This month is all about degrowth! I’ve made a few videos a while back talking about degrowth, but it’s been multiple years since I’ve actually made a dedicated video on the topic. So, I felt it was high time to dig back through the politics of degrowth. Below you can the video I made on the subject, as well as three quotes and three links I found useful along the way.

Three Quotes:

1. “Planned degrowth or deaccumulation and a shift to sustainable human development is now unavoidable in the wealthiest countries, whose per capita ecological footprints are non-sustainable on a planetary basis, if organized civilization is to survive. The scale and tempo of the necessary ecological-energy transformation, as emphasized in scientific reports on climate change and other planetary boundaries, indicate that in order to avert disaster a revolutionary transformation of the entire system of production and consumption must be implemented under the principle ‘Better Smaller But Better.’”

   — John Belamy Foster

2. “A coordinated plan out of this crisis must entail, as the agrarian sociologist Max Ajl has noted, the disappearance of sectors like “the military, non-renewable energy production, chemical fertilizers,” among others, while “agroecological food production, public transport, primary healthcare, and renewable energy, need to grow incredibly fast…while remaining decommodified.”37 Furthermore, the Global North will have to pay the ecological debt with which it has robbed the Global South, thus assuming demands made by the latter in relation to climate justice.”

   — Alejandro Pedregal and Juan Bordera

3. “Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring

   the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces

   inequality and improves human well-being”

   — Jason Hickel

Three Links:

1. What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification (Jason Hickel)

2. Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development (Monthly Review)

3. Capitalism’s Addiction To Growth Means Civilisational COLLAPSE (Novara Media)

In addition to Means TV, you can also support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month I decided to turn back to a topic that I haven’t talked about in some years: solarpunk! I recently read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance and found the political strategies to achieve abundance quite lacking. So, I thought exploring what true abundance looks like through the beautiful art of solarpunk artists would be a fun and fulfill exercise. You can check out the video below if you’re interested in learning more!

As always, you can find three quotes and three links I found useful during my research process.

Also, I have some very exciting news! I’m now officially on the anti-capitalist, worker-owned streaming service Means TV. This has been in the works for a while and the day has finally come when I get to announce it :). I’ve got a bunch of bonus videos and release my videos a month early on there, so if you want to check it out head over to this link: https://means.tv/programs/OCC

Three Quotes:

1. “We live with abundance not because we choose but because the economic system is designed to create this kind of abundance. When the maximization of profit is completely disconnected from satisfaction of needs, we end up with an economy that produces useless stuff just to keep going.”

   — Vlad Bunea

2. “If the state can derisk private capital, it could start derisking commons, instead. By combining mass mobilisation and concerted strategies, workers and citizens can convince them to do that. In the book’s second part, the authors sketch an institutional strategy to achieve this called “public-common partnership” (PCP).”

   — London School of Economics

3. “Building popular protagonism—in which, through democratic deliberation and collective action, the popular classes become the main characters in social re-transformation—is the task that can orient the left through the protracted work of anti-capitalist transition.”

   — The Nation

Three Links:

1. We Need Radical Abundance (The Nation)

2. Abundance Liberalism or Social Efficiency: A Review of 'Abundance' (Cosmonaut)

3. Cooperation Jackson Presents - "The Build and Fight Formula": Introduction (Democracy @ Work)

In addition to Means TV, you can also support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month, I decided to dive into the muck that is the Epstein files. I held off researching/writing about him for a while, because I felt like I didn’t have much to say that hadn’t already been said, and it was such a heavy topic, but after reading more and more, I felt like there was something that was missing in a lot of the mainstream analysis of Epstein. The gist of what I was hearing and reading was that Epstein was an aberration in the world of capitalist elites. He was uniquely terrible in the way he used and abused those around him. To me, a person who reads about how capitalists use and abuse people and the planet to accumulate more and more profits, Epstein seems like a run-of-the-mill ruling class man existing under patriarchal capitalism. So, I made a video sharing my thoughts. You can find it below. Let me know your thoughts.

As always, you can find three quotes and three links I found useful during my research process.

Three Quotes:

1. “Rung by rung, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as a potent form of currency. His girlfriends, lovers and even exes helped elevate his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets and gained him entree to prestigious organizations. And deliberately or not, some of them enabled him as he constructed a sex-trafficking operation that would later ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women.”

   — The New York Times

2. “Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation. The earth’s forest fire. Potentially a good thing for the species.”

   — Jeffrey Epstein

3. “I don’t want [Bill Gates] to ask me to support his African causes…He is brilliant and so is Warren [Buffett], can’t they come up with a better foundation structure and goal, then [sic] to make the ludicrous statement that every life is equal.

