Hot & Bothered: A Dissent Climate Podcast

The last two months have seen the left come closer than it has in decades to nominating a U.S. presidential candidate, only to end in stinging defeat. In Congress, Democratic leaders have been on the back foot in negotiating record stimulus spending amid a historic crisis. For the U.S. left, in other words, the current moment in many ways looks like one of defeat. 

Still, says Waleed Shahid, “The progressive movement is dominating the ideas conversation in the Democratic party, which was not the case five years ago.” Shahid, a veteran of Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign in 2016 and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset run in 2018, is now the communications director for Justice Democrats and a leading voice of left-wing realignment in the Democratic Party. 

On this week’s show, Kate and Daniel talk to Shahid about how the broad left can still shape the party after the Bernie Sanders campaign; why primarying matters; whether the climate movement needs to abandon the “Green New Deal” label; and what it takes more broadly to build power in a time of monsters.  

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If you like the episode and want to hear more from Kate and Daniel, sign up as a monthly member at patreon.com/hotbotheredclimate today. It’s thanks to those who are able to contribute that we’re able to make the podcast free for anyone to listen to. 

Paying members will get access to perks like a monthly happy hour with Kate, Daniel, and friends, a free ebook of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, and much more. And as a special thank you to everyone who’s able to pitch in right away, supporters who sign up by May 1 will automatically get bumped up to the next subscription tier. 

So don’t hesitate: sign up on Patreon today.

Further reading

Kate: The Urgent Message of Negative Oil Prices (The New Republic) 

Waleed Shahid: Joe Biden, Here’s How to Earn Our Support (The Nation)

The Realigners: An Interview with Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats (Joshua Leifer, Dissent)

Democrats Are Handing Donald Trump The Keys To The Country (Zach Carter, Huffington Post)

Democrats fight Green New Deal attacks on stimulus (Timothy Cama and Nick Sobczyk, E&E News)

The COVID-19 pandemic will change everything – for better or worse (Christine Berry, Verso blog)

Colossus Wears Tweed (Quinn Slobodian, Dissent)

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast: Building Power in a Time of Monsters, with Waleed Shahid appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

With half of the planet on lockdown, many people around the world have been suddenly confronted with an issue they’re not used to thinking about in political terms: food. From empty supermarket shelves sparking fears of shortages, to farmers dumping out lagoons’ worth of milk, to endless lines forming outside of food banks and migrant workers facing threats of pay cuts, the coronavirus pandemic has put the contradictions of our global food system on full display. 

And who better to help us parse those contradictions than the veteran food writer, scholar, and activist Raj Patel? On this week’s show, Kate and Daniel talk to Patel about the hunger crisis and the current pandemic; climate-friendly agriculture; labor actions ranging from the Great Cowboy Strike of 1883 to Instacart; and much more. 

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“Seven out of the ten worst-paying jobs in America are in the food system,” says Patel. “Those workers are now seen as essential and nonetheless are being thrown in harm’s way with little to no protection.”

Yet this is also fueling a new wave of worker militancy, he says—if not yet on the scale that followed the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. 

“The high point of US strike activity happened after the 1918 pandemic,” says Patel. That is, until the New Deal: then, “every year of the New Deal, there were more and more strikes… In fact, the sign of success of the New Deal was increasing confrontation and polarization.” 

Even if today’s strikes are still on a far smaller scale, Patel says, “this a moment in which [food workers] are recognizing, as their forebears have, the power that they have compared to Wall Street. And that to me is a good sign for democracy.”

If you like the episode and want to hear more from Kate and Daniel, sign up as a monthly member at patreon.com/hotbotheredclimate today. It’s thanks to those who are able to contribute that we’re able to make the podcast free for anyone to listen to. 

Paying members will get access to perks like a monthly happy hour with Kate, Daniel, and friends, a free ebook of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, and much more. And as a special thank you to everyone who’s able to pitch in right away, supporters who sign up by May 1 will automatically get bumped up to the next subscription tier. 

So don’t hesitate: sign up on Patreon today.

Further reading

Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic (David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery, New York Times)

White House Seeks To Lower Farmworker Pay To Help Agriculture Industry (Franco Ordoñez, NPR) 

A Green New Deal for Agriculture (Raj Patel and Jim Goodman, Jacobin)

The Long New Deal (Raj Patel and Jim Goodman, The Journal of Peasant Studies)

COVID-19 and the Crisis in Food Systems (iPES Food, Communiqué)

Food Chain Workers Alliance 

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast: Why Food Doesn’t Cure Hunger, with Raj Patel appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

Still hot… still bothered… and now facing a global crisis rivaled only by the climate emergency itself. Kate Aronoff and Daniel Aldana Cohen are back with a new season of Hot & Bothered, the podcast on climate politics for the 99%, hosted by Dissent magazine. Every Thursday, they’ll be joined by friends and special guests far and wide, to make sense of the catastrophe(s) unfolding around us and think through what comes next. 

