“The capitalist system is necessarily built on creating ecological crises.”

Bertie speaks to Ståle Holgersen about his new book Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World, in which he argues that, contrary to popular economic thought, economic crises are not triggered by ecological ones but instead the capitalist economy benefits from ecological crises. 

Bertie and Ståle discuss the ways in which crises are defined, the drawbacks to arguments for degrowth and the potential solutions to the climate emergency. 

Ståle Holgersen is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Stockholm University and a member of the Zetkin Collective, an ecosocialist group of scholars and activists primarily working on the political ecologies of the far right.

Against the Crisis was published last month and is available to buy from Verso here.

Further reading:

• Read an extract from Against the Crisis on Land and Climate Review. 
• White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, The Zetkin Collective, 2021
• Searching for “Solutions” to Crisis: A Critique of Urban Austerity and Keynesianism, Uppsala University, 2018
• Destroy what destroys the planet: Steering creative destruction in the dual crisis, Uppsala University, 2016

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.

One month ago, Prabowo Subianto was inaugurated as the new president of Indonesia. An investigation by The Gecko Project has revealed that Subianto has invested in or owned companies involved with rainforest logging, coal mining, palm oil production, and industrial fishing - but many of the companies appear to be inactive.

Do these investments representing potentially concerning conflicts of interest, or are they par for the course? Are his own claims of enormous wealth accurate or exaggerated?

Alasdair speaks to the author of the Gecko Project research, Margareth Aritonang, who is also the Pulitzer Center's 2024 Rainforest Investigations Fellow for Indonesia.

Further reading: 

• Read Margareth's reporting here. 
• 'Activists fear supercharged ‘business as usual’ under Indonesia’s new president', Mongabay, November 2024
• The 'Indonesian environmental activists keep dying in suspicious circumstances', Gecko Project, September 2024 

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.

This year, Land and Climate Review’s first investigative series has documented more than 11,000 breaches of environmental law at North American wood pellet mills. 

Alasdair MacEwen speaks to Camille Corcoran, whose recent reporting was published with The Times in the UK, and Bertie Harrison-Broninski, who normally co-hosts with Alasdair, but here discusses Land and Climate Review’s Canadian investigations, which were featured on BBC Newsnight. 

They discuss the process of uncovering environmental violations at wood pellet mills owned by Drax Group, which operates the UK’s largest power station, and how residents in Mississippi and British Columbia say they have been affected by the pollution from the mills. 

Audio engineering by Vasko Kostovski and Podcast House. 

Read the investigations: 

• ‘Drax-owned facilities broke environmental rules more than 11,000 times in the US’, Land and Climate Review, November 2024
• ‘The Dirty Business of Clean Energy: The U.K. Power Company Polluting Small Towns Across the U.S.’, The Intercept, September 2024
• ‘Drax’s pellet mills violated environmental law 189 times in Canada’, Land and Climate Review, May 2024
• ‘Drax faces penalty after Canadian biomass plant fails to submit pollution report’, The Independent, October 2023

Related episodes: 

• Are Canada’s sustainable forestry claims accurate? - with Richard Robertson from Stand.Earth
• Does bioenergy increase CO2 emissions more than burning coal? - with John Sterman from MIT
• What is BECCS and what does it mean for climate policy? - with Daniel Quiggin from Chatham House

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.

As the UN Biodiversity Conference draws to a close Bertie speaks to María Arango, a lawyer at the international human rights organization Forest People’s Programme, about the impacts of the sugar cane industry on Black communities in the Cauca River Valley region of western Colombia. 

A new report titled The Green Illusion finds that more than 80% of the region’s wetlands have been drained in order to plant sugar cane, resulting in Afro-descendant peoples being displaced from their ancestral lands and stripped of vital resources.

Bertie and María discuss the report’s findings and how international summits such as COP16 present key opportunities to protect the rights of Indigenous people that live in biodiversity hotspots.

Further reading: 

• Read the full report: The Green Illusion: Impacts of the Sugar Cane Monoculture on the Biodiversity and Livelihoods of the Black People in the Cauca River Valley, October 2024
• The Green Monster: Human Rights Impacts of the Sugarcane Industry on Black Communities in Colombia, June 2021
• 'Colombia’s cane industry efficient but potentially damaging', Mongabay, March 2017

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.

“In 2022, Indonesia only consumed about 70,000 tonnes of wood for electricity. In 2023, we consumed almost half a million.”

Alasdair speaks to Timer Manurung, Chairman of the Indonesian NGO Auriga Nusantara, about a new report he worked on with five other environmental charities.

Titled Unheeded Warnings, the report warns that the Indonesian government’s plans for biomass power risk harming 10 million hectares of untouched primary forest, and "the deforestation of an area roughly 35 times the size of Jakarta — resulting in CO2 emissions almost five hundred times higher than current levels.”

Alasdair and Timer discuss the investigation process, the scale of these potential impacts, and the Indonesian Government.

To see photos from Timer's investigation, click here.

Further reading: 

• Read the full report, which includes maps outlining the threatened and logged forest areas: Unheeded Warnings: Forest Biomass Threats to Tropical Forests in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, Auriga Nusantara, October 2024
• 'Rush to Burn Wood for Energy Threatens Indonesian and Southeast Asian Forests & Communities', Auriga Nusantara, October 2024
• 'The President's new clothes', The Gecko Project, October 2024
• Bioenergy Explained, Land and Climate Review, 2022

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.

