From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lerer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Tuesday, January 9th.

This year will determine who will be setting the national climate agenda, if any, for the next four years.

And with today's news,

did you see this, that last year was officially the hottest on record? And planet Earth keeps setting that record year after year during the 21st century, if you haven't noticed, that makes

this election year even more critical. My guest today is a professor who studies direct action and resistance movements

and who's stepping closer to advocating for them as we face this choice. Dana Fisher is the

director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity, and a professor in the School of

International Service at American University, and the author of the soon-to-be published book,

Saving Ourselves from Climate Shocks to Climate Action. Professor Fisher, welcome to WNYC.

Thank you so much for having me, Brian. Do you want to reflect for just a moment to start out on

this breaking news today that last year was the hardest on record

and put that in some context? Absolutely. So this week we are expecting a number of different

Earth observatories to release their assessments of the data coming from 2023 with regard to

climate change and global warming, basically, the average

temperature over the past years, which they do all of this analysis to determine it. It ends up

that depending on which of the two data sources that have so far been released, Earth was 1.4 plus

degrees Celsius warmer than on average, which puts us very close to the 1.5 degree threshold that both the intergovernmental panel and climate change and the Paris Agreement identified as the threshold we wanted to stay below in order to limit the climate crisis and to limit the degree to which we're going to

be experiencing climate shocks around the world. Yeah. And, you know, I heard an interesting

analogy, I think on our morning show today, about why 1.5 degrees Celsius, which doesn't sound like

...