 Hello, welcome to Downstream here on Avara Media. My name is Aaron Bustoni. Thanks for joining us before we go any further. I have two things to ask of you. First is to like this video. Second, if you've not already, if you haven't, what the hell is going on, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Neither cost you a thing. And both mean so much to all of us here at Avara Media, really helps get our content even further out. Now, on with the show. At the start of the 20th century, Rosa Luxemburg said that humanity was faced with an alternative between socialism and barbarism. People repeatedly have said that since, but increasingly those words do appear to be somewhat prophetic. And now we're told that the alternative is eco-socialism or neoliberalism. Joining me today are two authors who have written a new book, Planet on Fire, a manifesto for the age of environmental breakdown. They are Matt Lawrence and Laurie Laborn Langson. Guys, welcome to the show. Good to be here. I'm going to ask you a very simple question here right at the start, which is, the book is called A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown. Why don't you just say climate change? What's the difference? The political imaginary is captivated increasingly by the climate crisis. That's happened more and more over the last couple of years, and that just does not encapsulate the terrible position that we find ourselves in. As increasingly we've seen, again in the last couple of years, particularly things like extinction rebellion, that imaginary is opening itself up to conceive of, say, plastic pollution or biodiversity loss or the loss of species or the extinction of species. But it's so much more than that. And we need to see this as an overall destabilisation of the natural world. It's the climate crisis. It's what we've done to the nitrogen cycle. It's what we're doing to the water cycle. It's what we're doing to biodiversity. And overall, we've destabilised the natural life support systems, the overall conditions that make life both human and non-human possible on the planet. But why don't you say climate change? Because people know what climate change is, where environmental breakdown. People go, well, what is that? I look outside, the trees are growing, the grass is there, the sun's out. Does that make an already complex thing more ambiguous? Do you think there's a really critical point you're trying to convey here? Yeah, because it's more than just climate change. It's more than just the climate crisis. It's both more, it encompasses, like I was saying, biodiversity loss, the destabilisation of other systems. And if we don't have publics that are engaged in the full picture of what's happening to the environment, then we're not necessarily going to have the feedback into politics or the feedback into the behaviour of all the institutions that are going to solve this problem. And secondly, change in other words like that are too benign compared to the situation that we find ourselves in. The destabilisation of the natural world is surpassing critical thresholds. And by that, I mean, is getting to the point where it's going to become so destabilised that what agency we can muster as human beings is just not going to be able to be sufficient for being able to bring this back away from a position where we'll end up with globally catastrophic results. Let's talk about the biodiversity aspect for a second, because I read Bill Gates' recent book about climate change. I actually thought it was quite useful, you know, and I said, I said some things which were wholly negative. And of course, he was, oh, these guys are standing for Bill Gates and Big Pharma. But I thought it was useful in a number of ways. But one thing I really disagreed was with this kind of singular focus on reducing CO2 methane emissions. You know, just we just need to decarbonise. And then everything is going to be fine. And what you're saying is with this whole idea of environmental breakdown, actually, it's far deeper than that. So can you just talk about the importance of biodiversity and what's going on? Because, you know, for some people out there, we just need to decarbonise. You're saying it's not that. So what are these other issues besides reducing and ultimately eliminating the 51 billion tonnes of fossil fuel emissions we emit every year? Yeah. And I agree that Bill Gates' book was quite good in systematising the climate element of the challenge. But we could decarbonise our economies, all the vehicles, all the production processes and everything. And we still be in serious trouble because the other activities in our economy, like producing the food that we eat, or building homes or whatever, could the impacts upon the environment, including the destruction of ecosystems or the habitats in which animals live, which plants are found in, would still be being destroyed by those processes, right? So take the Amazon and the Cerrado there often, or at least the Amazon is often in the news, they're being destroyed not just because of rising temperatures, but they're being destroyed directly by a global food system. Basically, you know, the impacts upon the Amazon is connecting, intimately connected to the consumer tastes of, say, meat eaters in Europe, and then the companies that meet that demand and also push certain ideas of what the right kind of lifestyle is on those people. And so we could, all of that could be decarbonised, the plane that would then take the packed meat over from South America to Europe and then the processing and the distribution of it to then the restaurants that run by renewable energy. But we'd still be in a seriously catastrophically dangerous environmental situation because we're crushing through those habitats, clearing rain forests to make way for cattle. And that is multiplied all around the world. And so we cannot do this if we just take out the emissions part. And the Bill Gates book was very interesting in many ways, but it's just shining a spotlight on this overall storm that is engulfing the world that encapsulates so much more than just the climate crisis. Matt Lawrence, what's your take on that? Well, I think in terms of why has been more than just the climate crisis is partly because of the compounding age that Laurie mentions, but just look around us. So COVID-19 is in some ways the first major global crisis of environmental breakdown or at least a crisis of the speed and scale because its drivers really is capitalism's entanglement of natural systems, of biodiversity, of deforestation, inter-cycle accumulation. And that was sort of the proximate cause that drove the zoonotic transfer. There's a movement of the COVID sort of stream from was it pangolins, through bats, into human lifestyles and then sent around the world via sort of carbon-based mobility in the form of planes. And so just looking around us, we can see that actually it's not enough just to say, well, actually, just what we need to do is decarbonize because that would be enough. We actually need to think about the wider sort of interconnected and compounding set of environmental