Hot & Bothered: A Dissent Climate Podcast

We know—it’s been a long, hot summer without us, but the Hot & Bothered team is dipping its toes back in the rising waters of international climate politics with a special project to close out 2017.

As we warm up for season two, we’re excited to launch a special, three-part miniseries in collaboration with Cited, an award-winning documentary radio show out of the University of British Columbia. Over the course of these next three broadcasts, Kate and Daniel 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 1.

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In the early 1990s, a pathbreaking activist named Judi Bari sought to ally forest workers and environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest against predatory Wall Street investors. What can we learn from her story today?

Kicking off a three-part series, Kate joins Sam and Josh to tell the story of tree spiking, a Texas millionaire, and the Northern Spotted Owl. Along the way, we hear from documentary filmmaker Mary Liz Thomson and University of Oregon sociology professor John Bellamy Foster about how activist Judi Bari worked to overcome the antagonisms between loggers and Earth First environmentalists through working-class solidarity.

Then, in the second half of the hour, Sam talks to independent forester Herb Hammond about how forest management could help mitigate climate change on a massive scale.

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.

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

Read (and watch) more:

Bellamy Foster, John. “The Limits of Environmentalism Without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest Crisis of the Pacific Northwest,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 1993), pp. 11-41.

Who Bombed Judi Bari? Directed by Mary Liz Thomson. Hokey Pokey Productions, 2012.

Hammond, Herb. “Good Jobs require Healthy Ecosystems and Healthy Communities” 21 November 2014. Unpublished Conference Paper. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-BC. 2017. Web.

Plus: Catch up on Kate’s recent reporting on Puerto Rico, Trumpism, and the ongoing COP23 climate talks at In These Times and The Intercept.

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

The post Why Environmentalism Needs Class Politics appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

We’re just under one month into the Trump regime and prospects for curbing climate change feel bleak. ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson has been confirmed as Secretary of State, the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines look like unkillable zombies, and the EPA is closer to the chopping block than ever.

Still, the resistance is alive and well. As thousands flood into the streets to stop a draconian Muslim travel ban and attacks on civil liberties, a coalition of grassroots groups in New York is showing what climate policy might look like in the age of Trump. New York Renews—a coalition of 104 labor, racial justice, green, and community groups from across the state—showed up in Albany this week to pressure Governor Andrew Cuomo into putting climate justice into the budget, allocating state funding for everything from green jobs to infrastructure development in low-income communities.

To hear more about this campaign, we caught up with Franchelle Hart, Executive Director of Open Buffalo, a member of the New York Renews one of the organizations leading efforts for a just transition in upstate New York. Before coming to Open Buffalo, Franchelle worked for years on both state and federal policy, and with 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East. She has served as a board member for the Western New York Area Labor Federation and President for the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists’ Buffalo Chapter.

What with the stench of the Trump regime starting to sink in more fully, Kate and Daniel appreciate your loving and constructive feedback bigly—particularly about Daniel’s dad jokes. Tweet your scathing critiques, your deepest fears and your future show ideas to #HotBotheredClimate. Note: we’ll be taking a hiatus after this episode to prepare for our bigger, better second season. That’s right—we’re going refresh the show, find some more funding, and get ready to come out more often. In the meantime, don’t delete Hot & Bothered. There might just be a mid-hiatus episode sometime soon.

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Writing Climate Justice into the Budget

Karen Dewitt, Climate change activists urge Cuomo to go further (WBFO 88.7)

Rebecca Nathanson, Can This New York State Campaign Finish What the Paris Climate Talks Started? (The Nation)

New York Renews

Open Buffalo

Buffalo Billion

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast #11: A Just Transition for New York State? With Franchelle Hart appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

With Donald Trump at the White House doorstep, we do something different this month. The show features four brief interviews with leaders from across the climate movement on how they’re interpreting this unique moment—and what they plan to do about it.

First up, Daniel speaks to Kert Davies, founder of the Climate Investigations Center. Before that, Kert was the chief architect of the Greenpeace web project ExxonSecrets, launched in 2004, which helped expose the oil giant ExxonMobil’s funding of organizations and individuals who work to discredit the validity of climate science and delay climate policy action. Next, Kate talks to Desiree Kane. Desiree is a journalist and a Miwok organizer who has lived out at Standing Rock fighting the Dakota Access pipeline for the last several months, and just arrived in D.C. She’s joining up with #District13, a partially Hunger Games-inspired hub of millennial resistance there to Trump’s agenda.

