us as Vali Nasr examines Iran’s political history to explain the actions and ambitions of the country’s leaders. He says behind the veneer of theocracy and Islamic ideology, modern Iran pursues a grand strategy with the twin goals of internal security and international activism.

Nasr, author of Iran’s Grand Strategy, draws on memoirs, oral histories, and original in-depth interviews with leading Iranians to uncover facts and events that have been previously overlooked. He examines the impact of its war with Iraq, the subsequent American actions against Iran and its invasion of Iraq in 2003, and ensuing events. He says these events have shaped the outlook in Tehran, creating a pervasive fear of the United States and its ambitions for the Middle East.

Want to understand Iran and how best to engage with it? Don’t miss this program.

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UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s 2024 book No Democracy Lasts Forever examined how democracies collapse and give way to authoritarian regimes. 

Trump’s second term, Chemerinsky says, is following the playbook. 

”If one were to design a path to authoritarian rule, it would be what we have seen in the first weeks of the Trump administration,” he wrote earlier this year. One of the country’s most prominent legal scholars, Chemerinsky has been speaking out on the need to protect due process and the rule of law and to defend against attacks on academia and the media. 

Don't miss him as he returns to Commonwealth Club Word Affairs to talk about the most pressing threats to democracy—and the possible solutions.

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In a world in which artificial intelligence will change everything, we need a leader to illuminate the impact of “the automation of thought” on our way of life. How is the widespread use of AI impacting our world, our minds, and our future—not just as a technical innovation but as a mode of culture? Should we be afraid?

De Kai has been a trailblazer in the world of AI. He invented and built the world’s first global-scale online language translator that spawned Google Translate, Yahoo Translate, and Microsoft Bing Translator. He brings decades of his paradigm-shifting work at the nexus of artificial intelligence and society to help people make sense of their interactions with AI at both personal and collective levels—ethically and responsibly. While Hollywood narratives of AI destroying humanity might be overblown, the age of AI is reshaping the future of civilization. 

What should each of us do as the responsible adults in the room? De Kai asks critical, overlooked questions requiring urgent attention.

Dr. De Kai is professor of computer science and engineering at HKUST and distinguished research scholar at the International Computer Science Institute. He was honored by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of only 17 Founding Fellows. De Kai is an independent director of the AI ethics think tank The Future Society and was one of eight inaugural members of Google’s AI ethics council.

His book Raising AI provides an accessible framework to navigate the enormous impact of AI upon human culture, our values, and the flow of information. De Kai demonstrates that society can not only survive the AI revolution but also flourish in a new world where we all play our part in a more humane, compassionate, and understanding society—alongside our artificial children.

Our moderator, Camille Crittenden, Ph.D., is the executive director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute and co-founder of the CITRIS Policy Lab and EDGE (Expanding Diversity and Gender Equity) in Tech at UC. She served as chair of the California Blockchain Working Group in 2019–20 and co-chaired the Student Experience subcommittee of the University of California’s Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence. She continues to serve on the UC AI Council.

A Technology & Society Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

OrganizerGerald Anthony Harris 

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