Lee Raymond was one of the great mass murderers in the history of the world. A longtime executive, President, and CEO of ExxonMobi and the mastermind of climate denialist misinformation, he was an ecocidal lunatic who seemed to believe in making more money No Matter What, even if it killed millions and made the world burn. Good riddance, Lee Raymond, and other climate news.

This week, there's a supposed-maybe-hinted-at 'deal' with Iran that's getting more sustained attention than the last time there was supposedly a 'deal' with Iran. Even if this agreement does materialize, there's a whole lot of reasons to doubt that it's going to work. This episode explains seven of those reasons.

We're back to active hostilities in and around the Strait of Hormuz. We're back to very active hostilities in Lebanon and Gaza. In looking at the fallout, the second half of this episode argues that the inflationary pressure from fossil fuels is stronger than central banks can contain. Even interest rate hikes and currency interventions aren't enough to keep inflation down when fossil fuel prices are spiking.

The United States is losing the Iran War. They tried to prompt a popular uprising, to change the regime, to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, to extract a promise of no nuclear enrichment. All that has failed. Iran actually extended its fuel blockade to the Emirati port outside the Strait. Now the Trump administration is trying to claim the war is over, even as the missiles continue to fly. This isn't Iranian propaganda--it's right there in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. We're getting some Orwellian statements out of the White House about this fossil fuel war with Iran.

Ben Leffel, public policy professor, was with us last episode to talk about cities making efforts to cut their emissions. Those were the good guys in the story. This week we get to the bad guys: climate lobbyists seeking profits, and climate deniers.

Ben Leffel, who researches climate policy for a living, is with us for two episodes. This is the first, mainly about cities and what city governments can do on climate. It's probably more than you think. These are the good guys in the story. Next week's episode features the bad guys.

This week we complete our conversation with Shooka Bidarian, Environmental Correspondent for Marjan Television, an Iranian news network not based outside of Iran. We hear about that time that every Democrat in the U.S. Senate voted against basic climate action - that was the Kyoto protocol. And another extreme weather event, this one in British Columbia. It was the most expensive natural disaster Canada has ever seen.

Besides the war, Iran is in deep crisis over climate change. Climate is severely impacting the country ecologically and politically. Our guest is Shooka Bidarian is Environmental Correspondent for Marjan Television, a Farsi-language network based in London. She received the Alfredo Sirkis Memorial Green award for her work on our climate crisis. With Shooka, Alycee and Matthew explore how global heating is affecting Iran as well as the Iranian regime's reaction to both climate change and climate activists. We'll also hear about the documentary our guest produced, the first major documentary on climate change in the Farsi language.

In this episode we further reflect, process, try to comprehend how the President's threat to wipe out an entire civilization has weakened the United States and the world. It's weakened it economically, militarily, but above all morally. No one thinks he was joking. What does it mean for humanity that the threat to wipe out a civilization has occurred by someone who has the power to do it? Where does the United States go from there? Where does humanity go from there?

Let's pose the question: What is more unstable? The mind of the President of the United States, or the global supply of fossil fuels? Recent events have shown that both are highly, highly unstable. The President's profanity-laced social media posts threatening to wipe out an entire civilization comes at the very same time as the real possibility that Australia or Asian countries will run out of fuel. Both of these instabilities have dire consequences. We explore them in this episode.