breakdowns that are happening at the same time. And I think that takes you to the second part, which is that actually, we have to decarbonize absolutely, but we've got to recognize what sort of driver of this is, which is sort of extractive and propulsive model of capitalism that sort of seeks to commodify and transform all of nature into the profit-making process, sort of transform sort of uncommodified labor, uncommodified labor and nature in sort of commodity forms into wealth. And that is such sort of propulsive driver that we need to, in that sort of moment of decarbonization, reimagine deeply the institutions that organize our economy if we're going to have a sort of chance of cutting the drivers of not just emissions, but environment breakdown in the round. Yeah, I think Andres Malm, who we've not had the pleasure of having on actually on downstream yet, who's written, I think, he's prodigious, you know, I think he's known as the third book to do with Covid. I just got a new proof copy of his new book coming out with the Zettkin Collective. It's very, very good. Not to promote another book. Yeah, no, it is very good from what I've sort of breezed over it. But in his previous book about the sort of, you know, he equates what's needed to happen with Covid-19 to war communism. And he says, you know, the problem here is that we're inserting all of nature, the entirety of nature, as you said, into the circuits of capital. What is that? It's money making money. It's fundamentally about instrumentalizing the entirety of the natural world. And by the way, beyond it, if we ever get to that thing, I'm so keen on, which is space asteroids, you know, asteroid mining and resource extraction beyond other planets, for now, we're limited to this planet. And it's entirely subordinated to that logic. So I guess which leads me on to that next question is, can we have an environmental breakdown while keeping capitalism? Because if I'm trying to be really contrarian here, I could just say, well, okay, fine, we need to decarbonize. Let's do the Bill Gates thing. And we all need to become vegetarians. But that doesn't mean we have to ditch capitalism. Look, there's two things here. There's a technical challenge of how we decarbonize. And there's the political challenge of how you mobilize the power to overcome the entrenched interests that would inhibit that sort of technical decarbonization or the bringing in sort of natural limits of economic systems. On the first point of technical questions, I think in Malmö's sort of, you know, his argument of like the stock versus the flows, the stock of fossil fuels versus the flow of renewable energy, there's a set of contradictions in how capitalism and how the sort of profit making sort of operates. You know, for example, in that book, you mentioned about the chronic emergency talks about sort of like companies that are sort of sucking carbon out of the air. But then rather than just sort of sucking out of the air, what they're then doing is then selling it as sort of, you know, sort of fizz for like carbonated water because they need some commodity to make profit out of. So they're actually just like taking out of the air, but then putting it back into exchange. So like there's some certain contradictions in if you're trying to sort of do this transition through, you know, publicly traded corporations that are by law and by design built sort of maximalist profits and therefore to extract wealth, extract value from nature and labor. I think there's sort of real challenge there technically about how you can do and sort of selling capitalism as we know it. You know, we need much more forms of democratic planning, sort of socialization of investment, a whole suite of things that really challenge sort of the nature of capitalism as we know it. But then importantly, on the sort of political point, if you're going to do this of epochal civilizational transformation to build a sort of society of post carbon plenty, you're gonna have to mobilize, you know, in 2019 and before, you know, in 2020 and sort of GND movement and across the world, we've seen sort of attempts to do this, but if you're going to sort of mobilize people, you've got often more than just, well, we can just decarbonize today's economy and that's it. In that process of reimagining, surely there's a political opportunity to mobilize a coalition to say it's not enough just to sort of decarbonize sort of existing capitalism with all its inequalities and failures and inefficiencies, actually it's about building both a decarbonized but also a democratized economy. And that's how we sort of build the political coalition necessary to overcome sort of fossil capital. Laurie? I think this year it could be a kind of ground zero for a status quo, Trump realism, a feeling say at the UN climate conference that we have in Glasgow at the end of the year COP26, where everyone's slapping themselves on the back, they're very pleased that Biden has been elected in the US. These are positive things, of course. Many countries sign up to net zero targets, some of which are by 2025 or 2030. And you get this sort of modified approach to the neoliberal paradigm we have at the moment that basically finally says we're going to give this ago and we're going to start to swap dirty technology for clean alternatives and we're going to try and get the market incentives right to make sure that happens at a sufficient speed and scale. And over the course of decade, it's probably going to smash up against the reality that many people are predicting for a very long time. And I think there are three factors there that constitute that. One is power, as Matt is saying. We had a sort of a feeling of this earlier on this year when Mark Carney had delivered, former government back in Covinga, delivered these BBC refectors and talked about kind of changes that we need to the current neoliberal paradigm to be able to swap essentially dirty for clean as quick as possible. And then he got embroiled in this sort of scandal where he talked about how his hedge fund management company had chosen not to invest in certain types of dirty technology and that meant that it itself overall was net zero. And that sort of speaks to the problems that in practice decarbonisation is going to face when it is focused too much upon trying to get market actors to behave in a certain way. The second area is consumption. And this is where the fact that this isn't just a climate crisis really comes to bite. Because as we were saying earlier, you could decarbonise all of this stuff. You could have all of those cleaner technologies in terms of the carbon problem, but we'd still be speeding towards this astonishing global catastrophe if we're doing all the other elements of consumption that is driving that, right? And that's before you even have to question whether or not we've got enough carbon rumours it were to swap all of that dirty for clean. And there are some big questions about that. And then the third big barrier is equality. How are you going to do it? How are you going to maintain that extraordinary global