Naomi Oreskes on the coal bailout and the myth of the free market

Coal is dying. Gas, wind, and solar got cheaper, and the market moved on. So why is the federal government spending about $700 million, and reaching for a 1950 wartime law, to keep coal plants open and even build new ones? 

Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes — author of "The Big Myth" — joins host Robyn Vincent to unpack the contradiction at the heart of America's coal revival: the same movement that insists government should stay out of the way is now using government power to overrule the market. Then they turn to a very different plan — the World Inequality Lab's new Global Justice Report, which maps how to lift the world's poorest and hold warming under two degrees by taxing the very richest. Why does one get called "pragmatic" and the other "impossible"?

It's a conversation about coal, capitalism, and who gets to decide what's realistic.

Mentioned in this episode

• The Global Justice Report (World Inequality Lab): Global Justice Project - World Inequality Lab

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