261 - Building Postcarbon Futures (feat. Billy Fleming)

The Queen and King of Jetlag recount tales of airplane toilets, surprise geckos and AI abominations on this week's episode. Then (16:32) Billy Fleming saves the podcast by joining us to talk about his marvelous new book, Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice and Energy Transitions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026). We start with the legacy of the New Deal and how what actually happened in the infrastructural boom of the FDR years is often misremembered. We move from there to talking about the optimal and necessary scales at which building postcarbon futures must proceed and how to balance bottom-up and top-down models and actions. We talk about the fetishization of efficiency and economization logics, the need for designs that serve multiple purposes at once, and why we must make hard choices today about what kinds of industry belong to our planetary future. We close talking about the case studies in the book that may help to inspire more bold experiments in postcarbon future-making and Billy's new project on recarbonization and the importance of managed decline. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.   Book credit: Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions. By Billy Fleming. Edited by Jennifer Sigler. Designed by Cristian Ordóñez. 480 pages. Published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Distributed by Columbia University Press. How to order it: CUP: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/building-postcarbon-futures/9781558444560/ Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=978-1558444560 Amazon: https://a.co/d/0cH9KxsB Other links discussed in the conversation: Climate and Community Institute: https://climateandcommunity.org/ Living New Deal: https://livingnewdeal.org/ Cristian Ordonez (book designer): https://studio.cristianordonez.com/ Book Tour/Events (schedule is updated regularly): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gh6taC3BlR6EfoAjD-255rdCYwv7T78XUXcThPOUah0/edit?usp=sharing