Wicked Problems - Climate Tech Conversations

Get bonus content & full show notes at wickedproblems.earth

Thick ice caps topping some dormant volcanoes may be acting like a champagne cork. Research released earlier this month suggests that by speeding up the melt of those ice caps through human-caused climate change, we’re removing the foil and the little wire cage on some trapped liquid that will taste a bit more acidic than champagne when it gets out as the cork tries to free itself.

Bob Berwyn has reported for a decade for Inside Climate News - the OG climate outlet that in 2015 broke the story of the biggest corporate scandal in history: a nine-part investigative series demonstrating how much #ExxonKnew about the effects that burning oil and other fossil fuels would have on the future climate, and then doing everything in its power to prevent anyone from stopping it.

Bob’s piece on the volcano research stopped me in my tracks. As he said in this conversation:

“the most profound thing about a study like this volcano study … is how profoundly we're changing fundamental parts of the global Earth system. I mean, we're sitting here talking about things like, ‘wow, could our activities actually cause more volcanoes?’ I mean, just the fact that we're asking this question is, ‘wow, what have we done?’ You know?”

In This Conversation

01:33 Scientific Insights on Volcanic Activity

05:20 Challenges in Climate Research

12:09 Global Climate Negotiations

20:12 Heatwaves and Public Health

23:54 Legal and Ethical Responsibilities

24:36 The Reality of Heat Waves and Their Deadly Impact

26:13 The Political Project Against Climate Science

27:07 Social Science and Climate Action

28:58 The Anti-Autocracy Handbook for Scientists

31:02 Free Speech and Authoritarianism

34:25 The Role of Legal Obligations in Climate Justice

37:05 Public Perception and Managed Retreat

40:37 Final Thoughts and Upcoming Stories

Keep Up With Bob

Bob is an essential follow on BlueSky, and his journalism for Inside Climate News does not quit. Here are links to just some of the stories we touched on:

Melting Ice Caps Could Bring Dormant Volcanoes to Life

Human-Caused Global Warming Spiked the Death Toll of Europe’s Early Summer Heatwave

New Handbook Aims to Protect Scientists From Autocratic Threats

Bonn Climate Talks Rife With Roadblocks and Dead Ends

If you think these conversations are worth listening to, share them with a friend or make an offering to the volcano gods to spare your town.

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In this Wicked Problems – Climate Tech Conversations, we’re joined by Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century, a landmark work on climate-driven migration. From the existential realities of climate displacement to the politics of denial and adaptation, it’s about what happens when we stop pretending everyone will stay where they are.

It Bad

Last week, a catastrophic flood hit Kerr County, Texas. 30 cm of rain—four months' worth—fell in hours. The Guadalupe River rose 8 metres in under an hour, swamping the area around Camp Mystic. Over 90 are dead, many of them young girls at the camp. Some are still missing.

Cue the blame game. Officials who refused to fund early warning systems claimed the event was unpredictable. Trump-era cuts had gutted the National Weather Service, yet some still pointed fingers at the agency. Others called it karmic justice or MAGA-targeted weather warfare. Conspiracy theorists went further, blaming imaginary geoengineering attacks. Marjorie Taylor-Greene tweeted: “We must end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering.”

Right-wing extremists, already attacking Doppler radar sites, turn tragedy into paranoia. In past hurricanes, conspiracy-fueled threats forced rescue crews to withdraw.Rapid attribution studies confirm what should be obvious: climate change makes these once-rare floods far more likely.

OK Doomer

In a now-notorious quote, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki said “it’s too late.” Critics pounced, accusing him of defeatism. But, as we discuss with Gaia Vince, the real issue isn’t optimism vs pessimism—it’s whether we’re brave enough to face what’s actually happening.

After decades in media and PR, I can tell when people are dodging the truth—even for good reasons. In climate comms, there’s a lot of that. But we try something different here: saying what we think is true, even if it’s hard to hear.

On the Move

Gaia Vince has been writing about climate and migration for over a decade. In Nomad Century, she argues:

• Migration is a natural response to climate change—always has been.
• By 2070, up to 3 billion people may need to move as habitable zones shrink.
• Governments that prepare for this now will fare better than those that deny it.

The book isn’t dystopian; it’s clear-eyed and pragmatic. It insists we have a choice: chaos, or planned adaptation.

