Climate Confident - Stories And Strategies That Cut Emissions

Get in touch - leave me a message One of the issues we have today is that we're using far too many virgin resources in our supply chains. These virgin resources then mostly end up in landfill, or worse are incinerated and the end of a products useful life. The fix for this is to use circular economy principles, but these are still very early in their development and so can be challenging to i...

Get in touch - leave me a message Change is hard. We know this. However, however hard change is, systemic change is by definition orders of magnitude harder. But that is what is needed if we're to come to terms with climate change. And that is precisely the mission of North Star Transition - to accelerate systemic change. How does any single company take on this mission, and why? To answer th...

Get in touch - leave me a message A couple of episodes of this podcast have featured guests from the financial space, but we've never had someone from the startup/VC industry so I felt it was time to address that. Plug and Play calls itself an innovation platform. They help around 2,000 startups a year, and they are committed to working with startups in reducing plastic waste, and decarbonisi...

Get in touch - leave me a message On this 30th episode of the podcast, I'm honoured to be joined by renowned climate scientist Professor Maureen Raymo . Maureen is Co-Founding Dean of Columbia Climate School , and Director at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory , Columbia University. Here is a sample paragraph from her bio on the Columbia Climate School Leadership page : Prof. Raymo is an electe...

Get in touch - leave me a message It has been a while since I had anyone from SAP on the podcast, and since SAP recently held its SAP Sustainability Summit , I wanted to catch up with the team to see how things are progressing. For this episode I invited Gunther Rothermel to come on the show. Gunther leads the Sustainability Engineering teams at SAP, so he's the perfect guy to let us know how...

Get in touch - leave me a message A couple of week's back on this podcast we chatted with Alejandro Agag , the founder of the Formula E World Championship - the electric motorsport racing series. This week I managed to convince Ian James , the Team Lead and Managing Director for the Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team ! We had a fascinating conversation around electric cars, the Formula E championship...

Get in touch - leave me a message Bavarian agtech company BayWa AG was recognised recently as one of the Top 50 Global Sustainability and Climate Leaders for all the work they do not just reducing their own emissions, but crucially helping their customers in the agriculture space to reduce their emissions too.    I reached out to their CIO, Tobias Fausch to invite him to come on the podcast to tal...

Get in touch - leave me a message A few months back I hosted Rodi Basso on the podcast where he talked about the E1 Electric Powerboat racing series and it was an excellent episode so, I decided to invite his co-founder Alejandro Agag to come on the podcast to talk about Formula E , and the new extreme off-road electric racing motorsport series Extreme E . Formula E, if you are not familiar with i...

Get in touch - leave me a message Deloitte , one of the largest professional services companies in the world announced recently its World Climate Commitment . Given who Deloitte are, I was keen to know more, so I invited Marc Van Caeneghem to come on the podcast. Marc is a member of Deloitte's Executive Committee and is their Global Climate and Sustainability Leader . Marc and I had a fascina...

Get in touch - leave me a message My guest on the podcast this week is Prof Sir David King . An incredibly accomplished scientist with over 500 papers to his name, he has also been Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government, the UK Government's Special Representative for Climate Change, and in May 2020 he formed and led Independent SAGE amongst other accomplishments. You can see more about...

Get in touch - leave me a message The world of finance is a black box to me. I don't have that money gene. But it is an area that is starting to play an increasing role in the world of climate. The podcast I published two weeks ago with David Harris about how the investment world is shifting towards sustainable finance, went down really well, so I decided to have a follow-up In this episode I...

Get in touch - leave me a message Over on the Climate 21 Forums I created for discussions about this podcast a user called Siobhán commented that "I would love to hear how design can help in the fight against Climate Change..." When you think of design and sustainability one name stands out - William (Bill) McDonough . Bill is an internationally renowned architect, designer, and co-autho...

