PODCAST · science
Sustainababble
by Sustainababble: comedy, nature, climate change.
A funny podcast about the environment, sustainability, and all the total guff people talk in the name of saving the planet.
Episodes
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#274: The End.
Well, this is it. Yer last ever Babble. Thank you - seriously, thank you - if you've lent us your attention over the years. It's been a pleasure.Herewith a valedictory episode in which we reveal the real reason we're binning the babble, Ol serenades Dave with an original tune, and we humbly…
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#273: Chris Packham meets Sustainababble, again
For our final interview, we're joined for a second time by the majestic Chris Packham, our first 'proper' guest all the way back in 2015. We discuss all that has changed in those seven and a half years, not least some pretty hardcore stuff for Chris personally, and we chew over what the world of...
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#272: Twitter
If there wasn't twitter, would we have solved climate change by now? Might we at least have got round to thinking about solving climate change? Would Ol have had more sleep?Sure, loads of important eco connections and organising and other useful stuff have happened via the site, but so too has a...
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#271: Onshore Wind
Bat-chomping bird-slicing eco-crucifixes* are making a comeback! A mere eight years after some Tories effectively banned anyone from erecting wind turbines in England, some other Tories now look poised to overturn that ban. Which sort of tells you everything you need to know about Westminster...
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#270: Heat Pumps
Look, we're quitting, so if there ever was a leash we are now firmly off it. Problem is, while unleashed Dave might follow his nose into the bushes of podcasting misadventure, unleashed Ol... well, he's not that interesting is he? So having cast aside any editorial imperative to stay vaguely...
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#269: Just Stop, Ol
Now then, we have Some News about the babble. Listen to the show to find out precisely what (don't worry, we haven't been bad), but suffice to say this year's Sustainabauble will be particularly valedictory.But before we get too festive and emotional, there's work to be done. Like trying to…
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#268: David Roberts meets Sustainababble
Chances are you’ll have read David Roberts’ superlative writing on climate – at Vox or more recently Volts – and thought ‘coo, that’s sensible and right and interesting’. We certainly have, so we’re delighted to finally have him on the show.David natters with us about US politics (are things...
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#267: Eels
If we said "name the weirdest, most mystical & inexplicable creature on earth" you would rightly say "80s English footballer Peter Beardsley". But pause for a moment to consider instead the 'umble eel, a fish(ish) so unknown and unknowable that no human has observed one shagging in the wild. In...
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#266: Poo
Loathe though we are to be scatological, it's time to face faecal facts: the astonishing amount of human excrement on the planet presents a honking environmental challenge.When you think about it, with nearly eight billion of us crimping one out most days, the fact that humans aren't all swimming...
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#265: Rainforests of Britain
Britain has lost a lot of things lately: international standing; economic credibility; its collective shit. But we've also mislaid something more fragile, dank and extraordinary than even Liz Truss's premiership: our precious and hitherto largely unknown temperate rainforests.In his new book, The...
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#264: Coke at COP
Who knew climate conferences had corporate sponsors? 183,295 people, that's who, for they have signed a petition telling the UN suits to ditch the sponsor of this year's jamboree in Egypt which is... Coca-Cola.That's Coca "oh hi! we're the biggest plastic polluter in the world!" Cola. Producers…
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#263: Sorry
Mistakes have been made, lessons learned. Yet again, us being away for a few weeks coincided with the ass falling out of everything that is good.In fact Blighty's new "Government" has done so many dastardly things that even usually mild-mannered bird watchers are losing their shit. Worse still,...
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#262: Liz Truss
What, or who, is a Liz Truss and why does anyone care? Well buckle up because approximately 17 old white men from the rich bits of England have just made her boss of Blighty and there are, we fear, going to be some changes around here.Or, er, are there? Because while Liz Truss is an MP with as…
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#261: Leah Thomas meets Sustainababble
'Intersectional environmentalism' is a) a lot of syllables, b) a brilliant concept explained simply and powerfully by writer and environmentalist Leah Thomas, and c) coincidentally also the title of Leah's new book.Part activist toolkit, part theory, and part history of environmental (in)justice,...
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#260: Rupert Read meets Sustainababble
Rupert Read is an author, philosopher, and activist, perhaps best known for his prominent role in Extinction Rebellion. He's written more than a dozen books and his most recent - Why Climate Breakdown Matters - is, well, full on. Full on in that it argues that unless we confront the full horror…
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#259: The High Seas
If you ever encounter a Sloane's Viperfish, you're in for a treat. The charming creature has a bite so ferocious that its first vertebra has to act as a shock absorber. When it chomps, it unhinges its skull, opens its jaw 90 degrees, and expands its stomach to eat things up to 50% bigger than...