In This Conversation

01:54 Climate Change’s Global Reach

04:24 The Reality of Climate Migration

09:24 Political Responses to Climate Change

10:44 Economic Implications and Adaptation

21:57 Innovative Solutions and Future Outlook

26:10 Australia and Tuvalu

27:06 UN, Sovereignty, and Vanishing Nations

29:00 Climate Refugees

30:05 Early Agreements

30:56 Adaptation and Relocation

34:21 Facing the Climate Reality

46:55 Can Global Governance Step Up?

Get the Book

Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval remains one of the most honest, practical guides to climate adaptation out there. Listen to the conversation—and get the book.

Tips, Bribes, and Abuse

Guest idea? Want to help us do more of this? Or just dying to tell us how crap we are? Reach out on Bluesky or email us at [email protected]—and maybe stand us a pint.

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Is the “Abundance” discourse - and you can fit most iterations of it in a spectrum from Aaron Bastani and Zohran Mamdani to Ezra Klein to Elon Musk - an inspiring vision of the future or a dangerous delusion? Is insisting on “limits” just realism or is it pathological pessimism? And where does climate tech fit into all that?

We think the answers to these questions are kind of important. So we were excited to talk it through onstage at Extreme Hangout during London Climate Action Week at Ladbroke Hall; with climate tech entrepreneur Yasmine Abdu, co-founder of Fridays for the Future Michael Spiekermann, and BP exec to sustainability strategist Charles Perry.

Enjoy!

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02:27 Michael Speakman's Journey from Activism to Policy

03:36 Yasin Abdu's Carbon Track Initiative

04:51 Discussion on Abundance vs. Limits

15:19 Charles Perry on the Stellar Vision

24:30 Debating the Future of Energy and Policy

28:18 Reconciling System Change and Longevity

28:44 Building an Ecosystem of Corporate Support

29:39 Avoiding Venture Capital for Mission-Driven Impact

30:58 Choosing Entrepreneurship Over Activism

32:18 The Power of Bottom-Up Movements

37:31 Identifying the Villain in Climate Narratives

50:29 Hope and the Global Sustainability Revolution

52:45 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

All the Outros

Many thanks to our panel and our partners at Extreme Hangout for bringing us on to their stage!

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How am I gonna be an optimist about this? This conversation’s official exit music is from Bastille. But stick around for a twist.

Turns out it’s not just men who think about the Roman Empire.

Polymath raconteuse Solitaire Townsend - sustainability consultant, co-founder of Futerra, UN envoy, award-winning author of the non-fiction The Solutionists - wasn’t just thinking about Rome. She’s wondering, ‘what if I combine some Roman Empire stuff with climate fiction in an alt-history universe in a novel featuring a kick-arse heroine?’ And gets herself a two-book deal.

Pre-order Godstorm from our Bookshop.org site or wherever you get good books.

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As a cli-fi/alt-history nerd with shelves stuffed with riffs on Rome from Gibbon to Mary Beard with stops for Asimov’s Foundation series, I cannot tell you how pleased I am to be the first to introduce Solitaire Townsend as “novelist” on a podcast.

We talk about her turn to fiction, why now, why the alt-history genre, kick around ideas about alt-history from Philip K. Dick to Star Trek (with some Ursula le Guin because why not), and how she deploys the form to tell a cautionary tale about a world that could have been a lot worse off in its climate breakdown — where Rome never fell, because of the 2nd-century CE invention of the combustion engine.

As Solitaire says, if we started burning oil under Marcus Aurelius, climate change would have started much sooner. The warming and rising seas fuel extreme weather events called “God-storms”, caused - according to the Imperial version of Fox News - by lack of piety.

Most of that is in the background only creating the more personal, intimate world in which her characters struggle - including a gladatrix-turned-governess seeking to rescue her charge from nefarious clutches and kicking serious arse along the way.

In Conversation

00:28 First Podcast as a Novelist

00:56 Pitching 'Godstorm'

02:18 Background and Career of Solitaire Townsend

02:37 Solitaire, Sustainability Caesaris

04:01 Nonfiction Writing Journey

05:49 Role of Storytelling in Social Change

07:22 Transition to Fiction Writing

08:14 Discovering a Passion for Writing

10:24 Exploring Alternate History

14:05 Speculative Fiction and Personal Interests

17:26 Themes and Inspirations for 'God Storm'

20:14 Character Development and Empathy

22:14 Reflections on Ursula Le Guin and Sci-Fi

27:21 Conclusion and Book Pre-Order Information

Pre-order Godstorm from our Bookshop.org site.

Exit Music

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In 2024, Wim Carton and Andreas Malm released Overshoot - How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. It was praised and critiqued in various quarters - but we included it in our books of the year because it’s a) beautifully written - with plenty of lateral-thought LOLs and b) was perfectly timed to come out just as the data was increasingly at odds with the “Keep 1.5 Alive” stuff of “incantatory governance” - the magical thinking that seems to be a really complicated way of avoiding some obvious, but difficult, choices. But Overshoot was just the first half of a 2-parter.

In the final part, out in October, The Long Heat - Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, Carton and Malm take up the challenge about what to do about it. Will adaptation, carbon dioxide removals, and geoengineering be topics seriously engaged with? Or will they just be a new version of finding ways to avoid the fossil fuels “stranded assets” conversation we’ve avoided having for 35 years of climate politics?

In this conversation, we spend a lot of time talking about carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, revealing their roots in extending fossil fuel use, and argues for the necessity of political change to make meaningful progress.

But we ended up in an unexpected place. The book, surprisingly to me when I read it, concludes (however reluctantly) that CDR is going to be necessary. But that it needs to be decoupled from a system full of perverse incentives and moral hazard on meth and towards a re-framing of CDR as a public good.

What’s in the Conversation

00:00 Introduction and Opening Remarks

00:17 Host Introduction and Upcoming Events

02:27 Guest Introduction: Wim Carton

04:48 Discussing 'Overshoot' and Climate Politics

06:13 The Role of Fossil Fuel Companies

16:38 Adaptation Strategies and Challenges

18:43 Technological Solutions and Their Limits

20:07 Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)

20:51 The Concept of Negative Magic

21:41 Problematizing Reversibility

22:43 Political Economy of Carbon Dioxide Removal

24:08 Klaus Lachner and Carbon Removal

28:05 Startups and the Political Economy

31:07 Challenges in Carbon Removal Market

35:36 The Role of the State in Carbon Removal

40:12 Concluding Thoughts and Future Discussions

Get the Books

Like the authors we’re speaking with? Want to get their books, support the author, independent booksellers, and this show?

Come get em at our Bookshop.org shop!

Next episode out very soon is with Solitaire Townsend - talking about her debut novel - a cli-fi/alt-history/Roman-Empire mashup - Godstorm. What if Rome invented the combustion engine, so it never fell?

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Join host Richard Delevan on Wicked Problems as he engages in a compelling conversation with Indian journalist Rishika Pardikar. They discussed Rishika's extensive work covering environmental and land rights issues in India, including her stories from the coalfields of Central India and the impacts of major development projects on tribal lands. Rishika shares insights into India's complex climate and energy landscape, the challenges of effective climate reporting, and the cultural intricacies of her homeland. And what Western climate narratives keep getting wrong about India - and what they might learn by listening to voices like Rishika's.

00:58 Meet Rashika Kar: Environmental Journalist

01:47 Rishika's Journey into Environmental Reporting

02:21 Land Rights and Tribal Communities

03:24 Mega Projects on Tribal Lands

05:06 Challenges in Reporting from India

11:56 India's Coal Belt and Energy Transition

16:59 The Future of Energy in India

22:51 The Efficiency of Indian Appliances

24:00 The Politics of Climate Science

24:36 Challenges in India's Forecasting Capabilities

27:54 The Intersection of Religion and Science

28:53 Controversial Studies and Their Implications

32:01 The Role of Journalism in Climate Action

36:36 India's Climate Action Plans

40:10 Future Reporting and Closing Thoughts

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For nearly a decade, a court in Hamm, Germany has been considering a case brought by a Peruvian farmer, Saul Luciano Lliuya, against the giant German utility RWE. The legal claim was novel: Lliuya said because RWE had caused a percentage of climate change because of its share of past fossil emissions, and that climate change threatened his farm by potentially collapsing a glacial lake, RWE should have to pay a pro rata percentage of the adaptation costs of protecting the farm against potential flood.

Judges flew to Peru, took testimony from dozens of experts, heard the defence by RWE. And as their press release noted, the claim in its particulars was dismissed:

Climate case against RWE: Hamm Higher Regional Court rejects Peruvian plaintiff’s appeal as unfounded

The court held there was “no imminent danger” to Saul’s farm.

But that’s not the whole story. As an Ancient Greek king supposedly once said: “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” Because in its 25th May ruling the court also held - for the first time, anywhere - that fossil fuel emitters can be held accountable financially for damages, anywhere.