For the first episode, Kate and Daniel catch up on the onslaught of the last several weeks: the mounting toll of the coronavirus pandemic, with its deep racial and economic disparities; the equally alarming economic fallout; and what a green stimulus could look like in response. They also worry about the devastation threatened by likely climate disasters in the coming months— not to mention the Trump administration and local right-wing lawmakers using COVID-19 as a pretext to further slash regulations on fossil fuels. 

If you like the episode and want to hear more from Kate and Daniel, sign up as a monthly member at patreon.com/hotbotheredclimate today. It’s thanks to those who are able to contribute that we’re able to make the podcast free for anyone to listen to. 

Paying members will get access to perks like a monthly happy hour with Kate, Daniel, and friends, a free ebook of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, and much more. And as a special thank you to everyone who’s able to pitch in right away, supporters who sign up by May 1 will automatically get bumped up to the next subscription tier. 

So don’t hesitate: sign up on Patreon today.

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Further reading:

A Green Stimulus to Rebuild Our Economy (Medium)

Daniel: Covid-19 and Eco-Apartheid (Medium)

Memo: Green Industrial Policy for Domestic and Global Climate Justice Is Popular (Daniel Aldana Cohen, Thea Riofrancos, Billy Fleming, and Jason Ganz, Data for Progress)

Kate: Green Jobs Are the Answer to the Coronavirus Recession (The New Republic)

Kate: The Democrats Screwed Up (The New Republic)

The Climate and Environmental Rules Being Rolled Back During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Amy Westervelt, Drilled News)

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast: Climate Politics in the Time of Coronavirus appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

Still hot… still bothered… and now facing a global crisis rivaled only by the climate emergency itself. Kate Aronoff and Daniel Aldana Cohen are back for a new season of Hot & Bothered, the podcast on climate politics for the 99%, hosted by Dissent magazine. Every Thursday, they’ll be joined by friends and special guests far and wide, to make sense of the catastrophe(s) unfolding around us and think through what comes next. And Colin Kinniburgh will be back as their tireless producer. They won’t be able to do it, though, without your support. 

Sign up as a monthly member at patreon.com/hotbotheredclimate today. As a special thank you to everyone who’s able to pitch in right away, supporters who sign up by May 1 will automatically get bumped up to the next subscription tier.

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Sign up for as little as $3/month and you’ll get access to a monthly, virtual happy hour with Kate, Daniel, and friends.

If you can pitch in $5/month, you’ll get a free digital subscription to Dissent.

And if you can afford $10/month, you’ll also get a free ebook of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, published by Verso books.

Better yet, if you sign up by May 1, you’ll automatically get bumped up to the next subscription tier. So don’t hesitate: sign up now on Patreon.

The post Announcing Hot & Bothered Season 2: Pandemic Edition appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

This podcast episode is part of a special mini-series on Designing the Green New Deal. The Hot & Bothered podcast will return from a hiatus next Thursday, April 9. Tune in with Kate and Daniel for weekly episodes on how we tackle climate change amid the coronavirus emergency.

To win a Green New Deal, we need to deepen and expand mass movements and coalitions. Last fall at the University of Pennsylvania, we organized a massive conference on Designing a Green New Deal, with contributions by academics, journalists, organizers, and designers. In this four-part mini-series, we bring you audio of the discussions.

We can only decarbonize fast and reduce social inequalities at the same time with a new political economy. And only new methods of physical design, from buildings to landscapes, will successfully build a new no-carbon world. This episode features Stony Brook economics professor Stephanie Kelton, author Kate Aronoff, Architecture Lobby Founding Member Peggy Deamer, author and SCAPE Founding Principal Kate Orff, and Sunrise Movement executive director Varshini Prakash—whose signing takes the conversation to a whole new level.

Daniel, Kate, and special guest (and conference co-organizer) Billy Fleming introduce the episode. The conference was co-hosted by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology and the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

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Further reading

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (Stephanie Kelton, Public Affairs)

A Golden Opportunity for a Green Stimulus (Kate Aronoff, The New Republic)

The Architectural Imperative (Peggy Deamer)

How Can Oysters Revive New York City’s Waterways? (Kate Orff, TED Radio Hour)

Generation Climate Change (Varshini Prakash, Ezra Klein Show)

The post Hot & Bothered: Bold Visions for a Green New Deal appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

This podcast episode is part of a special mini-series on Designing the Green New Deal. The Hot & Bothered podcast will return from a hiatus next Thursday, April 9. Tune in with Kate and Daniel for weekly episodes on how we tackle climate change amid the coronavirus emergency.

