Dr. Ajay Chaudhary Discusses "The Exhausted of the Earth, Politics in a Burning World"

In his soon-to-be-published book, Dr. Chaudhary argues the climate crisis or the Anthropocene era is the political product of rightwing climate realism - what he terms the “Rex Tillerson Position.”  Listeners should be aware politics, not technology or economics, explains why the US continues to emit an enormous amount of CO2e pollution. (The US healthcare industry contributes approximately 550 MT CO2e annually or roughly 9% of the nation’s total.) The politics of functional climate denialism, or the belief business-as-usual can mitigate global warming, has resulted in economic, ecological and social despair, disenchantment or in sum socioecological exhaustion.  What capitalism has built, Dr. Chaudhary argues, is an exhausted world.  Any workable solution or any effort to create a sustainable environmental niche requires a new climate realism.  Real ecomodernism he argues must be in sum grounded in decolonization - that essentially means the Global North no longer exploits the Global South.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the Executive Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. He holds a PhD from Columbia University and an MSc from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on social and political theory and economy, political ecology, media, religion, and post-colonial studies. He has written for The Guardian, The Nation, The Baffler, n+1, Los Angeles Review of Books, Quartz, Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The Hedgehog Review, Filmmaker Magazine, and 3quarksdaily, among others.

Information on the book is at: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736324/the-exhausted-of-the-earth-by-ajay-singh-chaudhary/.

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