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.
In much of the media, the importance of the legacies of empire and colonialism are often dismissed, with the public conversation dominated by the "culture war" elements, from debates about statues to institutions like the National Trust becoming "woke". The implication within much of this discourse is that empire and colonialism are features of the past, and should be left there.
In reality, it is far from that simple. Our guest for Episode 18 is legal scholar Kojo Koram, whose first book, Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire, unpacks how the legacies of empire continue to structure every part of our unequal global economy, from international tribunals that protect corporate interests to the systems that leave countries trapped in cycles of debt. Rather than a thing of the past, Kojo expertly breaks down just how present empire really is, and critically, how it has shaped both the roots and impacts of climate and ecological crisis.
Around the world, politics is incredibly polarised, but if there’s one thing politicians of all major parties can agree on, it’s growth — that their political rivals failed to deliver growth, that we need more of it, and that getting it will solve all of our problems, from inequality and poverty to crumbling public services and stalling investment.
But not everyone agrees. For a growing movement of post-growth and degrowth economists, economic growth is neither neutral nor desirable. Instead, many increasingly call for the abandonment of our growth-dependent economic model on the basis that unfettered growth is driving our climate and ecosystems to the brink.
My guest today, Hans Stegeman, is an unusual figure in this community — a banker who wants finance, and the wider economy, to move beyond growth for the sake of the planet. Hans is Chief Economist at Triodos Bank, as well as a leading writer and thinker on post-growth economics.
In today’s episode, Hans and Adrienne discuss degrowth, the myth of green finance, and why breaking the rules of mainstream economics is the first step to a sustainable future.
A lot has happened in the six months since we launched this project. It feels like every week of 2024 has packed a decade’s worth of news. In just the past few weeks, we've seen crises hit the French and German governments, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, a day of martial law in South Korea, and, of course, Trump’s reelection to the White House.
Amidst all of it, climate has generally taken a political backseat. This is despite 2024 having been a bumper year for the climate as well — whether it’s record breaking investment in energy; the hottest year on record; the highest annual emissions on record; or an alarming number of supposedly “once in a lifetime” storms and heatwaves.
With all of this in mind, progressive and independent media voices covering climate feel more important than ever. We’re therefore delighted to welcome James Meadway, host of the hit weekly economics podcast Macrodose, to the Break Down. For today’s crossover episode, James and Adrienne take a look back at a tumultuous 12 months.
If you're not already familiar with Macrodose, you can find their feed wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you for joining us this year on The Break Down. We’ll see you in 2025.
Further Reading
Ned Beauman, Venemous Lumpsucker, Sceptre, 2022
Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm, "Oil Prices, Oil Profits, Speculation and Inflation", Institute for New Economic Thinking
Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger, "Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change", Global Environmental Politics
Isabella Weber et al., "Inflation in times of overlapping emergencies: Systemically significant prices from an input–output perspective", Industrial and Corporate Change
Jinshan Hong and Bhuma Shrivastava, "Yes, Everyone Really Is Sick a Lot More Often After Covid", Bloomberg
In 2024, we’re set to break a major climate threshold for the first time: this will be the first calendar year in which global average temperatures breach the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold enshrined in the Paris Agreement. Importantly, while one year at this temperature doesn’t mean all is lost, it does fire a profound warning shot over our faltering progress on mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis.
While every fraction of a degree matters when it comes to the climate, the consensus is clear that above 1.5C the severity of impacts and risk of tipping points like mass coral reef die off or the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet become substantially higher. You might therefore expect this to be front page news. Yet compared with its gravity, it has barely made headlines. If, like us, you’re wondering why — as it turns out, this was always part of the plan.
In this episode, Adrienne and Andreas Malm break down the concept of “overshoot”, how it’s tied up with the power of fossil fuels, and the future of climate politics, from ecofascism to geoengineering.
Andreas Malm is an associate professor at Lund University, an activist and the author of several books, most recently Overshoot: How The World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, co-written with Wim Carton.
