The Long History of Capitalism's Critiques (w/ John Cassidy)
Release Date: 10/22/2025
The Climate Pod
Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, , to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it! -------------------- Before the end of the year, I had my annual conversation with the always wonderful Evlondo Cooper, senior writer with the climate and energy program at Media Matters. In this conversation, we explore the new challenges of climate reporting that we saw unfold in the politically charged environment of 2025. We looke at the specific changes under the Trump administration and how a continued lack of diverse voices in climate coverage is helping to...
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Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, , to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it! -------------------- This week, we explore a fundamental question at the heart of the climate crisis: why are so many people willing to destory the environment? This is something I think about a lot and can be infurating. It's also a more complicated story when you really dig into the motivators. To find out why environmental crims happens, Dr. Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist and author of , is on the show. She explains the intersection of criminal...
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Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, , to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it! ------ This week, we're taking a deep dive into the UNEP fascinating, new with legendary climate scientist Sir Professor Robert Watson. We discuss the state (and accelerating pace) of global warming and environmental destruction. Watson explains how emissions continue to climb, what's happened since the Paris Agreement, the state of biodiversity loss, land degradation, and air pollution, and much more. He also explains the transformative investments and changes...
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Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, , to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it! ------------- We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement. In this new series from The Climate Pod, we're looking back on the global pact to determine: how have things changed since 2015 and what has the Paris Agreement accomplished? Our first episode was on . This week, we're looking at the role of adaptation. In the decade that has past since the Paris Agreement was signed, emissions have continued to climb and the globe has continued to...
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Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, , to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it! ------------- When talking about climate change, it's easy to get caught up in the scientific terms. Carbon emissions, parts per million, global average temperature, etc. But I always want to make sure I'm framing this conversation in the human impacts that result from the crisis. That's why I wanted to have Sharon Lerner back on the show this week. Sharon Lerner is a journalist and author at ProPublica, where she cover health and the environment and the agencies that...
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Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, , to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it! ------------- Another annual UN climate change conference is in the books. So, what did it accomplish? This week, The Guardian's Oliver Milman joins the show to breakdown the results of COP30. We discuss why many thought the conference was underwhelming, the final decisions on a fossil fuel phaseout, finance for adaptation, and improving Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). We also talk about the lack of agreement on combating deforestation, the United States...
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Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, , to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it! ------------- We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement. In this new series from The Climate Pod, we're looking back on the global pact to determine: how have things changed since 2015 and what has the Paris Agreement accomplished? To kick off the series, Dr. Kristina Dahl, vice president for Science at Climate Central and the co-author of the new report joins the show to talk about how our understanding and projections of extreme heat have...
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Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, , to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it! -------- Are global leaders trying to solve the wrong climate problem? In this episode, Professor Jessica Green aruges that too often governments and institutions have misdiagnosed the core issues of the climate crisis and are going about solutions in all the wrong ways as a result. In her new book, , she focuses on the power dynamics between fossil fuel asset owners and green asset owners and why it's critical to understand this as the central fight at the...
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Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, , to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it! This week, Justin Worland, senior correspondent at TIME, is back on the show to delve into the COP30 and what you will want to know about this critical convening of world leaders. As one of the top journalists covering climate change and international climate policy, Justin shares his perspective on the evolving nature of these global conferences and what's actually at stake this year in Brazil. We explore the shift from traditional negotiation-focused...
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Become a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, , to help support this show! It's fun. All the cool kids are doing it! This week, we dive into the transformative potential of a world less reliant on automobiles and ask the question: "why aren't we more honest about the harms caused by our car dependency?" We're joined by the amazing Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, co-hosts of "The War on Cars" podcast and co-authors of the new book, "Life After Cars," to explores the deep-seated cultural and economic ties to car dependency and the urgent need to change it. We look at how car culture...
info_outlineThere is no denying that capitalism has played a leading role in warming the planet. As the Industrial Revolution ushered in previously unseen levels of prosperity for some people, human beings' negative impact on the natural world exploded at a ferocious rate. While it's helpful for modern-day economists to look back at the faults and failures of capitalism as a way to explain the multitude of problems facing humanity in the 21st century, it's even more interesting to understand the critiques that economists of the 19th and 20th century had about capitalism and what they were experiencing in real time that led them to these incredibly-prescient conclusions.
John Cassidy joins the show this week to discuss his new book "Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI". John has written about economics and politics for The New Yorker for over 30 years. He's also the author of "How Markets Fail" and "Dot.Con: How America Lost Its Mind and Its Money in the Internet Era." John's new book covers 250 years of economic critiques of capitalism from well known economists like Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Joan Robinson, as well as some lesser-know, yet incredibly important critics like Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Rosa Luxemburg, JC Kumarappa, and many more.
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