cooperation need in countries and between countries if you're not dealing with feelings of injustice and actual existing injustices? And the status quo even a modified version that doesn't seem to have a proper answer. So it capsism whatever happens is going to look different in the coming years because of the environmental crisis and because of the certain changes that we're going to need to even be able to conceive of dealing with it. I suppose the counterfactual is that we've had a massive transition before we've had several massive transitions, but the most recent one was from feudalism to capitalism. Over the course of the last, it starts maybe 500 years ago, but for most of the world over the last 250 years. And that was done with a great deal of violence completely undemocratic. And that's the paradigm shift we're going to have to do now. So I wonder, because towards the middle of the book, you start talking about ecofascism. And it does feel to me that we are in right now a period, I think, you know, there's a great dithering. The idea that there's anything remotely resembling the kind of action we need in climate change is laughable, right? Even the most radical proposals right now coming out from the Biden administration are laughable. They're sort of, I think they're almost contemptible to anybody who's kind of serious about this stuff. And so it does feel to me that like from 1990, maybe to the middle of this century, nobody's actually in power who serious about dealing with this thing. And so it does kind of come back to this. Well, if the status quo won't, and the left as we'll talk about, perhaps it doesn't look like it has the social power to do that. I mean, I don't think that's inevitable. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing this, you wouldn't be writing the book. But it does feel like that actually this attachment to the status quo is really potentially enabling the rise of ecofascism. Can you talk a little bit more about that, the rise of ecofascism in this context of neoliberalism failing to provide answers to the climate crisis? Yeah, in the book, we argued that you could, if you look at the sort of the powers that be that arrayed around the world at the moment, you've got a few tribes that you can discern, you've got the status quo, neoliberalism, which as we discussed is sort of going through, you could argue a modification to properly recognize at least the climate element of the crisis. You've then got what we call denialist conservatives, like for example, the former Trump administration. And then you've got this open kind of eco nativist fascist approach, right? And we argued in the book that as things get worse, the first two could start to fold into the final one. So for example, take someone like Emmanuel Macron, who we very much put in the status quo neoliberal element, even if he's starting to potentially experiment, at least rhetorically with some kind of modification on the status quo, they don't talk about this as being an overall destabilization of the natural world, as you're alluding to the not introducing policies that are the sufficient level of systemic change, which by the way, the scientific community, this is often not reported, the scientific community is very clear about and saying, we need changes in paradigms goals, technology, everything needs to be moving and very fast. And while that's going on, and talking about making the planet great again as Macron has done, then pumping money into Frontex, the European Border Force, in a way that does not fill you with confidence that we're going to react as benevolent as we need to, to people who are going to be forcibly displaced, or at least in response to the specter of huge force displacement that is often thrown up by the far right or by in a different way by multilateral organizations. As things get worse, it's not hard to imagine a situation where there's a sort of militarized, securitized, knee-jerk reaction to things getting worse, and the desire to pivot, to appeal to populations that are very scared, understandably, and are being appealed to by the harder right will mean that kind of status quo near-liberalism begins to nudge itself more and more in that direction. And you just need to look at the so-called migrant crisis of the 2010s in Europe to have seen this sort of prelude to that, right? One minute you've got politicians over here talking about making the planet gray again, and then over here you've got the reprehensible treatment of people in the Mediterranean, and you've got, you know, the British government putting all naval destroyers in the channel and saying there's a migration, there's a massive crisis because a few people are trying to reach these shores, and that doesn't set us up well for what comes next. So we're concerned that as things get much more destabilized, which they will, that we will end up with this sort of retreat to that eco-nativism, and it doesn't take much of a stretch of imagination to imagine a millennial version of Trump standing up and saying, liberal elites sold you out, this was always a disaster, is now become a global catastrophe, and we've just got to protect what's left and keep the others out. And that is, would be horrific in and itself, but would be globally catastrophic, because that would probably be a situation where global cooperation has partly evaporated, and then we're in a serious trouble because those natural feedback loops overwhelm us at that point. Matt, what's your take on that? Because it does feel instinctively to me that actually that could be a very popular politics in 10, 20, 25 years. I mean, I don't think we need to wait 25 years for that type of politics to really metasize on this, of course, we're going on. I mean, I think if you actually recall back to sort of Macron, Le Pen, sort of in almost that two-third time, past December 2012, the election, and there's that sort of meme going around, you know, this time Macron, next time Le Pen, what we're seeing with the polls right now, that sort of 52, 48 was the last one in the second round. You're seeing that sort of beginning in some sort of political transformations to come to pass, or at least on that trajectory. I think that's what one of our arguments is that actually, in this context of compounding environmental breakdown, sort of laced through with like stark inequalities that are generated by design by our economic systems, the sort of much more radical and disruptive sort of way forward is not a deep reimagining from sort of eco-socialist trajectory of our society, is actually the status quo. It's actually saying, you know what, actually in the face of all these challenges in the need for that, you know, scientists have been telling us for decades for the sort of deep paradigm shifts that Laurie mentioned that you were alluding to, Aaron, in the face of all this, you know, what we're going to do is we're going to just keep plowing on, we're going to have a bit of a tinker here, we're going to have a bit of a tweak there, but it'll be okay. And then when you combine that with, you know, what is