Either we will destroy the earth and we'll have a trillionaire who has everything,

or find a society that provides for everyone and maybe has some problems,

but is still better for the world and for us as a species.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tack Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guests are Drew Pendergrass and Troy Viteze.

Drew is a PhD candidate in environmental engineering at Harvard University, and Troy is an environmental historian and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He also doesn't own a smartphone. Now, both of them

are the co-authors of Half Earth Socialism, a Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate

Change, and Pandemics. And it's a really fascinating book that I feel gives like a really

honest accounting of what is necessary to actually address the crises that we face in terms of,

you know, climate, but also these other environmental catastrophes that we, that capitalism is

fueling in its drive for constant growth.

And that just inventing some new technologies is not actually going to solve for us.

Now, I feel this conversation builds really well on the previous conversations I had with Sabrina Fernandez and Molly Taft on the climate crisis and, you know, why net zero isn't a solution and why just new technologies

alone are not going to save us. And Drew and Troy lay out a philosophy that can help guide us

into a future, into a socialist future that actually addresses these crises that they identify

and that they explain, but also do the important and the more difficult work of

kind of imagining what this future would actually be like and what the implications of that

would be for how humans live. And that would entail quite a different society, quite a different

way of life than what we have today. And initially, that can seem like

a bad thing because in some ways, and for some people, that will involve sacrifices to, you know,

what they enjoy today and what they were able to consume today. But when we accept that technology

alone is not going to save us, then we need to kind of reckon with the harm that we've caused to the

...