Extinction Rebellion Radio

This is the latest in our occasional series running down the climate disasters that are happening now, presently. We hope to convey the level of destruction and disruption that climate change is creating across the world right now. It's not a problem for the future or for our children or grandchildren. It's a problem for us. And it will only get worse from here if we keep on burning mass quantitie...

With the help of Marina Rivera Ramos of Rutgers University, we explore indigenous perspectives that are relevant to climate change. The place-based collective continuance has lessons for how we might live differently from how we do. If we had based more of our society on these indigenous world views, we might have avoided climate change altogether, and maybe if we do going forward, we might reduce...

We analyze the train wreck that was COP30 and predict the train wreck that will be COP31. At COP30 the toilets didn't work, the venue flooded before it caught on fire, and nothing of substance was agreed. For COP31, they couldn't even agree on where it would take place. These are the United Nations-sponsored conferences that are supposed to be the main forum for addressing climate change. So what...

This episode is in solidarity with the recent indigenous demonstrations at Cop30 in Brazil. Before there was the climate conference known as COP, there was Pre-COP, a negotiating meeting between second-tier delegates held in Milan, Italy. Extinction Rebellion made a protest, blocking traffic, creating a huge swooping bird installation, and going to jail. It caused at least a brief disruption of th...

COP30, the United Nations-sponsored global conference supposedly trying to address the climate crisis, has already failed to make progress. We explain in this episode how the flagship fund to protect the rainforest went splat, how the conference itself cut down part of the rainforest, and how no major country is even pretending to cut emissions. In the background is Bill Gates, changing his tune f...

Chuck Collins has just released a new book this month, "Burned by Billionaires: How Wealth Concentrated Wealth and Power is Ruining Our Lives and Planet." As we discuss in this episode, there are three main ways billionaires are ruining things: first, enormous energy consumption by billionaires; second, pressing for fossil fuel-friendly policies; third, undermining the solidarity required for the...

Terms like net zero, real zero, absolute zero, carbon neutrality, and so on refer to radically different things. Professor Doreen Stabinsky from the College of the Atlantic joins us to explain the differences and articulate why approaching real zero quickly is the only way to avoid massive global temperature increases.  

We cannot keep on driving fossil fuel-based cars in massive numbers without limit and expect the planet to be livable in the future. So what would it mean to ration gasoline? How would we do that? How would we do it with the least amount of disruption to society? This episode offers some thoughts, not because we have this all figured out, but just to get the conversation started. 

This week we talk about how to cut emissions by rationing electricity. It looks like that's going to be the only way to get industrialized countries to seriously cut their power consumption. For decades we've asked businesses and people to cut their energy consumption and it hasn't worked. Energy consumption is still going through the roof and, as a result, Earth is getting hotter every year. How...

Anyone in the U.K. who says they support Palestine Action could face a terrorism charge and years in jail. Although this is completely separate from climate activism, if the authorities can do it to one group they can do it to another. Also Russia has sold almost one trillion dollars of oil and gas since invading Ukraine, and that's what allows it to keep on invading Ukraine. Lastly, a slight bit...

There really are places running out of water, but they don't seem to be genuinely conserving the little bit they have. As we face the looming potential of an electricity shortage, we're certainly not cutting our electricity consumption. On the contrary, it's going up. Are we going to keep on with full-throttle consumption until we run out? Besides posing that question, this episode talks about the...

Wen Stephenson, who writes for The Nation (among other publications), has a new book out, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Climate Catastrophe. There is so much despair and doom among people who understand climate change. One big part of the book--the part we focus on in this episode--asks about an earlier time that was likewise filled with doom and despair: the 1930s and 1940s. W...

This week we recount the climate disasters from June and July—some of the significant destructions and disruptions that would not be happening without climate change. This is the latest of an occasional series showing that climate change is not a thing of the future. It’s a thing of the present. 

In this episode we talk about the gigantic loss of old growth forests last year. Also, fossil fuel companies are claiming that destroying the environment is freedom of speech, first amendment protected - they're actually making this claim in court. And we look at some reprehensible statements by Sierra Club's former Executive Director. We call out the bad stuff when it's from environmentalists,  t...

A short reflection after doing the preceding episodes with Saabira Chaudhuri on plastics. We absolutely must stop producing material that never decomposes and can only be recycled a limited number of times. Otherwise plastics will inevitably cover the earth. Even wild science fiction scenarios aren't solutions. We're better off doing it sooner than waiting a few decades or longer to make the probl...

Saabira Chaudhuri was the Wall Street Journal's consumer goods reporter. Her upcoming book is called Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic. We learn from her the origins of plastic as a mass consumer good after World War II, already known to big industry as a severe environmental problem by the 1960s, but pushed and pushed onto consumers. Big supermarkets replaced local shops and a dis...

Just a short time ago, there were far more street protests, including confrontational civil disobedience where folks deliberately got arrested. We talk with two of them about the experience. As they explain, it's not about getting arrested. It's about bringing attention to the climate crisis that they fear will have a terrible impact on their grandchildren's lives. Through them we hear eyewitness...

We open with a comment on the Iranian bombings and what they have to do with the climate crisis, then move into the first of a two-part discussion on immigration and climate. The Los Angeles raids and protests are a great illustration of how ICE uses a robotic approach of not considering the social impacts of what they are doing. The thing is, there is a deep tradition of law enforcement trying to...

After a quick note on what happens when there's no more insurance in a climate changed world, we talk about fear of speaking out. We start with the real life example of a wealthy and well-connected person with strong advocacy skills who is not speaking out against the Trump administration out of fear of what could happen to her grandchildren. We digest that and talk about how to feel fear and act...

Whatever authorities can do to one social movement they can do to another one. Watch what's happening to truth-telling about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That could happen in the future to truth-telling about climate change: Individual spokespeople detained or deported without hearings, academic studies de-funded, a society of fear where organizations anticipatorily crack down on what they im...

Could lawsuits against fossil fuel companies save the climate? Maybe. If the companies had to pay for even a fraction of the destruction they are causing, they would quickly go out of business. Alycee (who is an attorney) and Matthew (who is not) discuss. Also, the utopia of being truthful, and our semblance of constitutional order.  

We periodically compile some of the climate disasters happening all around the world. This is to show that climate change is causing havoc now. It is a problem for us, not for our grandchildren. This episode consists of some notes on disasters I found in my files and, I believe, have not used; hopefully listeners will pardon the out-of-chronological narration. We end with a survival story we think...

Most of the guests on this series are credentialed experts who are old, or at least not particularly young. But younger people research the climate, and reflect carefully on the situation. This week we have three students from the University of Liverpool who took a climate course last year that was taught by the producer of this show. One wrote her term paper about geoengineering, one about greenw...

Mike Berners-Lee, the author of There Is No Planet B and other books, joins us to talk about his newest release: A Climate of Truth: Why We Need It And How To Get It. He makes the case for a no-tolerance attitude to dishonesty in politics, media and business. We explore and critique this with him. His core claim is that enforcing the highest standards of honesty in public discourse is the best cha...

We're talking about Tesla vandalism: why the Trump administration's response is over the top, crazy, and absurd, and why the vandalism itself is a terrible idea. Electric cars and electric charging stations are the wrong target.