The China adventure continues for your two co-hosts. Cymene and Dominic report from Zhangzhou, a small city of five million in Fujian province, and talk about party hotel life and what might have been the first energy humanities workshop in the country. And then (9:02) we welcome Ryan Cecil Jobson to the podcast to discuss his groundbreaking book, The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (U Chicago Press, 2024). We begin with how petrostates seek to assert their permanence even in times of obvious crises and Ryan's insights into how the performance of permanence becomes all-powerful in maintaining petrostate legitimacy. We move from there to exploring the significance of Caribbean culture in T&T fossil fuels, thinking about the tension between the state masquerade and the people's masquerade, and the historical transition from plantation labor to oil field labor. We close talking about petronostalgia, speculative sovereignty, efforts in T&T to unlock ultradeepwater drilling, and the importance of "dwelling in the hyphen" when it comes to nation-states and petro-states. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Cymene and Dominic report from the first week of their trip to China. And then (11:22) we welcome legal scholar Ann Carlson to the podcast to talk to us about battling smog in one of our favorite cities, Los Angeles. Ann has just published a new book, Smog and Sunshine (U California Press, 2026) that tells the remarkable and often inspiring story of how Los Angeles radically improved its air quality. We begin with a reminder of how bad things once were in LA and why. Then we discuss the scientists who helped pinpoint the origins of smog (with an assist from the science of the pineapple of all things) and the oil and automobile industry which tried to suppress the science and deny, diminish and delay action. We turn to comparing the environmental challenges that smog and anthropogenic greenhouse gases pose. Finally, we round things out by examining political polarization around climate action and the importance of government action and attribution science to climate mitigation going forward. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

It's World Cup season and so your co-hosts deliver their first ever sports corner. And then (9:38) drum roll please, we welcome the one and only Tim Mitchell back to the podcast to talk about his latest masterpiece, The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow (Verso, 2026). We start with Tim's model of the shareholder corporation as a machine built to produce present wealth at the expense of future encumbrances. Encumbering the future is also key to how Tim is rethinking the dynamics of economic growth since his earlier work, Carbon Democracy. We talk about how growth is really an alibi of capital, one that deeply misdirects language and knowledge and entraps us in a belief that capitalist growth delivers a public good. Tim argues that both the Industrial Revolution and Keynesianism can be better understood as strategic pivots within this long run process of capitalization and future capture. We turn from there to infrastructure as a strategy of capture via delay and deferral and the critical role that technology plays in promoting misunderstanding of our relationship to the future. Finally we turn toward the climate crisis and how it exemplifies the dynamics Tim outlines in the book. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.