Josh Visits the South Pacific: Climate Chaos, Chinese Bribes & Mosquitoes
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What can a stunningly beautiful, dirt-poor, corrupt, tropical-island nation teach us about the battle between China and the West... and about how climate chaos will affect you?
A lot, it turns out. In this bonus episode, Josh is on the ground in Solomon Islands, where leaders from across the Pacific are currently attending the 54th Pacific Islands Forum Meeting. Beneath all the happy-talk about foreign aid is a deeper subtext. The big rich players (i.e. Australia) are trying to bribe their tiny South Pacific neighbours into siding with the West instead of China.
Josh visits a freshwater spring in the jungle with one of Australia's leading hydro-geologists, Sam Buchanan, who's stationed in Solomon Islands to manage its long-term water projects. Sam works for the principal scientific and technical organisation in the Pacific region, The Pacific Community, and is a world-leading expert on water security and climate resilience in small island developing states. He's also one of Josh's oldest friends, who brought to Josh's attention this amazing story in a forgotten tropical battleground.
Josh and Sam drive around Guadalcanal, the country's main island (and the site of the famous WWII battle in which a young naval officer named John F Kennedy made his name), discussing how the country gets its water, how it gets energy, how foreign aid is distributed, how geophysicists are using MRI technology to scan for underground water, and what this all has to do with DOGE, Trump, and subsidence in the Central Valley of California.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Giday, humans. |
| 0:04.6 | Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. |
| 0:07.4 | Something different for you today. |
| 0:08.6 | A little bonus episode live from the front lines of the South Pacific. |
| 0:14.5 | I am broadcasting, well, not right now, but in a moment I will be broadcasting to you, from the Solomon Islands. |
| 0:20.5 | A fly-spec, semi-autocratic, Pacific Island nation, which has sort of become a front line of the clash between the Chinese Communist Party and the West in their attempt to curry favor with tiny island nations by bribing them with infrastructure. |
| 0:39.7 | Also, a critical place for looking at the impact of climate chaos on smaller countries, what's going to happen to their |
| 0:44.5 | populations, how they're going to get water, will they all become refugees and so on. I felt like |
| 0:50.6 | I travel so much that I am missing an opportunity to bring you to some of the places |
| 0:54.7 | that I go to where I end up having really fascinating conversations with some experts on the |
| 0:59.8 | ground just out of my own curiosity and sort of natural interest and instinct that then you |
| 1:06.5 | don't get to hear. So this is an attempt to actually bring you onto the ground in the jungle-clad |
| 1:11.5 | rainforest-clad hills of a volcanic Pacific Island country to sort of see how the big geopolitical |
| 1:19.2 | forces and climate forces are playing out on the ground. The reason I bring it to you this week, |
| 1:23.8 | even though I traveled there some months ago, is because this week is the 54th |
| 1:27.5 | Pacific Islands Forum meeting in the capital of the Solomon Islands, Honiara. |
| 1:33.4 | If you haven't really heard of the Solomon Islands, don't really know about it. |
| 1:36.8 | You may have heard of Guadalcanal as a pivotal battle in World War II. |
| 1:43.5 | In fact, at Guadalcanal, John F. Kennedy was in the Solomon Islands |
| 1:48.4 | in 1943. His patrol torpedo boat was sunk by a Japanese destroyer on the night of August 1st, |
| 1:55.1 | 1943, and he heroically led his surviving crew to safety. He received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, |
| 2:03.1 | and that contributed to his rise from being a young naval officer |
... |
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