Daniel then turns to Cindy Wiesner. Cindy is the National Coordinator of Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ), a network of U.S.-based grassroots groups building an agenda for power for working and poor people and communities of color. She is also Co-Chair of the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) and a leading organizer of the #ItTakesRoots coalition. And Kate closes by interviewing May Boeve, executive director of 350.org—a movement that has profoundly transformed climate organizing in the U.S. and around the world.

The clouds are gathering above, but we’re hanging on to the silver linings. Tweet your flinty determination, the climate justice campaigns you’re watching, and any leftover Moscow mischief jokes to #HotBotheredClimate.

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Apocalinks

Energy Firms in Secretive Alliance With Attorneys General (Eric Lipton’s 2014 New York Times report on Scott Pruitt and the Republican Attorney Generals Association)

Kate: Either Rex Tillerson Lied Under Oath, Or He Doesn’t Know How Fossil Fuel Subsidies Work (In These Times)

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast #10: Into the Abyss appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

Daniel’s map for “Carboniferous” in “Nonstop Metropolis: A New York Atlas” by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (University of California Press, 2016). Cartography: Molly Roy; artwork: Bette Burgoyne. Underlying data from Kevin Ummel, adapted from research he did for the Center for Global Development. Courtesy of University of California Press. Click here to view the full map.

Just in time for a season of holiday excess, Daniel spends the ninth episode of Hot & Bothered indulging in some heavy data wonkery, while Kate gets the week off. First, he touches on fears among scientists that the Trump administration could actually erase or conceal key climate data. Daniel’s colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania are helping lead an effort to safeguard this valuable material through their #datarefuge campaign (see links below).

Next is Daniel’s feature interview with Kevin Ummel, which reveals why the rich have such high carbon footprints, just what kinds of consumption really drive carbon emissions, how urban density does (and doesn’t) make a difference, and what all this means for developing ethical climate policies, like a properly designed carbon tax. Indeed, if we are still perfecting our knowledge of the climate system, we’re at a much earlier stage in the social science of carbon emissions—figuring out which social and spatial factors are most important. Kevin Ummel is a data scientist and environmental economist based in Colorado. He was formerly a Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and  a Visiting Senior Associate at the Center for Global Development. He currently consults for organizations like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby and the World Resources Institute. Kevin and Daniel collaborated on a map of New York’s per capita carbon emissions that was published this October, alongside an essay of Daniel’s, in Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas.

You know a melancholy Santa Claus will be listening carefully to our bonus episode as he circles above the melting North Pole in the early hours of December 25, trying to find a solid patch of ice near his workshop to land his sleigh. He might even be as shocked as you to find Daniel closing the episode with a passionate plea for optimism. But he’ll certainly be convinced. And with that jolly thought, happy holidays from Hot & Bothered. See you in 2017.

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Protecting climate data from Trump’s anti-science administration

University of Pennsylvania #datarefuge project

Environmental Data and Governance Initiative

Climate Mirror

End of Term Harvest

Consumption-accounting of carbon emissions

Kevin Ummel, “Who Pollutes?”, Center for Global Development

Kevin Ummel, “Household Impact Study”, Citizens’ Climate Lobby

Daniel Aldana Cohen, “Petro-Gotham, People’s Gotham,” excerpt at The Leap Blog with map “Carboniferous,” developed with Kevin Ummel’s data

Daniel Aldana Cohen on urban climate emissions on Forecast podcast

Fun bonus holiday link:

Kate Aronoff, “Star Wars Goes to the Countryside,” Jacobin

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast #9: A Holiday Gift for Climate Wonks, with Kevin Ummel appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

In the eighth episode of Hot & Bothered, we get two perspectives on the crucial links between racial justice and climate justice. First, Kate travels to Standing Rock to talk to Native organizers there about their recent victory and what the growing movement against Trump can learn from the water protectors.

Then, Daniel speaks with Dawn Phillips, Program Director at Causa Justa-Just Cause, a multiracial, grassroots organization building community leadership to achieve justice for low-income San Francisco and Oakland residents. Dawn, who has a background in environmental justice organizing and serves as Chair of the Steering Committee of the Right to the City Alliance, explains how gentrification and the housing crisis are intertwined with environmental racism and systematic disinvestment in communities of color, not just in the Bay Area but across the country.

As we were wrapping up this episode, we learned that Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson is first in line to be Secretary of State in the Trump administration. We’ll be discussing all that and much more in our next few episodes, so stay tuned. Until then, keep sending us your questions, comments, and thoughts how we might still stave off climate dystopia at #HotBotheredClimate.

