"I don’t think these are times when you can sell people a vision of ‘how not only can we save the world, but we can make all of our lives better in the process.’ There’s too much loss written into the story, too much hardship around and ahead of us, whichever path we take. I think people can smell that, whether or not they want to face it yet. It doesn’t mean we give up, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing left worth fighting for. But it may not be the kind of fight where memories of last century’s heroic future are much help."

In the last episode for 2019, we come to the Green New Deal and ask whether it represents a reckoning with the ongoing collision with ecological realities, or a way of postponing more difficult conversations. This week’s essay touches on the way the political imagination is shaped by the industrial era, the desire to ‘reboot the future’ – taken to its extreme in Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism – and the tendency of the left to treat climate change as a vindication of positions it held all along, as exemplified by Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. 

In Notes From Underground, Dougald Hine (co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project) invites us to go deeper into the context of the new climate movements and what they tell us about the moment in which we find ourselves

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