Patricia Kullberg hosts the final Old Mole broadcast of 2024, which includes the following segments:
War and Climate Crisis in the Middle East: Laurie Mercier speaks with Dr. Zeinab Shuker, who is an assistant professor of sociology at Sam Houston State University and a fellow at the Century Foundation. Her research focuses on comparative global political economy and climate change, with special emphasis on the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular. Shuker discusses the short and long-term environmental impacts of US and Israeli wars in the region.
For more on her work, see:
https://tcf.org/content/report/roundtable-gaza-in-crisis/
How Trump Can Make Things Worse in the Middle East
Global Warming and the Crisis of Imagination: In his 2016 collection of three essays, novelist Amitav Ghosh takes up a question of immense importance: what explains humanity’s collective failure to avert the existential threat posed by climate change? Capitalism and colonialism are the great structural forces that keep humanity on its suicidal path toward destruction. But, Ghosh argues, it is also our habits of thinking as they are shaped by the ideas of literature, history and politics, which in turn are driven by the hegemonic ideologies of those same forces of capitalism and colonialism. Patricia Kullberg reviews the book by Amitav Ghosh, called The Great Derangement.
Climate Change and the Law: On December 18th, Montana’s Supreme Court upheld a landmark ruling from a lower court last year. In the Held v Montana case, the Montana justices agreed that the state was violating residents’ constitutional right to a clean environment by permitting oil, gas and coal projects without regard for global warming. The lawsuit originally filed in 2020 by 16 Montanans —who are now ages 7 to 23 — was considered a breakthrough as the first climate youth lawsuit to go to trial in the US. In their Left & the Law segment, Jan Haaken and Mike Snedeker discuss the significance of this ruling and the legal climate ahead for cases before the courts with Trump returning to power.