Doing Good, Badly Podcast

We're not climate doomers, we're climate realists, and the climate solutions we need to meet the moment may already be here.

Every few days another post goes around telling us the world is hard right now but good things are still happening.We get why people share it, but it mostly tells everyone that someone else has this under control and that everyone can get back to business as usual. It's the same story we grew up on, where a hero turns up just before the credits, and climate has been sold to us that way for years, most recently by billionaires who wanted to be Tony Stark.¹ But the harsh reality is - nobody is coming to do this for us, and we think it is more useful right now to be a little scared and motivated than to be soothed.

I despair most of the time, but we can’t afford the luxury of despair.- David Suzuki

Part of the problem is that extreme weather has become background noise, something we watch on the news and scroll past, and we have been desensitized one record-breaking summer and one climate disaster after another. Weather, climate and water disasters have gone up 5 times in 50 years, and the losses went from an average of $49 million a day in the 1970s to $383 million a day in the 2010s. In Canada, insured losses went from $14 billion between 2006 and 2015 to $37 billion between 2016 and 2025, and the Arctic is warming roughly 3 times faster than the global average. When the hunger stones along the Danube start showing up again, carved centuries ago to warn that if the water is this low famine is coming, it gets hard to keep calling any of this a trend.²

None of this is news to the people who have been ringing the alarm for a decade or more, from the Paris Agreement in 2015 to the IPCC’s 2018 warning that we had twelve years, which in Canada lost the news cycle nine days later to cannabis legalization.³ Mainstream climate coverage peaked in 2021 and has been falling ever since, and this September’s UN report saying we will now pass 1.5°C degrees was mostly read as game over (I mean read the cover…. they are saying there are many ways to recover we just need to act - Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return). The report itself says something more demanding, which is that how far we overshoot, and for how long, still depends on what governments and companies decide to do next, and so far what they have decided goes well beyond inaction, with more money flowing into fossil fuels and climate conferences sponsored by some of the biggest polluters in the world.

David Suzuki clearly points out that when there is a war, economics get set aside, and we have watched that happen twice in recent memory. During COVID governments rewrote the rules to keep people alive and safe, and in the past year Canada decided defence was a priority and the capital showed up almost overnight, including from funds that weren’t even allowed to invest in defence a few years ago.⁴ The argument that there simply aren’t enough climate solutions to fund does not survive that comparison, because solutions show up where the money and the political will go.

We also don’t have to re-invent the model. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps put three million young men to work in the 1930s, planted three billion trees, built 711 state parks and sent $25 of every $30 paycheque home to their families, and Canada already has its own versions. Canadian wildland firefighters get deployed from Australia to Greece because of the expertise built through CIFFC, and Indigenous Guardians, running at more than 240 sites, returns up to $3.70 in social, cultural, economic and environmental value for every dollar invested. Canada already has a climate corps, it is Indigenous-led, and most people have never heard of it.

We really deeply need to sit in wonder and whimsy at the natural world and the gifts we've been given, and find the fight in ourselves. - Kristy, Sustainability Consultant Not Giving Up!

We are in a climate emergency, and we are not screwed yet. Every time a flood or a fire makes the news, somebody asks who is going to fix it, and the answer is simple - you and me, and a lot of ordinary people who haven't been hired yet. That work will be done by millions of people finding their role in it rather than by one hero, which is exactly where we go next episode, with climate jobs and the skills it will take to fill them. Next episode we look at those jobs, who is training for them, and what it would take for the rest of us to get one.

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Every billionaire with a rocket sells the same story: they are saving us. Earth is fragile, the future is dangerous, and they are the ones who will get humanity through it. It is a rescue, and they are the only rescue on offer. None of which is true. They are not doing this to save you and me, and our neighbours. They are doing it for ego, for power, and for growth, because a man who already owns this much of the planet starts to find the planet small. They will tell you Earth is finite, that infinite growth on one world is impossible, so we have no choice but to expand outward. But the limit they have run into is not the planet's. It is their own. And what they are selling is not a solution to that limit, it is a way to keep growing past it, somewhere new.

