The Land & Climate Podcast

Brazil’s historic election results have been a rollercoaster ride for the country and the international community. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ultimately defeated Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, in the second presidential vote to claim a historic fourth term. The congressional vote earlier in the month, however, saw Bolsonaro's Liberal Party gain seats in both congressional houses.

Bertie is joined by Cultural Survival’s Brazil lead, Edson Krenak, to discuss the environmental and Indigenous context around the elections. 

Edson and Bertie discuss the legacies of Bolsonaro and Lula's previous administrations, successful efforts to increase Indigenous voter turnout in the second presidential vote, and what comes next for communities affected by mining and deforestation in the Amazon. 

“We don’t just want to vote and talk about politics. We want to be part of the decisions. We never had a positive experience with the state: it was always violent, colonial, and unjust. For the first time, we have had an experience with the state that can be fruitful.”

Further reading: 

• '‘Amateur morons’: Flávio Bolsonaro’s short-lived ‘president-elect’ claim met with mockery', The Guardian, October 2026
• 'Brazil’s victory for the planet and democracy: seven lessons from Lula’s win', The Guardian, October 2026
• 'For Indigenous peoples in Brazil, the election results offer a reprieve — not a resolution', Grist, October 2026
• '2026 Elections and COP31: What’s Ahead for Indigenous Peoples in Brazil?', Cultural Survival, October 2026
• LET THE A’UWĒ-XAVANTE KEEP DREAMING: How Brazil’s FICO corridor violates the cultural integrity and consent rights of the A’uwẽ Xavante Peoples, and what international human rights law requires, Cultural Survival, 2026
• 'Climate diplomacy must shift focus from markets to land rights', Land and Climate Review, October 2025

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How is a monopoly organised? What does 'the economy' really mean? Is the conception of growth misleading? 

To answer these big questions, Timothy Mitchell sits down with Alasdair to discuss his latest book, The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow. 

The political theorist and historian, whose previous book analysed the political power of Big Oil, now seeks to re-examine modern understandings of the economy. He moves away from the idea of growth as owning or consuming more, and instead explains it as burdening future generations with the cost of resources consumed today.   

Providing concrete examples, from Uber to billionaires, the housing market to AI, Timothy comments on the 'Great Acceleration' of human activity since 1950, and how all of this contributes to the current climate breakdown. 

 “We are continuously selling the future to those who can access the funds to purchase it, and the rest of us are living with the burden of having to pay it back at an increased price”.

Further reading: 

• The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow by Timothy Mitchell, 2026
• 'The Great EconoCon: Climate Crisis and the Misconception of Growth', Critical Times, 2026
• 'Destroying nature will aways be profitable', Land and Climate Review, 2024
• Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil by Timothy Mitchell, 2023
• 'Economy shall (no longer) mean economisation', Journal of Cultural Economy, 2022

Related episodes: 

• 'Are financial markets destroying climate ambition?' with Ann Pettifor
• 'Why is wellbeing ignored in climate modelling?' with Inge Schrijver
• 'Is climate crisis really an economic threat?' with Ståle Holgersen
• 'Can renewables ever be profitable enough?' with Brett Christophers

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Environmental journalist Edward Struzik returns to the Land and Climate Podcast to discuss his latest book, Animal Diaspora: Decoding Ice Age Mysteries to Reveal the Future of Migration. 
 
The book reconstructs migration patterns of animal populations from the last Ice Age, finding that millions of mammoths, reindeer, and early humans moved into the Americas after rapid periods of warming and cooling temperatures displaced them from their habitats. 
 
In conversation with Bertie, Edward Struzik gives insightful examples of how temperature shocks often lead to extinction, such as rising sea levels that cut off land access and stopped migration around 11,000 to 13,000 years ago.
 
“Warming after the last ice age resulted in two-thirds of the large mammals in North America going extinct - very similar to what is taking place now.”
 
Listen to Bertie and Edward discuss parallels between the last mass extinction and the present day, and what the Ice Age can reveal about the current climate crisis. 