it, some fascism, some sort of hierarchical, some valorization of certain lives, and sort of the racialization of human lives and that violent policing. Now, you could say there's echoes of that already, certainly in the Mediterranean and other places already, but you sort of combine that through a pressure cooker of a billion people on the move. You combine that through sort of a world of like resource scarcity. You combine that through sort of, you know, the failure of, you know, sort of, you know, the neoliberal growth model for another sort of 10, 15, 20 years, you know, Europe's, you know, look at the budget the other day was sort of set for another sort of 10 years, 20 years of sort of low wage growth in this country. So all of them were like ashes, the status quo that is the really dangerous response to these conditions, it both gave rise to where we are, but also can't solve them. And in that context, you can see this fusing together, which the Malmberg does really well in real depth, this fusing together of sort of like a radicalized right with sort of, you know, the sort of remnants of fossil capital combined with sort of nationalist sort of policing and stratification, really violent policing of borders in the castle state and that this of ramping up even further than what we already have, which is already sort of incredibly bleak. And so, you know, you combine all those forces together. And that really does suggest that actually it's much safer if you care about, you know, basic, you know, and this is what should be a big political coalition, if you care about sort of supposedly basic norms of democracy, human rights, humane treatment, et cetera, actually really the spirits of both isn't just about the left, the left to be able to build out from and say, well, actually, if you care about any of these things, the status quo is exactly the thing that will road and make these things impossible. If we continue on the trajectory that it's setting us on, on the policies, the institutions, the sort of objectives that its politics is generating. But I mean, people don't care, do they? I mean, politicians, moderate politicians don't care. I mean, they might make knowledge reality of climate change, but in terms of the sixth grade extinction, you know, I mean, when you look at the scale of what's headed our way, you don't need to be an extinction rebellion kind of activists to realize that we are we are facing a huge series of existential challenges over the next several decades over the next century. And you'd actually the political center doesn't really doesn't really care, you know, in this country, labor talking about will give subsidies to have electric cars, that's their big offer. What do you make of that policy in particular? For instance, I mean, I raised that because of course, labor in 2019, we're offering the most radical vision we've seen in response to the crime climate crisis. And obviously, they've been very light on policy, some people think that's good, something that's bad, whatever. But this is kind of one of the few sort of tentative policies we've seen towards the climate crisis. Where's your where's your standard? Is it not good enough? Are these the kinds of things we need? Or is it, you know, is it reflective, actually, of a politics which is completely out of touch with the problem? Yeah, so I think transport is really interesting on mobility in the round, because it's really sort of the vex to the modality by which sort of race, class, identity holds a host of trends of filtered and forced through so you can think of sort of environmental racism and its relationships of the combustion engine and how we build sort of, you know, sort of highway infrastructure. I saw a mayor piece got in trouble about that the other day, but he was obviously completely right that sort of, you know, how we build fossil fuel infrastructures is laced through and including mobility infrastructures laced through sort of the racialized sort of politics. And so in some ways, you know, to sort of step back and answer the mobility question, or to your question about like, well, you know, sort of no one seems to be subspeaking to this. And, you know, the electric vehicle announced me the other day, spoke to, you know, labor's internal political economy with trade unions and sort of, you know, unites of electric vehicles, sort of manufacturing plants, etc. But, you know, I think there's a chance it's actually people sort of struggle to comprehend the scale of it because it seems very large scale. It seems in some ways abstract. There's sort of, you know, the problem of sort of time versus, you know, the present. And so what we try and do in the book is, you know, we take an example of mobility and we try and sort of say, well, what concretely could we do that would be transformative that would be, you know, about sort of a purposeful expansion of, you know, capability of the means of everyone to enjoy a good life. So there, you know, mobility would be, you know, instead of potentially like just more and more sort of electric vehicles in the transition, you know, just swapping combustion engines for electric vehicles, it would be about reimagining cities as mobility commonsings. So, you know, sort of decommodified public transport, that's all electric vehicles, expansion of cycling networks, expansion of sort of walking networks. And we sort of refer to Timothy Mitchell, sort of UK, historian of sort of empire and sort of a fossil fuel economy around how in the 50s, the transition in Europe and the US to really car intensive modes of travel wasn't just like random because people wanted to get into cars, you know, is because there's a really active effort on the part of like major four districts of corporations, most obviously Ford, to really embed fossil intensive modes of transport. And so like, you know, everything is political and therefore we should say, well, actually, there's no reason why, you know, of course, it seems natural, but we've got to reject that naturalization and say with mobility with our food systems with how we organize the corporation and work, how we organize our sort of, you know, everything really, we need to say, actually, let's go to the root of this and re-pick and re-wire these if it's failing to deliver on that question of equity and question of sort of transition. And mobility is a really good way of saying, actually, we need to be much more expansive. And I think actually much more compelling in that process. So what do you make of, I'll ask Laurie the same question as well, what do you make of the labor policy? Do you think it's inadequate? Do you think it's a start? I mean, because it's the kind of policy, which is a green policy, but I wonder if you think it's appropriate or goes far enough? I think that it should be seen as a subset of an overall transition that we need to do. It's a good start. It's the kind of stuff that probably should have been happening when I was born about three decades ago. And as Matt is saying, it's not part of a bigger picture of how we transition, say, mobility, which the root is