Bertie speaks to Sherri Goodman about her new book, Threat Multiplier:
Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security.

From 1993-2001, Sherri Goodman served as the first US Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security, making her the Pentagon's Chief Environmental Officer. She then went on to help deliver influential reports that helped to establish climate change as a national security threat in the US. 

Threat Multiplier documents key environmental and climatic challenges during her career, such as negotiations around the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and managing geopolitical risk in the Arctic as melting permafrost changes the ocean landscape.

Goodman is now Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate & Security, and a Senior Fellow at the Wilson Center. 

Further reading: 

• Click here to buy Threat Multiplier from Island Press. 
• 'A career spent trying to make the military care about climate change', The Washington Post, August 2024
• 'The US Department of Defense’s Role in Integrating Climate Change into Security Planning', New Security Beat, May 2024
• 'Changing climates for Arctic security', The Wilson Quaterly, 2017
• National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, 2007

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.

Last week, Greenpeace Africa published their new report “Fast Fashion, Slow Poison: The Toxic Textile Crisis in Ghana”. The report outlines the shocking environmental and public health impact of the second-hand clothing industry in Ghana - revealing that every week, up to half a million items of clothing from the Kantamanto Market in Accra end up discarded in open spaces and informal dumpsites.

Bertie speaks to the report's author, Sam Quashie-Idun, about his findings, who is responsible for the harmful textile imports and what can be done to alleviate the problem.

 Sam Quashie-Idun is Head of Investigations at Greenpeace Africa and a member of Land and Climate Review's investigations unit.

You can read the report here and watch Sam’s Instagram video summarising its findings here.

Further reading: 

• Poisoned Gifts, Greenpeace, 2023
• How to Ensure Waste Colonialism is Not Written Into Law and That Fashion’s Biggest Polluters Have to Change, The Or Foundation, 2023
• ‘‘It’s like a death pit’: how Ghana became fast fashion’s dumping ground’, The Guardian, 2023
• ‘European secondary textile sector ‘on the brink of collapse’’, Recycling International, 2024

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.

In 2015, 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement, a legally binding treaty with the goal of limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Since then, climate planning has increasingly revolved around overshooting this target, with the hope that temperature levels can be brought back down in later decades. Temperature overshoot models are now the default, but also a cause of scientific concern, as the devastating impacts of crossing this threshold may not be reversible. 

In their new book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton study this risky approach to policy, and the economic interests that they theorise have led to it. Alasdair spoke to them both about the new book.

Andreas Malm is Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, and the celebrated author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, among other works. Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, and the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics.

Further reading: 

• Buy Overshoot from Verso Books
• 'The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C', The Conversation, August 2024
• 'Why Carbon Capture and Storage matters: overshoot, models, and money', Land & Climate Review, 2022
• 'What does the IPCC say about carbon removal?', Land & Climate Review, 2022
• 'Global warming overshoots increase risks of climate tipping cascades in a network model', Nature Climate Change, 2022
• 'Overshooting tipping point thresholds in a changing climate', Nature Climate Change, 2021
• 'Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures: Whose Emission Reduction Pathways Is the IPCC Performing?', in Has It Come to This? The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink, 2020
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, Verso Books, 2020

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.

Many governments are wary of providing transparency around their militaries' emissions, and campaigners can be hesitant to focus on the carbon footprint of conflicts, rather than more obviously humanitarian issues.

But Ukraine has helped to shift opinion this year, after pushing for more accountability for wartime environmental harm. Recent estimates put the CO2e cost of Russia's invasion of Ukraine at 175 million tonnes, and day to day military operations - not including conflicts - at a staggering 5.5% of global emissions.

Bertie spoke to Lindsey Cottrell, Environmental Policy Officer at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, about the military emissions gap in carbon accounting, and the campaign for UNFCCC rules to be changed to acknowledge it. 

Further reading: 

• 'Russia’s war with Ukraine accelerating global climate emergency, report shows', The Guardian, June 2024
• 'Revealed: repairing Israel’s destruction of Gaza will come at huge climate cost', The Guardian, June 2024
• 'National climate action plans must include military emissions', CEOBS Blog, June 2024
• 'UNEA-6 passes resolution on environmental assistance and recovery in areas affected by armed conflict', CEOBS Blog, March 2024
• 'Does reporting military emissions data really threaten national security?', CEOBS Blog, February 2024
• 'Ticking boxes: are military climate mitigation strategies fit for purpose?', CEOBS Blog, February 2024 
• Estimating the Military’s Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 2022

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.

Alasdair speaks to Jonas Algers about steel decarbonisation; what the options are, where there are challenges, and what is happening so far. 

Jonas Algers is a PhD candidate at Lund University, Sweden, researching steel decarbonisation policy. 

Further reading: 

• 'Leading with Industrial Policy: Lessons for Decarbonization from Swedish Green Steel', Roosevelt Institute, 2024
• 'Phase-in and phase-out policies in the global steel transition', Climate Policy, 2024
• 'Building a stronger steel transition: Global cooperation and procurement in construction', One Earth, 2023
• 'Paris compatible steel capacity: Contraction and replacement for zero emissions', Environmental and Energy Systems Studies, Lund university, 2023

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.