The Planet Can't Wait for the Next Election #150

For our 150th episode we set aside the week's news cycle and talked about still does not get the attention it deserves: climate change, and why our political systems are structurally incapable of dealing with it.The problem is not a lack of information. The Club of Rome warned about unsustainable economic growth in 1972. Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius wrote about it in 1908 in his book "Worlds in the Making". Average heat days in Central Europe have risen from three per year in the 1950s to ten to twelve now. Two hundred thousand people died in Europe from extreme heat in the last four years alone. The science has been clear for decades. The political will has not followed, and the reason is straightforward: governments operate on four-year election cycles, and climate change in centuries. There is no political glory in prevention, and no visible enemy to fight.We discuss why climate change is psychologically harder to mobilise around than COVID or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, why the masses and their leaders share responsibility for the inaction, and what the interaction between tribal politics, neoliberal managerialism, and the collapse of intellectual leadership has done to our collective ability to respond. We also talk through Dario's experience bringing an energy efficiency proposal to his Berlin apartment block, which produced a 95 percent vote in favour and a useful microcosm of every obstacle that climate policy faces at every scale. As Naomi Klein put it: our economy is at war with many forms of life on Earth, and only one of those sets of rules can be changed.This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights & Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at [email protected].