Planet: Critical Rachel Donald

Whoever controls the energy supply controls the new world order.
Russia and China are deepening their relationship, Western allies in the Middle East are joining the fossil-fuelled BRICS alliance spanning the globe, and the Wagner group is loosening Europe’s grip of Africa. The tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting along new fault lines as rising powers focus on securing resources while the old Empire in the West pretends it can decouple economies and energy. The world is at war, but only one side is being honest about what for.
Acclaimed energy expert Art Berman says this is the culmination of millennia of human fallibility. This is a conversation that takes us from 3000 BCE and the discovery of what he calls the most disruptive technology humans ever had right up to today and the energy wars blooming around the world. We discuss our psychological disposition to immaturity, our cognitive shortcomings when examining complexity, the secrets of holy texts and even morality. Art explains how energy is reshaping geopolitical alliances, which leaders understand the reality of our situation, and why technology cannot solve our problems.
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What's the relationship between our energy consumption, our material footprint and our economies?
Tim Garrett and I come to refer to these as “the holy trinity”. Tim is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah, and over two years ago, he joined me to discuss the thermodynamics of collapse, where he explained his research into the behaviour of snowflakes and how you could extrapolate the behaviour of economies and civilization using the laws of thermodynamics. He's back on the show to explain how we use our energy, the necessity of a surplus of energy and how all of this relates to a society's growth and health.
In this conversation we discuss questions like: Will renewables facilitate an increased consumption of fossil fuels? Can we reduce inequality by reducing energy consumption? How can we organise a wave-like civilisation, which grows and decays within safe boundaries? Can we decline in order to recover before crashing completely?


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What does artificial intelligence have in common with eugenics?
The first person to float the idea of a "general intelligence" was a eugenicist who was determined to rank intelligence according to race. This is just one of the legacies of A.I., a technology which Silicon Valley vehemently promises will transform the world, but which for now only consumes enormous quantities of energy. Despite the warnings from technologists around the world, for-profit companies are racing to develop A.G.I. no matter the costs.
Artist John Wild has traced the deep history of A.I., finding its roots in disturbing schools of thought which seek to raise the dead. He's also found where these histories are alive and kicking in C-Suite boardrooms. He joins me to reveal the disturbing imaginaries associated with A.I., and how we can begin to reimagine it as an entangled, decentralised, collaborative tool to create new ways of being.
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Who takes the initiative when governments fail to ask?
Amazingly, in Denmark, an industry is lobbying its government for much tighter regulations to absolutely reduce emissions in order to meet the Paris Agreement. Stakeholders across the entire Danish building industry have agreed to an ambitious reduction roadmap tafter a team of architects undertook an independent review of government policies. They found that global building emissions must be reduced by 96% to limit global warming, and are currently lobbying for an emissions cap of carbon dioxide kilograms per meter squared.
I'm joined by Dani Hill-Hansen, sustainable design engineer, architect at EFFEKT, and co-author of the Reduction Roadmap. She explains the findings of their research, the ambitious targets of the roadmap, how they got 540 stakeholders across the industry to sign on, and the methodology of "brand activism" they've developed alongside this project to kickstart other industries across the globe to initiate necessary climate action.



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What’s the future of food?
Last year, two of my former podcast guests had a long and very public disagreement about the politics of food, locking horns over the utility of farming in a densely-populated world. Activist and writer George Monbiot has written extensively about lab-grown food and the need to revolutionise our food systems with technology so that we can better feed everyone. Farmer and academic Chris Smaje has argued that farming is a critical component of community autonomy, and wrote a book in response to George’s own, Regenesis, criticising the vision as “eco-modernist”. George hit back that Chris’ proposal is a “cruel fantasy”.
I watched this unfold online, worried to see two experts disagree so deeply on something fundamental to how we organise society, and invited Chris back to talk about this second book, Saying No To A Farm-Free Future. Chris explains how our food production systems are emblematic of our crisis of relationship to the earth. He argues that de-materialising our food supply plays into the colonial history of uprooting people from the land and denigrating agriculture. This leads us to discuss land, language, and culture, decentralising power, and the political binaries that could be dissolved by grounding our thinking in the land.
Correction: The previous version of this interview stated that the debate between George Monbiot and Chris Smaje was around lab grown meat instead of lab grown food.



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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 Gaza emitted more carbon dioxide than 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in one year. Our ecosystems are at their breaking point, with six of nine planetary boundaries crossed. We need global collaboration to commit the huge systems overhaul necessary to survive the planetary crises and mitigate the catastrophic decisions of the last centuries.
Olivia Lazard, research fellow at Carnegie Europe, joins me to discuss just how complex that task is, detailing the five steps of the Anthropocene and how violence increases at each step. We discuss these legacy systems of extraction and violence and how they are embedded into decisions being made around A.I., creating security risks in a resource-scarce world. We also cover the dematerialisation of our economies, the myths that blind us to energy and materials, before discussing the balance of power tipping our planet and human systems further into crisis.
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