Planet: Critical Folgen

Militarisation, isolationism, extractivism.It looks like we learned nothing from the 21st century, as the powers that be are approaching looming civilisational collapse by cranking up the gears on the very machine which caused it. We’re re-entering a period of dog-eat-dog in a resource scarce world, which could result in the return of serfdom.That’s the warning from Antonio Turiel,  physicist and a mathematician who works as an environmental scientist at the Institute of Marine Sciences at the CSIC in Spain. On this big picture episode, we cover everything from fossil fuel production to re-armament to male supremacy, with Antonio cutting through noisy data to reveal exactly how resource scarcity is driving the violent shift in global politics, and what we can expect to happen in the coming years including military colonisation, food shortages, oil crashes, and rampant inequality.Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Choose a paid subscription to support independent, paywall-free journalism. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

I recently interviewed Paul Hawken for Mongabay and want to share the moving conversation with you here. Celebrated author, thinker and entrepreneur Paul Hawken joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss his new book, Carbon: The Book of Life. He argues that the jargon and fear-based terms broadly used by the climate movement alienate the broader public and fail to communicate the nuance and complexity of the larger ecological crises that humans are causing.In this wide-ranging discussion, Hawken explains that carbon — the fourth most abundant element in the universe, and a fundamental building block of life — is being maligned in a way that distracts from the root causes of ecological destruction in favor of technological solutions that are not viable at scale, or international agreements that prioritize carbon accounting.Jargon is useful for communication of concepts within the scientific community, but when applied to messaging for the general public, it fails to communicate the problems humans face effectively: “We have to create a climate movement that is actually the human movement. And the human movement is humans that are not separate and distinct from nature.”Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.Planet: Critical is 100% independent and community-powered. If you value it, and have the means, become a paid subscriber today. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

Free speech is under attack.Banning books, cutting library funding, attacking Wikipedia. The authoritarian regime of the tech-bro backed hard right doesn’t want to protect your free speech. It plans on eliminating freedom altogether. When it comes to dismantling democracy, it’s far easier if your populace is divided and uneducated with limited access to diverse opinion. Enclosing our information spaces, both online and physically, is a key strategy in undermining our rights, minimising our power, and draining our wallets. Researcher, writer and software engineer, Molly White, has been tracking exactly how these tech billionaires have been dismantling the information space so their political allies can dismantle the political space, boosting their profits while we suffer.Molly writes the newsletter Citation Needed and runs the websites Follow the Crypto and Web3 is Going Just Great. She joins me to the radical political agenda of these tech bros, how cryptocurrency helped buy the election, and how much money Trump and his family are making off of meme coins. We then explore the ideological failings of these power brokers, and why they’re determined on denying us access to information. Finally, we examine how to build resilient, reliable, open-access information systems, alternatives which protest our the erosion of our collective web of knowledge—and protect our fundamental human rights. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe