Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at background briefing.

I'm me and Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the heat wave baking the planet and killing people from Saudi Arabia to Greece and India to the United States.

We'll discuss the political cost of climate denial and the contrast between Biden, who calls climate change,

quote, an existential threat to humanity, and Trump, who has called global

warming a con and a hoax, which was invented by the Chinese to make US manufacturing non-competitive.

Joining us is Jeff Goodell, a New York Times best-selling author of seven books, including

Big Coal, The Dirty Secret Behind

America's Energy Future, and The Water Will Come, Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking

of the Civilized World, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and a contributing editor at Rolling

Stone, he has covered climate change for more than a decade, and his latest book is

The Heat Will Kill You First,

Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

Then we'll examine climate change denial and speak with an author of a new book that exposes

the sources of denial and weighs the options for a future beyond denial.

Joining us is Tad DeLay, a philosopher, religion scholar, and interdisciplinary

critical theorist, a professor of philosophy at Baltimore City Community College, whose books

include Against What Does the White Evangelical Want, The Cynic and the Fool, and God

is unconscious.

His latest book is Future of Denial, the Ideologies of Climate Change.

Then finally we'll assess how much we should be alarmed by Putin's pact with Kim Jong-un or disgusted by the pathetic display of two murderous pariahs, hoping to resume their love

affair with Donald Trump. Joining us is Sue Me Terry, a former senior CIA analyst and director

...