From annual ‘once a centuries’ fires, to ‘storms to end all storms’ making landfall every hurricane season, the signs that capitalist climate change represents a civilizational threat have never been more ominously evident. It has become impossible to ignore the dire need to move beyond green tinkering to an overhaul of the entire system, lest we be left with a charred and blasted husk where once there was a planet. As the global fever rages, we are faced with the choice of "Ecosocialism or Barbecue."

In his new book, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, leading environmental thinker, Andreas Malm points to the state mobilizations across the globe to combat the coronavirus as an example of the scale of intervention that will be required to execute the just-transition we need.

If it is possible to conjure trillions of dollars to combat an invisible, epidemiological threat, why is the climate emergency not greeted with similar sized programs?

Malm is joined for this virtual teach-in by fellow activist and author Thea Riofrancos—whose new book Resource Radicals looks at lessons for our movement from the experience in Ecuador— for a conversation that touches on this question and many more.

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Speakers:

Andreas Malm is a scholar of human ecology, and the author of Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, The Progress of this Storm and Fossil Capital, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020-2022), and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2020-2021). Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America. These themes are explored in her book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020) and her co-authored book, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and serves on the steering committee of the organization's Ecosocialist Working Group.

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This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books, Verso Books, and DSA's Ecosocialist Working Group.