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Sept. 17, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
21:28
How Capitalism Breaks The Planet: Kate Aronoff

To access the full episode, additional content, and support the podcast, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast  Jared and Nick host Kate Aranoff, author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet--And How We Fight Back, to discuss how the nature of our monetary system is set up to destroy the environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast, the weekender edition for our patrons.
Thank you for your support.
You're the absolute best.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Hauselman.
We've got a treat for the people, do we not, Nick?
Oh, yeah.
Great conversation.
Well, it's a great conversation, but it also, if you think about it a little hard, then it gets to a place where it doesn't feel so great.
It's a lot.
We have Kate Aronoff, who is the author of an absolute Stunningly good book, Overheated, How Capitalism Broke the Planet and How We Fight Back.
For my money, it is the best book on climate change and the climate catastrophe, an absolute expert on this topic.
And I just want to say for anybody who's listening to the preview of this, you're going to want to hear this episode.
I think this is the definitive person on understanding climate change, how things can actually get better, what we're actually dealing with.
I think this is an important conversation.
Sure.
Well, let's make sure we tell them where to go.
Yeah, go over to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast.
Again, your support is what keeps this show ad free and editorially independent.
We appreciate your help all the patrons who are supporting us.
You have been coming up huge lately and we're just so grateful.
And so now we're going to go over we're going to hang out with Kate Aronoff and we'll be back in just a minute.
Hey, everybody, we have an incredibly special guest today.
I've been waiting to have this conversation for a while, and we're really, really lucky to have Kate Aronoff, who covers climate for the New Republic and is the author of a really incredible book titled Overheated, How Capitalism Broke the Planet and How We Fight Back, and very recently was named a reporting fellow for the Climate Social Science Network.
Congratulations on that, Kate, and thanks for being on here.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, good to be here.
So, I've been wanting to talk to you for a while about this.
I think Overheated is one of the best books out there about, I think, undoubtedly the most important issue that we are facing.
I think it takes a very large, frightening topic, it explains it, it talks about where this thing came from, and I think in terms of people who are covering the developing climate crisis, I think that You have been an excellent source of this, if not one of the absolute best sources.
And I wanted to ask, first and foremost, how did you get into this?
What is it about the climate that necessarily, like, piqued your interest?
How is it you decided to tackle one of the biggest, most complicated, dangerous things that humanity has ever faced?
Sure, well thank you so much for all the nice words.
I'm tempted to just end the interview there.
You should, that should be it.
All those nice things.
How did I get into this?
Yeah, it's a good question because I think I come at this from a slightly different angle than I think people tend to, you know, come to the climate issue in that, you know, I don't I don't have any sort of special relationship to nature did not sort of grow up hiking or, you know, never have felt like a You know, a real sort of commune with that side of things.
But I sort of came into climate stuff my freshman year of college and sort of came to campus really wanting to do some kind of activism, wanting to, you know, get involved in, you know, something left-leaning in some capacity, like a lot of people do, you know, when they're 18.
And my Preference really was, you know, to work on sort of labor issues, to work a little bit with a group called SLAP, Student Labor Action Project, and that was really where I thought, you know, I would spend a lot of my time in college and was not, you know, particularly interested in climate issues, in part because that was about 2010 and a lot of what the focus was of campus climate activism, and to some extent the environmental movement
But more generally was about composting and recycling and kind of riding your bike more.
And that was, you know, just not very exciting to me.
You know, I had a sort of working knowledge of the climate crisis and just thought those things seemed a little out of touch with what seemed to be happening.
But I had the opportunity in my freshman year to go visit with folks who were resisting mountaintop removal coal mining.
in West Virginia.
And going there, sort of hearing from people from the area, you know, who were involved in these fights, really just sort of brought into focus how connected questions of political economy were, questions of labor were with climate and the things that were driving this crisis, right?
I mean, in West Virginia, you have these epic sort of labor struggles through the early 20th century to, you know, make working conditions better and calm ends, right?
And to fight for, you know, things like, you know, and to just horrific, horrific working conditions and to, you know, give working people kind of a shot.
And so, you know, have this whole sort of political economy structured around this one industry, and it just really shapes things in this fundamental way.
And you see the threads of that through Today, right, companies just sort of walking away because they don't value don't value the lives or the land or, you know, people who have really built a tremendous amount of wealth, both for the owners of those companies, for this country.
And so I think that that trip really, you know, solidified and brought together a lot of threads I was I was interested in and then worked on the fossil fuel divestment movement and getting my college and, you know, trying to encourage other people to start campaigns to get their college colleges to take their university endowments and divest from fossil fuels in their portfolios.
I worked on that for four years and then realized I was better at writing than I wasn't organizing, and so I decided to become a reporter instead.
You know, I was thinking, I think the challenge here is to convince people that alternative energy sources could be a moneymaker.
And I'm wondering why that seems so hard to get enough people in this country to believe.
Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean, and I think this math has changed a little bit in the last couple of years.
I mean, it's pretty recent, right, that we see the rise of sort of ESG, these green asset classes, that pretty big segments of capital are interested in.
And the last, I would say, three, four years in a way that was not true, right, when I first started looking at this stuff.
