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)--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.comAvailable 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 [email protected].

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. *(On Zoom)--Shout out to our podcast buddies, the superb 'Life Sentence' team, as mentioned at the end of the show. Check them out here https://life-sentence.simplecast.com/--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.comAvailable 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 [email protected].

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)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.comAvailable 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 [email protected].

"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 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.comAvailable 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 [email protected].

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)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.comAvailable 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 [email protected].

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. Ecoguff read out by Arabella. Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable 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 [email protected].

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/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.comAvailable 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 [email protected].

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 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.comAvailable 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 [email protected].

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 babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable 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 [email protected].

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. 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.comAvailable 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 [email protected].