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Climate and Racial Justice, From Coast to Coast

Kate: A People’s Victory at Standing Rock (In These Times)

Development Without Displacement: Resisting Gentrification in the Bay Area (Causa Justa-Just Cause)

Daniel: The Urban Green Wars (Jacobin)

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast #8: Why Climate Justice Means Racial Justice, with Dawn Phillips appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

Hot & Bothered #7 is a little different. The national election this past Tuesday was a $#$#*(@ disaster. Donald Trump will be president of the United States. We did not expect this. We did not plan for this. But the future of our species will in part depend on how successfully we can fight back.

By chance, Kate happened to be in Philadelphia, where Daniel lives, on November 10. So we sat down on a couch, poured a couple glasses of wine, and tried to wrap our heads around climate politics in the age of Trump. We talked about a lot. Fundamentally, we tried to grapple with how in this dark moment, more than ever, we need to merge the agendas of climate justice, economic justice, racial justice, and social justice writ large. The timeline for climate action is really, really tight already. The world cannot afford to lose four years of U.S. climate action.

But there’s no separating climate from violence, from bigotry, or from class struggle. If Trump’s victory represents climate emergency, it also portends wide-scale violence for countless people in this country. In our hour-long conversation, we got past our immediate, desperate emotional reactions to Trump’s victory to discuss the how the climate movement can, and must, connect its agenda to the movements already blossoming to resist the onslaught.

Tweet your dread and your hope to #HotBotheredClimate. We’re feeling them both. We don’t know what’s next. We do know that we’ll be thinking, debating, organizing, and fighting back.

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Conversation

Energy World Rocked by Trump Win (E&E News)

Al Gore offers to work with Trump on climate change. Good luck with that. (Washington Post)

Kate: After Trump’s Win, Our Job Is More Clear Than Ever: Organize. (In These Times)

Kate: LIUNA’s Rank-and-File is Challenging Union Leadership on Standing Rock—and Beyond (In These Times)

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast #7: What Trump’s Victory Means for the Climate Movement appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

In the sixth episode of Hot & Bothered, we take a break from biting our nails over November 8 to look abroad—and ahead—at what the climate movement can do with a foothold in state power. But not before we get Kate’s take on what’s wrong with the Green Party, and why we should probably all still be knocking on doors to get out the vote this weekend.

So why look across the pond? Well, after a long, broad-based campaign, a coalition called Switched On London recently secured a commitment from London’s newly elected Labour Party mayor, Sadiq Khan, to create a publicly-owned municipal energy company there—what the group calls an “affordable, democratic and environmentally sustainable alternative to the Big Six.”

We talk to James Angel, a campaigner with Switched On London and PhD student at King’s College London, about what this energy democracy win means for the anti-austerity and climate justice movements. Angel also recently took a research trip to Barcelona, where the city’s Podemos-affiliated left government is rolling out a similar plan to transition entirely over to renewables. While the presidential election has dominated the news cycle here in the United States for the better part of the last two years, what’s happening in Barcelona can be seen as as model for what’s possible when the left contests for other levels of government.

In the second half of the show, we hear from Kevin Smith, a member of Liberate Tate. Led by artists and cultural workers, Liberate Tate successfully pressured the museum to cut ties with oil company BP this year, after six years of organizing and direct-action performances. Since Liberate Tate began in 2010, several “fossil free culture” groups have emerged around the world, including the Natural History Museum here in the states.

Stay tuned for episode seven in the coming weeks. We’ll be doing a post-mortem on the big carbon tax proposal that has raised the eyebrows of leftists (including many climate activists) in Washington state. And in the meantime, keep sending us your questions, comments, suggestions, and prepping tips for the dystopian future at #HotBotheredClimate.

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Trash Fire 2016

Kate: Stop right there: assuming a Hillary Clinton victory is downright dangerous (Guardian)

Kate: The Left Deserves Better Than Jill Stein (In These Times)

More of Kate’s election coverage at In These Times and the Guardian

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Energy Democracy in London, Barcelona, and Beyond, with James Angel

Switched On London

James Angel, Strategies of Energy Democracy (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung)

Sebastiaan Faber and Bécquer Seguín, Welcome to Sunny Barcelona, Where the Government Is Embracing Coops, Citizen Activism, and Solar Energy (The Nation)

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Getting Big Oil Out of the Arts, with Kevin Smith

Liberate Tate

Fellow Liberate Tate member Mel Evans, Painting with Oil (Dissent)

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Back Stateside

Erik Loomis, Philly Transit Strike and the Election (Lawyers, Guns & Money)

A #NoDAPL Map (Huffington Post)

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast #6: Taking Back Power, with James Angel appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

It’s Episode 5 of Hot & Bothered and all around us, the bad climate news is falling like hard rain from the hot, damp air of a warming world. Long story short: time is getting uncomfortably tight. But it’s still far from over! In this episode, we take shelter from the storm. It’s the first in our new series on the idea of a Green New Deal to slash carbon emissions, crush inequality, and rebuild our politics.