And so now, we're starting to reach the point where solar and wind really are kind of cost competitive with oil and gas in many parts of the country,
You see utilities, for instance, are voluntarily, not of the goodness of their hearts, but are starting to, in some cases, skip past what was known as the bridge, natural gas, and start using much more renewables as part of their plans for the future, just based on a financial calculation about what that means.
That trend is starting to happen too slowly, not fast enough as it would need to be to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius or 1.5, certainly.
But you see this real resistance sort of cropping up from entrenched interest in the oil and gas industry, in the coal industry.
And so the sort of market logic, which I sort of go to task with in the book, but I do think market forces are important.
I think they're a powerful driver of of, you know, shifts, certainly in a capitalist society.
But what we find over and over again, looking at climate is that's not enough, right?
Is that, you know, there are these really sort of thorny political fights that need to be won in order to, you know, make this massive, massive transition happen.
Yeah, and one of the things that I really appreciate in your work, and you know, it feels like when people are covering climate or discussing it, they almost treat it like this is a thing that just happened.
Like it's just a natural side effect of, you know, we're humans.
That's what we do.
We change the climate.
You know, that's how it happens, even though this is obviously A side effect of the industrial revolution, post-industrial revolution.
And really, there's no way to talk about this honestly and maturely without talking about capitalism.
About that we are in an environment, an economic system that constantly has to grow.
It has to absorb any and all resources in pursuit of constant growth.
Can you talk a little bit about how these two things are inextricable?
How, like, not only do we have to talk about market forces, which is what a lot of people were, like, talking about, oh, we'll give tax cuts, or we'll invest in this, but it's actually a natural, or unnatural, I suppose, side effect of this giant capitalistic system.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, capitalism, I think, has this really sort of inborn And so you can look at different iterations of how capitalist economies have operated.
I mean, a big part of the story, especially in the last decade or so, has been about neoliberalism, the sort of set of rules by which certain capitalist economies can operate.
But if you look more broadly at how just capitalism functions in general, it has a sort of endless thirst to go and find new frontiers to extract value from.
And that is really core to understanding what's gotten us to this point, right?
This sort of endless thirst, which requires sort of endless material usage, endless fossil fuels.
And in our case, it's really sort of incomplete to look at
climate crisis and try to think about it as removed in any way, right, from this economic system, which has really shaped this economic system, this belief system, political ordering that has really shaped our world in a really fundamental way, which is not to say that other sort of belief systems don't shape the world, right, don't have an impact on the environment, but sort of the trajectory that we've been on for the last, you know, many centuries, and in particular, since this great acceleration, right, since about mid century,
is really a product of capitalism, right?
Is a product of this sort of endless drive for accumulation. - You know, I'm in California and we're just going off of this failed recall, which reminds me of Gray Davis being recalled in the early 2000s.
I don't know, it might be like before your time and what your study, but you know, there's a direct connection between him getting recalled and the Enron scandal in Texas.
And I'm good, you're nodding your head.
So I'm wondering if, you know, there was price spiking, there was a lack of energy that was manipulated by Enron to, you know, make more money for them.
Have we seen more instances of those things?
I find it funny or amazing that here's, you know, energy and politics completely intertwined to the point where we lost our governor over this, basically.
So I'm wondering, we're still seeing this, right?
And are we seeing any hope that somehow we can regulate that or stop that from happening?
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Enron.
I actually thought at some point of including a lot more on Enron in the book, and my chapter in Utilities was initially like double the length that it was, and it's already, it's as is, I think, the longest chapter in the book.
But the Enron story is so interesting, right?
Because, you know, it's sort of told as this story of Just kind of crony capitalism, right?
That, you know, this really dastardly set of actors had a relationship with the Bush administration and manipulated prices to crash, you know, California's energy market.
And then by some bizarre series of events, you know, Gray Davis gets recalled and, you know, a Republican elected.
But it's more, it's more common than not, right?
In terms of, you know, how particularly energy markets are manipulated.
And there's a guy, there's an academic name, Gavin Banky, he's written a great book about the Enron scandal sort of telling this story, right?
That it can't be understood neatly as a sort of, you know, evil villain, evil villain narrative when sort of Enron's whole approach was really making markets out of what should be basic rights, right?
It's sort of introducing a profit logic into the provision of a very essential service.
And Enron was very innovative in finding new ways to do that and finding new sort of opportunities for profits, particularly in natural gas, but also in wind, right?
I think people forget about the sort of huge amount of business Enron had in wind.
And, you know, how interested they were in that space.
And, you know, I have this chapter in the book that looks at sort of, you know, vaporware tech companies and connecting that to the fracking story.
But I think, you know, the kind of moral of that is just that there is always a sort of tendency to scheme, to grift, to, you know, make a profit off of things that, you know, should not be profitable, right?
In terms of, you know, something like energy in the case of Emrahim.
But that is just how, you know, that is the kind of place you end up when you decide, right, and this was a set of choices that were made over the last century, when you decide that very basic services should be subject to profit-making.
And, you know, Enron is a sort of natural endpoint of that, as sort of, you know, comical as some of its villains are.