In the wake of the US election, hot takes and autopsies of the Democrats’ fairly spectacular loss are a dime a dozen. Amid the swirl of diagnoses there has also been real fear about what a Trump presidency means for the climate — an issue that felt almost entirely absent from either campaign, despite its significant role in Biden’s policy platform.
How should we understand what just happened? What comes next for climate policy, both in the US and, through its huge influence, in countries around the world. And crucially, in a moment where it feels so politically sidelined, how can we build a broad base of popular support for action on climate?
Joining us on The Break Down to work through these questions is Matt Huber, a Professor at Syracuse University and author of “Climate Change as Class War”. If the book’s title is any indication, Matt makes the case that climate and ecological crisis are fundamentally class issues, and that any chance of political success means taking climate out of the world of technocrats and experts, and connecting it to the everyday issues that shape people’s lives.
Amid the threat of “Project 2025”, ongoing genocide in Gaza, and a nation-wide battle over reproductive rights, to name a few major issues, the climate crisis has been considerably sidelined in the US election taking place on November 5th. But even if it’s not grabbing headlines, what the United States does — or does not do — on climate has profound implications for the entire world.
So where does climate stand in this election? With Kamala Harris praising both the Green New Deal and her role as a champion of fracking, how should we understand the Democratic position on climate? What is the legacy of the Inflation Reduction Act, and does it even register with voters? What, if anything, is the future of the Green New Deal? And, for the many people who don’t feel represented by either major party, is voting for a third party — or not voting at all — the answer?
These are big questions — here to help us answer them are two brilliant guests, journalist Kate Aronoff and Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid. In this special episode, Adrienne, Kate and Waleed unpack the chaos and the stakes of the US election, and what it means for climate action in the US and beyond.
In a 2023 referendum, the people of Ecuador voted 59 per cent to 41 per cent to stop exploiting oil in the Yasuní region, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, with more tree species in one single hectare than in all of the landmass of Canada and the US combined. It was a massive break with the global status quo, in a year when fossil fuel use around the world reached record highs and profits soared.
However, the referendum was not an overnight success. It built on years of struggle, including the failed Yasuní-ITT initiative undertaken by then-president Rafael Correa in 2007, which asked foreign governments to pay Ecuador not to exploit the oil in this region.
So how did it happen, and what lessons can the rest of the world learn from Ecuador? Here to answer these questions, and many more, is Andrés Arauz, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research and, formerly, a politician in the Ecuadorian government.
In this special episode, Adrienne speaks to Andrés about Ecuador’s pursuit of climate and environmental justice, as well as the barriers facing lower income countries in the context of a highly unequal global economic system. From the International Monetary Fund to the rules of international trade, Andrés unpacks the ways that injustice is built into global capitalism, and lays out a blueprint for a radical alternative.
We have become incredibly good at producing food. In doing so we have transformed our planet. Yet when we go to the supermarket or eat at a restaurant, the supply chains, labour and environmental impacts that went into our food are all but invisible.
Those impacts are huge. Today, humans and livestock make up 96 per cent of all mammals. Agriculture consumes about 70 per cent of global freshwater, and is responsible for some 80 per cent of deforestation. And yet despite producing more than enough food to feed everyone on earth, every day a minimum of 800 million people go hungry, while a fifth of all food produced for human consumption goes to waste.
Clearly, something has got to give. Thankfully, here to help us out of the mess is Dr. Sonali McDermid, a climate scientist and Chair of the Department of Environmental Studies at NYU. In this episode, she breaks down how climate and ecological crisis threaten our food systems — and how we can feed the world without wrecking the planet.
In a 2004 essay for the New Left Review, theorist and literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote: “Utopias are non-fictional, even though they are also non-existent. Utopias in fact come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being.”
Today's episode of The Break Down explores the idea and the power of utopian fiction with guest Kim Stanley Robinson, the acclaimed science fiction author whose most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, offers a harrowing and detailed vision of how we might respond to the climate crisis.
Among other things, Adrienne and Stan discuss the politics of science and technology; the place of speculative fiction in an era dominated by nostalgia and the importance of utopia at a time when our political imaginations are so constrained.
Like The Ministry for the Future itself, this episode is dedicated to the late Fredric Jameson.