In our feature interview, Daniel speaks to Robert Pollin, an expert in the macroeconomics of climate change and energy; he’s a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. We talk about his proposal for a massive but utterly feasible program of investment in renewable energy, and how we can decarbonize the global economy while providing good jobs from the United States to India and beyond. All we need is to get the political ball rolling. And as Pollin points out, key coalitions are already mustering, both to support a Green New Deal and to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Indeed, we start off the show with a report from the front lines of that fight: the indigenous-led encampment against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota. Kate interviews Desiree Kane, a Miwok organizer and journalist who’s been at Standing Rock for the better part of the last three months.

Anxious listeners, tweet your sighs of relief, questions, comments, and support for #noDAPL to #HotBotheredClimate. And stay tuned for episode six in the coming weeks. In our pre-election special, Kate Aronoff will bring some of her own hard rain down on the Green Party.

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Bill McKibben, Recalculating the Climate Math, The New Republic

Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The Truth about Climate Change, a sweeping new report

Standing Firm at Standing Rock: Why the Struggle is Bigger Than One Pipeline (Sarah Jaffe, Moyers & Company)

#noDAPL Communications Support Hub

Robert Pollin and Brian Callaci, A Just Transition for U.S. Fossil Fuel Industry Workers (The American Prospect)

Robert Pollin, Greening the Global Economy, MIT Press, 2015

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast #5: Time for a Green New Deal, with Robert Pollin appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

In the fourth episode of Hot & Bothered, co-host Kate Aronoff talks to leading Nigerian climate activist Ken Henshaw about fossil fuel resistance in Africa’s largest oil-producing region. Communities in the Niger Delta are battling the oil companies themselves, whose environmental and human rights abuses have included everything from gas flaring to colluding in the killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow Ogoni activists in 1995. But they’re also dealing with the immediate climate impacts fueled by oil and gas extraction around the world. Henshaw explains how climate change has contributed to the rise of Boko Haram; why energy democracy activists are joining larger battles against privatization in Nigeria; how unions fit into this complex picture; why most Nigerians don’t benefit from the country’s oil wealth; and more.

Meanwhile, with TV audiences worldwide glued to the Olympic games in Rio, Daniel gives us his hot and bothered take on the opening ceremony and its in-your-face call to climate action. At what point does the clichéd symbolism of Mother Earth become not just annoying, but counterproductive? Finally, before we go, an update on just how hot it’s been in our New York studio.

Listeners: as always, tweet your questions, comments, and complaints about 2016’s record heat to #HotBotheredClimate. And stay tuned for episode five next month. We’ll be talking to activists on both coasts about race, housing, and climate change.

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Nigerian activist Ken Henshaw

Social Action, the organization where Henshaw is Senior Programs Director

Lake Chad: Almost Gone (UNEP), a report on environmental devastation around the Niger Delta

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast #4: Resisting Oil in the Niger Delta, with Ken Henshaw appeared first on Dissent Magazine.

In the third episode of Hot & Bothered, co-host Daniel Aldana Cohen has an extended conversation with leading climate scientist Michael Mann about what “runaway” climate change, feedback mechanisms, and tipping points actually mean. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University and the director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center.

We ask Mann: is there One Big Threshold that we’ve already crossed (or are about to cross)? Is a methane bomb in the permafrost about to blow up civilization? Or, as Mann suggests, might the scariest stories told by some climate activists be as harmful as the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to silence climate scientists? And yes, Daniel makes a “shades of gray” reference as we examine the lingering uncertainties of climate science.

After hearing about the (shrinking) grounds for hope, Kate sends us a quick report from the People’s Summit in Chicago. There, she speaks briefly to filmmaker and anti-fracking activist Josh Fox. And in closing, we find out what Kate bought Daniel as a graduation gift when he finally finished his PhD.

Listeners: tweet your outrage, consternation, curiosity, and uncertainties to #HotBotheredClimate. And stay tuned for episode four next month. We’ll be talking with grassroots activist Ken Henshaw about petro-politics from above and resistance from below in Nigeria.

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Climate scientist Michael Mann

Michael Mann’s content-packed home page at Penn State

Forthcoming book (with Tom Toles): The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (Fall 2016)

The People’s Summit and Josh Fox

Kate: The Political Convention Where Bernie’s Revolution Reigns (Rolling Stone)

Josh Fox’s latest film: How To Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change

The post Hot & Bothered Podcast #3: How Tipping Points Actually Work—And Why It’s Not Over Yet, with Michael Mann appeared first on Dissent Magazine.