Get in touch - leave me a message The investment world is changing. Investors are realising that regulations are increasingly mandating for lower carbon products and services which has a knock on effect on organisations with higher emissions, and consequent risks for any money invested in those companies. I invited David Harris , the Group Head of Sustainable Business at London Stock Exchange Grou...

Get in touch - leave me a message Last week's episode of the podcast with Sandra Pallier and Hannah Smith from ClimateAction.tech looked at the issue of reducing IT's carbon footprint taking a bottom up approach so, I wanted to have a follow-up episode looking at reducing IT's emissions issue with a more top-down perspective. With that in mind I invited Michael Terrell , Director of...

Get in touch - leave me a message Technology has a large and growing carbon footprint. Everything from when you open Google on your phone, to browsing your Instagram feed, to sending an email has climate emissions implications (by the way, speaking of Google, next week's episode features a senior Google exec sharing what they're doing to reduce their emissions!). How can we address that...

Get in touch - leave me a message I'm on vacation this week, so I recorded a short episode where I talked about three things: Ratings and reviews for the podcast Some of the recent episodes I published (in case you missed them ,now's a good time to catch-up!) and I previewed some of the upcoming episodes including an incredible episode which I'm hoping will go live April 28th. Liste...

Get in touch - leave me a message I wanted to have an episode of the podcast where we level set on the importance of sustainability for organisations, so I invited Frank Omare to come on the podcast to frame sustainability from a business perspective. We had a fascinating conversation, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I hope you enjoy it too. If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podca...

Get in touch - leave me a message Stopping global emissions is not enough. We have to also find ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it. One of the biggest contributors to global emissions is the production of concrete. Imagine if concrete production could be turned from a carbon emitting process into a carbon sink... That is one idea the Global CO2 initiative is looking into. They...

Get in touch - leave me a message The first time I came across Impossible Foods was when I read an article about them in Techcrunch back in 2016 and I was immediately sold on the idea - making protein for people cutting out the animal middle-man is such an excellent concept, and such a win for the planet in terms of land use, energy use, and water use! So when I kicked off this podcast, I was keen...

Get in touch - leave me a message Data is the new currency we're told (some people call it the new oil, I refuse to use that expression given the negative connotations of being associated with oil!). Given that, I'd be remiss not to have an episode of the podcast dedicated to talking about how data, and big data can help with the climate crisis. To that end, I invited Jacob Dencik to com...

Get in touch - leave me a message I'm a big fan of the concept of Indoor Vertical Farming , so when I came across the company &ever I reached out to their CSO, Mark Korzilius and asked him to come on the podcast to tell me more about their operations. &ever is a startup in the vertical farming space with a large operation in Kuwait, some interesting hyperlocal operations in Germany, a...

Get in touch - leave me a message So much of what's happening in the climate space revolves around geopolitics that I thought it might be interesting to bring an expert in to talk about that. So, I invited Jacob Shapiro to come on the podcast to talk about these issues. Jacob is the Founder and Chief Strategist at Perch Perspectives , as well as the host of the Perch Pod podcast . As we cover...

Get in touch - leave me a message Boston Consulting Group is one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the world. In September 2020 BCG committed to going Net Zero by 2030, and carbon negative thereafter. And they are committing "$400 million over the next decade to enable BCG teams to drive climate and environmental impact across industries and countries". Then in late...

Get in touch - leave me a message In the episode of this podcast where I talked to JP Morgan's Head of ESG Debt Capital Markets, Paul O'Connor , Paul mentioned ESG and it's importance. I wanted to dig into this in more detail, especially it's relevance to companies, the reasons for its increasing importance, and why it is suddenly a board level issue. To that end I invited Adam...

Get in touch - leave me a message On this week's episode of the Climate 21 podcast we have a slight change of direction - away from the corporate world, and into the world of sport. Specifically powerboat racing. Not very sustainable, right? Well, that depends... The new E1 Series is the first ever world electric powerboat series - yes, electric powerboats. In the same way that Formula 1 car...