Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.

And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.

You can find a link in the description, or search close readings, wherever you get your podcasts.

... You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and this week I'm joined by Brett Christophers, who teaches human geography

at Uppsavar University in Sweden. His most recent book is The Price is Wrong, Why Capitalism

Won't Save the Planet, which William Davis reviewed in the LRB last year. In the latest issue of the

LRB, Brett has written about overshoot, how the world surrendered to climate breakdown

by Andreas Malm and Vim Carton. And that's what we're going to be discussing today. Hello, Brett,

and thank you very much for talking with me. Hi, and thanks for having me. It's great to be with you.

So, smart investors, Nicholas Stern wrote 12 years ago, smart investors can already see that most fossil fuel reserves

are essentially unburnable if we are to avoid global warming of more than 2 degrees centigrade.

That was in the forward to a carbon tracker report called Unburnable Carbon 2013, Wasted Capital and Stranded stranded assets. Even at the time, it sounded

a bit like wishful thinking, and so it has proved. Could you talk a bit about this idea of

stranded assets, which, as you say, is at the centre of Marlon and Carton's story and where the

idea came from and where it's gone? Yes, and that was kind of a key moment, I think,

in the early, sort of early 2010s,

...