Carnegie Council Podcasts

Atlantic Council's Ukraine expert Melinda Haring joins Doorstep co-hosts Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin to discuss where we are one week after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a large-scale invasion into Ukraine. What are the key takeaways after a week of intense fighting? Can the U.S. and Western allies do more to stop Putin's advance? How will the war re-shape U.S. domestic politics as midterm season begins? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

Russia's invasion of Ukraine raises several ethical questions: Why did diplomacy fail? What does the invasion mean for the principle of sovereignty? How does history inform the present and suggest the future? Are sanctions an appropriate and effective response, and what principles should guide their implementation? Carnegie Council President Joel Rosenthal and Senior Fellow Nikolas Gvosdev discuss the ramifications of Putin's decision and the ethical principles at stake in the current crisis. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.

Dr. Francesca Rossi, the AI Ethics Global Leader for IBM, joins Senior Fellow Anja Kaspersen for a riveting Artificial Intelligence & Equality podcast. Rossi speaks about her ethics-focused role at a multinational company and the importance of lateral expertise and multidisciplinarity in addressing ethical considerations and tensions in AI research. How can we insert human values into AI systems? Can AI transform and strengthen human decision-making? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.

In the 1950s, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev bemoaned that the United States wouldn’t even sell buttons to the Soviet Union. "Buttons can hold up a soldier’s trousers," he groused. Today, China is far more entangled with the United States than the Soviet Union was, and the relationship trades in far more than buttons. In a new series of dialogues, Carnegie Council is exploring the question: How should American institutions engage with China? The first event of the series examines the ethical questions that media outlets and journalists must grapple with when reporting on China. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.

In this episode of the Artificial Intelligence & Equality podcast, Senior Fellow Anja Kaspersen speaks with Dr. Jürgen Stock, secretary general of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol). In an engaging conversation, they discuss his professional journey towards leading the world police body, what keeps him up at night, and the critical role of global police work in keeping societies safe, especially as those seeking to evade justice increasingly hide behind screens, and operate via bits and bytes, as well as on the dark net. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.  

With 2022 U.S. midterm elections looming, George Mason University's Colin Dueck comes back to speak with Doorstep co-hosts Nick Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin about the opportunities and challenges the Biden/Harris administration is facing on the global stage. What lessons has the U.S. learned from its failed Afghanistan pullout? Can Biden bridge foreign policy divisions that cut across party lines? Will he be able to do this in time to thwart the Russia-China "no limits" strategic partnership? For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.

In this Artificial Intelligence & Equality podcast, Senior Fellow Anja Kaspersen sits down with Caltech's Professor Anima Anandkumar, also director of machine learning research at NVIDIA, for a captivating conversation. They discuss the "Trinity of AI" (data, algorithms, and infrastructure), Anandkumar's work on tensor algorithms, and the state of AI research, including the critical importance of diversity in the field. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world's wealthiest added a whopping $3.9 trillion to their pockets while as many as 500 million people descended into poverty. This trend continues a trajectory of decades of wealth accumulation by the 1 percent. In this podcast, New York Times correspondent Peter Goodman, author of Davos Man, talks with Doorstep co-hosts Tatiana Serafin and Nikolas Gvosdev about the global billionaire class and their visible and invisible impacts on nearly every aspect of modern society. For more, please go to carnegiecouncil.org.

In this episode of the Artificial Intelligence & Equality Initiative podcast, Senior Fellow Anja Kaspersen and Carnegie Council President Joel Rosenthal sit down with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation's Stelios Vassilakis for an engaging conversation about how to preserve and empower public space ethics. What we can we learn from the Athenian agora to guide the means and methods of governing AI? For more, including a full transcript, please go to carnegiecouncil.org. 

Current international responses to climate change continue to place the world on a trajectory beyond 1.5°C global warming, with impacts posing severe risks to natural and human systems. Discussions on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) globally has grown since the publication of the IPCC special report on global warming of 1.5°C, which reaffirms that large-scale CDR is required in all of its pathways to limit global warming to 1.5°C, with limited or no overshoot to achieve net-zero mid-century and global net negative emissions thereafter, until the end of the century. By removing between 100 to 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 depending on the speed of emissions reduction in respective pathways. CDR methods vary and include the use of nature-based approaches, such as afforestation and enhancing wetlands, or engineering-based approaches to directly capture carbon dioxide. At scale, they all present potential benefits and risks of negative side-effects and pose significant governance challenges as many governance gaps exist. Most CDR approaches are currently theoretical and far from being ready to deploy at the speed or scale necessary to prevent overshooting the Paris Agreement temperature goal of 1.5–2°C. Discussions around CDR governance, in particular on and around nature-based approaches to CDR as well as direct air carbon capture and storage, have more recently gained growing interest in light of the wave of net-zero commitments or pledges by governments, companies and other actors over the last two years. However, important knowledge gaps persist around the role CDR could play in achieving net negative emissions after net-zero to deliver the Paris Agreement's goal. This C2GDiscuss features three global experts sharing their views on the role that CDR could play to achieve net negative after net zero. Some of the topics explored in this discussion are: what needs to be done now to have CDR functioning by the time we need it; how can CDR's full potential be realized as a climate response while making sure that the co-benefits are maximized, and trade-offs minimized in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); what role could the public and private sector play to scale up the required CDR and is there a role for other non-state actors. Understanding these issues is crucial and urgent for meaningful societal deliberations and decisions today. Jan Minx is head of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change working group Applied Sustainability Science. James Mwangi is the executive director of the Dalberg Group, and a partner with Dalberg Advisors. Shuchi Talati is chief of staff for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) at the U.S. Department of Energy. Janos Pasztor (moderator) is executive director of C2G and a senior fellow at Carnegie Council. This discussion was recorded on September 8, 2021, and is available with interpretation into 中文, Español, and Français. For more, please go to C2G's website.