The Land & Climate Podcast

Geoengineering research is growing, as scientists look for increasingly radical means to protect humanity from the disastrous impacts of global heating.
Less publicly, concerns are also building about the use of these techniques for geopolitical disruption or control. 
Technologies such as solar radiation management (SRM) and stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) are controversial amongst climate scientists: they could buy us time through a temporary cooling effect, but they would not actually stop global heating, and could cause other negative impacts.
Danielle Young tells Alasdair that scientific research on these technologies often lacks alignment with political realities. While scientists plan for multilateral governance regimes to protect global populations from heat, government and military officials are more likely to think about SRM or SAI in terms of weaponisation and international power struggles. 
Dr Danielle Young is an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Studies at The University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the geopolitical and security implications of emerging solar geoengineering technologies. 
Further reading: 
'Why we need to explore conflict and competition around solar geoengineering', PLOS Climate, 2026
'Who could deploy stratospheric aerosol injection? The United States, China, and large‐scale, rapid planetary cooling', Global Policy, 2025 
'How will capitalism react to climate collapse?', Land and Climate Review, 2025
'Who Can Govern from a House on Fire? International Order, State
Responsibility, and the Problem of Solar Radiation Modification', Ethics & International Affairs, 2024
'Scientific models versus power politics: How security expertise reframes solar geoengineering', Review of International Studies, 2024
'Considering stratospheric aerosol injections beyond an environmental frame: The intelligible ‘emergency’ techno-fix and preemptive security', European Journal of International Security, 2023
'Do-or-Die: Should we be talking about geoengineering?', Land and Climate Review, 2022
'The Geopolitical ecology of solar geoengineering: From a ‘logic of multilateralism’ to logics of militarization', Journal of Political Ecology, 2020
Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature, Jeremy Baskin, 2019
‘The entwined Cold War roots of missile defense and climate geoengineering’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2019
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Click here to watch the video recording of this interview. 
In her latest book, Ann Pettifor argues that we are not governed by politicians or diplomats, but “by wealthy and powerful players in markets based in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the City of London.”
These players, she says, largely either ignore the threat of climate breakdown, or see it as a struggle for resource control. The “unregulated actions of private actors and institutions in global markets have led to the increasingly rapid breakdown of the world’s climate and ecosystem.”
In a special episode of The Land and Climate Podcast, recorded live in front of an audience as part of London Climate Action Week, Bertie and Ann discuss the influence financial markets exert over climate policy, and strategies to reassert democratic control.
Ann Pettifor is a political economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis, successfully campaigning to cancel approximately $100 billion in debt owed by poor countries, and for co-authoring and advocating the Green New Deal. 
In January 2026, Verso published her latest book, The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet. Buy a copy from Verso's website before 31st July and recieve 30% off with the following discount code: CLIMATEREVIEW30 
Further reading: 
Ann's Substack, System Change.
The Case for the Green New Deal, 2019
The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, 2018
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Most net zero policies and major scientific models rely on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to limit global heating to 2℃. The most commonly known methods include afforestation, bioenergy with carbon capture, and direct air capture - but various proposals are emerging for ocean-based CDR technologies. 
Could marine CDR offset emissions from sectors that cannot easily decarbonise, or are the costs and risks too great? Bertie sat down with oceanographer David Ho to discuss these questions, shortly after he returned from the 4th International Conference on Carbon Dioxide Removal in Milan. 
David Ho is a professor at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a lead author on the upcoming IPCC methodology report on carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture, utilisation and storage. His 2023 article for Nature criticising overreliance on CDR has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
Further reading: 
'Three challenges to marine carbon dioxide removal', npj Ocean Sustainability, November 2025
Principles for responsible and effective marine carbon dioxide removal development and governance, 2025
'Marine carbon dioxide removal may be a future climate solution', Dialogues on Climate Change, November 2024
'Can coastal and marine carbon dioxide removal help to close the emissions gap? Scientific, legal, economic, and governance considerations',  Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, August 2024
'Deployment expectations of multi-gigatonne scale carbon removal could have adverse impacts on Asia’s energy-water-land nexus', Nature Communications, July 2024
'Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution — we need to change the narrative', Nature, April 2023
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The 17th Century Little Ice Age wreaked havoc on weather systems and economies around the world. In China, extreme cold and intense droughts led to soaring grain prices, and as food security collapsed, so did the centuries old political regime of the Ming dynasty.
Alasdair speaks to Tim Brook about his groundbreaking book ‘The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China’. They discuss the importance of climate changes in the rise and fall of empires, and the lessons that can be learned from climate-induced famines in dynastic China. 
Dr Book is a Canadian historian and an Emeritus Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He held the Republic of China Chair at UBC’s Centre for Chinese Research until his retirement in 2022. 
Further reading:
‘What is climate-flation?’, Land and Climate Review, March 2026
The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China by Timothy Brook, 2023
The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 by Dagomar Degroot, 2018
‘Climate change and society in the 15th to 18th centuries’, WIREs Climate Change, March 2018
‘Nine sloughs: profiling the climate history of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, 1260-1644’, Journal of Chinese History, November 2016 
The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties by Timothy Brook, 2013
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Scientists warn we are in an age of mass-extinction. Entire species are ceasing to exist at unprecedented rates. When did this age begin, and when did humans start to confront their impacts on ecosystems and living populations?
 
Sadiah Qureshi explores extinction as ‘unnatural’ and inherently political, by placing humanity at the centre of her latest book, 'Vanished: an Unnatural History of Extinction'. 
In conversation with Bertie, she traces the history of the concept of extinction in European thought and its connection with settler-colonial politics. Bertie and Sadiah also discuss present day conservation policy, and echoes of imperialist thought within it.
 
Sadiah Qureshi is a Chair of Modern British History at the University of Manchester, and a historian of science, race and empire. 
Further reading
‘Vanished: An Unnatural History Of Extinction,’ is available to purchase from Penguin here.
This week, Professor Qureshi delivered the annual Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Prize Lecture for the Royal Society. You can watch that here.
'What can histories of Empire teach us about modern environmental efforts?', The British Academy, December 2025
'Reversing extinction', aeon 
'‘A billionaire will pay a lot of money to shoot a recreated being’: historian Sadiah Qureshi on extinction and empire', The Guardian, June 2025
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