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October 16, 2026
Please join us for a talk by Dr. Leah Stokes, UC-Santa Barbara, Associate Professor and Anton Vonk Chair in Environmental Politics about her new book “The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect our Planet.”
About the Book:
“They were perhaps an unlikely trio: the professor Leah Stokes, the policy wonk Sonia Aggarwal in the White House, and the DC insider Adrian Deveny in the Senate, but together, they crafted the boldest climate legislation of our time. In The Carbon Wave, Stokes chronicles the turbulent path of their climate bill as it veered between breakthrough and collapse—from the hopeful beginnings of the Green New Deal in 2018, to the bill’s near-certain defeat by Senator Joe Manchin in the winter of 2021, to the surprise passage of the landmark legislation in August 2022. During this critical time, the author was pregnant or in the NICU with her premature twins, and Aggarwal and Deveny were new parents too.
Interlacing personal narratives with stories from Congress, the White House, and outside activists, Stokes shows how dogged perseverance and collective action can still bend the course of history. The book concludes with an update from the second Trump administration, explaining the parts of the bill that were—and were not—rolled back, and why we should remain hopeful that progress is still being made.
Everyone has been told to shrink their carbon footprint and lighten their load on our planet by changing their behavior. But what if instead of making ourselves smaller, we joined with others to maximize our impact? That’s the carbon wave. And this book shows us how to make it.”
Leah C. Stokes is the Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at UC Santa Barbara and the author of The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet. She has championed climate policy in the United States at all levels of government and was selected for Time Magazine’s Time100 Next list and Business Insider’s top 30 global climate leaders. Trained at MIT, Columbia, and the University of Toronto, Stokes has been published in top scholarly journals, as well as The New York Times, Washington Post, and other popular media outlets. A recipient of a Harvard University Radcliffe Fellowship, she is also the author of the award-winning Short Circuiting Policy, which was listed as one of the top five climate books in 2020 by The New York Times. She is also a co-host of the climate podcast “A Matter of Degrees.”
Dr. Stoke’s hybrid talk will take place October 16th from 10:30-11:30 am at Rutgers University, in Blake Hall, Room 131 (93 Lipman Dr, New Brunswick, NJ 08901) OR Zoom