The BREAK—DOWN

Capitalism could not exist without the power and structure of the law — that’s the simple but radical argument made by my guest today, Katharina Pistor, law professor at Columbia University, and the author of The Code of Capital: How The Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.  On today’s episode, we break down how the law ‘encodes’ capital and invisibly structures our world, from giving corporations t...

What would you say a human life is worth? According to the US government, for an American it’s about $7.2 million, compared with the global average of approximately $1.3 million. If you’re Swiss though, you’re worth a pretty penny at $9.4 million. While these estimates might sound absurd, they're important to understand: these kinds of figures and the models that produce them are a core part of ho...

“The stakes could not be higher.” These are the recent words not of climate activists, but of a coalition representing major oil and gas companies in a letter to the US Supreme Court. The context? They’re asking the Court to block dozens of lawsuits that seek to hold these firms to account for their role in driving the climate crisis, including by awarding damages for the costs of extreme weather...

In this special episode, Adam Hanieh explains the threads linking the global oil economy; more than a century of Western imperialism; contemporary American interests in the Middle East; and the response of governments in the US, UK and much of Europe to the ongoing genocide and ecocide in Gaza. Ultimately, he explains why these overlapping histories demand shared solidarity between the climate mov...

Oil is fundamental to our understanding of the climate crisis. But despite its starring role, the dominance of oil in the global energy system is a relatively recent phenomenon, with the industry only really taking off after the Second World War. So how, in just a few decades, did oil become so integral to American power and to our understanding of global capitalism? In this episode of the Break D...

Renewable energy is often held up as the great success story of climate change, with policymakers and journalists constantly celebrating that clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels. By their logic, these plummeting costs mean that when it comes to the energy transition, the economics are essentially sorted, and we're now on an inevitable path to a world of clean energy. But is it really tha...