Background Briefing: December 27, 2021

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Background Briefing’s Feb 3, 2021 Broadcast on Polluters Trying to Blame Climate Change on Personal Responsibility Not the Fossil Fuel Industry

In this last week of the year between Christmas and the New Year as the year comes to a close, we are looking back on Background Briefing’s coverage of the major stories and issues of the year 2021. Today we deal with climate change and the accelerating warming of the planet after four years of willful neglect by Trump as the window of time to make radical changes away from our fossil fuel-based economy to a clean energy future narrows before global temperatures pass a tipping point of no return. We begin with a Background Briefing broadcast from February the third of 2021 when we spoke with Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State who contributed with other IPCC authors to the award of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace and is the author of The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy and his latest book, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. He joined us to discuss how the first climate war was about denialism and now the new climate war is underway in which the polluters are shifting blame away from themselves onto the people as though global warming is about personal responsibility not the result of the fossil fuel industry and the politicians they own who are resisting and delaying the overdue and urgently needed change to alternative energy.

 

Our Broadcast From May 24, 2021 With the Philosopher/Author of After The Apocalypse

Then we go to a broadcast of Background Briefing in which we covered climate change on May 24, 2021 with the philosopher/author, Srecko Horvat, the author of Poetry from the Future, Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism and The Radicality of Love in which we spoke about his latest book After the Apocalypse. We discussed how, since progress and catastrophe are two sides of the same coin, the combination of the climate crisis and nuclear risks presents humanity with a choice between radical reinvention of the world or its destruction.

 

The November 14, 2021 Broadcast on How Our Fragile Planet Hangs By a Thread With a Meek and Weak COP 26 Agreement

Then finally we go to a broadcast of Background Briefing from November 14, 2021 when we discussed how our fragile planet is hanging by a thread and the last thing it needs is a meek and weak COP 26 agreement. We began as the final agreement was emerging from the COP 26 climate summit in Glasgow in which China joined with India in watering down the language from a “phase out” of coal to a “phase down”. Nevertheless the COP 26 president claimed an historic agreement that keeps the 1.5 degree centigrade limit on rising global temperature “within reach”. Joining us was Laurie Laybourn-Langton, an award-winning researcher and writer and an Associate Fellow at the U.K.’s Institute for Public Policy Research where he leads a project developing policy responses to environmental breakdown. Previously, he was the Director of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change and has also worked in the House of Lords where he focussed on post-crash macroeconomic policy. He is the co-author of Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown.