What Comes After What Comes Next

We're back! And for this episode we're lucky to welcome the one and only Ben Rhodes onto the show.Ben spent eight years with President Barack Obama - as a close confidante, speechwriter, national security advisor, and friend. He was there when the Paris Agreement was signed, and at Obama's side every step of the way towards that historic moment - including the breakthrough with Chi

Elizabeth Kolbert is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction. Her most recent book, Under a White Sky, looks at the unintended consequences of human attempts to control nature with technology.  "We're now intervening to counter the effects of our own intervention," Kolbert says. "I call it the control of the control of nature."When it comes to climate ch

This week James catches up with the former chief strategist and senior advisor to President Obama, David Axelrod. James and David talk about the tensions between consensus building and the need for urgent action when it comes to climate action. They also talk about the need to tell a positive story about how climate action will benefit people's lives. David shares his experien

This week James catches up with award winning author Barbara Kingsolver, whose work over the last three decades has eloquently and movingly touched on matters of genuine social and environmental concern.Most notably, Barbara's novel Flight Behaviour conveyed the impact of climate change on a community, an ecosystem and a species. The novel also draws out the tension that can exist

When Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim was a child, Lake Chad in her home country spanned 10,000 km2. Today, because of climate change, it is around a tenth of that size.As Hindou puts its "climate change is not about our future, it's about our present.”Hindou is an expert in the adaptation and mitigation of indigenous peoples to climate change. She is a member of the Mbororo pastoralist pe

James catches up with author and journalist David Wallace-Wells. David's 2017 best-selling book The Uninhabitable Earth began with the now-famous line “it is worse, much worse, than you think.” It then goes on to set out in rich and forensic detail what the impacts of climate change could be for our politics, our culture, our economy, and our psychology. It's one hell of a book

This week James catches up with world-renowned climate scientist and science writer, Dr. Kate Marvel. Kate is research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor at Columbia University’s Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics. One of the reasons for inviting Kate on the show was to get to the bottom of how a climate model works. How

Kia ora!Welcome back for the second series of What Comes After What Comes Next, Aotearoa New Zealand's number one podcast about how we tackle the climate crisis and renew our economies in a post-pandemic world. To kick off series two James catches up with "probably the most important economist in the world"* Professor Jeffrey Sachs. *according to the New York Times, no less.Ja

Series two drops this Saturday. Look forward to joining you then! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As we weather the economic storm of the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis continues to loom large. We also face a biodiversity crisis and a crisis of deepening poverty.The good news is that all of these crises can be solved together and that is very much the message of this week's guest, Bill McKibben. And he certainly knows what he is talking about.In 1988, Bill wrote The