Planet: Critical

We’re breaking all kinds of records at the moment: cities are boiling at 62C, ocean temperatures are literally off the charts, and governments have increased the global defence budget to an alarming $2440 billion.War costs life, and not just human life. The environmental impacts of war are colossal, with one study already showing that the first few months of Israel’s assault on

Can the market do the right thing?Not without supportive policy. Market-based solutions do not have a good track record when it comes to climate, stuck as they are within an exploitative economic framework. But, equally, we cannot just do away with markets, which have existed for millennia in many different forms. They need revolutionised, not abandoned. Civil engineer and geo-hydr

Here’s the good news: People can change—quickly.Sometimes it feels impossible to imagine anything other than collapse with the way our energy systems are designed, the corruption in governance, and the financial motives which skew the present system towards profit over everything else. It’s true that if nothing changes, the global system will collapse. But it’s also true th

When do you think we’ll run out of oil?2050? 2100? Never? That’s understandable given the IPCC models access to oil until 2100; politicians like Rishi are betting big on North Sea deposits. Petroleum is the life blood of our global economy, and it’s difficult to imagine it drying up. More often, when we talk about transitioning away from fossil fuels, it’s because of the ne

I like to think of intellectual discourse as the entangled root network of an ancient tree: everything is connected to everything else. Not so much a linear march of progress but a gnarled and entangled mess from which fruits bear. This is why, despite thousands of years, some ideas don’t travel very far, but double back and loop themselves around other roots, creating something

We need to confront political impossibility.A few months ago, I was sitting on a train bashing out a furious article about the British government’s climate incompetence. The man next to me was in a zoom call on climate change, vigorously shaking his head. I couldn’t help but ask. That’s how I met today’s guest, Jonathan Mille, a researcher at University College London’s C

We need to restore our own ecology.That doesn’t just mean fencing off parts of the earth into “nature conservation” spaces because, as this week’s guest Laura Martin points out, what does that say about the space on the other side of the fence? That human spaces are unnatural? Or that they don’t deserve to be protected?Laura is an environmental historian, Assistant Profes

Nuclear: The perfect energy or perfect weapon.There are such widely-held—and understandable—fears surrounding nuclear that in 2023 the Green party in Germany were instrumental in decommissioning the nation’s final plants—in the middle of an energy crisis. The environmentalists in the sixtoies and seventies were key to the anti-nuclear movement which swept the world, with Fr

Could AI be a natural intelligence?Artist Mer Maggie Roberts, cofounder of the collective Orphan Drift, has been investigating how the natural world can inspire technological development to resist continuing anthropocentrism. The more-than-human world has so many perspectives to offer which could open our eyes to our own blind spots, and encourage a politics of care, stewardship an

Truth is stranger than fiction—but fiction is better written.We know their playbooks and their networks, but the bad guys of this story are in no rush to change their tactics. From funding dodgy research to bleating lies on prime time television, the fossil fuel industry and its allies are audaciously villainous. They’d been getting away with it for decades—but now independen