   — Jeffrey Epstein

Three Links:

1. The Epstein Network (Epstein Mapped)

2. Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich (New Yotk Times)

3. 'A good way of dealing with overpopulation': Epstein files reveal how the rich fuel climate denialism (Fast Company)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

The finale of the three-part Earth Liberation Front series is finally out! I’ve been working on this series since the end of September, so it feels so good to finally have the whole series available to watch on YouTube! This final part explores the aftermath of the Earth Liberation Front. We follow the fate of Daniel McGowan through the carceral system, look at Joseph Dibee’s tumultuous life on the run for more than a decade, and examine how the Green Scare influenced the crackdown on eco-saboteurs seeking to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Hope you enjoy the last part. And if you haven’t already, definitely check out part one and part two.

Three Quotes:

1. “Some of these people in my group were sort of cut off. They just cut off from the world, and I feel like cutting yourself off from the world can create… some real big theoretical mistakes. Not even theoretical, applied mistakes that we made because we cut off, we were out of touch.”

   — Daniel McGowan

2. “Violence, certain types of violence (if you define property destruction as a type of violence), can be necessary to break down the inertia and the resistance of a deeply entrenched order and all the power interests that come with it. The scale of the transformation of our society that we need have never in history been accomplished without confrontation.”

   — Andreas Malm

3. Similarly, lionizing “heroes” can be a way for the rest of us to let ourselves off the hook: as we are obviously not heroes of their caliber, we need not hold ourselves up to the same standards of conduct. It is a disservice to glorify McGowan, Exile, Sadie, Peter Young, and others like them; in choosing anonymous action, they did not set out to be celebrated, but to privately do what they thought was necessary, just as all of us ought to.

   — Crime Thinc

Three Links:

1. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (Full Movie) (Marshall Curry)

2. Dousing the BBC’s Fake News Before It Can “Burn Wild” w/ Former ELF Member Daniel McGowan (Green and Red Podcast)

3. From Environmentalist to “Domestic Terrorist” with former Earth Liberation member Daniel McGowan (Green and Red Podcast)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

You can also listen to a podcast version here (or wherever you get your podcasts!)

(For sources and citations, check out the video and show notes— for some reason, footnotes can’t copy into Substack)

The missiles struck on February 28, 2026. Then came the war.

Israel and the U.S. unleashed a brutal and, despite official claims to the contrary, indiscriminate air assault on the people of Iran over the next few months. The first day set the tone: a missile strikes the all-girls primary school in southern Iran, killing 168 people.

Bombs fall, thousands die. Sadly, this violent incursion isn’t an isolated event. Just a month before this war began, the Trump regime invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president in the dark of night. This is imperialism. But in the age of Trump, in the age of fossil fascism, are these violent escapades just the opening salvo? The Iran war might just be the beginning, because as long as the United States perceives itself as the global hegemon, and as long as fossil fuels remain the primary lubricant for the engines of capitalism and military power, the U.S. will continue to burn and plunder.

The Spiral of Contradictions

The Iran war didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. It is also not just the result of Trump’s idiocy or rogue whims, although those certainly do factor into the timing. This new violent conflagration in West Asia has deep roots in the past. Indeed, the history of Iran is one of spiralling contradictions and escalating tensions. A history wrapped up in play and counterplay between Iran and the imperialist reach of the United States. Indeed, from the 1950s onward, the development of Iran cannot be understood without the U.S.

The history that brings us to where we are today starts long before 1953, but 1953 gives us enough context to understand the current situation.

And it starts with a coup.

On August 19th, 1953, ex-Iranian general Fazlollah Zahedi, with the aid of the CIA and MI6, ripped the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power.

By 1953, Mosaddegh had gotten unruly. With the parliament’s support, he took back and nationalized British-controlled oil reserves in 1951, and for British and U.S. oil corporations, that could not stand. So, the two clandestine wings of the British and American empire took down Mosaddegh and installed their own puppet dictator more amenable to the multinational corporations from the Imperial core siphoning oil from their soil. That dictator’s name was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. For 26 years, the Shah ruled under the auspices of the United States, essentially acting as a puppet dictator for the Western superpower in the area.

Importantly, in 1954, the Shah signed a consortium agreement with the United States and England, allowing 5 U.S. oil companies a 40% share in oil, while Royal Dutch Shell and BP would take 20%, leaving just 40% to Iran. A deal that would last until 1979, and would allow Western oil multinationals to get rich off Iranian oil. But as the years dragged into 1978, the people of Iran grew restless and angry. The imperialist meddling could not stand.

