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Date: Tuesday September 22, 2026 @ 2:00-4:00pm
Location: CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (CUNY SLU)
Address: 25 W 43rd St 18th floor, New York, NY 10036
Registration required: tinyurl.com/TUED-Sep22
Speakers:
Opening remarks: Rita 'Kiki' Edozie, CUNY SLU Chief Academic Officer
Moderator: Lala Peñaranda, TUED Global, Latin America Coordinator
This Climate Week NYC 2026 event will bring together trade unionists, researchers, and movement allies to examine the growing international momentum behind the “Public Pathway”, a union-led approach to energy transition based on public ownership, democratic planning, public finance, and energy as a public good. The discussion will situate current energy debates within the wider global crisis of neoliberal “green growth,” where transition policy has too often relied on private investors, de-risking schemes, and market incentives that fail to deliver universal access, decent work, or rapid system transformation.
The panel will highlight emerging struggles and proposals from Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and North America, asking what it means for unions to reclaim energy systems from a market-led approach and rebuild them around social need, sovereignty, and democratic control. Speakers will discuss examples such as Mexico’s post-neoliberal electricity agenda, public energy debates in Latin America, South-South cooperation, and the role of unions in defending public utilities while pushing them toward a stronger public-goods mandate.
The event will also ask how international solidarity can move beyond statements and become practical cooperation: shared research, political education, worker-to-worker exchanges, and coordinated responses to privatization, trade/investment pressures, and climate finance models that weaken public systems. The goal is to make the Public Pathway visible during Climate Week as a serious global alternative: not simply “more public ownership” in the abstract, but a concrete strategy for energy democracy, just transition, and development led by workers and communities.
Location: CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (CUNY SLU)
Address: 25 W 43rd St 18th floor, New York, NY 10036
Date: Thursday September 24, 2026 @ 2-4 pm
Registration required: tinyurl.com/TUED-Sep24
Speakers:
Opening remarks: Rita 'Kiki' Edozie, CUNY SLU Chief Academic Officer
Moderator: Lala Peñaranda, TUED Global, Latin America Coordinator
This Climate Week NYC 2026 event will focus on the core principles of the Public Pathway and what they mean in the New York and U.S. context. While TUED has focused on the Public Pathway in an international context to describe reclaiming energy from neoliberal privatization, the underlying principles are directly relevant to struggles in the US and New York: public ownership of energy, democratic governance of public services, utility accountability, visionary energy planning by the state, decarbonization of built infrastructure, public transit, robust workers’ rights, affordable housing, affordable energy bills, and the defense of quality public services.
Climate policy cannot succeed if it is organized around fragmented private, profit-maximizing markets, cost-shifting to working people, and “green privatisation” projects designed primarily for investor returns.
Panelists will explore several guiding principles of the Public Pathway, including energy as a public good, progressive climate finance, workers’ use of public procurement and industrial policy, and the need to link climate action with a robust labor movement. The discussion will connect these principles to concrete U.S. and New York debates, including public power, the role of NYPA, utility regulation, green jobs, electrification, public housing retrofits, public transit expansion, and local industrial strategy.
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