Yeah, it's weird when you start looking for solutions in a market based way, it sort of goes ahead and breeds corruption.
It's kind of odd how those types of things happen.
On that note, I would be interested to hear from you as someone who covers this, focuses on it.
You know, I think a lot of people, climate change and climate catastrophe particularly, is such a massive thing.
That it's almost hard to grasp.
It's almost hard for for a human to imagine a future.
It's weird I was doing the research on the Industrial Revolution and basically even then the climate was changing like within 50 years and immediately everyone's like I don't worry God will take care of it.
You know there's some sort of a divine thing that will take care of it.
Now it feels like we've almost Reckoned ourselves into believing that if we just get back into the Paris Accord, that'll fix things.
Or I keep seeing these ads that drive me insane.
It's like the IKEA stuff where it's like, oh, if you just get a reusable product, all of a sudden we're going to stave off the apocalypse.
But I think one of the larger things I would love to hear what you think about this is for us to avoid catastrophe, for us to actually solve this, it would take a Societal revolution on a scale that I don't think most people understand or really are able to reckon with, which almost keeps us from being able to do it.
Is it hard to think about this, research it, talk about it, while meanwhile understanding that there is some sort of an epoch that needs to occur for this to change?
Yeah, I mean, I've been doing this for a long time, so in some sense I'm a bit desensitized to it, I think.
But, you know, that's a very human, I think, longing, right?
For there to be some quick solution, for there to be something that, you know, can solve the problem all at once.
And there's this sort of very individualistic consumer version of that, right?
If you turn your lights off, if you buy this reusable product, if you drive an electric car, And then you can do that.
Create the change that's needed for decarbonization.
But, you know, there's versions of this that I have probably fallen prey to myself.
That, you know, we'll have some big policy change, right?
That will really make the difference.
Or this one quick trick.
Or, you know, in my, like, headier kind of young anarchist days, like, the revolution, right?
It's going to be the thing that saves us from the climate crisis.
But it's just harder than that, right?
It is really a sort of Societal shift in how How we get our energy and sort of the direction that electrons are going and how we get around and the types of places we live, right?
And this is, you know, not necessarily a change for the worse, right?
It doesn't mean, sort of, doesn't have to mean this kind of collective belt tightening or that the government is going to ration out how many hamburgers you can eat, but can mean investing in things like public housing, right?
That has good insulation, that is very energy efficient, you know, that is Also more fun to live in right than a lot of the housing that people have to live in today, which is really drafty and people, you know, spend a tremendous amount of their income on their energy bills.
So I think a lot of, you know, the exciting work that I've seen in the last couple years is sort of putting that kind of positive vision into.
Into the conversation, right?
This doesn't have to mean, you know, making your life worse in order to take on this crisis.
And I think that's, you know, potentially for thinking about how to do something about this.
That's maybe a more promising avenue than yelling about how bad it is, right?
Which I think can be, for me at least, kind of personally exhausting.
But isn't that also, I mean, what you were saying, I think, about the personal sort of sacrifice part of it, it feels like the responsibility for climate change has been pushed off on the individual to consider through consumer choices, as opposed to, I mean, nation states.
Like, we're literally talking about something that only the United States and China and all the major contributors to carbon can possibly even begin to deal with.
And so as a result, it's almost as if I think the hamburger thing is one of the dumbest things that has been going, right?
Like, obviously we can do our parts, but that's not going to stave off apocalyptic scenarios.
And it pushes it on to people and it makes people think that their lives are going to get worse.
But isn't the answer that your lives will get better if somehow or another we manage to figure this out?
Because it'll figure inequality, it'll figure production, it'll mess with all of this, right?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, the only thing on offer for the 21st century is very radical change, right?
So we don't do anything about the climate crisis.
We see just a fundamentally unstable climate that is, you know, magnifying the types of disasters we've seen this year, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, all of this just really expanded into realms that we can't really, you know, know the full length of, right?
We can't really know All of what that will look like, because we are basing our projections on the climate that we've known, and all the science tells us that the climate that we're going into is one that is fundamentally pretty unpredictable, right?
And that is only more so true the more the earth warms, right?
And so that's the sort of radical path that we're, you know, kind of going down right now.
And there's the other kind of radical path, right, of changing our economic system, of changing sort of all these things that we were just You're just talking about in the real tragedy of climate politics, right?
Is that at the time when it emerges into the popular consciousness and, you know, about the late 80s, there's been this real sort of decades long organizing project that is very successful, you know, decades long organizing project by business conservatives, by Companies that were fighting back against the New Deal order to really refocus the realm of politics, right?
To de-emphasize that the state can do really big positive things and have a really big positive impact in people's lives and focus that down to focus the unit of society down to the individual, right?
Margaret Thatcher has her famous quote about there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families.
And Reagan, you know, takes that up in the United States, of course, right, and to really just eviscerate this idea that the state can or even should, right, do things for people or do things to make our world a better place and that that, you know, job is best left, if not to individuals, then, of course, to private companies to make those changes.
And so, yeah, I mean, the only sort of actors which can deliver climate You know, climate policy that's anywhere near the scale of the problem are nation states, right?
Or is government policy?
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