Novara Media

We’ve entered a new climate reality. The pace of the energy transition has picked up – and so have the impacts of climate change.

But has there ever actually been an energy transition? Or do we just use more and more and more of everything?

As climate change accelerates, feedback loops in the climate system will start to speed it up even further.

All this is to say: we’re approaching the point when geoengineering will start to seem awfully tempting.

Richard Hames spoke to Laurie Laybourn, executive director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, about what we do when that temptation arises.

Investigative journalist Matt Kennard joins Aaron Bastani to discuss Britain’s complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, following a series revelations published in Declassified UK.

In an extensive conversation about the shifting sands of global security, the author of The Racket also discusses the elimination of USAID, America’s U-turn on Russia, and the rearmament of Europe.

Downstream IRL: Israeli historian Ilan Pappé will join Aaron Bastani for a LIVE conversation at EartH in East London on 22 April. Tickets are available now on Dice.

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After capitalism comes communism, according to Marxist doctrine. But in the meantime, what should we call our increasingly unequal system? Political theorist Jodi Dean posits ‘neofeudalism’ as the best way to describe our growing society of serfs and servants in her new book, Capital’s Grave.

She talks to Eleanor Penny about a vision of class struggle led by the ‘servant vanguard’.

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The ‘special relationship’ is central to how Britain conducts its foreign policy and perceives itself as a country. The argument goes: proximity to Washington allows London to maintain a semblance of its former prestige and power. The media and political class can’t get enough of it.

But what if Britain’s relationship to the United States was, in fact, deeply damaging to its interests – and the living standards of its citizens? What if, rather than a partner, Britain was instead a vassal of the American empire? What if – despite the herd thinking of the establishment – Britain got remarkably little in return?

These arguments aren’t new, indeed they’ve been around since the Second World War, but as the Trump presidency explicitly embraces a different kind of geopolitics – centred around calculation and interest, rather than appealing to values – it’s worth asking: what precisely does the United Kingdom get from its relationship with the world’s greatest power? And is it time to try something different?

And if Britain is losing out in its relationship with America what does that look like? Is it purely economic, or has it compromised our political system too? Does Britain even have a military capable of acting without the consent of the White House?

On this episode of Downstream, Aaron Bastani is joined for the second time by Angus Hanton, businessman and author of ‘Vassal State: How America Runs Britain’.

In the wake of Assad’s regime collapse and the call for the Kurdish Worker’s Party to disband, Elif Sarican talks to Richard Hames about how to make sense of this new world, and whether or not the Kurdish revolution in Rojava can survive.

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The US is no longer supporting Ukraine, and in response, the UK and Europe are rearming. Germany is taking off its hallowed ‘debt brake’ to allow it, while Keir Starmer is talking tough about the capabilities of the British armed forces.

In a world still dominated by the American military, what does it matter? And what could we do instead?

Khem Rogaly, a senior research fellow at Common Wealth, has proposed a ‘Lucas Plan for the 21st Century’ that would put the fight against climate change, and not war, at the centre of European economic growth.

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When we talk about politics – whether it’s the climate, the economy or constitutional reform – the thing that’s at stake is an idea of ‘the future’. These days, the idea of imminent societal or ecological breakdown necessarily means adopting the framing of the present as being a ‘state of emergency’. This is an obvious way for political actors to attempt to generate consensus – but does this ostensibly well-intentioned way of viewing the future actually narrow political discourse in favour of far-right and authoritarian politicians?

To discuss this, Aaron is joined by Jonathan White, Deputy Head of the European Institute and Professor in Politics at the LSE and author of In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea.

What’s the point of the arts when the world is on fire? To follow the pipeline from creativity to activism and back again, Nadia Idle is joined by Amber Massie-Blomfield, former chief of theatre company Complicité and the author of Acts of Resistance: The Power of Art to Create Better World.

They discuss Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell’s Power Station, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, the Gaza Free Circus,
Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, Blood of the Condor (1969), the writer Edouard Louis, Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ and the artist-activist Jay Jordan.

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Lockdown was one of the defining experiences of our lives, but it was far from unique in history. Contagion and confinement are inextricably intertwined, from the plantation to the infirmary, the leper colony to the stay-at-home order.

In The History of the World in 6 Plagues, Edna Bonhomme investigates how fear, power, race science and colonial violence have shaped the most powerful plagues and pandemics in history, shaping our societies in turn.

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In 1996 Samuel Huntington published ‘The Clash of Civilizations’. At the time its hypothesis was counter-intuitive. Despite the supremacy of the United States after the Cold War, the ascent of globalisation would not lead to the end of history, but a return to distinctive and competing civilisations. Rather than homogeneity we would see a growing emphasis on difference, rather than unhindered free markets we would see friction, and eventually rupture.

In 2025, with the continued rise of China to superpower status and a revanchist Russia, it’s tempting to think Huntington was right. Rather than a global civilisation – based on market competition and the rule of law – we are edging towards a world of multipolarity and civilisation-states. But what if civilisational thinking is itself mistaken? What if the idea of plural ‘civilisations’ is a product of the 19th century? Where does such civilisational thinking really come from? What even is a ‘civilisation’? And what, in particular, is ‘the West’?

Josephine Quinn is one of Britain’s most respected historians of antiquity. Chair of Ancient History at Cambridge, her most recent book, “How the World Made the West”, was a book of the year for The Economist, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. In this conversation Josephine and Aaron go from the very dawn of ancient European history, through the Bronze Age Collapse, to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. How similar were those people to us? And what lessons does the distant past hold for the challenges of the 21st century?