Meteorologist Jeff Masters joins me in this interview to discuss the damage wrought by Hurricane Helene in the southeastern United States, as he has written extensively about for the Yale Climate Connections blog, Eye on the Storm.
All tagged Climate Change
A Hundred Years Of Covid: Plague As A Process, Not An Event / Nate Bear
Social critic and writer Nate Bear joins me to discuss his work over the years communicating his insights into the intersections between the ongoing pandemic, human-caused climate disruption, and biospheric collapse. Nate describes how the abandonment of the population to repeated infection, mass illness, and death, is layered into the compounding crises affecting the living systems of the planet today.
Reading Nate Bear’s writings have been a balm for me. His essays are fascinating and educational, citing diverse sets of scientific research and historical accounts that bring our Covid age into a starker clarity. While many of the subjects he chooses to cover are often dire in nature, I find it reassuring to read his honest assessments of the global pandemic and how it intersects with the broader existential and ecological predicaments we face on this planet we all share. As listeners of this podcast have shared with me, having meaningful discussions about—or in the case of Nate’s essays, reading about—our global predicament, and the political, economic, cultural, and historical reasons why it’s occurring, can provide psychological and emotional relief from the inane, obfuscating, trivial bullshit that demands our regular attention.
Earth’s Greatest Enemy: The US Military-Industrial Complex Is A Climate Behemoth / Abby Martin
Independent journalist and documentarian Abby Martin joins me to discuss Earth's Greatest Enemy, a feature length documentary that examines one of the largest polluters and contributors to global climate change in the world: the United States military. I ask Abby what the seeds of this massive project were, and why the military-industrial complex is the "elephant in the room" in the political discourse on human-caused climate change. Also, we connect this subject to the horrific mass violence in Gaza being enacted by the State of Israel—with full US complicity—to the ecocide implicit in the maintenance of US hegemonic interests globally.
Off The Charts: Climate Data, Doomerism, & Deceptive Expectations / Eliot Jacobson
Eliot Jacobson—climate science communicator and “know-it-all doomer”—joins me to discuss his eclectic background, why climate change data in 2023 was off the charts, and what it means to be a doomer at his stage of climate and ecological breakdown.
2023 was truly unprecedented, with record-breaking temperatures recorded across the globe. We know the planet we are living on has changed; this new world we are in is unrecognizable. It becomes harder to ignore and forget how fucked we are when you’re choking on putrid smoke for weeks on end; when the asphalt buckles under the stress of heat domes that last weeks; when basic food staples become unaffordable at the supermarket; when reports about “wet bulb temperatures” become common in the headlines; when millions of carcasses of sea life wash ashore on the beaches around the world; when climate scientists say things like “[t]his month was—in my professional opinion as a climate scientist—absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”
Fire Weather: The Petrocene & The Making Of A Beast / John Vaillant
Acclaimed author John Vaillant joins me to discuss Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, a masterfully written chronicle of the destructive power of fire in the twenty-first century.
Humanity’s kinship with fire extends across the millennia. The conditions that allow fire to exist, let alone flourish, are the same that allow Homo sapiens to survive and thrive on this planet. Our relationship with this element has been mutually beneficial. Our ancestors use of fire propelled the rapid evolution of human anatomy and cognition. In turn, fire was able to spread, shaping the environments that allow us to co-exist, survive and thrive, forever binding the fates of human and more-than-human life with it.
Since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the beginning of what Vaillant calls the Petrocene, the co-adaptive, co-evolutionary path we have carved out with this life-giving/life-destroying element has become discordant and unbalanced. Industrial humans, harnessing the incredible power of ancient fossil fuels over the past few centuries—a mere blink of an eye in Earth’s geological timescale—claimed mastery over this lively entity, and has, in turn, altered the global climate system so dramatically as to trigger a mass extinction event. A relatively small subset of the peculiar species we belong to have, with careless abandon, produced the conditions for fire to claim a larger and destructive role on the planet. Is it really that we are masters of fire, or instead, is it the other way around?