Three days later, as if to make a point, the Swiss village of Blatten 500 miles south of Hamm in Germany was destroyed by a glacial collapse. One person was reported missing - but most of the area’s 300 residents had been moved out of danger in time.

So is the RWE case a blow to climate litigation or is it a Pyrrhic victory that could set in motion a whole range of new claims that could run to the tens of trillions of dollars, in the kind of law case even Americans can understand: “You broke my fence, you pay to fix the fence.” Or in this case: “You broke my climate.”

Dana Drugmand covers climate cases around the world and we talked about the precedent this might set - and we also discuss some of her coverage of plenty of other US climate cases that continue to roll on despite the best efforts of the Trump Administration and oil & gas companies to stop them.

Wicked Problems is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this Conversation

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:31 Overview of Climate Litigation

01:51 The German Court Ruling: Saul Luciano Lliuya vs. RWE

02:39 Significance of the RWE Case

06:37 Implications for Global Climate Litigation

10:15 US Climate Lawsuits: Boulder, Colorado vs. Exxon and Suncor

14:37 Federal Preemption and State Law Claims

15:43 Hawaii's Climate Deception Case

17:23 Trump Administration's Legal Counterattacks

22:14 Youth Climate Lawsuit: Lighthouse Review vs. Trump

23:47 Montana's Constitutional Right to a Healthy Environment

25:19 Challenges in Federal Court

27:14 The Role of Climate Litigation in the US

30:17 California's Clean Air Act Battle

31:56 Conclusion and Future Outlook

It’s a good listen - and if you’re a subscriber you can find links to get these episodes ad-free at wickedproblems.earth.

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I have a confession to make. Even with a self-image as a world-weary cynic, I’m as vulnerable to manipulation as anyone else, especially for stories I grew up with.

The Limits to Growth came out the year I was born. I grew up in the US in the 80s. So we heard a lot of things like this:

So even though I’m late to it, I was delighted to have come across the work of Katy Shields, who presents (and co-produced with Vegard Beyer) a beautifully executed 3-episode audio documentary series about Limits to Growth, which makes its principal author Danella Meadows the main character.

Hearing Katy’s telling of the story of this extraordinary woman who tried to warn us against the future we now inhabit, often in her own words - thanks to an unpublished book outline by Danella to which Katy got exclusive access - made me a bit embarrassed to have previously accepted the bracketing of Limits to Growth in the same category of far more problematic stuff like Malthus, Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb or (the MAGA-right fave) Jean Raspail’s dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints. Many such works seem not so troubled by population growth per se as much as the hue of the babies being produced.

While I’m not completely convinced by the arguments Meadows made and Katy Shields/Vegard Beyer excavated and made fresh, Katy does have an excellent series of essays where she takes forward the thinking of Meadows et al as a way to investigate how economics was hijacked by the opponents of Limits to Growth.

In this Conversation

00:00 Introduction: Questioning Growth

00:32 Meet the Guest: Katy Shields

02:21 Discovering 'Limits to Growth'

04:38 The Impact of Systems Dynamics

07:30 Critiques and Misunderstandings

09:37 Danella Meadows' Influence

11:23 Uncovering Unpublished Diaries

14:43 Life on Foundation Farm

18:51 Economic Theories and Climate Inaction

19:12 The Abundance vs. Scarcity Debate

20:08 Historical Influence on Modern Economics

21:41 The Chicago School's Dominance

23:26 Challenges in Modern Economic Education

28:54 Donella Meadows' Legacy

31:15 Visioning a Sustainable Future

34:34 Future Directions and Final Thoughts

At the top of the episode we clip a 1994 speech by Danella Meadows that is an extraordinary few minutes that seem to foreshadow the ‘abundance discourse’ currently all the rage on the centre-left.

Which is not actually to shame those who, I believe in good faith, believe that ‘perpetual growth’ is the only potential solution to the challenges of the mid-21st century.

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Exit music for this episode is “Oil Money” by Graham Barham. Because, well, it’s a bit obvious this time, no?

If insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result, global climate institutions like the annual COP meetings are definitionally loopier than Elon Musk deep down a K-hole.

We spend our time arguing about how to count emissions in order to avoid the real conversation, which is a struggle between three asset classes: fossil fuel assets, ‘vulnerable’ assets (like Small Island Developing States), and ‘green’ assets. Pretending that struggle is not existential is the essence of climate diplomacy for the past 35 years.

