One Planet Podcast Climate Change & Environmental Solutions · Creative Process Original Series

"People speak about the Anthropocene. I don't quite like this term, but the idea that humans have been transforming nature and have been altering it, adulterating it, something to put into perspective regarding this nostalgia for pristine nature. And utopianism actually goes hand in hand with nostalgia. I mentioned the myth of the Golden Age. This was something that used to exist, the Golden Age or paradise, an idea of pure nature in harmony with human beings. These nostalgic imaginaries that feed into and can reactivate utopian thinking in our day. We should by no means let go of an idea of pristine nature. And I also don't think, just to return to this idea of species extinction. I don't think that the de-extinction efforts are particularly utopian, even though they may seem this way. How do we compensate for the material loss of biodiversity? I think no amount of technological ingenuity will actually fulfill this desire for a return to the pristine nature that we have lost.”

As Surrealism turns 100, what can it teach us about the importance of dreaming and creating a better society? Will we wake up from the consumerist dream sold to us by capitalism and how would that change our ideas of utopia?

S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.

“There's that old saying, ‘blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.’ For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe. There are layers and layers of insulation made up of civilizational narratives that dislocate many people from climate chaos and those whose psyches buckle upon contact with this reality are the ones deemed mad. But this pathologizing is a defense mechanism employed by the civilized or by the dominant culture, which ends up subjugating those of us whose minds stray from accepted norms. There are lots of studies that show that certain forms of psychosis are actually a form of meaning-making for communities that feel like they have no sense of purpose. We've had generations and generations of trauma visited upon the human species by picking apart communities and our intimate relationships with nature. Especially since the 80s, picking apart our inability to even consider ourselves as part of society in a meaningful sense. That kind of pulling apart means that we're locked in quite individual and atomized spaces, where when something as massive as climate change starts to happen, people feel both responsible for it, and completely unable to do anything about it. That's not me saying that being depressed is the only objective kind of indicator for reality, but it's quite easy for the human species to underestimate or discount quite how significantly dangerous our situation is and people with depression are more able to see that with eyes unclouded by biases.”

The planet’s well-being unites us all, from ecosystems to societies, global systems to individual health. How is planetary health linked to mental health?
Charlie Hertzog Young is a researcher, writer and award-winning activist. He identifies as a “proudly mad bipolar double amputee” and has worked for the New Economics Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, the Good Law Project, the Four Day Week Campaign and the Centre for Progressive Change, as well as the UK Labour Party under three consecutive leaders. Charlie has spoken at the LSE, the UN and the World Economic Forum. He studied at Harvard, SOAS and Schumacher College and has written for The Ecologist, The Independent, Novara Media, Open Democracy and The Guardian. He is the author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future.

“When I broke it down for every inhabitant of planet Earth, I was staggered at how much money it is. So, if you take things like subsidies, and they could be consumption or production subsidies, it's less than a trillion. But then if you add in the costs of climate change and other damages done by using the fossil fuels, we come up to this figure of five trillion. And actually, in the last few years, it's been more than that. It's been up six and seven trillion, as well. For example, if we compare it with the amount that the governments of the West are supposed to supply each year in climate finance, which is a hundred billion, it's approximately one fiftieth of the amount that we're actually subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, which is the major cause of the problem.”
The Five-pronged Clean Energy Future
“I thought about it, and I was wondering, what do we actually need in the world? Because we don't need petrol and we don't need coal. We need energy to power various things. So, we need these energy services. So, what's the simplest way of providing all of the energy services? And it really seems to me that we can basically do it all with about five different types of goods. So the system of the future I put out in the book is first of all, you have the generation of electricity, which is mainly going to be with renewables, mainly with wind and solar because they are the cheapest and they're getting cheaper thanks to Wright's Law. Then you need energy storage and other means of sharing matching demand to supply. So, storage is the one that people will be most familiar with, which can be batteries, for example. And again, the price of batteries has also plummeted about 85 percent price reduction in a decade. And it continues because, again, we have mounting volumes. In a competitive market, there's lots of innovation going on in terms of battery design, in terms of construction, and all of this stuff, new materials coming into batteries. So, that's your first two, that's your renewable generation and your battery storage. Electric vehicles will be the main method of transportation. Already, they dominate sales in the two-wheeler market in China and India. They're already eating into global oil demand. They're taking about 1.5 percent of global oil demand already, and the sales are increasing exponentially in China and other countries as well. They are cost-competitive. It's just on the purchase price in some markets with some models now. And it's going to get cheaper again because battery costs will fall. Heating and cooling, which is a big demand for energy. We can use heat pumps, which are super efficient running on electricity…Hydrogen, that will probably be the fifth prong, but a smaller prong, rather like the little finger on your hand.”

How and when will we transition to a clean energy future? How will the transition empower individuals and transform global power dynamics? How did China become the world’s first electrostate, leading the drive for renewable energy, and what can we learn from this?

Richard Black spent 15 years as a science and environment correspondent for the BBC World Service and BBC News, before setting up the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. He now lives in Berlin and is the Director of Policy and Strategy at the global clean energy think tank Ember, which aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy.

He is the author of The Future of Energy; Denied:The Rise and Fall of Climate Contrarianism, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London.