About this event
The second Trump Administration marks a pivotal shift in United States climate policy, raising critical questions about the future of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the voluntary carbon market, and international climate cooperation, including the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
Join climate experts, Zara Ahmed, DrPH, and Julio Friedmann, PhD hosted by Maria Travaille as they examine the evolving landscape of climate policy and its implications for federal, state, and global climate action.
Key insights:
- The global consequences of the US stepping back from the Paris Agreement.
- The future of the IRA’s clean energy tax credits and the durability of its provisions.
- Impacts of federal policy shifts on the voluntary carbon market and corporate sustainability.
- How state and local governments can lead in the absence of robust federal leadership.
Hosted by
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Guest speaker
Zara Ahmed Vice President, Policy & Advisory Operations @ Carbon DirectG
Dr. Zara Ahmed leads policy analysis and science strategy at Carbon Direct. Dr. Ahmed's primary focus is strategic planning, program development, and U.S. policy engagement. Prior to working at Carbon Direct, Dr. Ahmed was the Government Affairs and Policy Lead for the COVID-19 Response at the CDC. She rejoined CDC in August 2021 after two years at the Guttmacher Institute as the Associate Director for Federal Issues. Before her time at the Guttmacher Institute, Dr. Ahmed spent 10 years with CDC, including seven years based overseas at US embassies in Rwanda, Namibia and Haiti as a senior technical advisor, and three years as the Associate Division Director for Policy and Communications in the Division of Global Health Protection at CDC headquarters in Atlanta.
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Guest speaker
Julio Friedmann, PhD Chief Scientist @ Carbon DirectG
Dr. Julio Friedmann is Chief Scientist at Carbon Direct. He works directly with clients, the Science team, and the leadership of Carbon Direct to solve major technical challenges around carbon management and CO2 removal. Dr. Friedmann recently served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy at the Department of Energy where he was responsible for DOE’s R&D program in advanced fossil energy systems, carbon capture, and storage (CCS), CO2 utilization, and clean coal deployment. More recently, he was a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia. He has held positions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, including Chief Energy Technologist. Dr. Friedmann is one of the most widely known and authoritative experts in the U.S. on carbon removal (CO2 drawdown from the air and oceans), CO2 conversion and use (carbon-to-value), hydrogen, industrial decarbonization, and carbon capture and sequestration.
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Guest speaker
Maria Travaille (moderator) Advisory @ Carbon DirectG
Maria Travaille advises clients on high-quality carbon reduction and removal strategies, developing tailored solutions that maximize climate impact. Maria Travaille's expertise draws upon her management consulting experience at Hitachi Consulting, where she led Hitachi’s internal Sustainability Action Network. She then worked for the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change & the Environment on their climate adaptation and resilience team. She is an additional contributor to the 'Business and Industry' chapter of the Third UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, the UK Committee on Climate Change's national five-year review and her MSc dissertation work was published in Business Strategy and the Environment research article ‘What explains firms' net zero adoption, strategy and response?’. Most recently prior to Carbon Direct, Maria managed carbon buyer relationships at forest carbon developer NCX.
Carbon Direct
Go from climate goal to climate action.Carbon Direct is a science-first carbon management firm that helps organizations reduce their carbon footprint with their end-to-end platform.
