Planet: Critical Rachel Donald

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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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-hydrologist Delton Chen joins me to discuss the Global Carbon Reward, a policy for managing climate-related risk. Described as a “carrot policy”, Delton says the GCR incentivises polluting industries to reduce their emissions whilst encouraging the private market to invest in research and development of mitigation technologies. This conversation is filled with nuance, technicality, analysis and discussion on the viability of market-based solutions in a market that drives perverse incentives.
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You can also listen to my latest episode of the Mongabay Newscast where I spoke with Dahr Jamail about the resource wars driving climate-fuelled conflict.



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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 that people are capable of amazing feats of imagination and adaptation—especially social imagination.
This week I’m joined by Erin Remblance, degrowth advocate and co-founder of ReBiz, an “un/school” designed to equip all people with the worldview and skills to create regenerative and pluriversal post-growth futures. ReBiz offers a core course on social tipping points and Erin joined me to discuss exactly that: What are social tipping points? And, importantly, how do we create them? This is a conversation about technology, economy, imagination, politics and a just transition—because most people are good people.
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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 necessity to limit global warming—not because we run out.
But a team in Scotland are warning exactly that—we’re running out. Fast. Alister Hamilton is a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the founder of Zero Emission Scotland. He and his colleagues self-funded research into oil depletion around the world and the results are shocking: We will lose access to oil around the world in the 2030s.
They calculated this by establishing the Energy Return On Investment (EROI) and found that whilst there will still be oil deposits around the world, we would use more energy accessing the oil supply than we would ever get from burning it. This is because we’re having to mine further into the earth’s crust to access lower-grade oil. According to their calculations, the oil in the North Sea will be inaccessible—in a dead state—by 2031, and the oil in Norway by 2032. Around the world, oil reserves see the same trend through the 2030s.
Petroleum is the life blood, and we haven’t yet built out a different circulatory system to support renewable energy—in less than a decade, the world as know it could crash.
© Rachel Donald
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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 that feels solid, but may be rotten at its core.
This week I’m joined by ecologist and writer Carl Safina who has spent the past few years researching that root network of cultural beliefs from all over the world, discovering profound similarities and critical differences. He explains that the main difference between Western thought and most other cultures is the disconnectedness of humankind from nature, and he traces this back to Plato’s philosophy of absolute ideals.
This is my second episode with Carl. We first spoke over two years ago when he was deep in the process of researching his latest book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. That conversation was truly fundamental to my own thinking, so it was a real joy to have Carl back on the show now that the book is out. This conversation goes begins with Plato, takes us through the delightful common threads that weave together most human cultures, and ends with Carl explaining how this rift between humans and nature results in the perverse incentives in our psychotic system today.
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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 Climate Action Unit, where he studies systemic risk and the impact of our interdependent global systems on climate change response. Jonathan focuses much of his attention on the physical and political possibility of the energy transition, and in today’s episode we discuss that exact tension between what is physically possible and what is politically possible. We explore the narrative challenge we face as a society, along with the distinct knowledge gaps found in industry, policy circles and business which create blind spots of psychological vulnerabilities, impeding the necessary psychological transition.
© Rachel Donald
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