Sustainababble

The blood diamonds of Mexico. A hipster's fever dream. Compressed mushy peas disguised as a gonad. Is there *anything* to commend the avocado? A fruit, we'll remind you, that CAN'T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO TASTE SWEET. And that's before we consider 'avolattes', an invention every bit as infuriating as the people who drink them. Well hang on just a vegan-bashing minute. Why does the humble alligator pear cop so much flack? Sure, the practice of growing billions of the blighters is, in many ways, absolutely catastrophic. But so is growing billions of anything. Perhaps the h8ers could leave off the poor old avo, and let the planet-conscious eat a nice thing in peace for once? -- COME AND SEE US LIVE! On 9 December join Dave and Ol* for a Q&A with the writer & director of the Mark Kermode-endorsed The Atom: A love affair documentary. Tickets are £8, and include access to the film for a week. 50% discount for babble patreon supporters. Kick-off 7.30. Sign up here. *(On Zoom) -- Sustainabab

**JUST 10 DAYS TO GO! Join Dave and Ol for a LIVE Q&A on 9 December! More details below.**It's here! Black Friday-mas is finally here! Thank the lord. Thank Jeff Bezos. Thank f*ck.Sigh. It's probably not OK to go warm and fuzzy in our special areas at the thought of being hoodwinked into buying sh*t we don't need just a month before we all lose our minds over the next orgy of mindless consumerism. And it's probably right and proper to get het up and misanthropic about it.BUT hang on. Is Black Friday actually that bad? And don't all the people who hate Black Friday also hate shopping in general, and probably humanity too? Might it be conceivable - and stay with us here - that Black Friday is *good* for the planet?--COME AND SEE US LIVE! On 9 December join Dave and Ol* for a Q&A with the writer & director of the Mark Kermode-endorsed The Atom: A love affair documentary. Tickets are £8, and include access to the film for a week. 50% discount for babble patreon supporters. Kick-off 7.30. Sign up here.

** Join Dave and Ol for a LIVE Q&A on 9 December! More details below. ** Is it OK to feel sorry for teary Alok Sharma? Which country's delegation parties the hardest? Who put China in the shed? And was anyone at all standing up for the dormouses (dormice?)? Not a single one of the 15,276 hot takes already published about COP26 has addressed these serious and urgent questions, but my god the babble is not in the business of hot takes. So sit back and allow yourself to be taken on a retrospective, warts 'n' all, aural tour of Glasgow's shed of sheds by Craig Bennett, CEO of the Wildlife Trusts, veteran of COPs passim, and a very tired human indeed. Follow Craig on Twitter @craigbennett3. COME AND SEE US LIVE! On 9 December join Dave and Ol* for a Q&A with the writer & director of the Mark Kermode-endorsed The Atom: A love affair documentary. Tickets are £8, and include access to the film for a week. 50% discount for babble patreon supporters. Kick-off 7.30. Sign up here. *(On Zoom) Su

"So Dave, Ol, what IS your favourite tetrahedral molecule?" is not the most F of AQs we get, but the answer - since you asked - is of course CH4, or methane to its mates. It may lack the celebrity cachet of CO2, but boy does methane pack a punch in the warming stakes. In fact it packs 84 times as much of a punch, which is one reason sleepy men in suits have started announcing plans to gaffa tape some of the places from whence it guffs. So this week we don our lab technicians' coats to mansplain the sources of this fleece-like molecule, and point our microscopes at the newly penned international agreements to investigate whether they're worth the vellum they're written on. COME AND SEE US LIVE! On 9 December join Dave and Ol* for a Q&A with the writer & director of the Mark Kermode-endorsed The Atom: A love affair documentary. Tickets are £8, and include access to the film for a week. 50% discount for babble patreon supporters. Kick-off 7.30. Sign up here. *(On Zoom) Sustainababble is your fr

