Show Notes
It is becoming common for the fossil fuel industry to sue governments that attempt to decarbonise over “lost future profits.” They do so via an obscure part of international law called international-state dispute settlements (ISDS) that can allow them to extract billions in public money. Alasdair speaks to Eunjung Lee, a senior policy advisor at think tank E3G. The two discuss how ISDS began, how the international treaties came to being predatory, and what measures countries should take...
More from The Land & Climate Podcast
How is a monopoly organised? What does 'the economy' really mean? Is the conception of growth misleading? To answer these big questions, Timothy Mitchell sits down with Alasdair to discuss his latest book, The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow. The political theorist and historian, whose previous book analysed the political power of Big Oil, now seeks to re-examine modern understandings of the economy. He moves away fr...
Environmental journalist Edward Struzik returns to the Land and Climate Podcast to discuss his latest book, Animal Diaspora: Decoding Ice Age Mysteries to Reveal the Future of Migration. The book reconstructs migration patterns of animal populations from the last Ice Age, finding that millions of mammoths, reindeer, and early humans moved into the Americas after rapid periods of warming and cooling temperatures displaced them from their habitats. In conversation with...
Content advisory: this episode describes events that listeners may find distressing. Five years ago, in the small coastal town of Palma, Mozambique, 500 fighters from the ISIS-affiliated al-Shabab group stormed a community living and working beside a multi-billion-dollar natural gas field part-owned by France's biggest company, TotalEnergies. As insurgents swept through Palma, they beheaded and shot men, women and children indiscriminately, among them construction workers contracted to build ...
Colombia is one of the most unequal countries in the world regarding agriculture and land ownership. Violence in the Colombian countryside has often allowed corporate agriculture to displace land once held by small farmers, known as “campesinos”, and transform it into new frontiers for capital. Jaskiran Kaur Chohan tells Alasdair that “armed conflict undermines the productive systems of campesinos, which reinforces the corporate food regime and the modernisation of agriculture”. They discuss ...
With five and a half years of content, The Land and Climate Podcast has an overwhelmingly large back catalogue. We have always aimed to produce evergreen episodes, however, and many of our older interviews still have insights and relevance in 2026. This is why we are launching a new offering, alongside our usual programming, called 'In Review'. Alasdair and Bertie pick one topic per episode, playing highlights from our favourite interviews and discussing recent developments. First...