Prominent Voices on Climate Change to Conclude WC’s “Year of Chemistry” Celebration

CHESTERTOWN, MD — A leading American journalist and a Nobel Laureate chemist from Mexico will come to Chestertown to speak this fall as Washington College concludes its special programming for the 2011 International Year of Chemistry.

On Thursday, October 27, veteran magazine writer Ryan Lizza, who covers the 2012 Presidential campaign and national politics as Washington Correspondent for The New Yorker, will share his insights into how and why Congress and the White House failed to reach agreement on breakthrough energy legislation designed to be both business- and consumer-friendly.

The free public lecture, “The Politics of Climate Change,” is based largely on a major feature article Lizza published in the October 2011 issue of The New Yorker. His talk will be held at 5 p.m. in The Prince Theatre of the Garfield Center for the Arts, 210 High Street, Chestertown, MD.

A week later, on Thursday, Nov. 3, the fifth and final event in the year-long celebration of chemists and chemistry will bring Mario J. Molina, Ph.D., one of the chemists who first discovered the threat that chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, pose to the earth’s ozone layer. Molina will receive an honorary degree of science from the College and deliver his remarks at a special convocation beginning at 5 p.m. in Decker Theatre, inside the Gibson Center for the Arts. The event is free and open to the public.

Molina and two colleagues shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on the atmospheric chemistry of CFCs and their detrimental effect on the stratosphere, especially the formation of the Antarctic Ozone Hole. After a successful career at the University of California, Irvine and at MIT, Molina returned to his native Mexico City in 2004 to establish the Mario Molina Center for Strategic Studies in Energy and the Environment, which focuses on issues where public policy and environmental health intersect. He also serves on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego.

More information on both events will be available at www.washcoll.edu