In 1978, over ten thousand seminary students and residents marched en masse to the homes of religious leaders, urging them to join the fight against the Shah, who they saw as an unjust, imperialist puppet regime. But the firm hand of the Shah couldn’t countenance this dissent. The government deployed armed forces and shot live rounds into the crowd, killing many. Estimates put the death toll that day anywhere from 5 to 300. Regardless of the exact number of deaths, this was a spark that would ignite an inferno. By 1979, 10% of Iran flocked towards an uprising against the Shah that coalesced around Islamic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

With this new, and decidedly anti-American, Islamic Republic in power, a new era of tension would stretch on in the Middle East. One that saw the U.S. and Israel, which Nixon’s secretary of state called “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk,” work to contain and pry open this new threat to the stability of markets. Specifically, oil markets. This took the form of Reagan sending arms to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, the heightening of sanctions under the Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and Trump administrations, border skirmishes, and military exploits like the 12-day war in 2025 and the assassination of Iranian Major General Soleimanii. Finally, the pressure from these contradictions grew too intense, and the gasket blew on February 28, 2026.

Peak Oil?

But of course, this brief history of spiralling contradictions that have now led to outright war, isn’t floating in a void. The Iran war is materially grounded in resources, in finance, in profit, in labor, in the logic of capitalism. And in the 21st century, nothing is more materially important to the smooth flow of capital accumulation, to the undying acquisition of profits, to financial markets, than oil. Iran, Venezuela, and so many of the United States’ other imperialist exploits are grounded in the fundamental nature of our fossil capitalist economy: oil is king. Oil, and more broadly, fossil fuels, are what make our capitalist economy tick. Fossil fuels allow capitalists to bring production to where the work is cheapest and enable them to exploit their labor as long as needed. In short, as Andreas Malm describes in Fossil Capital, fossil fuels give the owners of production flexibility in time and space to maximally exploit workers and ultimately achieve maximal profits. Not only that, but oil is crucial for military superiority. All the war machines that the U.S. spends billions on each year are useless without a steady flow of oil to turn them on and keep them running, and all that fossil fuel use means that if the U.S. military were a country, it would rank 47th in terms of emissions. Ahead of countries like Sweden.

In our current global order, the core hub of the capitalist exploitation machine, through which the tendrils of multinationals stretch their imperialist arms across the globe, is the United States. In short, the United States’ supremacy, both economically and militarily, is reliant on a stable flow of fossil fuels, especially oil. As one professor of political science puts it:

“Oil has continued to play a role in American foreign and military policy because the United States has feared that political disruptions in the Middle East—internal instability, the threat of extremist fundamentalist Muslim control in the Middle East, if that came about—could pose a threat to American oil supplies that especially would hurt our prosperity.”

This desire for stability can be seen in this chart. When we look at this graph, the United States by no means holds the majority of oil reserves. Indeed, the countries on this chart are overwhelming ones that the U.S. deems “enemies of the state.” And part of that has to do with the slow decline of easily available oil in the United States. Starting in the 1960s, as the United States leaned more heavily on fossil fuels for every aspect of our economy, oil production increased, but as more and more oil flowed out of U.S. soil, fossil fuel companies had to dig deeper and use technologies like advanced oil recovery to get more product. Essentially, the days of oil gushing up from wells were over in the United States, and it became more costly to wring oil out of the likes of shale fields and deepwater rigs. It seems as if the U.S. has reached the moment of peak “easy oil,” and now we’re scraping at domestic wells with techniques like advanced oil recovery, which uses carbon dioxide pumped into wells to eke out the last drops of oil. And the U.S. has gotten very good at wringing out those last drops. Over the last two decades, it increased its oil exports substantially to the point where the U.S. was exporting more oil than it imported in 2020. The first time it had done that since 1949. But again, this wasn’t an easy process, and the eyes of multinationals like Exxon wandered outward across the Atlantic, because out there, there was oil. And not just any oil. Easy to pump oil.

From Nigeria to Iraq, U.S. multinationals have pried open foreign markets to siphon the lush reserves into their coffers. Iran contains more than 11% of the world’s proven oil reserves. Venezuela, notably, is home to the largest proven oil reserves in the world. This is telling. But as we will soon see, “it’s oil” is a vague oversimplification of the imperialist dynamics playing out in West Asia right now.

