Babble listeners are definitionally a wise and discerning bunch, so just occasionally we permit the besplurgification of our inbox with probing questions that we absolutely promise to answer on air - unless they're shit.This week, then, it's Dave and Ol doing the shutting up and listening, minus the shutting up bit, as we subject ourselves to interrogation by you, our loyal enablers.Lines of enquiry include:- why haven't you covered the most controversial enviro topic in UK politi...
Mar 21, 2022•54 min
"No please, tell me MORE about your cavity walls!" said absolutely no-one, ever.And that's kinda the problem for poor ol' insulation: it's dull. Yawningly, achingly, Michael-Owen-in-that-weird-Dubai-helicopter-video dull. And as such, few people so much as shrug when Governments comprehensively fail to insulate Britain.BUT any muppet can see it's a spectacularly good idea not to waste heat. Especially when there's a war on, fuelled in part by people paying for ...
Mar 13, 2022•54 min
Suing national Governments for gross Inhofery, whilst simultaneously laying the smackdown on oil and gas companies, sounds daunting and, frankly, a lot of work. Thank bejeezus then that international environmental & human rights lawyer Tessa Khan is busy doing all this and more, with no little success.We natter to Tessa, who founded and directs Uplift, about Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its connection to all things fossil fuelled; the merits and pitfalls of trying to save the planet...
Mar 06, 2022•48 min
They're not birds, and approximately half aren't ladies. But ladybirds very much ARE beetles, and that alone is reason to celebrate them. Even if they do puke from their knee-joints.However, not everyone coos over these perfect shiny wonders. SOME PEOPLE (*cough* Dave *cough*) seem to think they're inhofes, especially the foreign ones coming over 'ere ruining aphid-munching for our natives species.So we delve into the mysterious world of Coccinellidae, from STDs to tooth powd...
Feb 27, 2022•49 min
What is a culture war? Are greenies like us now fighting one? Are we... the baddies?All questions we must, regrettably, now grapple with, because a phalanx of Tory MPs - ably assisted by their outriders in the shite-wing media - are labelling 'net zero' advocates as woke-ist elites, determined to heap misery on the poor. So who are these finger-jabbing inhofes, and how much support do they have? Why do they hate climate action so much? Do they... have a point?Show notes:* Excellent Gua...
Feb 20, 2022•50 min
If you thought Bitcoin was confusing, wait 'til you hear about 'non-fungible tokens'.In fact you've probably already heard about them, after a major conservation charity decided to flog NFTs of pictures of tigers and the like, only to be met with the mother and father of all backlashes.NFTs are modern and confusing, for sure. But are they really environmental kryptonite? Was the backlash deserved?Also this week, two wonderful and separate examples of creative activism from th...
Feb 14, 2022•50 min
Very, VERY excitingly, this week we natter with one of the best climate communicators around, who also happens to be one of the planet's foremost climate scientists.Professor Katharine Hayhoe is a United Nations 'Champion of the Earth', chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, and one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people.Her new book, Saving Us, makes the case that the most important thing we can do about climate change is the one thing we're terrible at - ta...
Feb 06, 2022•58 min
It is bonkers that so much effort, land, water & energy is used to make so much food that never goes in anyone's gob. Bonkers and, as babble listener Alysia points out, VERY planety-imperilly.Alysia also notes that we've gone 236 episodes without focussing our babblenoculars on the matter, so this week we pinch our noses, gingerly approach the kitchen caddy and gag on the maloderous stench of the global food waste scandal.Question one, of course, is who are the inhofes? Supermakets...
Jan 30, 2022•53 min
SPOILER ALERT! This week we natter about the Netflix film 'Don't Look Up', so EFFIN' WELL WATCH IT it before listening.The second most viewed Netflix film ever, Don't Look Up tells the story of two astronomers attempting to warn humanity about an approaching - and, more to the point, LARGE - comet that will go bang on planet earth. The writer, Adam McKay, says the crashy comet is an allegory for climate change, and the film is a satire of various inhofes' indifferen...
Jan 23, 2022•51 min
A statement from Dave and Ol: "All Sustainabaubles complied with the rules at the time of recording. Not that there have been any Sustainabaubles. But should there have been, they would have been babble-secure. And, just to be sure, we've instructed Arabella to investigate a Sustainabauble that definitely didn't happen, in case it in fact did."RIGHT, ON WITH IT.**You can still watch Dave and Ol in a livestream event, together with access to watch the wonderful film The Atom: ...
Dec 15, 2021•45 min
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 blig...
Dec 05, 2021•48 min
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 F...
Nov 28, 2021•54 min
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 ...
Nov 15, 2021•48 min
"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 ...
Nov 07, 2021•53 min
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 p...