accessibility to certain opportunities across society, and how we transition that both to deal with environmental constraints, but also to maximize the benefits of doing so. I work with some of the leading health organizations in the UK and in a climate alliance a couple of years ago. And many of them have been arguing for huge changes in how we plan our economies and societies for probably about a century anyway. And wonderfully, those are the same things that will also help us deal with the environmental crisis. And that we haven't done them already is itself completely barefoot. And I think it's dismaying, but also understandable, that our current politics now is itself not going to be able to be the thing that gets us out of the mess that it has essentially brought us into. And we've had two big trends in the last, what, 30 to 40 years, we've had politicians essentially abdicating their role as big positive structural agents of change within economies. And we didn't necessarily, at least in a massive scale, at least in the West, have a kind of social political movement that sat behind environmental politics, right? It was often a niche thing, sometimes isolated to middle classes. You know, green politics was often disparaged and mocked by the mainstream. And that is starting to shift. And it provides us with an amazing moment of renewal and energy as we begin to experiment with what a true social and political movement in a mass sense could be around the environmental imperative. And as ever, there's a huge amount to learn not just from the things that catch the headlines in the US, but also examples of this across the world, where people in the communities that have always been on the front line have been the ones who are struggling with not just alternative visions, but the movements that are trying to bring them into reality as well. Do you think that's sort of that disposition to a positive effect? Oh, this is changing, this crisis, we're going to come together, things will never be the same. Do you think that's kind of counterproductive? Because it seems to me that actually we've gone backwards over the last 50, 60 years, particularly on mobility. You know, most towns and cities in the UK, I think, had better public transit networks before I was born than they do today. They may have had trams, there was a greater ability to walk from one place to the other. I think there was an amazing chart, I saw a couple of weeks ago, I'd heard of the story already, but the fact that yes, while in London, the volume of people using buses has gone up over the last 20 years, outside of London for the rest of England, it's gone massively down. And it does feel to me that people think that we're making progress, but actually we are really going backwards really quickly. That's not to say there aren't tangible success stories like Britain, for instance, reducing its median carbon emissions per person. But I suppose one thing that's really absent in the book is you don't mention China. And I find this interesting because obviously China is a huge source of emissions, that's because it's home to 1.3 billion people, but it's also the place which has built 35,000 miles of high-speed rail networks. It's also the place where you have in Shenzhen, a city, I think 17,000 electric taxis, 12,000 electric buses, those are on the precise numbers, but that's the ballpark. And that's the kind of thing we now need to be doing in the West and we're not. And yet China in this book is kind of absent. And I'm wondering why, because we're talking about big advanced economies at the forefront of transitioning away from fossil fuels. And yes, China is opening all these coal mines and it burns more coal than any other country, but it's doing some other stuff as well, which frankly is leaving Europe in the dust. So why not the mention of China, given it's doing so much so quickly? So two quick things. So one on the bus chart, which was really interesting, I think that's exactly why there's a positive story to tell, because the reason that Lyon will have that, as you mentioned, wasn't just like random, it was because of politics, it was because of decisions to sort of deregulate the bus market. So actually, that's exactly an example, like mobility is not something that just sends like manna from heaven, it's actually constructed and we can reshape it. On China, I mean, partly, I mean, Laurie Bowings just in second, but partly it's because we're not China experts who have written for an audience of like activists and movements in the global north broadly. What we say, we referred like sort of the Beijing model, which is sort of a replacement, particularly for countries in the global south to failed Washington consensus. So this is looking at things like state led sort of investment for development of renewables and sort of green industries. It's about capital control, it's about sort of breaking with some of those axiomatic fundamentals that have governed a sort of liberalized political economy globally. I think the problem, China's sort of also sort of trade wars is class wars, but it's sort of got a really interesting and sort of both positive role in the international political economy, extraordinary Michael can attest this extraordinary achievement in reducing poverty. So Michael Walker, but also there's a whole host of so dangerous sort of problematics within its economic model, represses real wages for workers, the whole host of things. And of course, despite adding a hell of a lot of renewable sort of stock sort of on top of the existing stock, it's still continuing to expand hugely sort of carbon. So if you look at the one belt one road initiative, this sort of global infrastructure investment, which is where a lot of the sort of accumulated savings of Chinese workers is going towards, this is an incredibly carbon intensive piece of infrastructure equipment. So this is not care as infrastructure, this is old fashioned fossil fuel infrastructure just being built as a sort of road around the world for a sort of export commodity different economic strategy. So I think, you know, on China, it's like, it's obviously hugely important. And it's got to be in the background as it has to be in any sort of book about contemporary capitalism in the future of the planet in the 21st century. But it was sort of, you know, in some ways deliberately not trying to say like, Hey, we're experts on this, we're going to go into this, but yeah, I definitely take the point. But I'll ask this to glory, then a kind of variation on the formal question, which is, you know, we know that sort of these market driven states who've sort of been subordinate to the Washington consensus, they clearly don't want to do this transition, even if they wanted to do it, they don't seem to be able to do it quickly enough because of the various competing interests. I mean, there's an argument to be made here, which is, well, actually, you know, it's time for the Beijing consensus. And that's not to say I'm going to excuse or apologize everything that's going on in China. But this fundamental idea that there's a