Regardless of whether peak oil or peak “easy” oil has or will happen, those inside the U.S. government feel it is happening. Back in 2007, “a seventy-five-page report…argued that almost all studies had shown that a world oil peak would occur sometime before 2040.” And it’s clear that Trump’s interest in both of the U.S.’s most recent violent attacks is to pry open resources for American markets…

Watch the video version of this essay to hear the rest!

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

Definitely check out the video below, and if you’re itching for part three right now, it’s available to my Patreon supporters a month early!

Three Quotes:

1. “The No. 1 priority in the Domestic Terrorism Program, which I run, is ALF/ELF.”

   — Jim Jarboe (Deputy Director of the FBI)

2. “If you can label a group a terrorist, it’s then not that hard to make the general public quiescent when you go out and exterminate them.”

   — Bron Taylor

3. “A major hypocrisy exists when the U.S. government labels an organization such as the Earth Liberation Front a terrorist group while simultaneously failing to acknowledge its own terrorist history… If the U.S. government is truly concerned with eradicating terrorism in the world, then that effort must begin with abolishing U.S. imperialism.”

   — Craig Rosebraugh (ELF Media Liason)

Three Links:

1. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (Full Movie) (Marshall Curry)

2. Dousing the BBC’s Fake News Before It Can “Burn Wild” w/ Former ELF Member Daniel McGowan (Green and Red Podcast)

3. From Environmentalist to “Domestic Terrorist” with former Earth Liberation member Daniel McGowan (Green and Red Podcast)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

Three Quotes:

1. “Some of these people in my group were sort of cut off. They just cut off from the world, and I feel like cutting yourself off from the world can create… some real big theoretical mistakes. Not even theoretical, applied mistakes that we made because we cut off, we were out of touch.”

   — Daniel McGowan

2. “Violence, certain types of violence (if you define property destruction as a type of violence), can be necessary to break down the inertia and the resistance of a deeply entrenched order and all the power interests that come with it. The scale of the transformation of our society that we need have never in history been accomplished without confrontation.”

   — Andreas Malm

3. Similarly, lionizing “heroes” can be a way for the rest of us to let ourselves off the hook: as we are obviously not heroes of their caliber, we need not hold ourselves up to the same standards of conduct. It is a disservice to glorify McGowan, Exile, Sadie, Peter Young, and others like them; in choosing anonymous action, they did not set out to be celebrated, but to privately do what they thought was necessary, just as all of us ought to.

   — Crime Thinc

Three Links:

1. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (Full Movie) (Marshall Curry)

2. Dousing the BBC's Fake News Before It Can "Burn Wild" w/ Former ELF Member Daniel McGowan (Green and Red Podcast)

3. From Environmentalist to "Domestic Terrorist" with former Earth Liberation member Daniel McGowan (Green and Red Podcast)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month’s video dives into the idea of progress under capitalism— has our economic system actually bettered the lives of people, and perhaps more importantly, are there more effective systems out there that might bring a more comfortable live to more people. Check out the video below to find out more, and (as always) I’ve placed three quotes and three links below that I found useful during my research process.

Three Quotes:

1. “Simon Szreter, one of the world’s leading experts on historical public health data, shows that industrial growth through the 19th century triggered not an improvement in life expectancy but rather a striking deterioration. ‘In almost every historical case,’ Szreter writes, ‘the first and most direct effect of rapid economic growth has been a negative impact on population health.’”

   — Jason Hickel

2. “Because the myth of an unstoppable technological progress, with a predetermined direction, conceals the fact, that beyond every development there are decisions, that can be changed, and that behind every decision there are real people with names, addresses, interests and above all: bank accounts.”

   — Fabian Scheidler

3. “The problem is that the global economy has been designed to funnel the vast majority of income into the pockets of the rich. Remarkably, only about five per cent of all new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60 per cent of humanity. ”

   — Jason Hickel

Three Links:

1. Progress and its discontents (New Internationalist)

2. Breaking the chains of delusion -Technological progress mythologies and the pitfalls of digitalization (degrowth.info)

3. Jason Hickel - Degrowth: The Path to Progress (Renegade)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

For this month’s video, I decided I needed a break from all the horrible climate (and world) news. So, I looked through the last decades to see how far we’ve come, and, when we take a bird's eye view, we’ve actually accomplished a lot. That being said, we still have a longgggg way to go if we are to stave off catastrophic climate change, but that can be for another video. This month’s video is all about celebrating the wins we’ve made so far. Hope you enjoy, and as always, below the video you can find three quotes and three links I found useful during my research process.

Three Quotes:

1. “We are all called upon to balance a sense of danger with a sense of possibility, to pack some of both in our kits and not let one outweigh the other.”