Preorder Animal Diaspora from Princeton University Press by clicking here. 

Related episodes: 

• What is the history of extinction? - with Sadiah Qureshi
• Meltdown: is it too late for the Arctic? - with Mia Bennett
• How are assumptions around science and migration undermining climate policy? - with Sonia Shah
• How urgent is the need to restore our peatlands? - with Edward Struzik

Further reading: 

• 'With Sea Ice Melting, Killer Whales Are Moving Into the Arctic', Yale E360, 2025
• 'The cryosphere is nearing irreversible tipping points – and the world is not prepared', Land and Climate Review, 2025
• 'Remembering dreams of a green peace', Land and Climate Review, 2025
• 'Rain Comes to the Arctic, With a Cascade of Troubling Changes', Yale E360, 2024
• 'How Tensions With Russia Are Jeopardizing Key Arctic Research', Yale E360, 2023
• 'Swamplands: Edward Struzik’s bog book is a call for cultural change', Land and Climate Review, 2021
• 'Is Warming Bringing a Wave of New Diseases to Arctic Wildlife?', Yale E360, 2018
• 'How a Wayward Arctic Current Could Cool the Climate in Europe', Yale E360, 2017

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Content advisory: this episode describes events that listeners may find distressing.

Five years ago, in the small coastal town of Palma, Mozambique, 500 fighters from the ISIS-affiliated al-Shabab group stormed a community living and working beside a multi-billion-dollar natural gas field part-owned by France's biggest company, TotalEnergies. As insurgents swept through Palma, they beheaded and shot men, women and children indiscriminately, among them construction workers contracted to build Total's gas plant.  

British journalist Alex Perry spent almost two years investigating the massacre, and established the death toll among Palma's population was over 1,000 people. Perry’s reporting has since won a Polk Award and a True Story Award, and has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.  

Alasdair chats to Perry about his new book, Blood Will Flow: The Murderous Business of Oil and Gas - now longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year - which provides a full account of events in Palma and their aftermath.

TotalEnergies did not respond to a request for comment from The Land and Climate Podcast. The Land and Climate Podcast has not independently verified Alex Perry's account of events, and guests' views do not necessarily represent the editorial views of The Land and Climate Podcast. In November 2025, TotalEnergies rejected accusations of complicity in war crimes, torture, and enforced disappearances in Mozambique. Legal investigations are ongoing. See TotalEnergies' past statements on this issue at the links below: 

• 'Mozambique LNG: TotalEnergies welcomes the launch of official investigations in Mozambique', March 2025
• 'Mozambique LNG: Clarification by TotalEnergies', November 2025
• 'Chronology of exchanges between TotalEnergies and media about Mozambique LNG' 

Further reading: 

• Blood Will Flow: The Murderous Business of Oil and Gas, by Alex Perry, 2026
• The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth by Nicholas Niarchos, 2026 
• 'Climate diplomacy must shift focus from markets to land rights', Land and Climate Review, 2025
• 'Cobalt mining kills. Who is sorting it out?', Land and Climate Review, 2023
• 'To stop fossil fuel finance, The Equator Principles must change', Land and Climate Review, 2021
• My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience by Rian Malan, 1990

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Colombia is one of the most unequal countries in the world regarding agriculture and land ownership. Violence in the Colombian countryside has often allowed corporate agriculture to displace land once held by small farmers, known as “campesinos”, and transform it into new frontiers for capital.

Jaskiran Kaur Chohan tells Alasdair that “armed conflict undermines the productive systems of campesinos, which reinforces the corporate food regime and the modernisation of agriculture”. They discuss how corporate food regimes take root in the aftermath, and how the country's smallholders can survive. 

Dr Kaur Chohan is a political ecologist at the University of Bristol, whose work focuses on rural communities in Colombia and the intersection of violence, conflict, and agriculture.

