Planet: Critical Folgen

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 planetcritical.substack.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 planetcritical.substack.com/subscribe

We can’t make this make sense.The world’s most famous face of renewable solutions spent a record-breaking amount to get Big Oil’s candidate into the White House. The ruling communist party of China is backed by Chinese billionaires. Political pundits are whipping up war fever without reason. The international rule book is merely scattered pages in the wind. And, in the midst of it, the Left is struggling to produce a coherent and collective analysis.David Edgerton, historian and author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, joins me to explain how we are in a unique period of history, pointing to changing geopolitical relations, emboldened authoritarians, oligarchic capitalists and flailing climate policy as evidence. We discuss the contradictions which make this world so hard to navigate, and probe the failures of Leftist discourse to make sense of the mess. This broad conversation covers war, productivity, dematerialisation, power and information — explaining why it’s so hard to keep up with a rapidly changing world.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 planetcritical.substack.com/subscribe