Fire Weather is an astounding chronicle of the boreal fire that swept through Fort McCurray, Alberta in May 2016. Over the course of 24 hours, the nearly 90,000 residents of this modern-day bitumen subarctic boom town evacuated, escaping the out of control fire as it eviscerated everything in its path. Vaillant zooms in close, guiding us through the decisions made that day as the fire raced into the city, made by residents and authorities alike as catastrophe unfolded. He expands the story to situate Fort Mac as a nexus point in the larger settler colonial history of Canada and its inextricable relationship with the fossil fuel industry and extractive capitalism, all situated within our present paradigm of ecological crisis, climate change, and 21st century fire.
Ecological Revolution From Below: The Power Of Land-Based Resistance / Peter Gelderloos
Anarchist writer and activist Peter Gelderloos returns to the podcast to discuss ecological revolution from below, beautifully documented in his book The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, published this year by Pluto Press.
Nothing short of revolution is required to address the global ecological crisis. The technocratic solutions presented to us by various capitalist nation-states are less than sufficient in mitigating the most dire consequences of biospheric collapse and runaway climate change. In fact, more than just merely insufficient, these top-down so-called “solutions” reimpose the dominant socioeconomic and political order producing the crisis to begin with. As Gelderloos describes and points to The Solutions are Already Here, numerous land-based movements around the world are rising to the occasion — actively protecting territories from extractive capitalist enterprises, reclaiming what has been taken and exploited for industry, and building resilient autonomous communities and networks, many of which that span the artificially imposed rural-urban divide. To really grasp the scale and scope of this ecological revolution from below, Gelderloos lets representatives of these movements speak for themselves, weaving them into a tapestry that enlivens a radical imagination of what a post-capitalist world may hold.
Hot As Hell: The Quickening Of Incredible, Deadly Weather Events / Nicholas Humphrey
Meteorologist and geoscientist Nicholas Humphrey returns to the podcast, sharing his insights into the various catastrophic, record-breaking heatwaves and weather events currently playing out in numerous regions across the planet. He explains how the complex dynamics of anthropogenic climate disruption is quickening the pace of these events, and in turn, how ill adapted and ill prepared we are in addressing the realities of this predicament.
Faster Than Forecast: Greenland Ice Collapse; Our Climate Undone / Jason Box
Renowned climate scientist and "ice maverick" Dr. Jason Box joins me to discuss the specific and broad implications of anthropogenic climate disruption. He cites nearly three decades worth of on-the-ground documentation of the impacts human industrial activity is having on the rapidly thawing Greenland ice sheet, written about extensively in his independently published book Faster Than Forecast: The Story Ice Tells Us About Climate Change.
Heat Engine, Civ: Another Planetary State, Tapping At The Door / Tim Garrett
Atmospheric scientist Tim Garrett joins me to discuss, among other things, collapse. Contained within this hour-long interview, we cover the thermodynamics of civilizational growth and inevitable decline, the irrationality of dominant economic theory, Jevons Paradox, and his fascinating and wondrous study of clouds and snowflakes.
Storytelling Is An Emergency: In Our Bones, We Knew This Was Going To Happen / Sophie Strand
Writer, poet, and essayist Sophie Strand joins me to discuss the "emergency of storytelling" in our climate disrupted present and future, and the subjects she explores in her upcoming book releases, The Madonna Secret, and The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine.
Sophie and I entered this conversation a bit fuzzy, a little stunned. We acknowledge this from the get go. We were processing devastating news that morning: Hurricane Ida crashed and dragged itself from south to north across the East Coast, overwhelming the infrastructure, shutting down the grid and flooding cities. We discuss how climatologically, ecologically, we can feel how things have shifted tremendously — in the Northwest where I live, and in Hudson Valley where Sophie lives. While, personally, I tend to explore this broad subject on this podcast, Sophie writes about it.
Goodbye, 'Normal': The Existential Questions Of Climate Catastrophe / Roy Scranton
Roy Scranton, bestselling author of We're Doomed. Now What? and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, joins me to discuss his recent op-ed in the New York Times, I’ve Said Goodbye to ‘Normal.’ You Should, Too.
Systemic Failures: Rolling Blackouts, Decline, & Fragmented Realities / Richard Heinberg
Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute discusses the increasingly precarious situation we find ourselves in as fossil fuel energy production meets numerous intersecting crises, including, but not limited to: an aging and outdated energy grid, abrupt climate disruption-related weather events, rapidly depleting cheap fossil fuel reserves, and the fracturing of consensus reality.