Followers of The Break Down may remember our very first episode, in which Adrienne spoke to the brilliant Brett Christophers about the many and varied reasons why — despite all the hype about how cheap renewables have become — the transition to renewable energy cannot be left to the market and the profit motive. What that interview didn't leave us with, however, was an answer to the obvious question: if not the market, then what?
Here to make the case for a simple but radical solution are Chris Hayes and Melanie Brusseler, the Chief Economist and US Programme Director, respectively, at Common Wealth, a progressive UK based think tank and our partners in this series. In today’s episode, Chris and Melanie break down how public ownership can transform our energy system, providing not only a faster and cheaper path to 100 per cent clean energy, but also the foundations of a more just and democratic economy overall.
As a listener of The Break Down, chances are you’re living in a political system that could be defined as “liberal”. But what does “liberalism” really describe? Is it about democracy? Free markets? The protection of individual freedom? Ask ten different people, and you’re likely to get ten different answers.
According to Chris Shaw, liberalism can boiled down to a system oriented around the “bourgeoisie” or, to put it more simply, the “middle classes”, in which technocratic governance is preferred to the messiness of politics, in which the individual takes precedence over the collective, and in which the protection of markets and private enterprise takes priority.
In this episode, Chris breaks down the ways in which liberalism has placed a stranglehold over our political imaginations; why this is so crucial when it comes to the climate crisis; and what a climate politics that takes class seriously would look like.
Chris Shaw is an Associate at the University of Sussex and former Director of Research at Climate Outreach, where he spent nearly a decade developing strategies for communicating climate change. His most recent book is called “Liberalism and the Challenge of Climate Change”.
"To the question how shall we ever be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer.”
These words were written fifty years ago by philosopher Hannah Arendt, but are just as relevant to the present moment, in which our political leaders and systems continue to fail to grapple with climate and ecological crisis at the scale or urgency they demand. The degree to which these systems are failing has led many to question whether capitalism, democracy or even the nation-state are incompatible with a sustainable future, or whether they can survive accelerating climate change.
In today’s episode, Geoff Mann breaks down these political questions with Adrienne, focusing on the political ‘futures’ sketched in his acclaimed 2018 book “Climate Leviathan”, and asks what kind of politics we need to build a more just and sustainable world.
Geoff Mann is a Distinguished Professor in geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author, with Joel Wainwright, of the acclaimed Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (Verso, 2018). His work is currently focused on the role of uncertainty in policy and politics.
If you listen to this podcast, chances are you’ve heard of the global target of “net zero emissions” by 2050. You’ve probably also heard about how off track we are from meeting it. But what if I told you we’re even more off track than you might think, because thanks to some effective lobbying, governments don’t have to count the emissions from their militaries, despite their being some of the world’s foremost consumers of fossil fuels. Like me, you might be wondering how that happened, and what special treatment for the military might mean for our ability to tackle climate and ecological crisis.
Here to answer these questions and many more is Khem Rogaly, Senior Researcher at Common Wealth, our partners in The Break Down. In today’s episode, we break down the complex, often hidden, but vitally important relationship between militaries and the climate crisis, from their long-standing role in upholding the fossil fuel economy to the enormous extent to which governments prioritise military spending over other urgent tasks — not least addressing a climate crisis that makes us all more insecure.
Khem Rogaly is a Senior Researcher at Common Wealth whose work focuses on the military industry, green industrial planning and housing. He has previously worked on decarbonisation and energy efficiency at E3G and on housing policy at Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Further Reading
Khem Rogaly et al., "Less War, Less Warming: A Reparative Approach to US and UK Military Ecological Damages", Common Wealth & Climate + Community Project.
Khem Rogaly, "Welfare to Arms: Shareholder Payouts in the Arms Industry Since 2010", Common Wealth.
Neta Crawford, "Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change and the Costs of War", Watson Institute, Brown University.
Rachel Havrelock, "Pipelines in the Sand: The Middle East After Sykes-Picot", Foreign Affairs.
Capitalism could not exist without the power and structure of the law — that’s the simple but radical argument made by my guest today, Katharina Pistor, law professor at Columbia University, and the author of The Code of Capital: How The Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.
