The BREAK—DOWN

Amid the threat of “Project 2025”, ongoing genocide in Gaza, and a nation-wide battle over reproductive rights, to name a few major issues, the climate crisis has been considerably sidelined in the US election taking place on November 5th. But even if it’s not grabbing headlines, what the United States does — or does not do — on climate has profound implications for the entire world.   So where do...

In a 2023 referendum, the people of Ecuador voted 59 per cent to 41 per cent to stop exploiting oil in the Yasuní region, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, with more tree species in one single hectare than in all of the landmass of Canada and the US combined. It was a massive break with the global status quo, in a year when fossil fuel use around the world reached record highs and profit...

We have become incredibly good at producing food. In doing so we have transformed our planet. Yet when we go to the supermarket or eat at a restaurant, the supply chains, labour and environmental impacts that went into our food are all but invisible.  Those impacts are huge. Today, humans and livestock make up 96 per cent of all mammals. Agriculture consumes about 70 per cent of global freshwater,...

In a 2004 essay for the New Left Review, theorist and literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote: “Utopias are non-fictional, even though they are also non-existent. Utopias in fact come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being.” Today's episode of The Break Down explores the idea and the power of utopian fiction with guest Kim Stanley Robinson, the acclaimed scienc...

Followers of The Break Down may remember our very first episode, in which Adrienne spoke to the brilliant Brett Christophers about the many and varied reasons why — despite all the hype about how cheap renewables have become — the transition to renewable energy cannot be left to the market and the profit motive. What that interview didn't leave us with, however, was an answer to the obvious questi...

As a listener of The Break Down, chances are you’re living in a political system that could be defined as “liberal”. But what does “liberalism” really describe? Is it about democracy? Free markets? The protection of individual freedom? Ask ten different people, and you’re likely to get ten different answers.  According to Chris Shaw, liberalism can boiled down to a system oriented around the “bour...

"To the question how shall we ever be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer.” These words were written fifty years ago by philosopher Hannah Arendt, but are just as relevant to the present moment, in which our political leaders and systems continue to fail to grapple with climate and ecological crisis at the scale or urgency they demand. The deg...

If you listen to this podcast, chances are you’ve heard of the global target of “net zero emissions” by 2050. You’ve probably also heard about how off track we are from meeting it. But what if I told you we’re even more off track than you might think, because thanks to some effective lobbying, governments don’t have to count the emissions from their militaries, despite their being some of the worl...

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...