transaction between personal civil liberties and giving power to a state in China, so one party state, well, it's a one party government and I don't want to get into any arguments about the other political parties in China. And ultimately, what we've, the evidence of the last 20 years, this is the only nation state capable of acting at the kind of scale and extent we are talking about here, which we all agree is that is the kind of scale and extent which is necessary to avoid systems breakdown. Do you not think that's going to be a temptation for Europe, the United States, even if it was driven by the left over the next 10 years to look more like China? Yeah, and it already is a huge temptation. You have people across who would associate themselves with caring about the environmental crisis that have always talked about China and how we need to be much more like China. One, a big question that I, an open question that I have is China actually been that good at it. We need to be reducing emissions hugely. China's not necessarily been doing that. It's very welcome that it's ability to scale things and it's signing up to net zero. That's positive. But the follow through on that is a huge question mark as we saw with the latest five year plan, which didn't necessarily go as far into exploring how it's going to deliver on those promises. But again, this is just the climate bit of it. At the end of the day, a lot of that Chinese model at home is still based upon compounding material consumption and stretching that out across the population in a kind of Western conception of what that looks like. The environmental impacts of that are the catastrophic, increasingly catastrophic. They're not isolated just to China either because of production processes. We see this in complicit in the kind of supply chain networks that we're talking about in the context of COVID. You've got the destruction of megafauna in Africa to feed certain markets in China, and they want to be expanding that sort of Western conception of consumption more and more over the course of meeting this net zero target. That's a level of destruction that is above and beyond what the planet can sustain before you even talk about the one road, one belt initiative that Matt is talking about. The other thing I was saying, it wasn't just the reason that we are much more immersed in the policy debates in the UK and in the US primarily that we had the focus menu on them. It's also because I think a lot of the things that we can and should be doing right now are already at our fingertips. I listened the other day to the interview that you did with Marianna Matakatu, and there are these astonishing stories about the ability for countries like the US to be able to push the technological development and the scale of rollout that's needed across the economy. We should be visiting the positive stories that we have at home alongside having a recognition of what's going on in the rest of the world. The immense frustration that I got when I listened to that podcast of Marianna extends all the time that we're unable to bring about these incredibly inspiring stories from close to home about how we can deliver enormous change. I think we also, as well as being aware of what else is going on in the world, we need to look at how a lot of this stuff from, for example, mobility changes in cities like you're talking about, all the way to the national scale. A lot of those positive stories and methods of doing it, policies, we have them in our history here. So, give me some good news stories. I'll start with you, Laurie, because you made the point. I thought that was a really good answer from both of you by the way on China. I'm inclined to agree really. Give me some good news stories. Who is doing good things on climate which should be an inspiration to cities, regions, nations around the world? The first thing I'd say is that a lot of people are doing good stuff. You won't necessarily see it as being related to the climate and wine environmental emergency. Often, we're seeing around the world changes in political economy that start to create foundation for bigger changes elsewhere. An off-quote example is New Zealand exploring the idea of allocating a relatively small part of its government budget on other things that aren't just the maximization of GDP or other things in their cost-benefit calculus. That's really important. It hasn't necessarily been couched in terms of environmental factors, but it starts to break this consensus, at least in countries similar like the UK over here, that we should be making decisions based upon a different set of metrics. That could be profound. You won't suddenly change the objective of the economy and everything works in a different way, but that is a potential positive thing that could be going on. The way that cities are being re-planned, not just by planners and policymakers, but also by communities who are often at the frontline of doing that is itself a very positive thing. In not just London, we have increasingly instances of people beginning to move away from the use of roads just for cars or a whole palette of mobility options of different models of ownership and delivery for doing that, like we're seeing Andy Burnham talking about when it comes to more public involvement and say the bus network up in Manchester. They are completely disproportionate to the scale of the challenge. We have to be completely honest about that, but this has always been, sadly, about concurrent battles of shifting our political economy, which then opens up the ability to properly give this a go. Then we're going to have to do that while grappling with the growing destabilization that we see all around us. On the first step, I'm seeing lots of positive changes. It would have been unimaginable to have the kind of debates that we often see in mainstream policy circles, some of which we've dipped into in the last year around the efficacy of just focusing purely on compounding rates for economic growth, the ability for states to finance themselves beyond this juvenile focus on this deficit myth. These are big moments, potential big changes, and they're the best we've got, and they're full with hope and opportunity. We find ourselves in a moment of different potential than, say, 40 years ago, when there were similar signs of a paradigm shift as we headed towards the Thatcher Reagan era. We have to recognize that for those of us who are a part of progressive politics that the opportunities inherent are huge, and they need to be the grass in the same way that the right grass in the 70s and the 80s. I suppose leading from that, you want to come in, did you, Matt? Yeah, why not? It gives me positive sometimes. One of the book chapters focuses on commoning and the commons, and how we can democratically steward resources, whether it's land, whether it's cities, whether it's mobility, whether it's technologies, intellectual property, which obviously COVID vaccine is very relevant, but it kind of opens with actually the Bolsonaro and his opening up of the Amazon and the big fires that they let loose