Tag: environment

Could Collective Action Against Bad Actors Stop Climate Change?

We begin with the pressure on Brazil from the G-7 to stop burning the Amazon rainforests and assess whether this could be the precursor for collective action against a bad environmental actor or the beginning of climate wars. The author of the new book “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming”, David Wallace-Wells, a columnist and deputy editor at New York Magazine where he has an article “The Glimmer of a Climate New World Order”, joins us. We discuss whether climate change could become a universal touchstone of geopolitics or a source of great power rivalry and whether we could see a form of “ecofascism” with governments running roughshod over citizen’s rights or “ecosocialism”, a rejection of economic growth and a de-coupling of growth, which is the current imperative of corporate capitalism, from progress. With Brazil’s President Bolsonaro’s plan to deforest the Amazon poised to release as much carbon in a decade as the U.S. and China emit in a year, it turns out he is not the world’s only climate villain and we will examine other environmental horrors underway around the globe which should spur us all into action.

Do Brazilians Have Buyer’s Remorse Over Bolsonaro

Then we speak with James Green, the Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Professor of Modern Latin American History and the Director of the Brazil Initiative at Brown University about whether Brazilians have buyer’s remorse after voting for Bolsonaro who has much of the world united against him because of his reckless plunder of the Amazon. Furthermore a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice believes the jailed ex-president Lula should get a retrial since evidence has emerged that the judge who convicted him, now Brazil’s Justice Minister in Bolsonaro’s cabinet, colluded with the prosecution.

Again Trump Behaves Badly at the G-7

Then finally we get a recap of the G-7 Summit at which again America’s man-child president behaved badly after having thrown Starburst candies at Angela Merkel at the last G-7 then un-endorsed the agreed-upon summit document while hate-tweeting the host, Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau. This time the boorish bully Trump ruined the Saturday dinner for the G-7 world leaders by insisting Putin be re-admitted to the G-8. Heather Hurlburt, the Director of the New Models of Policy Change project at the New America Foundation’s Political Reform Program joins us to discuss her article at New York Magazine, “Trump’s Contradictions Dominate and Disrupt Another G-7”.