Britain has lost 90% of its seagrass meadows, most of that in the last three decades. This is a major opportunity for restoration and ocean farming.
Good interview in Vox that makes the connection between climate change and offshore tax havens.
Having written about how France is building a repair culture recently, it was great to read that the government will adopt the EU’s repair standards from the summer.
Bangladesh has scrapped plans for nine new coal power plants, more evidence that coal power is becoming an obsolete technology.
Next week I thought I’d write up some recommendations for podcasts on climate change and the environment. If you’ve got any favourites that you’d like to see included, let me know below.
How we insulated under our floors
Regular readers will know about my plan to get our house to an A rating by 2020, and net zero by 2025. I missed the 2020 deadline due to the government mis-handling the Green Homes Grant, but this week the underfloor insulation went in. I won’t be commissioning a new Energy Performance Certificate to confirm…
Book review: Breathless, by Chris Woodford
There is nothing more natural than breathing. As the back cover blurb for Chris Woodford’s Breathless points out, we all do it 20,000 times a day. And yet what we breathe into our bodies is far from natural, and really quite complicated. Breathless is an impressive overview of the issue of air pollution. And the…
Where the news goes unreported
At the weekend, two young parents gave an interview on television, in which they implied that all is not well in one of history’s most privileged families. Every commentator in the land then had their say, either agreeing and sympathising, or leaping to the defence of the royal family. The column inches generated by this…
The Earthbound Report 
I’ll point out the obvious podcast on climate change being Outrage & Optimism with Christiana Figueres and co… https://globaloptimism.com/podcasts/
Thanks – I actually hadn’t come across Outrage & Optimism until this month. A reader recommending it to me prompted the post so I can find out what else I’m missing!
I enjoy Fully Charged podcast https://fullycharged.show/podcasts/ on electric vehicles and the transition to net zero. It’s UK-centric but interested in other places.
And the Hopeful Activist https://praxiscentre.org/podcast/ from the Praxis Centre, again UK-based but interested in the rest of the world, interviewing lots of faith-based activists on climate, the environment and other issues.
Thanks, yes – two different and interesting listens. I like it when Fully Charged cast the net a bit wider, both in the show and the podcast. Their recent report from Shenzhen on its electric buses was brilliant.
Your call prompted me to actually start listening to The Sustainability Agenda (on my podcast feeds but till recently never I actually opened any). Although they can be more factually ‘stodgy’ and/or more radical (controversial?) than the (I feel) excellently accessible and lively Outrage and Optimism,, I’ve found some very good ‘food for thought’ in the few episodes I’ve listened to so far. Fergal Byrne (interviewer) also produced The Drawdown Agenda series of podcasts. I’m impressed at the range of interesting and deeply thoughtful people he’s identified to interview.
I did also listen to a few episodes of The Good Dirt (Australian, Christian ecology perspective IIRC)
https://thegooddirt.podbean.com/
not a podcast, but i saw today that Drawdown are also producing an educational course of videos:
https://drawdown.org/climate-solutions-101
really beautifully produced, and I liked the lucid, optimistic yet quite realistic way the first video at least summarised things.
I also think it’s interesting and signficant how much climate change/environment/sustainability has gone mainstream now, so that some of the best stuff isn’t found in dedicated sustainability podcasts but spread around the ‘podiverse’. A couple of BBC examples that struck me recently are The Compass (interesting recent features on the Arctic, Forests, Climate Wars, and some of the cities featured in My Perfect City series), and some of the Rethink series presented by Amol Rajan.