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A Fictive, Failing Dystopian Future | On Point

A still from the upcoming Hulu TV series adaptation of Margaret Attwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” (Courtesy Hulu)

Check out the new fiction coming from publishers these days and it may scare you to pieces. Not horror scare exactly, but dystopia. Dystopian fiction is all over the place now. Books of the future gone horribly wrong. A new civil war in America. Crazy microbes on the loose. The planet a mess. Democracy done. Insane inequality. Killer drones all over. Walls and fences and people fleeing Earth if they can. Great. This hour On Point, we’re armoring up to look at the new wave of dystopian fiction. — Tom Ashbrook

Guests

Alexandra Alter, publishing and literature reporter for the New York Times. (@xanalter)

Christopher Robichaud, professor of ethics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. (@cjrobichaud)

David Higgins, speculative fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Professor of English at Inver Hills Community College.(@canidaevulpes)

China Calls on U.S. Not to Break Paris Climate Change Pledge

Headlines Apr 03, 2017

Trump’s upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi comes as China is calling on the U.S. not to break its 2015 Paris Agreement pledges. China is now surging ahead of the U.S. in terms of tackling climate change and promoting renewable energy, after Trump signed an executive order dismantling a slew of climate rules last week.

Trump Says He Would Act Unilaterally Against North Korea

Headlines Apr 03, 2017

President Trump will be meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday at his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago—even though the meeting is unlikely to include any tee time on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf course. Xi has closed over 100 golf courses across China, where the Communist Party officially bans its members from playing the game. The Trump administration is currently not required to publish the visitor logs for meetings at private resorts, including Mar-a-Lago, although Democratic lawmakers have introduced a new piece of legislation, the MAR-A-LAGO Act, that would force him to do so.

In an interview with the Financial Times published Sunday, Trump warned he would be willing to take unilateral action against North Korea over its nuclear weapons program. Trump said, “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.” President Trump will host Jordan’s King Abdullah on Wednesday, the day before meeting with Chinese President Xi.

Former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz On Coal, Climate, Innovation And His Successor | Here & Now

April 03, 2017Updated 04/03/2017 4:06 PM

Since he left office in January, former energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has seen significant change in Washington, and more specifically, to the policies he helped initiate.

Last week there was an executive order to dismantle former President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, put into place to reduce carbon emissions. The Trump administration is also reviewing fuel standards and rules governing methane emissions from oil and gas wells.

Moniz joins Here & Now‘s Robin Young to discuss the Department of Energy and his successor, Rick Perry.

Interview Highlights

On a future without the Clean Power Plan

“The die is cast in terms of heading to a low-carbon future. Meeting the quantitative goals in 2020 or 2025, that will certainly be made more difficult. However, speaking of coal, let’s talk about that. I still expect no new coal plants to be built. The reality is, the decrease in coal use, the loss of coal jobs, has been primarily driven by low-cost natural gas. … An interesting fact is that the number of tons of coal produced per worker in Wyoming, let’s say, is nearly 10 times that of West Virginia, because in Wyoming, they have this highly mechanized surface mining. In fact, an irony of the president’s actions, is that he also eliminated the moratorium on coal leases on federal lands. If that is exercised, that will further tip the balance towards western coal, which has very, very few jobs associated with it, from eastern coal.

“Long-term, I honestly just don’t see that this is going to have an enormous impact. Because carbon dioxide emissions accumulate, if we emit more now, we’ll have to cut our budget of emissions even more in the future. So all this is doing is making it harder, and more expensive in the long-term. And the number of jobs lost in, let’s say coal, is measured in the couple of tens of thousands. The number of jobs created in the solar industry is about 280,000. The problem is, they’re not in the same place. And so the macro economy may actually be better off, but we have local stresses. And so I believe, frankly, that we’ve not done a good enough job, I think, in working bottom-up to look at what workers need, what communities need, to be helped through a period of transition.”

…(read more).