There are few childhood rules that continue into grownupness, but 'don't shit in the sea' is definitely one of them. Which is why it's such a shame that all Brits' shits diligently done not in the sea seem to end up there regardless. Perhaps even more dispiritingly, politicians have proven themselves disinclined to do anything, actively voting *against* a thing that would have forced water companies to stop flooding the oceans with our motions. We role up our sleeves and plunge shoulder deep into the parliamentary u-bend to find out what the blockage seems to be. Also this week, some unexpected integrity from Boris "Boris Johnson" Johnson, and a, er, concrete example of schadenfreude. COME AND SEE US LIVE! On 9 December join Dave and Ol* for a Q&A with the writer & director of the Mark Kermode-endorsed The Atom: A love affair documentary. Tickets are £8, and include access to the film for a week. 50% discount for babble patreon supporters. Kick-off 7.30. Sign up here. *(On Zoom) Sustainabab

Bugs in all their freaky forms do a staggering range of critical jobs that keep the planet from, among other things, quickly becoming a massive pile of corpses and poo. But humanity is nausing 'em, and we really, really need to stop nausing 'em. Yes, because bugs make it possible for almost all other animal species - including humans - to survive, but also because they are mesmerically wonderful in their own right. At least that's the view of this week's guest, author and head of sustainable farming at the charity Sustain, Vicki Hird, whose new book "Rebugging the Planet" is a joyous celebration of all things creepy crawly and a manifesto for bringing the little critters back from the brink. Discover more about Vicki's book at www.rebuggingtheplanet.org and follow Vicki @vickihird on Twitter and Instagram. Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. E

A year late, for obvious reasons, but the imminent Glasgow climate shindig is still seismically important. But will this cauldron of egos be any more productive than the previous 25? Yes. No. Possibly. Probably not. Oh Jesus we don't know do we. But what we DO know is that countries were set homework at 2015's Paris get-together, homework that's very much overdue. So we canter through who's the class swot, who's too cool to comply with artificial constructs like 'deadlines', and who's been feeding their assignments to the dog. Oh, and we also chat to Bamber Hawes, the man on pilgrimage to the talks from Shropshire with Clarion the polar bear atop his shoulders. For wherever there are gatherings of international suits deciding humanity's fate, there will, as sure as C follows UNFCC-, be wonderfully bonkers acts of protest, theatre, and physical endurance. Follow Bamber & Clarion's progress - and help them out with accommodation, polar bear carrying, and the like - here https://clarionthebear.fish/

What shape best represents the absolute lunacy that is humans and their economic activity? Something Jackson Pollock-esque? Mr Messy off of the Mr Men series, perhaps? Either way, probably not a nice, clean circle. But when you think about it, it really really should be. Cos unless we start (re)learning how to work with what we've got - i.e. sending things round and round in virtuous circles - rather than what we're about to drill / dig / blow up, we're gonna be in an awful pickle. To tell us what a circular economy actually is, why it's not babble, and how Ol buying a tumble dryer may not be inconsistent with it, is author, academic and activist Claire Potter. Claire's book, Welcome to the Circular Economy, is out now. Find it, along with all sorts of excellent resources, at her website https://onecircular.world/ or in any of the usual book-y places.Follow Claire on Twitter @clairepotter and Instagram @clairepotterdesign. Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme musi

Everything's running out in Blighty. Gas (as in gas), gas (as in petrol) and everyone's patience. As far as we can tell, the two crises are unrelated, other than their shared connection to the climate. But crikey moses they are getting people in a tiz, not least because - and brace yourself for some advance economics here - when things run out, things get more expensive. So in a daredevil move, and with one eye on the oh-christ-this-could-be-dull-ometer, Ol and Dave simultaneously attempt to explain the gas market, geopolitics (please Mr Putin we didn't mean it), and the psychology of humans queuing for hours for petrol that isn't running out. ALSO THIS WEEK, some schadenfreude that we absolutely don't find funny and categorically do not endorse or condone. At all. Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella. Love the bab