in 2018, and Bolsonaro, his regime, pitifies in some ways that linkage between the far right and fossil capital that us and others have explored. I think one of the positive things there, against the fact that this commons as a vital carbon sink, home to huge biodiversity, home to millions of people, on the one hand that's being opened up and exactly drawn into these cycles of commodity exchange and capital accumulation and devastation of nations, so all the terrible blowbacks, that's not the positive story, but the positive story is actually if you look at what's happened under Lula and under Dilma, actually there was a process by which there was actually reforestation happened with the Amazon. There was reforestation and that was based on some common base approaches about returning land out of circuits of exchange, circuits of financialization, and returning it to stewardship by indigenous communities who, after all, stewarded and lived and communed with the forest for time immemorial, and actually that process actually really began to regrow the forest. And frankly, the Amazon, we have this line in the book about capitalism sees a forest and creates a desert, I can't even remember what we wrote, but it was a good line in the book. But anyway, and it basically, that is the front line. If that, if the Amazon goes, then really, we are in just extraordinary trouble. But at the same time, we showed just even in the last decade or so, the politics and social movements in sort of a key sort of nodal point in the global south could actually begin to push back against the logics that have got to this point. And so that's sort of open. Obviously, there's been a Brazilian election coming up, which is going to be fundamental to the future of the planet in many ways. And exactly that example, I would point to, as one example, but amongst many of how new worlds of stewardship of democratic management of shared resources, of listening and prioritizing the needs and experiences, and life worlds like non-western, non-capitalist modes of development, can actually really begin to recover a different trajectory to the one we're on. But Matt, when Lula was incarcerated wrongly, when there was effectively a political coup against the Workers' Party in Brazil, most people in Britain who claimed to care about climate change cheered it on. Most sort of centrist, moderates, most of the intelligentsia, all they didn't care. So, I mean, I wonder, you're saying, look, we actually have some good news stories. It turns out, one of them went to prison for saying he didn't do, and the reason being, of course, and it gets the center of this conversation, because, of course, the book's about policy, but policy happens in the context of politics, and politics is about competing interests. And so, there are obviously a great deal of interests, and this is why it's so hard to break with the status quo around fossil capitalism, around hydrocarbons, around private ownership. How do we break that when the interest is so incredibly powerful, well-resourced? You talked about, for instance, the Koch brothers, but that's just a drop in the ocean in terms of how this system reproduces itself, often with consent. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, we also used the example of the 70s, how the impasse and crisis of the 70s was kind of seized by the right, and sort of, you know, broken through by into neoliberal sort of regimes into the 80s and beyond. And we kind of, of course, applied in very different ways, but there are potential lessons there. So, you know, picking up some of them, there's an immense amount of prefiguration. So, if you look at some of the iconic policies of, you know, sort of thatchism, right by, for example, this didn't come out of nowhere, as it was trialled in Battersea and other places, and it was kind of proved. So, can we begin in sort of green cities and, you know, around the world, sort of, you know, really make green municipal sort of movements actually prefigure and show the future that we're trying to bring to bear and be incubators of the future. There's a real intense sort of, obviously, sort of networking of social movements and like sort of culturally conservative social movements, but then combining that through to sort of, you know, the Tufton Street Complex in the UK. So, like the think tanks of Centre for Policy Studies, Adam Smith Institute, you know, sort of all of those guys, really intense coordination. So, you know, this is not to say that we're just into one pillar and so I think there was obviously like coordination of the intellectual and social movements that sort of fed into sort of neoliberal break. And I think an important part of the story, you know, you could extend this to say the Volcker shock in the US, which is in some ways the key moment in the breaking of the inflation regime or the switch from inflation regime of sort of Keynesian wage growth, low asset inflation to no wage growth, high asset inflation. Key moment, the Volcker shock, so that's when interest rates shot up in the US under Federal Reserve. That was about, you know, the conscious planning and redirection of our economic model and sort of the inflation regime in the US via sort of, you know, a politics of planning. So what we need in some ways is a politics when set out and democratize that planning, the planning function of central banking, the planning function contained inherently within corporations and sort of non-market forms of organization, democratize that planning and sort of begin to reorientate it. So then we've got incredible tools there, got incredible tools that you're right, exactly. We've got incredible tools in central bank and finance. If we can bring it under democratic control, we can begin to make real progress. That's the tension. We argue in the book that the climate and environmental crisis is overwhelmingly a political crisis, a crisis of power and power and equality, rather than a crisis of technical solutions. So if somebody's watching this and they care about climate change and obviously the book is a manifesto, but it's very broad brush and that's not a criticism. It's talking in a very broad terms. What would the sort of further steps that you would suggest be to a regular person just watching this? I'll start with you, Laurie. What can they do to a climate? They need to make sure that they're understanding how this is a problem of systems as well as a problem of individuals and can recognize their agency as an individual to try and change those systems. That means primarily learning about the true nature of the challenge itself, that it's not just a climate crisis, that it's not just a problem of the last 50 years, but a problem of the last 500 years. And then understanding how in moments of potential profound change that Matt's talking about, the previous one that we had in the 70s and 80s, there are all sorts of opportunities across what you could probably describe as an ecosystem of influence that can lead to a big tipping point moment in politics that you can get yourself associated with. So go and be a part of