   — Rebecca Solnit

2. “Solar installations are growing so fast that more solar panels were installed in the past three years than were deployed in the entire history of human civilization through 2020. And that number is on track to nearly double in the next three years.”

   — Yale Connections

3. “Renewables will usurp coal as the world’s leading source of power generation in 2025, according to a new analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The share of renewable technologies in the global electricity mix is expected to reach 35% in 2025 — a 5 percentage point increase in two years. On the other hand, coal’s share will decline to 33% next year, per the IEA’s projections, which are often criticised for underestimating the growth of wind and solar PV.”

   — Progress Playbook

Three Links:

1. The Progress Playbook (The Progress Playbook)

2. How much progress have we made on climate change? (Simon Clark)

3. Yes, There Has Been Progress on Climate. No, It’s Not Nearly Enough. (The New York Times)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month’s video is actually a spiritual successor to a video I made back in 2019 about the military industrial complex. I figured it was high time for an update, so I dug into the research and came out the other side with the video below. I wrote the script and made this video during the summer. A lot, and also very little, has changed since its making, but hopefully you still find it illuminating. As always, below you can find three quotes and three links I found useful during my research process.

Three Quotes:

1. “The Pentagon budget increased 91 percent in real terms between 1998 and 2011, while worldwide, total state military budget outlays grew by 50 percent from 2006 to 2015, from $1.4 trillion to more than $2 trillion. (This figure does not take into account the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on intelligence; contingency operations; policing; bogus wars against immigrants, terrorism and drugs; and “homeland security.”) During this time, military-industrial complex profits quadrupled.”

   — Truthout

2. “[War] expenditures accomplish the same purpose as public works, but in a manner that is decidedly more effective and more acceptable (from the capitalist point of view). . . . War outlays, in fact, have become the modern substitute for pyramids. They do not compete with private industry and they easily permit the employment of all those whom it is considered necessary to employ. True, this type of consumption (waste) of surplus labor brings with it a series of difficult political and economic problems. These, however, appear to be solvable; in any case, they can be postponed. The deluge may come but the next generation, not the present one, will have to face it.”

   — Walter J. Oakes

3. “As tools of war have grown more sophisticated since the Second World War, the U.S. government has subsequently grown more dependent on its relationship with what used to be called “industry,” in order to maintain American military edge. The resulting demand for hardware, software, and consulting expertise made the corporate producers of these new tools of war key diplomatic facilitators. They sustained government alliances, end-ran chronic labor shortages, and built up U.S. capacity for what amounted to indirect state governance across the Middle East, but in Israel/Palestine in particular.”

   — Zaynab Quadri

Three Links:

1. War and warming: The effects of climate change on military conflicts in developing countries (1995–2020) (Jeremy Ko et al.)

2. The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending (John Belamy Foster et al.)

3. Who funds the forever wars of America? (Hakim)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month, I decided to take a more hopeful approach and examine what an ecosocialist world could look like. Obviously, all of the different sectors I talk about in the video (free public transit, zero-carbon low-cost housing, a planned economy) probably won’t be an exact blueprint for an actual global ecosocialist system, but I feel like it’s important to envision and dream. Imagining better worlds keeps me going and energizes me in these dark times. So, if you’re interested in learning about an ecosocialist vision, check out the video below, as well as three quotes and three links I found useful along the way!

Three Quotes:

1. “Spending on fossil fuels, armaments, private jets, sport utility vehicles, second homes, and advertising would need to be cut in order to provide room for growth in such areas as regenerative agriculture, food production, decent housing, clean energy, accessible health care, universal education, community welfare, public transportation, digital connectivity, and other areas related to green production and social needs.”

   — John Bellamy Foster

2. ““The goal of oppressors is to limit your imagination about what is possible without them, so you might never imagine more for yourself & the world you live in. Imagine something better. Get curious about what it actually takes to make it happen. Then fight for it every day.”

   — Ashley C. Ford

3. “Our job is to show that replacing capitalism is not enough, as replacements can be feeble and temporary. What comes next needs to address the current system’s flaws and be better in so many ways that the status quo simply will not make sense anymore. The alternative needs to make capitalism outdated, pointless, and obsolete.”

