In a stark assessment of today’s world, author Amitav Ghosh says optimism feels almost impossible. Drawing on his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh argues that environmental crises like climate change will always be relegated beneath geopolitical power struggles, a truth now laid bare as nations abandon green goals to fuel war and rearmament. He criticises U.S. leadership that dismisses climate science while clinging to the petro-dollar economy — an economic system he says cannot survive without fossil fuels, and which actively suppresses challenges to it, citing how figures such as Saddam Hussein and Nicolás Maduro were toppled when they threatened oil interests. Ghosh paints the fossil fuel complex as a desperate, faltering empire, lashing out to uphold an extractive order. He also talks about New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who he has seen as a child and calls him a 'political genius'.