Walsh Fuchs: You came to
Overheated with years of experience reporting on climate change and advocating for a Green New Deal. Was there anything that surprised you over the course of writing this book?
Kate
Aronof
f: I initially set out to write about climate denial, but the book became more about democracy. A lot of strains of anti-democratic and climate denialist thinking converge theoretically, and thereâs also the fact that people like Charles Koch have funded efforts to erode U.S. democracy.
Walsh Fuchs
: For a long time the orthodoxy in environmental advocacy has emphasized our personal responsibility as consumers. You trace how the fossil fuel industry created that myth, naming some of the villains that got us to this point, such as Koch, specific companies, and even particular research papers with outsized influences. Who or what do you think holds the most blame, and what do they owe the rest of the world?
Editors ▪ December 30, 2020 Cover illustrations by John Michael Snowden and Molly Crabapple
We wanted to share some of our favorite articles from
Dissent in 2020.
In our first print issue this year, Democracy and Barbarism, Jedediah Britton-Purdy wove together the crises that had roiled American society long before the coronavirus, both in an article on carbon democracy cowritten with Alyssa Battistoni and a searching discussion with Aziz Rana. Our spring issue featured a section on the contemporary right, brought to you by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell of the
Know Your Enemy podcast and historian Lauren Stokes, that featured an insightful forum of ex-conservatives. Our summer issue combined analysis of the pandemic and a crucial U.S. election year. And our fall issue, Technology and the Crisis of Work, featured a collection of timely socialist-feminist essays guest edited by Katrina Forrester and Moira Weigel, including essays about the