Leigh Phillips is a Canadian science writer and the author of two books: Austerity Ecology and The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. In this episode, he explains the attraction of “doomism,” how elite academics and environmental groups became estranged from the working class, the Tennessee Valley Authority as a “cathedral of American socialism, and why Karl Marx was “an energy maximalist.”