Opinions vary on podcasts and their utility (1). Me, I use them so I’m not alone with my thoughts – what a yikes that would be – while I feed moorhens (2).
Besides Letter from An American (Sept 26 was brilliant – on what the ‘Battle’ of Wounded Knee actually was) there are four others worth your time
On a recent Bridging the Carbon Gap Peter Sikora is clear and blunt about what ‘climate’ activism can achieve, can’t, the barriers. I loved his pushback on the whole notion of hope.
Two from a new series called The Energy Revolution are particularly on good on the UK situation. The podcast is
“Hosted by Sulaiman Ilyas-Jarrett, former Head of Policy and Strategy for Renewable Electricity Delivery at the UK Department for Energy and Senior Advisor at No10 Downing Street. He is now a Policy Fellow at the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy.”
First there was “1800 to the present” with “Arthur Downing, Director of Strategy at Octopus and author of the forthcoming book Power and the People: a history of energy in Britain since 1800.” A wide-ranging discussion – the stuff that resonated most for me (don’t forget, I am a history geek) was about the four phases of the UK energy system over the last 200 years.
Then today I listened to Simon Evans, who was at ENDS but has been at Carbon Brief for the last decade or so. A really useful conversation about the nature of the UK media. My intuitions – that the FT is v. good and the Telegraph is comedically bad (Private Eye have been covering its descent into total swivel-eyed lunacy) – were backed up, so we both must be right. Predictably no conversation about the deeper ways of thinking about why the media is the way it is- Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model, for example (which, to be clear, is not the be all and end all, but is a useful tool to think/see with).
Finally, Chris Hayes “Why is this Happening?” had a really interesting guest, Costa Samaras, who was neck deep in the Biden Administrations Inflation Reduction Act (a huge effort to fund green technologies etc). Samaras clearly knows his stuff (he is an energy wonk’s wonk) and – which does not always follow – is able to communicate complexity without descending into jargon and waffle. An extremely useful hour. Only irritation was the idea that some of what Trump’s gang (it should surely really be called the Vought–Miller gang?) “makes no sense” – for example ending a 7 billion dollar scheme to get poor/marginalised communities installing rooftop solar.
It makes perfect sense if you want captive consumers. I am reminded (as I often am) of the Stamford Raffles anecdote by permaculture guy Bill Mollison.
When Sir Stamford Raffles went to Singapore, he went by way of Indonesia and saw how self-reliant people were with the palms that provided them with everything they needed. He said ‘These people are ungovernable’. There was nothing the government could give them that they wanted or needed. So what had to be done was clear. Cut the fucking palms down, so they became dependent, and hence governable. You can’t govern independent people. They have no need of anything you can bring them.”
So, anyway, all four are very much worth your time. Alongside Letter from an American, obvs.
Footnotes
(1) “To anaesthetize people? To feel they’re learning something? To put them to sleep. So they can exercise and not feel like idiots. Occasionally to learn something. To keep themselves entertained while doing busy work of some kind.”
(2) But I should be doing more narrating of vomit drafts.