Further reading: 

• 'Violent conflict, capitalism and insurgent food sovereignty', The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2026
• 'Have monopolies broken agricultural markets?', The Land and Climate Podcast, 2025
• 'The corporate food regime in conflict zones: Armed violence and agriculture in the Zona de Reserva Campesina-Valle del Río Cimitarra, Colombia', Geoforum, 2024
• 'Sugar cane is eroding Colombian biodiversity', Land and Climate Review, 2024
• 'Tough Tradeoffs: Coca crops and agrarian alternatives in Colombia' , International Journal of Drug Policy, 2021
• 'Slow violence and corporate greening in the war on drugs in Colombia', International Affairs, 2021 
• 'Zonas de Reserva Campesina: ¿Estrategia de Desarrollo Regional y contra el Desplazamiento?', Mama Coca, 2020
• 'Grassroots masquerades: development, paramilitaries, and land laundering in Colombia', Geoforum, 2013
• Broken Republic: Three Essays, Arundhati Roy, 2011

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With five and a half years of content, The Land and Climate Podcast has an overwhelmingly large back catalogue. We have always aimed to produce evergreen episodes, however, and many of our older interviews still have insights and relevance in 2026. 

This is why we are launching a new offering, alongside our usual programming, called 'In Review'. Alasdair and Bertie pick one topic per episode, playing highlights from our favourite interviews and discussing recent developments. 

First up: plastics. 

Following reports that the current draft of the much-delayed UN Plastics Treaty is even less ambitious than the one rejected by many nations last year, Bertie and Alasdair listen to interview excerpts about microplastics, false solutions to plastic waste, and industry lobbying around the Treaty negotiations. 

Featuring clips of science journalist Matt Simon, Punyathorn Jeungsmarn (Arm) from Environmental Justice Foundation, and Dr Rob Ralston from The University of Edinburgh. 

Listen to the original episodes: 

• 'Has the plastics industry co-opted the circular economy?' with Rob Ralston, 2026
• 'What if climate politics is about power, not carbon?' with Jessica Green, 2025
• 'Can the world regulate plastics?' with Punyathorn Jeungsmarn, 2025
• 'How badly have microplastics harmed ecosystems, climate, and human health?' with Matt Simon, 2022

Further reading: 

• 'Leaked memo shows how U.S. aims to weaken global limits on plastic pollution', Washington Post, August 2026
• 'UN plastic treaty is going backwards, experts say', The Guardian, August 2026
• 'The Global Plastics Treaty must include production reduction', Land and Climate Review, 2025
• 'There is so much to say about plastic pollution. Why are we not talking about it?', Land and Climate Review, 2023
• A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon, 2022

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Solar and wind power is growing worldwide, but so is electricity consumption: as a result, renewables are often only added to the energy mix, rather than replacing fossil fuels. 

Reducing energy demand would make net zero more achievable, but it recieves far less attention than decarbonisation efforts. This may be due to a perception that managing energy demand would be politically unpopular, requiring governments to make radical interventions into people's lifestyles and spending. 

Oliver Broad, Senior Research Fellow at University College London, tells Alasdair that such fears are unfounded. His team's research found that the UK could reduce energy demand by 52% without new tech or overly disruptive societal change, and has worked with policymakers and public focus groups to demonstrate political acceptability. 

Further reading: 

• 'Policymakers and academics envision energy demand reductions beyond typical policies in the United Kingdom', Nature Energy, 2025
• 'Policymaker-led scenarios and public dialogue facilitate energy demand analysis for net-zero futures', Nature Energy, 2025
• 'Energy demand reduction options for meeting national zero-emission targets in the United Kingdom', Nature Energy, 2022
• 'Real people or "economic processing units"? The limited understanding of people's roles in energy and climate governance', Energy Research & Social Science, 2022
• 'A low energy demand scenario for meeting the 1.5 °C target and sustainable development goals without negative emission technologies', Nature Energy, 2018
• 'Invisible energy policies: A new agenda for energy demand reduction', Energy Policy, 2018

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Geoengineering research is growing, as scientists look for increasingly radical means to protect humanity from the disastrous impacts of global heating.

Less publicly, concerns are also building about the use of these techniques for geopolitical disruption or control. 