   — Sabrina Fernandes

Three Links:

1. An Ecosocialist Strategy to Win the Future (Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung)

2. What would socialism in the United States look like? (PSL)

3. Story Seed Library (Story Seed Library)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month, I decided to celebrate the potential of solar power. Nudged along by the good people behind sunday.earth, I thought I’d examine what solar could mean for our energy system, in terms of cost, all the way from surviving the aftermath of a climate-fueled hurricane. After making a series of pretty depressing videos, I needed a little bit of hope in my life. So, I looked at the community solar model blossoming throughout the United States, the decentralized rise of balcony solar in Berlin, and the solar microgrids in Puerto Rico that have built resilience in the face of a failing grid and harsh hurricanes. If you need a little climate-oriented pick-me-up, you can find the video below, and (as always), three quotes and three links I found useful along the way.

Three Quotes:

1. “According to PowerLines, a nonprofit working to reduce electricity prices, about 80 million Americans have to sacrifice other basic expenses like food or medicine to afford to keep the lights on. And it’s about to get even worse: Utilities in markets across the country have asked regulators for almost $29 billion in electricity rate increases for consumers for the first half of the year.”

   — Vox

2. “Over the last 5 years, Germans have installed one million balcony solar systems with a combined capacity of 1 GW.”

   — Distilled

3. “Bangladesh has implemented the world’s largest off-grid solar power programme, with 20 million people across the country benefiting, according to the World Bank.”

   — The Progress Playbook

Three Links:

1. Utilities are shedding crocodile tears over community solar ‘cost-shift’ (Utility Dive)

2. Why your energy bill is suddenly so much more expensive (Vox)

3. Balcony solar took off in Germany. Why not the US? (Grist)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month, I decided to mull over some possible ways to break free from the consumerist society we find ourselves in. We’re constantly told to buy buy buy. Marketing screams at us from every nook and cranny, and when we finally cave, the useless crap we do buy pollutes the air and piles up in the landfill. Considering that consumerism ultimately comes from capitalist overproduction, it’s not enough to just stop buying. We must build a world that doesn’t push us to buy at every waking moment. We must build a world outside of capitalism. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the video below as well as three quotes and links I found useful along the way.

Three Quotes:

1. “Capitalist forces expend great resources to ensure that we are socialized to identify ourselves with what we consume far more than with what and how we produce which creates a barrier between us and critical revolution. In fact, Americans are subjected to over 20 times the global average of targeted advertisements.”

   — Climate and Capitalism

2. “The imperatives of capital (i.e. profit maximisation and accumulation) are in direct contrast with people’s interests (i.e. material needs and social aspirations) [32]. Much like gravity compels an apple to fall, this class antagonism breeds grassroots resistance.”

   — Climate Vanguard

3. “Capitalism produces too much, yes, but also not enough of the right stuff. Access to essential goods and services is limited by commodification; and because capital seeks to cheapen labor at every opportunity, particularly in the periphery, the consumption of the working classes is constrained.”

   — Monthly Review

Three Links:

1. Overconsumption as Ideology - Implications for Addressing Global Climate Change (Diana Stuart et al.)

2. The Eco-Socialist Party (Climate Vanguard)

3. Ecosocialism and consumerism (Climate & Capitalism)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

It takes me a fair bit of time to make videos, and this month’s video on Trump and fossil fascism was no different. I wrote the script a couple of months ago, and a lot has happened since, especially the “Big, Beautiful Bill” that is heading to the White House for Trump’s signature as I write this. Needless to say, this bill is a disaster for the environment as well as the working people of the United States. This shouldn’t be surprising. As I discuss in the video below, Trump’s regime is barrelling straight towards a fossil fascist regime of violent oppression and planetary destruction. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the video as well as the three links and quotes I found illuminating during my research process.

Three Quotes:

1. “Fascism is a politics of palingenetic ultranationalism that comes to the fore in a conjuncture of deep crisis, and if leading sections of the dominant class throw their weight behind it and hand it power, there ensues an exceptional regime of systematic violence against those identified as enemies of the nation””

   — White Skin, Black Fuel

2. “Masses in their thousands streamed to fascism. It became an asylum for all the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned. And what they no longer hoped for from the revolutionary proletarian class and from socialism, they now hoped would be achieved by the most able, strong, determined, and bold elements of every social class. All these forces must come together in a community. And this community, for the fascists, is the nation.”

   — Clara Zetkin

3. “Trump’s top officials encompass thirteen billionaires, with a total net worth, according to Public Citizen, of as much as $460 billion, including Elon Musk with a wealth of $400 billion. Even without Musk, Trump’s billionaire cabinet has tens of billions of dollars in assets, compared to the $3.2 billion in assets of his previous administration.”