To win a Green New Deal, we need to deepen and expand mass movements and coalitions. Last fall at the University of Pennsylvania, we organized a massive conference on Designing a Green New Deal, with contributions by academics, journalists, organizers, and designers. In this four-part mini-series, we bring you audio of the discussions.

To achieve rapid and equitable decarbonization will require immense practical wisdom, and a clear-eyed recognition of the obstacles in our path. We must also learn from the environmental justice movement, whose struggles invented the concepts behind the Green New Deal decades ago. This episode features UC Santa Barbara political scientist Leah Stokes, Vox writer David Roberts, WE-ACT Director of Legislative Affairs Kerene Tayloe, Esq, and Roosevelt Institute’s Director of Climate Policy Rhiana Gunn-Wright. 

Daniel, Kate, and special guest (and conference co-organizer) Billy Fleming introduce the episode. The conference was co-hosted by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology and the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

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Further reading

Cleaning Up the Energy System (Leah Stokes, Democracy)

 A Just and Sustainable Economic Response to Coronavirus, Explained (David Roberts, Vox)

WE ACT for Environmental Justice with Kerene Tayloe (Two Broads Talking Politics Podcast)

Meet the Policy Architect Behind the Green New Deal (Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Ezra Klein Show)

The post Hot & Bothered: Radical Pragmatism appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

This podcast episode is part of a special mini-series on Designing the Green New Deal. The Hot & Bothered podcast will return from a hiatus next Thursday, April 9. Tune in with Kate and Daniel for weekly episodes on how we tackle climate change amid the coronavirus emergency.

To win a Green New Deal, we need to deepen and expand mass movements and coalitions. Last fall at the University of Pennsylvania, we organized a massive conference on Designing a Green New Deal, with contributions by academics, journalists, organizers, and designers. In this four-part mini-series, we bring you audio of the discussions.

The New Deal was a mix of failures and successes. Understanding how these occurred is essential to informing the present, covering topics ranging from labor organizing to experimental federal governance to massive energy infrastructures. This episode features the author and academic Raj Patel, MIT planning scholar Jen Light, Places editor Nancy Levinson, UPenn landscape architecture professor Nicholas Pevzner, and author Mary Annaise Heglar.

Daniel, Kate, and special guest (and conference co-organizer) Billy Fleming introduce the episode. The conference was co-hosted by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology and the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

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Further reading

A Green New Deal for Agriculture (Raj Patel and Jim Goodman, Jacobin)

The Nature of Cities (Jennifer Light, Johns Hopkins University Press)

After the Storm: Climate Change and Public Works (Nancy Levinson, Places Journal)

The Green New Deal, Landscape, and Public Imagination (Nicholas Pevzner, Landscape Architecture Magazine)

What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus (Mary Annaise Heglar, The New Republic)

The post Hot & Bothered: Beyond the New Deal appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

This podcast episode is part of a special mini-series on Designing the Green New Deal. The Hot & Bothered podcast will return from a hiatus next Thursday, April 9. Tune in with Kate and Daniel for weekly episodes on how we tackle climate change amid the coronavirus emergency.

To win a Green New Deal, we need to deepen and expand mass movements and coalitions. Last fall at the University of Pennsylvania, we organized a massive conference on Designing a Green New Deal, with contributions by academics, journalists, organizers, and designers. In this four-part mini-series, we bring you audio of the discussions.

This episode, we start with our keynote panel, featuring author Naomi Klein, union organizer and author Jane McAlevey, and the journalist and vice president of Data for Progress, Julian Brave NoiseCat. They debate strategies for building a fighting mass movement led by workers that’s strong enough and wise enough to win a Green New Deal.

The current coronavirus crisis makes these debates more relevant than ever. As we struggle to get the health emergency under control, we must also begin planning the recovery. What do political mobilization and economic reconstruction look like in the face of a climate emergency?

Daniel, Kate, and special guest (and conference co-organizer) Billy Fleming introduce the episode. The conference was co-hosted by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology and the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2.

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Further reading

Coronavirus Capitalism — and How to Beat It (Naomi Klein, Intercept)

Why Unions Matter – Excerpt from A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy (Jane McAlevey)

The House on Magnolia Street: How a group of homeless mothers took on a housing crisis (Julian Brave NoiseCat, California Sunday

The post Hot & Bothered: Building Power, with Naomi Klein, Jane McAlevey, and Julian Brave NoiseCat appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

Facing a deluge of doom-and-gloom reporting on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kate and Daniel get together to put things in perspective—and, along the way, manage to find hope for a more equal, low-carbon future.

