Eric Holthaus: What Will the World Look Like in 2030?
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global crisis.
On today’s episode, Eric Holthaus, journalist and author of The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming, discusses what needs to be done to confront the other crisis: the climate emergency.
From the episode:
Eric Holthaus: I do think that on our current path, without changing much, we’ll go headfirst into an unlivable world, unlivable for the majority of the people on the planet, not unlivable for the people who have engineered this system for themselves and for their own benefit. So far, that’s the status quo that we have right now. We’re heading in that direction. And so there should be a warning.
I think we have felt that warning over the last 18 months or so as we’ve given more and more attention to people on the frontlines of the climate emergency and realize the overlap between, for example, communities that live in and around oil refineries have been dealing with toxic water in air for decades or people that live in California dealing with wildfires or people that live in Bangladesh that are dealing with record cyclones. These people are at the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the climate emergency, and if enough crises overlap at once I feel like it will be a breaking point. We’ve seen a glimpse of that this year, but I think there is room definitely for it to get a lot worse than what it is right now.
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Eric Holthaus is the leading journalist on all things weather and climate change. He has written regularly for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist, and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Support for this podcast comes from W. W. Norton, publisher of Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend. For decades we have dreamed of building an automobile that can drive itself. But as that dream of autonomy draws close, we are discovering that the driverless car is a red herring. When self-driving technology infects buses, bikes, delivery vans, and even buildings, a wild, woollier, future awaits. Available wherever books are sold.