Technologies such as solar radiation management (SRM) and stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) are controversial amongst climate scientists: they could buy us time through a temporary cooling effect, but they would not actually stop global heating, and could cause other negative impacts.

Danielle Young tells Alasdair that scientific research on these technologies often lacks alignment with political realities. While scientists plan for multilateral governance regimes to protect global populations from heat, government and military officials are more likely to think about SRM or SAI in terms of weaponisation and international power struggles. 

Dr Danielle Young is an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Studies at The University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the geopolitical and security implications of emerging solar geoengineering technologies. 

Further reading: 

• 'Why we need to explore conflict and competition around solar geoengineering', PLOS Climate, 2026
• 'Who could deploy stratospheric aerosol injection? The United States, China, and large‐scale, rapid planetary cooling', Global Policy, 2025 
• 'How will capitalism react to climate collapse?', Land and Climate Review, 2025
• 'Who Can Govern from a House on Fire? International Order, State
  Responsibility, and the Problem of Solar Radiation Modification', Ethics & International Affairs, 2024
• 'Scientific models versus power politics: How security expertise reframes solar geoengineering', Review of International Studies, 2024
• 'Considering stratospheric aerosol injections beyond an environmental frame: The intelligible ‘emergency’ techno-fix and preemptive security', European Journal of International Security, 2023
• 'Do-or-Die: Should we be talking about geoengineering?', Land and Climate Review, 2022
• 'The Geopolitical ecology of solar geoengineering: From a ‘logic of multilateralism’ to logics of militarization', Journal of Political Ecology, 2020
• Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature, Jeremy Baskin, 2019
• ‘The entwined Cold War roots of missile defense and climate geoengineering’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2019

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Click here to watch the video recording of this interview. 

In her latest book, Ann Pettifor argues that we are not governed by politicians or diplomats, but “by wealthy and powerful players in markets based in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the City of London.”

These players, she says, largely either ignore the threat of climate breakdown, or see it as a struggle for resource control. The “unregulated actions of private actors and institutions in global markets have led to the increasingly rapid breakdown of the world’s climate and ecosystem.”

In a special episode of The Land and Climate Podcast, recorded live in front of an audience as part of London Climate Action Week, Bertie and Ann discuss the influence financial markets exert over climate policy, and strategies to reassert democratic control.

Ann Pettifor is a political economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis, successfully campaigning to cancel approximately $100 billion in debt owed by poor countries, and for co-authoring and advocating the Green New Deal. 

In January 2026, Verso published her latest book, The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet. Buy a copy from Verso's website before 31st July and recieve 30% off with the following discount code: CLIMATEREVIEW30 

Further reading: 

• Ann's Substack, System Change.
• The Case for the Green New Deal, 2019
• The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, 2018

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Most net zero policies and major scientific models rely on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to limit global heating to 2℃. The most commonly known methods include afforestation, bioenergy with carbon capture, and direct air capture - but various proposals are emerging for ocean-based CDR technologies. 

Could marine CDR offset emissions from sectors that cannot easily decarbonise, or are the costs and risks too great? Bertie sat down with oceanographer David Ho to discuss these questions, shortly after he returned from the 4th International Conference on Carbon Dioxide Removal in Milan. 

David Ho is a professor at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a lead author on the upcoming IPCC methodology report on carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture, utilisation and storage. His 2023 article for Nature criticising overreliance on CDR has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

Further reading: 

• 'Three challenges to marine carbon dioxide removal', npj Ocean Sustainability, November 2025
• Principles for responsible and effective marine carbon dioxide removal development and governance, 2025
• 'Marine carbon dioxide removal may be a future climate solution', Dialogues on Climate Change, November 2024
• 'Can coastal and marine carbon dioxide removal help to close the emissions gap? Scientific, legal, economic, and governance considerations',  Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, August 2024
• 'Deployment expectations of multi-gigatonne scale carbon removal could have adverse impacts on Asia’s energy-water-land nexus', Nature Communications, July 2024
• 'Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution — we need to change the narrative', Nature, April 2023

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