Planet: Critical Rachel Donald

The global majority are not responsible for global warming.
A tiny percentage of the world's population are in positions of power, making decisions that impact the entire planet. These are the people who own and benefit from the fossil-fuelled means of production. Professor Matt Huber says taking power back from them is a class struggle—and cannot be done without building working class power.
Building on arguments from his book, Climate Change as Class War, Matt says that rather than focusing on elite consumption we should target elite production, making material arguments for systems change that the working class can relate to. He also explains what the professional class of environmentalists fail to grasp about working class voters, why capital ignores public infrastructure, and why a Green New Deal is the only way to combat petro-privatisation.
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The carbon cycle is more dangerous than an asteroid.
An asteroid killed the dinosaurs but unstable carbon cycles caused the worse mass extinctions in earth’s history—and we are putting carbon dioxide into the air at a rate the earth has never seen before.
I’m joined by science journalist Peter Brannen, author of The Ends of the World, to discuss how the carbon cycle has caused five out of the six mass extinction events — with the worst taking 10 million years for the planet to recover. Peter says all the drivers point that we are hurtling towards a sixth mass extinction if we don’t change rapidly change course, an event totally unprecedented in its man-made nature. This is an experiment in planetary systems going horribly wrong. We still have time to stop. If we don’t, the results could change the planet beyond recognition.
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A.I. is here—except it isn't. Or is it?
A.I. is all over the news all of the time, and nations are scrambling to win the race and become the world leaders in this technology which we're told will change the world. This belief, this myth, is driving policy, investment, hype and conferences. It's the myth that is making A.I., a technology which has consistenly been over-promised and failed to deliver.
Yet, nobody is asking if we want the changes we're told A.I. will deliver. The assumption is the future will be artificially intelligent. This means that other critical problems are falling off the agenda which is now dominated by the race towards a hyper-technological future—no matter the costs. Researcher Paul Schütze joins me to explore how these myths are making A.I. into a reality, with no consideration as to whether or not we want that reality. He explains the true cost of this A.I. futurism on the environment, social cohesion, and even our imagination.
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Books referenced: Rethinking Racial Capitalism


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Reparations provide legal rights.
So argues lawyer and humanitarian, Esther Afolaranmi. Esther is the founder of the Golden Love and Hands of Hope Foundation in Nigeria, working on women’s liberation, girls’ education and lobbying the UN to meet the climate pledges promised at COP meetings. Esther joins me to discuss the links between climate, family planning, social justice and explains the corruption in Nigeria preventing the country from moving past the legacies of extraction and colonialism.
Esther explains that climate reparations are not about money, but about granting equal legal rights to the world’s most vulnerable communities. She also says that as long as unethical leaders break the promises made at climate conferences, those communities will be forced to take more desperate action to secure their futures.


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What would you lose to take a stand?
Gianluca Grimalda, a climate change researcher, lost his job after he refused to fly back from fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Gianluca has been “slow travelling” for decades. He thinks his former employer tried to make an example out of him because of his climate activism. It’s one of those stories that reveals the madness of the world—he was sent to research how vulnerable communities are responding to climate change as the seas consume their villages, and then told he could no longer continue that research if he did not commit an act of harm.
He joins me to share the preliminary results of his fieldwork and tell this incredible story: his activism, the threats of dismissal, the ongoing fight with the institute, and the incredible journey from Bougainville to Germany by ferry, train and coach. This is a tale that reminds us that some things are less complicated than we are led to believe—and that we cannot rely on our institutions for moral clarity.
Watch the film made about Gianluca’s journey here.
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Our bodies know what words fail to describe.
Shifts in culture, ravages of violence, ruptures and reconciliation—the body politic lives in our own bodies, informing and inhibiting our experience in the world. Yet, we fail to recognise this connection, and the even wider one of our own bodies as part of the earth's system, which is experiencing great violence and chaos. We need to reconnect with our bodies.
Ruptures is just one of the themes Ranu Mukherjee explores as an artist. She joins me to discuss this, and the somatic experience, deep time, the lives of plants, and the violence that ripples out through society. We explore the limitations of connection in economies of scale, how this informs our power hierarchies, and the violence we then internalise, which leads us to a beautiful conversation on uncertainty.
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