2025 Winter Seminar Series

This year’s ESPE winter seminar series is centered around “Climate Solutions”.

Climate change is not just a technical and scientific problem but also a political and social one, and addressing it requires thinking through political and policy solutions. The ESPE winter seminar series welcomes three speakers who examine these solutions from different perspectives and backgrounds.

These talks will be free and open to the public, and held at Union College in the Nott Memorial from 6-7 PM on the following days.

Bob Inglis is the Executive Director of republicEn.org

“How To Get The World (And Conservatives) In On Climate Action”

Bob Inglis is the executive director of republicEn (republicEn.org). He was a member of the House of Representatives, representing Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina from 1993-1998, and again from 2005-2010. In 2011, Inglis went full-time into promoting free enterprise action on climate change and launched the Energy and Enterprise Initiative (“E&EI”) at George Mason University in July 2012 (later rebranded to republicEn). For his work on climate change, Inglis was given the 2015 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. He appears in the film Merchants of Doubt and in the Showtime series YEARS of Living Dangerously (episodes 3 and 4), and he’s spoken at TEDxBeaconStreet and TEDxJacksonville.

"Climate Lessons from Local News"

Lissa Harris is a former local news reporter, editor, and digital entrepreneur with a focus on environmental news and disaster reporting. Her news website, the Watershed Post, covered news in the rural Catskills from 2010 to 2017. She has a background in science writing (M.S. ’08, MIT) and natural resources (M.P.S. ’04, Cornell) and has extensively covered flood disaster and recovery, New York City watershed politics in the rural Catskills, and local and state climate issues for a variety of local and national publications. Her work has also appeared in publications such as the Times-Union and Chronogram. Harris currently works as a consultant on local capacity-building and community benefit projects in the rural Catskills for MTC, a small employee-owned independent rural telecom. She is also a certified volunteer firefighter with the Margaretville Fire Department and a member of the NYS Southern Tier Regional Clean Energy Hub Advisory Council

“The Winds of Change: Attitudes Towards Wind Projects and Their Electoral Implications in Texas”

Oksan Bayulgen is Department Head and Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. Her work examines the political economy of energy transitions, environmental politics, democratization and development, and has published extensively on these topics. Her most recent book, “Twisting in the Wind: The Politics of Tepid Transitions to Renewable Energy” examines the political determinants of energy policy and the clean energy transition in Turkey. She has conducted extensive field work in Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Norway, and Turkey, teaches a range of courses in comparative politics and environmental/energy policy.