My guest today is Julian Harris, Advisor at Almond, an app that empowers users to become carbon balanced by helping them to ‘Buy Better, Act Better and Offset the Rest’. Julian is committed to using his skills to combat climate change. 

In the episode, we discussed: 

• Julian’s personal experience of growing up in the mid-70s, reading a book that described pollution, and remembering how his interest sparked in the climate change subject early on 
• Julian’s expertise in programming and using that skill to work on climate mission-driven projects 
• Concept that it’s difficult for humans to think about and make decisions based on the long-term future — ‘not now but sometime in the future’ is an upward battle in a lot of topics including climate change 
• The major upward trend of the term ‘extreme weather’ on Google search over the past 5 years 
• Generational gap between peoples’ climate change mindsets based on the quality of life that one grew up in 
• The idea that getting people to change habits towards something that’s uncomfortable requires an exceptional amount of effort 
• Personal tipping point for Julian being the September 2019 Global Climate Strike 
• People want to get engaged in climate change but they’re turned off by all the negative news — suggestions on what we can do about that 
• Julian’s process of creating Flipboards that people can follow — Climate Hope and Climate Hopelessness — to read articles on the 2 sides of the news cycle
• Relating crisis based industries such as firefighters and emergency room staff to climate change — how we can learn to deal with the fact that the job is ‘crisis as usual’ from these industries 
• Discussion of looking for a new job at a company that aligns with your values and is doing good 
• Acknowledgement that we all fundamentally live in communities and our actions impact other people 

Here are the direct links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Here are the direct links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Julian’s Flipboard
• Almond.org
• September 2019 Global Climate Strike article