On today’s episode, we break down how the law ‘encodes’ capital and invisibly structures our world, from giving corporations the rights of a person, to obscure treaties that allow fossil fuel giants to sue governments when they attempt to act on climate. Ultimately, I ask Katharina whether the law can be harnessed as a force for progress on climate and ecological crisis, and what needs to change to break the legal deadlock.
Katharina Pistor is a professor at Columbia University Law School, where she is the Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation. She is the author of several celebrated books, most recently of The Code of Capital (Princeton University Press).
What would you say a human life is worth? According to the US government, for an American it’s about $7.2 million, compared with the global average of approximately $1.3 million. If you’re Swiss though, you’re worth a pretty penny at $9.4 million.
While these estimates might sound absurd, they're important to understand: these kinds of figures and the models that produce them are a core part of how mainstream economics understands and shapes policy, and they have had a significant role in how governments have responded (or failed to respond) to the climate crisis. In this episode, Adrienne and celebrated economist Ha-Joon Chang break down what mainstream economics gets wrong, and why it has proven so ill-suited to a challenge like climate and ecological crisis, not least by reducing complex decisions to abstract cost-benefit analyses.
Ha-Joon Chang is an economist and Professor at SOAS University of London. Ha-Joon has been an advisor to several international organisations, and is the author of many books, most recently ‘Edible Economics’.
“The stakes could not be higher.” These are the recent words not of climate activists, but of a coalition representing major oil and gas companies in a letter to the US Supreme Court. The context? They’re asking the Court to block dozens of lawsuits that seek to hold these firms to account for their role in driving the climate crisis, including by awarding damages for the costs of extreme weather events.
But how would this actually work? While it’s becoming more frequent, extreme weather has always been a part of our planet’s natural variation - so how can we know which events are part of a new normal as a result of climate change - and which are just ‘normal’? For a long time, it was hard to give a clear answer. But thanks to the work of today’s guest, Dr. Fredi Otto, that’s all beginning to change. In this episode, Adrienne and Fredi Otto break down "attribution science" - a relatively new field that seeks to examine the role of climate change in extreme weather events. Through their work, we’re gaining a much clearer picture not only of our changing planet, but also of how climate change is inescapably tied up with inequality and injustice.
Dr. Otto is Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and co-founder of World Weather Attribution.
NOTE: Since this episode was recorded, the case of Klima Senniorinen vs. Switzerland was ruled in favour of the plaintiffs, affirming that the government had violated their rights by failing to act on climate, in a landmark judgement.
In this special episode, Adam Hanieh explains the threads linking the global oil economy; more than a century of Western imperialism; contemporary American interests in the Middle East; and the response of governments in the US, UK and much of Europe to the ongoing genocide and ecocide in Gaza. Ultimately, he explains why these overlapping histories demand shared solidarity between the climate movement and the movement for a free Palestine.
Oil is fundamental to our understanding of the climate crisis. But despite its starring role, the dominance of oil in the global energy system is a relatively recent phenomenon, with the industry only really taking off after the Second World War. So how, in just a few decades, did oil become so integral to American power and to our understanding of global capitalism?
In this episode of the Break Down, Adrienne and Adam Hanieh break down the history and geopolitics of oil and imperialism, and explore how the petrochemicals and plastics that now permeate our lives, from the foods we eat to the clothes we wear and everything in between, are making it increasingly difficult to challenge the power of the fossil fuel industry.
Renewable energy is often held up as the great success story of climate change, with policymakers and journalists constantly celebrating that clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels. By their logic, these plummeting costs mean that when it comes to the energy transition, the economics are essentially sorted, and we're now on an inevitable path to a world of clean energy. But is it really that straightforward?
On the first episode of the Break Down, Adrienne speaks to Brett Christophers, an acclaimed author and economic geographer at Uppsala University, about his latest book, The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Solve the Climate Crisis. In it, Brett breaks down the energy system and its critical role in confronting the climate crisis, and makes the case that in a system structured around private ownership and "free" markets, profit — not cheapness — is ultimately what matters.