Bezos says he wants to move heavy industry off Earth so the planet can stay a treasure, and Musk says Mars is humanity's backup drive, and both of them would like you to hear this as generosity. But Musk's own pay package only pays out once a million people are actually standing on Mars, which means the moment he saves the species is also the moment he collects, and once salvation and payday are the same milestone it stops being obvious that we are the ones being rescued.

Wealth is no sort of power at all unless you make it one. Wealth is a State-made thing, a convention, the most artificial of powers.- H.G. Wells, The Time Machine and Other Stories

The billionaire brain is not a metaphor. Paul Piff spent years at Berkeley proving that as people get richer, their empathy goes down. Money, he said, makes you more likely to act like a jerk. Dacher Keltner found the same from the other side: feeling powerful shuts off the parts of the brain that enable you to read other people. Two decades of studies, and the findings only became more concrete. The more power someone holds, the less they can see the world from anyone else's perspective.

Then that brain runs into the one thing money can never fix, which is that the man hoarding is is going to die anyway. Terror Management Theory is the research on what we do with that knowledge, and the finding is that we manage the fear of dying by building things meant to outlast us. For most people that is children, or work. For a man with unlimited money and no real sense of anyone else, it is a rocket with his name on it, or a bunker under a mountain. Both are built to survive the end of the world rather than prevent it, and neither has room in the plan for the rest of us.

We get into the money too, the speed and size of the space industry, and what those same fortunes could do aimed at the ground instead of the sky. It does not tie up in a bow, which is the honest answer.

Overview Effect can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. - Will Shatner & Josh Brandon

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An episode about consultants, which is a little awkward given that we are two consultants ourselves. The reality of most of what a big firm sells is the average opinion in a nicer suit, and it costs the most at exactly the moment a safe answer is not what you or the world needs.

We spend a while dissecting why the consultants reputation is earned, from the metrics obsession that vanishes anything a spreadsheet cannot hold, to the sharper argument Mazzucato and Collington make in The Big Con, is that the real product is a client left worse at its own job than before the firm arrived, and continsouly reliant on an increasing amount of support. The opioid history and the oil-sponsored climate summit are in there too. Then we make the case for our existence and why there is still a place for consulting. We talk a lot about the version of the job we actually believe in, the one that is smaller, stranger, and genuinely bad for repeat business, because every problem turns out to be a creative problem and the people who shift anything are the ones thinking sideways and stealing like artists.

There is a line in here about making the rebellion delightful that reorganised the whole conversation for us. Not a time to be boring, so go listen.

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Last episode was about not buying things. This one is the opposite move: spending on purpose. The buycott.

Here is the part nobody puts on the tote bag. The wallet is a lousy ballot. One dollar, one vote is not one person, one vote. The rich vote early and often, the seller sets the options, and the whole thing tallies attention rather than virtue. And yet, a few times, it drew blood.

We get into three of them. GameStop, where a crowd in bandanas shorted a hedge fund into oblivion and, if you read the letters, it was never really about the money. Nike and Kaepernick, the buycott a brand ordered in advance, ran the numbers on, and monetized from both ends, burning shoes and all. Patagonia taking out a full-page ad to tell people not to buy the jacket, then selling a billion dollars of jackets anyway.

The ones that work are not random. They share the same bones: a clear target, a tight window, a signal loud enough that the wider community cannot ignore it, a cost to join low enough that almost anyone can, and a pressure point where all that deployed capital actually lands. Miss one of those and you get a hashtag that trends for a day and changes nothing. Hit all of them and a crowd of first-time buyers can move a company, a market, or a conversation.

Strip the mechanics off all of them and what is left is memory. Not the sales numbers, not the stock charts, the story people carry afterward. GameStop went quiet for three years and the crowd was still there when Roaring Kitty came back. People remember the Nike ad longer than they remember the burning. People remember “Don’t Buy This Jacket” and could not tell you a single other thing Patagonia has done. That is the real currency here, and it is the one thing your wallet cannot actually buy.

The wallet is a terrible ballot. But coordinated people are genuinely dangerous to the comfortable, and every so often they prove it.

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The most powerful boycott in American history lasted 381 days and started with a murder. Seventy years later, the biggest boycott story of the year is about oat milk and a chatbot. Welcome to consumer power, where the stakes swing from life and death to a very bad website.