everything that clearly is bringing agency to bear on changing systems. So that's from a local cooperative energy startup or how your local street may be campaigning to have the road, the amount of traffic going down the road, reduce to reduce the amount of pollution and the use of certain vehicles all the way through to trying to be part of a political party being part of say a policy organization that is pushing for these bigger shifts and recognize that within that the potential for change now and in many respects, the pace of change is greater than we've seen for quite a long time. One of the examples of a positive story that we use in the book is the example of national health service in the UK. It's only been about 10 years that the NHS has even had a part of it that thinks about sustainability and it's only in the last year that that is a really big central part of the NHS now and they have a chief sustainability officer and it has a plan now to be reducing its environmental impact and not just carbon emissions over the course of the next couple of decades. Now that isn't enough to deal with a global problem, but my goodness it's showing a pace of change that we've not seen for a very long time and one of my concerns is that at this crucial moment in which the bounds have opened up for people who want to deal with the environmental crisis in a progressive way and this kind of moment where all these doors are beginning to open we become overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. It is overwhelming, but we've got to make sure we're pushing on as many of those doors as possible in a way that's connected and collective before they're potentially closed shut by the gale of this growing environmental situation and so within the context of current moment all of the amazing political movements that may inspire you if you're looking at the environmental crisis everything from Friday's to the future all the way through extinction and belly and the summarized movement in in the US and then the whole plethora of things that are going on in countries around the world and have been for a very long time just getting involved with that energy is the thing right now you know this is the biggest challenge this is the moment to be bringing ourselves to bear on it and the potential for change is astonishing at the moment we must recognize that. Matt, what could people do? Well it goes back to your point Aaron which is about you know this is a question of politics and therefore it's a question of power so it's really about how we you know and what we can begin to build is collectivities collective forms of power so really it's about you know hearing that creating leverage like points in the system whether it's political system economic system social institutions and that's how you make progress so really about like what are the movements that you would care about what are the movements that where you live what are the movements you can connect with whether that's you know tenants unions whether that's wagon rights unions whether that's trade union movement there's a hot you know join all of them really but be careful you know sort of practice self-love and care at the same time so like there's a whole host of areas where we really begin to need to accumulate and build power and that's partly about sort of you know traditional sort of you know formal parliamentary systems but it's also about building social power out and beyond that and in antiquism with it to begin sort of you know create that accumulation of power rapidly in a whole series of overlapping institutions and spheres that we can then begin to leverage so you know I think that would be the the sort of key one and it's you know this is by nature sort of a collective thing there'll be knows that no one will be coming to save us and one thing we've got to be looking at into the future is that all of that has got to be robust to the fact that environmentally this is going to get worse and there is a little bit of complacency I think when we think about the frame of the environmental crisis it's sort of stuck in a tyranny of binaries of of save the world or what presumably the world ends on the 1st of January 2030 when we haven't decarbonized the world by 45% or whatever and in many respects you could say that the frame over the last number of decades at least in countries like the UK has been wanting of a storm in the distance that we need to change bearing and we will then avoid now that didn't happen and we accelerated towards the storm and our policies as well as our strategies for getting those things to happen in the world need to be robust to the impact of being in that storm and that is a very scary thing to have to comprehend but it's absolutely essential and if you are a certain age or below that's the reality that you're going to have to face you've got to make sure that you're not getting overwhelmed by people of a certain age saying oh well if it gets to this point then well then it is too late you have to say well hang on a minute the moment of it being too late is the future in which I will become a leader I will be trying to make this change and that is overwhelming but that is just the nature of the challenge that we face and so we need to make sure that we are being absolutely we're keeping our arm on the ball and we're making sure that all that we're doing is robust to a more destabilized and destabilizing future and that we're constantly saying to those people who say oh it's going to be too late or you know becoming overly fatalist that I'm sorry that's not good enough and boomers can't be dooms. Boomers can't be dooms. I was going to say something that you know what that's a perfect place to finish and that for me is the big takeaway from the book and I think it's why it's a really useful important interesting book is that the number one thing people can do who care about climate change yeah of course change your consumption patterns proselytize and tell people they can do this but not that whatever but the number one thing is to think in terms of systems think in terms of structures and realize that climate change didn't start 10, 20, 50 years ago it goes like hundreds of years I think it's so important systemic long-term thinking so thanks again to Matt and Laurie for that now if you're a regular listener or viewer of downstream here on the Barrow media you know what I'm going to say next yes we love the fact that you've already liked this video because I know you have and you've subscribed to the channel you can go that extra yard by going to environment.com forward slash support make a one-off payment or you can become we call a supporter helping us produce our work taking it to an ever bigger audience we didn't talk about it during that show but I think a pivotal part of breaking with the status of carbon hydrocarbons and fossil fuel capitalism is a new media for different politics help us do that go to environment.com forward slash support my name is Aaron Bostani we will be back with downstream again next Tuesday I hope you tune in and have a great week