University of Toronto political scientist Professor Jessica Green thinks we’re well past the point we can afford to continue pretending. Reading her forthcoming book, Existential Politics - Why Global Climate Institutions are Failing and How to Fix Them, was like waking from a dream. You should pre-order it now.

She cuts through the nonsense to focus on the real dilemma. The only way through an “energy transition” is for fossil fuel companies, enormously powerful economic and political actors, to have $trillions in ‘stranded assets’ and balance sheets that go up in smoke.

Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas (an idiomatic expression I’m pleased to be the first to share with Prof. Green). Yet the entire structure of global climate diplomacy is built on the fallacy that, somehow, oil majors and NOCs would ignore their self-interest and agree to die.

As you’ll hear in our conversation, Prof. Green doesn’t pull punches and doesn’t suffer fools. There’s an impatience in her writing and her presentation that has a lot of James Dyke “fuck this noise can we please stop kidding ourselves” energy. At some points I wanted to reach for the hemlock, but thankfully she is as witty as she is sharp.

I ask her how her ideas intersect or cut against other critiques of the mainstream climate conversation like Andreas Malm and Wim Carton in Overshoot, Rupert Read’s take on transformative adaptation and Tadzio Mueller’s anticipation of collapse.

I think you’ll enjoy the chat. Let us know what you think:

In this Conversation

01:48 Existential Politics Explained

04:18 The Flaws in Carbon Markets

05:47 Distributional Politics and Climate Policy

08:36 The Role of Corporations in Climate Governance

10:49 The Paris Agreement and Its Shortcomings

19:26 The Misconception of Solving Climate Change Like the Ozone Problem

20:54 Environmental Effects and Substitutes

22:04 Challenges in Environmental Governance

22:57 Market Dynamics and Trade Issues

25:03 Fossil Capital vs. Green Capital

28:31 The Role of Litigation and Policy

37:11 Grand Bargains and Political Realities

38:21 Carbon Capture and Storage Debate

40:26 Buy this Book!

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How do things get names? Who decides? What happens if they’re contested? Does it matter?

A brand, a label, a name, the words applied to people, places, or things change how an audience feels, and influences outcomes.

“Call me Ishmael”, “deadnaming”, or try using the wrong place-name depending on what bank of the River Foyle in Northern Ireland you find yourself, and see how that goes. On the other hand, if your company so dominates your category that your brand becomes a verb, like Hoover. But in the internet age the process happens much faster — see Google, Uber, Tinder.

As for people and companies, a tricker object is a whole category. Successfully dominating a category - even if you have to invent one - is, according to Silicon Valley investors like Peter “Competition is for Losers” Thiel, the only type of strategy worth pursuing. And often that will involve getting the name of the category right - some magical combination of things already in the zeitgeist, something that chimes with the audience/customer/media without them consciously knowing why.

The idea of whether businesses are in a category called “cleantech” or “climate tech” or “defence tech” or “fintech” does matter, I’d argue.

So I asked Art Lapinsch, a startup founder with a successful exit turned climate communications guru and energy lawyer. Now writing a lot of smart stuff on the subject in his new consultancy Delphi Zero, I wanted to return to the “is ‘climate tech’ dead?” debate.

But Lapinsch’s bio itself would be enough to want to hear him - going from fleeing civil war in the former Yugoslavia to adtech startup founder to turning to climate solutions ventures and how they should tell their stories. You’re going to enjoy getting to know him. I certainly did. And he was a good sport when dog-related imminent disaster required putting him on hold for a minute. Don’t worry. There’s good interval music for the occasion.

In this Conversation

00:00 Introduction to Climate Tech Narratives

01:17 Meet Art Lapinsch: Background and Mission

02:36 Personal Impact of Global Events

03:03 Delving into Energy Security

04:28 The Evolution of Climate Tech

08:32 Communication Strategies in Business

17:49 The Role of Neologisms in Industry

21:38 Ethics and Communication

22:05 Defining Neologisms and Ethical Communication

22:41 The Venn of Profit, Legality, and Ethics

23:50 Ethical Communication Techniques

25:36 Political Communication and Climate Founders

27:15 Common Mistakes in Branding and Communication

30:11 Navigating Venture Capital Challenges

35:32 Personal Reflections on Risk and Resilience

40:46 Final Thoughts and Future Projects

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