Oct 31, 2021•54 min
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 ...
Oct 24, 2021•52 min
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 'dea...
Oct 17, 2021•59 min
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....
Oct 10, 2021•52 min
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 attem...
Oct 03, 2021•54 min
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 ...
Sep 26, 2021•52 min
Despite what Assorted Inhofes say, climate change is a) real b) here already c) going to get worse. We'd better get ready. So how come we're - er - not? We chat all things climate adaptation with the eminent Dr Morgan Phillips, director of The Glacier Trust and, even more pertinently, author of a righteous new book about the subject, Great Adaptations. We talk about why despite human resilience, Morgan thinks that without shunting adaptation properly up the policy wazoo it's going...
Aug 22, 2021•54 min
A 'wellbeing economy' sounds like the sort of economy that might not ruin everything, and in that sense we are very much behind it. But it also sounds like the sort of thing that we don't really know what it is.HOWEVER, this week's guest - writer, researcher, and advocate for economic system change Dr Katherine Trebeck - very much *does* know what it is, and is spearheading efforts to get Governments to actually prioritise wellbeing.We sit down with Katherine to find out wher...
Aug 16, 2021•51 min
Does it really matter how 'fair' the solutions to climate breakdown are? So long as we stop the worst of it, who cares whether a few people have their noses put out of joint, right?Or is that missing the point, as well as being a bit inhofe-y? Is it *only* possible to achieve the radical changes needed if those changes don't, for instance, make the poor poorer?The rather splended Environmental Justice Commission has been talking to people throughout the UK about all this and more,...
Aug 02, 2021•41 min
The list of things that enable life on earth is a pretty short one: a dollop of sunshine, drizzle of water, and a soupçon of air. But for anything fun to happen on land, you're going to need a liberal smattering of soil, too.In fact that 30cm of topsoil is so fundamentally important that it gets a bit scary to think what would happen if it wasn't there. Unfortunately that's less of a thought experiment than it might sound - it's widely quoted that humanity has got only 60 yea...
Jul 25, 2021•49 min
It's more than 160 years since clever science people first worked out that digging up and burning long-dead bugs made Earth sizzly. So why are we still doing it? Why weren't the early warnings heeded? And was it inevitable that humanity would, at some point or other, combust its way into the current planetary pickle?These questions and zillions more are addressed in Dr Alice Bell's fabulous new book 'Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis'. Alice joins u...
Jul 11, 2021•52 min
A wise person once said that when it comes to buggering up the planet, prison is an underused deterrent. And just why should it be OK to be an Earth-nausing Inhofe with impunity? NO WE AGREE WITH YOU, IT SHOULD NOT. Enter a fearsome bunch of lawyers and campaigners that have been steadily building momentum behind getting 'ecocide' - deliberately harming the environment - adopted as an international crime. And if that's one of those ideas that makes you go 'wow yes, that seems...
Jul 04, 2021•47 min
Amster-, E-, Jean-Claude Van-. All splendid dams in their own right, but topics for another time. THIS week we set our babble sights on the massive concrete walls wot stall rivers so we can power our trouser presses.On the face of it, hydroelectric dams seem sensible: produce loads of reliable 'leccy from thing that isn't fossil fuels. But the problem about the faces of things is that they often distract from the armpits of things. And, as we discover, dams get awful armpitty when you ...
Jun 27, 2021•55 min
Grand narratives of history are woven around pivotal moments, and it's just possible that when the history of this period is written, 26 May 2021 will be one of them.A little under a month ago, Royal Dutch Shell got told in no uncertain terms by a Dutch court to stop Royally Ducking up the Planet. Specifically, it got what in legal parlance is known as a hiding.The oil giant stood accused of endangering the rights to life and to family life by its actions, i.e. by continuing to drill for oi...
Jun 20, 2021•42 min
It's the most successful website in the world, but many of us feel icky about using it. Is Amazon terrible for the planet or is it just, y'know, big? And if it is bad, is it any worse than thousands of little shops selling crap we don't need?Amazon's climate pledges and earnest sustainability marketing notwithstanding, we put our "we don't trust Jeff Bezos as far as we can propel him moon-wards" cards on the table... and then immediately get confused, given we&...
Jun 13, 2021•59 min
Boris "Gordon Gekko" Johnson aside, no-one likes greed. But growth - mmmmm, warm, cuddly, economic growth - well, that's another matter.Lesson one in MP school is that our collective prosperity increases as the economy swells. More GDP = more hospitals and schools. It's one of the few things upon which mainstream political parties everywhere agree: growth is unquestionably good.Which makes the life-work of this week's guest, the absurdly big-brained Professor Tim Jackson...
Jun 06, 2021•56 min
