Dominic and Cymene react to the police violence sweeping across US university campuses. Then (15:11) we are thrilled to welcome CNN’s Chief Climate Correspondent, Bill Weir, to the podcast. We begin with the big news of the day—the landmark legal ruling by the European court of human rights that Switzerland had violated the human rights of more than 2,000 older Swiss women by failing to cut its national greenhouse gas emissions. Then, we dive into Bill’s great new book, Life as We Know It (Can Be): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World (Chronicle Books 2024). We talk about how to balance nightmares and dreams in climate storytelling, techniques for building effective story arcs, the five stages of climate grief, and disrupting the idea that consumption leads to happiness. Bill explains the ideas of protopia and YIMBYism to us and emphasizes the need to act locally and with humility as he shares with us some of the more encouraging stories he’s encountered in his travels as a reporter. We close by discussing what Bill thinks has changed in terms of news coverage of climate change during the course of his long and storied career. Please listen and share!!

Cymene tries to convince Dominic to join the Freemasons on this episode of the Cultures of Energy podcast. Plus, a shallow dive into Buzkashi, the national sport of Tajikistan, the country that helped convince the UN to designate 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. Then (13:22) we are thrilled to welcome Siddharth Sareen from U Stavanger, author of The Sun Also Rises in Portugal (Bristol U Press, 2024) and the winner of this year’s Nils Klim Prize in Norway (go Sid!) We start with how Sid’s interests in energy research shifted from India to Portugal, an underappreciated star in solarity. We talk about the struggle between large scale solar and community solar in the context of aspirations toward a just energy transition. We discuss the environmental impact of solar and how it can be improved, and Sid explains why standards matter as solar becomes a more mature industry and how standards of commoning could help to constitute a better future for solar power. Finally, we discuss the need to pursue prefigurative politics as way of bringing more energy utopias into the world and allowing them to flourish.

Cymene accounts for her mysterious conversion from a coffee-drinker to a tea-drinker but [spoiler alert] it turns out she’s not a doppelganger after all. Then after some EV road trip talk (16:06) we are delighted to have Cristián Simonetti join us from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. We start with Cris’s research on concrete, one of the most abundant contemporary materials, and what it reveals about the course of the Anthropocene trajectory. From there we talk about the debate over the Anthropocene designation and how stratigraphers tend to petrify earth processes by valuing solids over fluids. From there we move to talking about ice and his interest in the viscosity of glaciers and soil. We circle back to concrete and how the Romans conceived of it as a solid fluid and as a conversation between the elements. Finally, we talk about the special role glaciers have played in the Chilean Anthropocene. Glaciers move like ketchup? Concrete is a colloid? For those and further revelations, please listen on!