Continue the conversation on Twitter: tag us @KateAronoff, @aldatweets, @dissentmag, and #hotbotheredclimate. You can find links to all the articles mentioned in this episode, and lots more related reading and listening, below. And if you like what you’re hearing, please subscribe to Dissent. You’ll get our latest issue, featuring a special section on housing, and plenty more great Kate and Daniel content in the months to come.

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Further reading

At Davos, bosses paint climate change as an opportunity (Alex Whiting, Reuters)

California just adopted its boldest energy target yet: 100% clean electricity (David Roberts, Vox)

The left vs. a carbon tax (David Roberts, Vox, 2016)

A Green New Deal is on the ballot in Washington state this year (David Roberts, Vox)

Kate: Climate Change Policy Is Proving Difficult To Enact Even in Liberal States with Democratic Control (The Intercept)

Endorsers of Yes on 1631

The Green Jobs Revolution Needs to Include All of Us (Audrea Lim, The Nation)

The Economy During Wartime (J.W. Mason, Dissent)

“Unhappy with what the military was paying for steel, Bernard Baruch, head of the First World War–era War Industries Board informed U.S. Steel chairman Elbert Gary that if prices didn’t come down, the government would simply take the industry over. When an incredulous Gary asked how U.S. Steel could be managed without its top executives, Baruch replied, ‘Oh, we’ll get a second lieutenant or somebody to run it.’”

Kate: Is Nationalization an Answer to Climate Change? (The Intercept)

Dems damp down hopes for climate change agenda (Timothy Cama and Mike Lillis, The Hill)

Kate: Valuing the World, with Mariana Mazzucato (Dissent)

“A carbon-neutral city will require innovation in mobility, nutrition, and how we build houses—all sorts of different areas. At the bottom of that are questions about how to transform government instruments. . . .”

Daniel: It Gets Wetter (Dissent)

“No matter what the earth system’s tipping points ultimately are, every fraction of a degree of warming that we avoid means saving millions of lives.”

Kate: The U.S. Decided to Show Up for the U.N. Climate Conference — to Lobby for Coal (The Intercept, 2017)

“Of the 17 operational large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities worldwide, the vast majority funnel captured carbon dioxide back into oil extraction, or ‘enhanced oil recovery.’ That fact that has led some to coin the acronym CCUS: Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage, a nod to the fact that captured emissions aren’t always stored.”

The World We’ve Built (Jedediah Purdy, Dissent)

“The scientists’ warning is addressed to ‘humanity’ . . . On one level, the phrases name a bare fact.

“On another level, the ‘humanity’ that the self-described ‘world scientists’ address does not exist. There is no ‘we’ that could take the actions that the scientists call for. . . . To face the Anthropocene, humans would need a way of facing one another. We would need, first, to be a we.”

Explainer: How ‘Shared Socioeconomic Pathways’ explore future climate change (Carbon Brief)

Video: Resisting Extractivism and Climate Change (Panel at “The Future of the Left in the Americas,” hosted by Dissent, NACLA, and the New School)

Daniel: The Last Stimulus (Jacobin)

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast: What the Climate Doomsayers Get Wrong appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

This is part two of a three-part collaboration between Hot & Bothered and Cited, an award-winning documentary radio show out of the University of British Columbia. Over the course of the three broadcasts, Kate Aronoff and Daniel Aldana Cohen will be joining Cited producers Sam Fenn, Josh GD, and Gordon Katic to talk environmentalism, jobs, climate migration, indigenous sovereignty, and more. Here’s episode 2.

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What does climate migration really look like? On today’s show we meet two Bangladeshi Canadians, Afroza Begum and her son Souri Zaman, whose stories speak to the unequal ways climate change is felt around the world. Living in Toronto, Begum now works with Bangladeshi community groups on settlement services, helping new immigrants with housing, employment, and language learning. She and Souri help us parse the layers of the term “climate refugee,” which is often used but little understood.

If you like what you’re hearing, subscribe to the Hot & Bothered feed on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts to get all three parts of our series with Cited and to catch up on season one. And while you’re at it, tune into more excellent recent episodes from Cited, including a prizewinning documentary on a Vancouver heroin clinic and a series on mass incarceration in collaboration with Jacobin’s The Dig.

Plus: Read Daniel’s recent case for working-class environmentalism in Public Books.

Special thanks to the Cited team for producing this series and to the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions for partnering.

Hot & Bothered is hosted by Kate Aronoff and Daniel Aldana Cohen and produced by Colin Kinniburgh. Browse the full archive here.

The post What Does Climate Migration Really Look Like? appeared first on Dissent Magazine.