Eugene Wertheim has been writing about climate change since the late eighties. In 19 94, i wrote an article for time magazine in which i discussed the insurance industry and climate change. Back then, i thought the insurance industry was going to turn out to be the white night of climate change. And it turned out that they would turn out to being a very timid white night.
Author and environmental journalist Eugene Linden's new book, Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change from 1979 to the Present, lays out how successive US governments managed to delay action on climate change when they should have been raising the alarm. It also looks at why the climate emergency will have a big impact on the global economy and why China and India, which could have taken a lead on renewables, double downed on coal to fuel their industrialisation in the 1990s. Our host for the podcast is the economist and broadcaster Linda Yueh.
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