Four wheels good, two legs bad. For a hundred years, the gas-guzzling car has been king. But its days are numbered - no-one seriously disputes that - and what comes next will determine the scale of biospheric butchery in the post. But what if The Car 2.0 turns out not to be flying cars, autonomous cars, or Richard Branson Cars, but instead a happy mishmash of whizzy things and old-fashioned things that you don't own? Y'know, bikes, e-bikes, scooters & hire cars all available at the swipe of an iphone, and all beautifully integrated with public transport that arrives punctually and isn't piss-stained. That's the dream of this week's guest, deputy editor of the Economist and author Tom Standage, whose exhaustive new book a) explains how the car came to occupy such economic, political and sociological dominance, and b) devotes a pleasingingly large number of pages to actual horse shit. Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo.

Despite what Assorted Inhofes say, climate change is a) real b) here already c) going to get worse. We'd better get ready. So how come we're - er - not? We chat all things climate adaptation with the eminent Dr Morgan Phillips, director of The Glacier Trust and, even more pertinently, author of a righteous new book about the subject, Great Adaptations. We talk about why despite human resilience, Morgan thinks that without shunting adaptation properly up the policy wazoo it's going to be Very Bad News Indeed for a very large number of people. And animals too. Turns out he's rather irked at big charities - and the Babble - for not banging on about it enough, a charge out from which we don't even attempt to weasel. All this, and why getting ready for climate change is very much like Tottenham's preparation for Harry Kane's off-sodding. Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur S

A 'wellbeing economy' sounds like the sort of economy that might not ruin everything, and in that sense we are very much behind it. But it also sounds like the sort of thing that we don't really know what it is. HOWEVER, this week's guest - writer, researcher, and advocate for economic system change Dr Katherine Trebeck - very much *does* know what it is, and is spearheading efforts to get Governments to actually prioritise wellbeing.We sit down with Katherine to find out where this all sits on the scale of Goldman Sachs to Kum Ba Yah, and how people can get involved in making it a reality. SPEAKING OF WHICH, please sign this splendid petition asking the UK govt to put the health of people and planet first https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/580646 Find out more about the Wellbeing Economy Alliance at weall.org and check out Nicola Sturgeon's Ted talk on why governments should prioritise wellbeing, as mentioned by Katherine, here https://www.ted.com/talks/nicola_sturgeon_why_governments_shoul

Does it really matter how 'fair' the solutions to climate breakdown are? So long as we stop the worst of it, who cares whether a few people have their noses put out of joint, right? Or is that missing the point, as well as being a bit inhofe-y? Is it *only* possible to achieve the radical changes needed if those changes don't, for instance, make the poor poorer? The rather splended Environmental Justice Commission has been talking to people throughout the UK about all this and more, and its boss, Luke Murphy, joins us to chew it over. Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella. Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble. MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.com Available on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Faceb

The list of things that enable life on earth is a pretty short one: a dollop of sunshine, drizzle of water, and a soupçon of air. But for anything fun to happen on land, you're going to need a liberal smattering of soil, too. In fact that 30cm of topsoil is so fundamentally important that it gets a bit scary to think what would happen if it wasn't there. Unfortunately that's less of a thought experiment than it might sound - it's widely quoted that humanity has got only 60 years of decent harvests left before the soil is either so degraded or so not there that we won't be able to feed ourselves. Eek. So, we DIG into the issue, dish the DIRT on some dodgy statmongering, and wonder what on EARTH it all means. Aaaaaand talking of Earth, we also give short shrift to gazillionaire bell-end Bezos and his willy wanging wocket whooshing. * As mentioned in the pod, Our World In Data's in-depth piece re the '60 harvests left' stat is here https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans Sustainababble is your f

