The BREAK—DOWN

Last night, after more than 100 days since the US and Israel went to war against Iran, the US and Iran reached a partial framework for peace. When the war began at the end of February, it was all but impossible to make sense of the irrational explosion of violence. In the months since, that sense of irrationality has hardly ebbed, not least as the economic impacts of the war and resulting closures of the Strait of Hormuz—on food and oil prices, and on the supply of goods like ammonia and aluminium—have begun to bite.The destructiveness of this war is clear. Less clear is what it could mean for the future of an industry at the heart of the region and the conflict: oil.

Our guest today is Laleh Khalili, a Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and author of several books, including Sinews of War and Trade. In this episode, she breaks down the mess of the US-Israeli war on Iran, shifting relations among the region’s petro-states, the US as an empire in decline, and the future of global energy.

We're celebrating the launch of The BREAK—DOWN's spring issue, Airborne! On May 6th, we hosted a live podcast where Adrienne Buller was joined by Geoff Mann, Daniela Gabor and Oliver Eagleton to discuss climate crisis through and beyond the contents of AIRBORNE.

ISSUE #3: Airborne

The engines of industrial production that power the modern economy release vast quantities of carbon and pollutants into the air, seeping into our soil, our water, and even our bodies. Air pollution alone is responsible for around ten million deaths each year. And yet this everyday emergency has not fundamentally reshaped how we understand our place in the world.

This issue explores the tensions between global causes and local effects, between the invisible and the immediate, by looking closely at the air itself: the medium that surrounds us, connects us, and sustains life, even as it is increasingly contested and compromised.

Featuring essays by Adam Almeida and Shruti Iyer on the inequalities of air pollution across time and place, from New York to India; Zsuzsanna Ihar on a spaceport in the outer Hebrides; Vera Huwe on the political history of air travel; Mae Losasso on the origins of “the environment” in airborne chemical warfare; Cecilia Rikap on Big Tech and the cloud; Drew Pendergrass on complexity and planning; Natasha Heenan on the politics of climate repair; a photo essay by Amelie David and Ségolène Ragu on the fight for clean air and energy in Beirut under renewed military assault; and an interview with journalist David Wallace-Wells.

Go to our website to ⁠become a member⁠ and get your copy of our latest issue - and follow us on our ⁠socials⁠.

You may never have heard of private equity firms like Blackstone, KKR, Bain Capital or the Carlyle Group, but in recent decades they have quietly become some of the most powerful companies in the world. They own your hospitals, your nurseries, your energy systems. Their reach stretches from formerly public utilities to the home you rent and the food you eat. In their rise to power, they have reshaped capitalism in their own image – all by using debt as a weapon to produce vast returns for the companies who own and control them. The implications for inequality, for how our economy functions, and for the fight to build a sustainable future, are profound.

Our guest this week is the Guardian journalist Hettie O’Brien, who is the author of new book The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself.

In the mid-20th century, nuclear energy was seen as the technology of the future. Then, questions about its environmental impact and waste, alongside crises like  Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, created a major public backlash, and the construction of new nuclear in places like the US stalled altogether.

But as the climate crisis pushes demand for non-fossil fuel energy, nuclear is once again being positioned as the energy source of the future: emissions free and a reliable baseload, ready to be deployed at scale again.

As M. V. Ramana, physicist and Professor at the University of British Columbia, argues in today’s episode however, the case for new nuclear power is not just misguided, but potentially dangerous. But the reasons he thinks so might surprise you, going beyond the standard points about accidents and waste to the heart of the political economy of the energy transition.

This talk was originally presented in partnership with the How The Light Gets In Festival, held in London in September 2025

We’ve all heard it before: any time a politician tries to put forward a policy that might finally improve people’s lives—think Mamdani's fast free buses, affordable homes, or renewable energy infrastructure—they’re met with the same line: we can’t afford it. Media pundits and technocrats alike obsess over the national debt, balancing the books and not “spooking” the ever mysterious bond vigilantes. 

It’s an obsession that paralyses action on the very challenges we most need to meet, from transforming our energy system to providing care for the most vulnerable. 

It’s also, as today’s episode explores, deeply misleading. 

Our guest today is Ann Pettifor, the esteemed political economist and author most recently of The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and Planet, which covers everything from the shocking power of Wall Street to Keynes's legacy to what money really is: in Ann’s view, an incredible human innovation that could be leveraged to transform our world for the better, rather than enrich a small minority. In today’s episode, she tells us how.

The history of the climate crisis is often told as a story about technology. 

