Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this episode, Nate is joined by energy expert and educator Jean-Marc Jancovici, who shares insights from his ongoing work advising governments and the public on the limits of our economic systems amid growing energy and ecological constraints.
Growth is often a pale substitute for value, which often takes a back seat to flackery, smoke, and mirrors. The brightest business minds of tomorrow will shrug off the constraints of the shareholder-primacy model and embrace new modes of finance and governance.
Stronger democratic institutions go hand in hand with stronger environmental policy. Understood in this way, democracy is both a tool and solution to the climate crisis.
We need to find ways to inhabit place and meta-place differently to the present, ways that are equal to the challenges of our times and what they’re revealing to us.
I’m more concerned with the course and speed of the Titanic (or why there even is a Titanic) than with the proper arrangement of deck chairs. As in Ishmael Chapter 12, my chief aim is not fairness and equity within the prison, but in dismantling the prison altogether—arguing that we oughtn’t be on the Titanic in the first place.
Being alive to the real world around us, seeing the love and the connection and the magic, is all we need in life, it is all we want. It is the meaning of life.
At the heart of everything this is what a strong social movement needs: people coming together to form meaningful and lasting friendships with a shared passion for system change and a willingness to push for that change.
Heroism and hope in these times are only possible against a backdrop of total relinquishment to the possibility that we won’t be able to control our own fate. But on a deeper level, this will be the way for us to reconnect with our origins, to become one again with the natural world.
As AI is “improved,” it has more “hallucinations.” When will the public and investors realize that reliability will always be a problem when there is no judgement based on lived experience?
The main lesson is that debt cancellation is a crucial component of a global energy transition, and substantial reconstruction funds must also accompany it. What would be the overarching rationale for the cancellation? To ensure that low-income countries constitute a strong and economically successful defense against climate change.
Modernity’s inevitable failure need not be humanity’s ultimate failure. Modernity never could have worked in the long term, and represents only a small sliver of human existence.
Democracy and environmental protection have two things in common: (1) they’re both supposed to be enshrined in the laws of the United States and (2) they’re both under severe attack right now. Asher speaks with Thomas Linzey of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights to uncover how the source code of the U.S. Constitution and the body of environmental laws that follow it are actually designed to allow corporations to override the will of the people.