   — Monthly Review

Three Links:

1. The Struggle Against Fascism (Clara Zetkin)

2. On Disaster Nationalism & The Climate Crisis (The Break Down)

3. The U.S. Ruling Class and the Trump Regime (Monthly Review)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month, I decided to dive into the concept of “overshoot.” A term that has increasingly been wielded by liberal capitalist governments to make it look like they are dealing with climate change and runaway emissions, but instead are just acquiescing to fossil capital and business-as-usual. This month’s video and the research that came out of it were inspired by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s book Overshoot, which I highly recommend reading. You can find the link for the book below, alongside the usual quotes and links I found useful during the research process.

Three Quotes:

1. “The logic of overshoot scenarios, therefore, lies with the possibility that future carbon-removal costs will be discounted (relative to today’s mitigation costs) to an extent that it makes sense to acquire a carbon debt now.”

   — Nature

2. “To argue that we can safely overshoot 1.5°C, or any amount of warming, is saying the quiet bit out loud: we simply don’t care about the increasing amount of suffering and deaths that will be caused while the recovery is worked on.”

   — The Conversation

3. “For many people, the climate that they will experience after overshoot will not be what they had experienced before it — even if global mean surface temperatures return to levels before the overshoot.”

   — Nature

Three Links:

1. Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Andreas Malm & Wim Carton)

2. The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C (The Conversation)

3. Overshooting global-warming limits is a risky idea (Nature)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month, I decided to tackle Elon Musk. He’s been in the news a lot lately, but I selfishly wanted an excuse to do a research deep dive into his emerging fascistic politics and the destruction he’s unleashed on the American government. The video below is the result of that research, alongside three quotes and three links I found useful along the way.

Three Quotes:

1. “In an industry increasingly built around ideas, hype was everything. As the Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, said at the time: ‘There’s no place like Silicon Valley, where your talents can be magnified, and the projection of that magnification is cash.’ The worshipful treatment of entrepreneurs thus directly brought them more power, and it continued to inspire young men to follow the same path.”

   — The Guardian

2. “Trump’s administration promises lower taxes and looser regulations, allowing Musk a longer leash for the kinds of environmental violations that his Texas Gigafactory has racked up. Trump offers a standing invitation for billionaires willing to come onside—particularly if they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected. Musk also has billions of dollars in federal contracts. Having a prominent role in the White House could sweeten and expand those deals. His DOGE job might offer invaluable opportunities to privatize large parts of the federal government and thus create even more business there for contractors like SpaceX, particularly in the defense sector.”

   — The New Republic

3. “‘It just shows [Musk is] an opportunist, really,’ said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House. ‘He now downplays the dangers of climate change, but I think in the back of his mind he’s thinking about using government contracts for geoengineering as the costs of climate change become so undeniably expensive.’”

   — The Guardian

Three Links:

1. ‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley (The Guardian)

2. Elon Musk is elevating the global extreme right (Disconnect)

3. Elon Musk’s DOGE Cuts Could Kill Your Dog (The New Republic)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month I decided to tackle AI. Artificial Intelligence has been everywhere in the last couple of years and I wanted to parse out fact from fiction with this video. I’ve heard a lot about how AI will save us from climate change, but I’ve also heard the opposite. So, this month’s video is my attempt to figure out which one is closer to the truth. Check it out below alongside three links and three quotes I found useful during my research!

Three Quotes:

1. “the carbon footprint of training a single big language model is equal to around 300,000 kg of carbon dioxide emissions. This is of the order of 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing, a quantification that laypersons can visualize.”

   — Payal Dhar

2. “In the United States, the rapidly growing AI demand is poised to drive data center energy consumption to about 6% of the nation’s total electricity usage in 2026.”

   — International Energy Agency

3. “Far from liberating humanity, AI under capitalism will only exacerbate its inherent tendency towards monopoly and inequality. The best AI for generating images, text and for solving problems, is and will continue to be developed by enormous monopolies like Google and Microsoft, with the best engineers, best hardware, and biggest databases. They will use their monopolistic position to make monopoly profits of course, and the technology’s advantages, namely in speeding up and cheapening production, will be used by other corporations to lay off some workers, and to drive down the wages of others”

   — In Defense of Marxism

Three Links:

1. AI is poised to drive 160% increase in data center power demand (Goldman Sachs)

2. The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence (Alex de Vries)

3. Artificial Intelligence: doomsday for humanity, or for capitalism? (In Defense of Marxism)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month I took a moment to look at how we can all take climate action. I wanted to make a video that went beyond suggesting individual/consumer actions, because there is so much more you can do than just recycling or voting with your dollar. So, I examined how unions, tenant organizing, and literally just joining a group or movement already fighting the fight can all create needed climate action. If you want to learn more, check out the video below, and, as always, below that are three quotes and three links I found useful during my research process.