Growing out of the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution, and accelerating along with new forms of production and consumption in the mid-twentieth century, we often hear that is technological development and innovation that got us into the mess we’re in. But it can also, apparently, get us out of it: what’s needed is a new green industrial revolution, or else other forms of technology like nuclear power or some form of geoengineering.

Could a more nuanced, and more accurate, history of technology and production tell us something new about the politics of the climate crisis? And could it even help us to think about new directions beyond fossil fuelled capitalism?

This week we’re joined by David Edgerton, historian and author of books including The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, and The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. He joins John Merrick,  deputy editor of The Break–Down in his first podcast appearance, to discuss how his historical work has shaped his understanding of the climate crisis, the rise of China as both an emissions and a green tech powerhouse, the new retro revivalism of the British right, and the ubiquity of AI boosterism.

Capitalism is often defended on the basis of freedom — “free markets”, free choice, as well as being credited with producing the wealth and material abundance that has freed countless people from poverty.

Marx, meanwhile, described workers under capitalism as “free in the double sense”: “free” to sell their labour power in the market, and “free” or divorced from the means of production: the land, machinery or materials to sustain themselves on their own. In other words: not particularly free, at all. 

We can add to this the countless things that are, within market systems, “free” insofar as they are assigned no value, from the free gifts of nature to uncompensated environmental destruction and the unpaid labour that creates and sustains life. 

What, then, does freedom really mean within a capitalist society? When wealth is so vastly unequal, can it really be argued that market exchange is “free” in any real sense? And when the harms of our economic actions are invisible in the prices we pay—from deforestation to child labour—can we really be said to be making “free choices”? These are the questions at the heart of Alyssa Battistoni’s book Free Gifts. In this episode, she joins Adrienne to talk about value, the politics of nature, and how we might live freely in a finite world. 

We hear a lot about “sustainable development”—it’s the buzzword of virtually every UN convening—but often with little clarity on what it means in practice. 

Countries like the US, Canada or the UK hardly developed “sustainably”, so to demand that others organise their economies and societies in ways that we never did can feel like pulling up the ladder behind us.

Moreover, how is “development” really defined? Reaching a certain level of GDP per capita? Having the right kinds of “advanced” industries, like finance or tech? And what do any of these indicators  tell us about the things that really matter, like ensuring a decent, affordable life for everyone without compromising the planet?

Joining Adrienne to answer these questions is Amir Lebdioui, a development economist, Associate Professor in Political Economy at the University of Oxford and author of “Survival of the Greenest”. In this episode, Amir breaks down the economics of sustainable development, the implications of global tariff wars and what we should all be learning from China.

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, was re-elected as the President of Brazil in 2022, defeating Jair Bolsonaro in a tense election, the Brazilian left and many around the world breathed an almost literal sigh of relief. Under Bolsonaro, Brazil’s ecological and climate record was scorched, with deforestation in the Amazon reaching record highs.

Hopes were high, and for good reason: Lula campaigned on the rights of the working class and Brazil’s Indigenous peoples; under his watch deforestation quickly began to fall; and at COP27 in Egypt he declared in no uncertain terms: "Brazil is back." 

Yet Lula’s record so far is complex, particularly when it comes to the challenges and perceived trade-offs of economic development and the climate, all while managing powerful competing forces in Brazilian politics. 

As COP30 begins in Belém Brazil, Adrienne is joined by Sabrina Fernandes, an economic sociologist and head of research at the Alameda Institute, to discuss her essay “Lula’s Dilemma”, which she wrote for the second print issue of The BREAK—DOWN, on the complexities of Brazilian ecological politics, the power of big agri-business and what we can expect from Brazil’s leadership of this year’s climate conference. 

Further reading: Sabrina Fernandes, Lula’s Dilemma, The BREAK—DOWN

To celebrate the launch of The BREAK—DOWN ISSUE #1, editor Adrienne Buller was joined by Quinn Slobodian and Geoff Mann for a timely conversation on the afterlives of neoliberalism, the climate crisis, and the global rise of the far right.

ISSUE #1

The BREAK—DOWN is dedicated to exploring the political economy of the climate crisis. We bring together personal stories, cultural critique, expert insight and radical imagination to explore the systems driving ecological collapse — and what it might take to confront them.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, our first issue, RIGHT TURN, explores climate politics in an age of rising authoritarianism, asking what happens when the future of the planet is shaped by a hardening new right.

Issue ⁠#1⁠ is available now. Buy a print copy ⁠here⁠.