Everyone says vote with your dollars. This episode is about the part nobody mentions: the money is the least interesting weapon you have. The real one is memory, and whether a company can survive being remembered.

We trace it from the bus that Rosa Parks would not give up, to the oat milk brand that answered a boycott with the most tone-deaf PR response, to the AI standoff that sent more than a million people to the cancel button in a single week. We also get into who actually gets to boycott, why perfect is the enemy of useful, and how paying attention to nothing at all is its own kind of protest.

We meant to cover buycotts in here too. They got too good, so they get their own episode next.

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Too tired for hype. Too stubborn to quit.

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In January 2026, Mark Carney stood at Davos and said what most people in power have spent years carefully not saying: the old model isn’t coming back, and nostalgia isn’t a plan.

We had so many thoughts, and we still have more.

The speech didn’t come out of nowhere. It landed at the end of a long arc, from the 1930s debate over who corporations actually owe anything to, through the moment Milton Friedman made shareholder primacy into a kind of religion, through the brief window when Larry Fink mentioned ESG 26 times in one letter and then once and then not at all, through the quiet collapse of the Net Zero Banking Alliance and the organizations that signed its commitments and then, one by one, didn’t.

This episode traces that arc. How the language of responsibility got built, scaled, weaponized, and hollowed out and what Mark Fisher had to say about why it was always going to be hard to imagine anything different. We get into what Carney is actually arguing (and what he borrowed from the Finnish president to say it), why the Davos setting is either deeply ironic or entirely strategic, and why two sustainability consultants who have watched all of this from the inside are still, against the available evidence, stubbornly optimistic.

Not because things are fine. Because the pretending is over, and that might be exactly what was needed.

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Every company has values. They’re on the wall, in the handbook, probably in a custom font. Most of them ‘are bland, toothless, or just plain dishonest.’

In Episode 03, Jo and Kristy get into taxonomy of corporate values and why most companies get them wrong. We break down the Lencioni taxonomy, which has been sitting in the Harvard Business Review since 2002 telling companies exactly what they’re doing wrong and has been cheerfully ignored ever since.

We get into H&M, whose former head of sustainability spent a decade saying all the right things before becoming CEO. The quotes are genuinely extraordinary.

We get into Oatly, which is not a villain story so much as a grief story, and we’re still bummed out for Mr. Science.

And then there’s Costco. We did not plan to end up here. A company so unsexy its entire marketing strategy is currently a CEO eating a hot dog in one take. And yet. Costco turns out to be one of the most genuinely values-aligned businesses in North America right now.

The gap between what organizations say they believe and what they do when it costs something is not usually malicious. It is not even usually cynical. But when it gets wide enough, something breaks that is harder to pinpoint than a lost customer or a bad headline.

Psychologists call it moral injury. We call it Episode 03.

Skeptical but hopeful. Optimism without the b******t.

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The brand that trademarked radical transparency just got sold to the least transparent fashion company most people can name.

In this episode we break down the Everlane acquisition by Shein -- what actually happened, why it hit so hard, and what it reveals about the gap between values as a brand identity and values as a legal structure.

We get into the founding story and the early cracks. The economics of the sale and who actually got paid. Who Shein is and what they are really buying. The psychology of the Shein haul and why it is the complete opposite of everything Everlane stood for. And the heartbreak -- because this brand was not just a place to shop. For a lot of women it was a place to put their values, their identity, and their hope that doing the right thing inside a broken system was actually possible. When that gets sold on a Saturday morning to the company it was supposed to be the antidote to, it does not feel like a business transaction. It feels personal. Because it is.

We also get into mission lock, the structural tools that actually protect values when the money gets hard and why the lesson here is not that the mission failed. It is that the mission was never structurally protected in the first place.

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Doing good is complicated.

Doing it badly is apparently very easy. We investigated.We’ve spent years inside sustainability, impact, and strategy work. In boardrooms. In workshops. In decks that promised transformation and delivered incremental change. We’ve seen what moves the needle. We’ve seen what stalls out.

And we’ve seen how often the language of change runs ahead of the systems meant to deliver it.

This podcast exists because pretending that doesn’t happen isn’t helping anyone. If you’re tired of nodding along to stories that don’t add up, or watching good intentions collapse under bad incentives, you’re in the right place.

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