Three Quotes:

1. “This is not to suggest that we pretend a socialist revolution is just around the corner but that in developing tactics and strategy, we should continually be asking ourselves, how does this or that action contribute towards a fundamental rupture with capitalism and an ecosocialist transformation of society?”

   — Rupture

2. “Strikes for a just transition can be our most powerful and disruptive weapon and can point the way towards an ecosocialist future of workers’ control of the economy.”

   — Rupture

3. “Our strategy needs to set out clear priorities. One way do so is by aligning the interests of people with the necessary infrastructure. If we need to reduce the number of airplanes in the sky, how can we offer people alternative means of long-distance transportation that are attractive in terms of cost, duration, and convenience? We could, for example, give people more high-speed trains in lieu of certain plane routes, take advantage of centrally located stations, and make them cheap — perhaps even free!”

   — Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

Three Links:

1. How do we get there? Some thoughts on ecosocialist tactics & strategy (Rupture)

2. An Ecosocialist Strategy to Win the Future (Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung)

3. How to Find Joy in Climate Action | Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (TED)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month I decided to look into microplastics. I’ve done several videos on recycling and the plastic industry, but I felt it was high time that I tackled the newest specter of the petrochemical industry. Microplastics have been gaining traction in the headlines in recent years for their potential health impacts, so I wanted to see for myself how destructive they really were— not just for our bodies, but for the planet. The result of my research is the video below. Check it out, and make sure to check out the three links and quotes I found illuminating during the research process.

Three Quotes:

1. “For decades, petrochemical companies and the plastics industry have known of the technical and economic limitations that make plastics unrecyclable and have failed to overcome them. Despite this knowledge, the plastics industry has continued to increase plastic production, while carrying out a well-coordinated campaign to deceive consumers, policymakers, and regulators about plastic recycling.”

   — Center for Climate Integrity

2. “Emissions of microplastics to the environment are estimated to be between 10 and 40 million tonnes per year, and under business-as-usual scenarios, this amount could double by 2040. Even if it were possible to immediately halt emissions, quantities would continue to increase because of the fragmentation of legacy items.”

   — Richard C. Thompson et al.

3. “Subsequently, we estimated that globally on average, humans may ingest 0.1–5 g of microplastics weekly through various exposure pathways.”

   — Kala Senathirajah et al.

Three Links:

1. Microplastics: How Worried Should You Be? (Science Vs)

2. Twenty years of microplastic pollution research—what have we learned? (Richard C. Thompson et al.)

3. The Fraud of Plastic Recycling (Center for Climate Integrity)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie

This month I’m diving into the economics of renewable energy. Specifically, I explored a disheartening phenomenon that’s been happening in the world of energy. For a long time, pundits and experts have claimed that one of the biggest barriers to renewable energy is its price. Renewables were more expensive than fossil fuels, so they weren’t getting adopted. As of this decade, however, that is no longer the case. Solar and wind are significantly cheaper than oil, gas, and coal. Yet, fossil fuel production and use continue to rise. Why? That’s what I tried to answer in this month’s video (with the help of Brett Christophers’ book The Price is Wrong). You can check out the video below, as well as three quotes and three links I found useful during the research process.

Three Quotes:

1. “Four out of five executives consider the ability to create acceptable returns on projects a main barrier to decarbonization of the energy system.”

   — Bain & Company

2. “To be sure, investment decisions are themselves shaped by price, as indeed they are shaped by government policy and regulation – which, needless to say, can and to one extent or another will reshape the ‘purely economic forces’ acting on technology shifts as referred to by Martin Wolf; and which, deployed in a highly interventionist way, would potentially render the energy transition something other than strictly ‘capitalist’ (i.e. market driven). But investment decisions are not determined by price. The nub of investment is profit.”

   — Brett Christophers

3. “In 2022 the global oil and gas industry earned nearly $4 trillion, according to the I.E.A.’s Fatih Birol — two to three times as much profit as they made in previous years… If renewables are the energy of the future and the green transition is rapidly accelerating, then why are the fossil-fuel dinosaurs so obviously thriving?”

   — David Wallace-Wells

Three Links:

1. Everything You’re Told About Green Capitalism is Wrong | Brett Christophers talks to Aaron Bastani (Novara Media)

2. Why making oil is more profitable than saving the planet (NPR)

3. Fossilized Capital: Price and Profit in the Energy Transition (Brett Christophers)

You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate

Hope you have a great day,

In solidarity,

Charlie