It's more than 160 years since clever science people first worked out that digging up and burning long-dead bugs made Earth sizzly. So why are we still doing it? Why weren't the early warnings heeded? And was it inevitable that humanity would, at some point or other, combust its way into the current planetary pickle? These questions and zillions more are addressed in Dr Alice Bell's fabulous new book 'Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis'. Alice joins us for a natter about how we arrived at now, i.e. arguably the most consequential point in human history. Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella. Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble. MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.com Available on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visi

A wise person once said that when it comes to buggering up the planet, prison is an underused deterrent. And just why should it be OK to be an Earth-nausing Inhofe with impunity? NO WE AGREE WITH YOU, IT SHOULD NOT. Enter a fearsome bunch of lawyers and campaigners that have been steadily building momentum behind getting 'ecocide' - deliberately harming the environment - adopted as an international crime. And if that's one of those ideas that makes you go 'wow yes, that seems very sensible' and also 'but how the Dickens would it actually work?', then you've come to the right place this week. Joining us to talk about the Ecocide concept and movement is Jojo Mehta, co-Founder of the international Stop Ecocide Foundation. Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella. Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.c

Amster-, E-, Jean-Claude Van-. All splendid dams in their own right, but topics for another time. THIS week we set our babble sights on the massive concrete walls wot stall rivers so we can power our trouser presses. On the face of it, hydroelectric dams seem sensible: produce loads of reliable 'leccy from thing that isn't fossil fuels. But the problem about the faces of things is that they often distract from the armpits of things. And, as we discover, dams get awful armpitty when you look into them. Talking of the pits, Ol this week provides the worst and most embarrassing technical hitch of the 218 babbles so far. And apologises to Dave forever more. (Dam right he does, ed.) WATCH: splendid 15 minute video from the Tyndall Centre re the CO2-ness of dams, as mentioned frequently in this episode https://youtu.be/wnTh07WpOKY Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at De

Grand narratives of history are woven around pivotal moments, and it's just possible that when the history of this period is written, 26 May 2021 will be one of them. A little under a month ago, Royal Dutch Shell got told in no uncertain terms by a Dutch court to stop Royally Ducking up the Planet. Specifically, it got what in legal parlance is known as a hiding. The oil giant stood accused of endangering the rights to life and to family life by its actions, i.e. by continuing to drill for oil and therefore warming the planet. A three-judge panel upheld that accusation and ordered Shell to slash its emissions PDQ. Like in-half-within-nine-years PDQ. To understand how the (s)hell this happened and help us wrap our minds around the consequences, we're joined by Sjoukje van Oosterhout from Milieudefensie, the campaign group who brought the legal action. Read more about the historic ruling on Milieudefensie's site here: https://en.milieudefensie.nl/ Sustainababble is your friendly environment podca

It's the most successful website in the world, but many of us feel icky about using it. Is Amazon terrible for the planet or is it just, y'know, big? And if it is bad, is it any worse than thousands of little shops selling crap we don't need? Amazon's climate pledges and earnest sustainability marketing notwithstanding, we put our "we don't trust Jeff Bezos as far as we can propel him moon-wards" cards on the table... and then immediately get confused, given we're both customers. Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella. Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble. MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.com Available on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at hello@sustainababble.fis

Boris "Gordon Gekko" Johnson aside, no-one likes greed. But growth - mmmmm, warm, cuddly, economic growth - well, that's another matter. Lesson one in MP school is that our collective prosperity increases as the economy swells. More GDP = more hospitals and schools. It's one of the few things upon which mainstream political parties everywhere agree: growth is unquestionably good. Which makes the life-work of this week's guest, the absurdly big-brained Professor Tim Jackson, all the more notable. Tim, one of the world's foremost experts on ecological economics, set political tongues wagging with his epochal 2009 book Prosperity Without Growth. Infinite growth on a finite planet, he argued, is impossible, anathema to human happiness and ecologically ruinous. More than a decade on, his new book Post-Growth: Life After Capitalism is a poetic and philosophical call to arms, daring us to imagine "a world beyond capitalism—a place where relationship and meaning take precedence over profits and power".