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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