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#258: Roads
"WHY HAVEN'T YOU BABBLED ABOUT EVIL EVIL POO-BUM ROADS?!?!" yells twitter. Well, your bellowed word is our grudging command.But while we're delighted to go truffling for babble in tarmac territory, there is no way on god's earth we are picking sides in the internecine war that is anti-roads...
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#257: Bird Flu
Fans of our feathered friends, look away now...If you've been to the coast recently there's every chance you'll have seen, how can we put this delicately, an exceptionally dead bird washed up on the shore. Or, more likely, dozens of the bastards.Bird flu has been around for ever, but evidently…
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#256: 40 Degrees
Famously soggy, predictably chilly. Well, not any more, cos Blighty has joined the global combustability club after turning in a world-beating and very much oven-ready 40.3 degrees C of scorchiosity in its latest heatwave.So how freaked out should we feel? Cos like, this was always going to…
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#255: Green Capitalism?
How much, precisely, is one whale worth? Half an elephant? Three dozen gibbons?"Don't be silly, Ol and Dave, you can't put a price on nature" we hear you cry. Well tell it to the IMF, because they say our blubbery friends retail for $2m, a big figure which, in the world of excel spreadsheets and...
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#254: Luke Turner Meets Sustainababble
Epping Forest, or "Effing Forest" as it's known to the locals, is at the heart of Luke Turner's wonderful 2019 book about sexuality, trauma, god and personal recovery.The forest, Luke says, hums with an energy of people both enjoying the place but also getting up to things they can't do, and…
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#253: Badverts
The babble, it must be said, has a problem with authority. Probably cos of our upbringing or something. But this week, The Authority – specifically the Advertising Standards Authority – shot up in our estimation after it said NO, PURVEYORS OF SH*T LAWNS, YOU CANNOT CALL SH*T LAWNS...
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#252: Business
If you were until recently, say, sustainability overlord at IKEA, should you be viewed as a suit who slapped green respectability onto a company that flooded living rooms with unnecessary tat? Or, perhaps, as a radical, transforming one of the word's biggest businesses into among the greenest…
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#251: Australia
Bring out the bunting, close the streets, give everyone an extra holiday! No, not for the Queen's platinum wotsit, for the fact that the Aussies have voted out another massive inhofe!Yep, believe it or not, this week we say cheery bye-bye to former PM Scott Morrison, purveyor of weapons grade...
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#250: Light Pollution
The night sky, it seems, is getting brighter. At least according to some not-science we got sent by some not-scientists. But whether it's true or not (it almost certainly isn't) the question of light pollution got us thinking. So this week we rattle off all the ways in which the simple act of...
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#249: David Attenborough
We live in a desperately cynical world - christ, the Babble should know - but a few public figures remain untarnished, standing tall as beacons of trustworthiness while our shared consensus collapses around us. The O.G. Big Dave is perhaps the most trusted of them all, the mere idea of him lying...
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#248: Being Dead
You might think being dead is when you can finally stop worrying about your impact on the planet. You'd be wrong.Be it burrying, burning, or buggering off to space, there are myriad options for dealing with one's remains, and not all of them particularly courteous to the living organisms you…
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#247: Mary Colwell meets Sustainababble
In a rare bit of good news for the nation's youth, a new natural history GCSE means 16 year olds might one day appreciate fauna as much as they do Fortnite.Author & conservation goddess Mary Colwell is the driving force behind the 10 yr + campaign to persuade the UK government to introduce this…
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#246: Seaweed
Kelp. That's what's gonna save the world. Not trees, kelp. Or seagrass. Or some other form of wibbly algae that lives in the sea and isn't a plant.Bingeing carbon; hoovering up chemical nasties in the water; being home for the ickle fishies; being turned into non-plastic plastic - seaweed does...
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#245: Trespass
Keep Out. Two little words that carry such unquestioned authority. But why are we so well behaved when what we're kept out of is often the thing we're all lacking - green space, the beguiling attraction of the natural world, things that aren't manicured and sanitised? How did England's green and...
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#244: Q & A
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...
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#243: Insulation
"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...
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#242: Tessa Khan meets Sustainababble
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...
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#241: Ladybirds
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…
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#240: Culture Wars
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...
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#239: NFTs
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...
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#238: Katharine Hayhoe meets Sustainababble
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...
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#237: Food Waste
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…
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#236: Don’t Look Up
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…
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#235: Sustainabauble 2021
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...
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#234: Avocados
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...
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#233: Black Friday
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...
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#232: Good COP? Bad COP?
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...
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#231: Methane
"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...
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#230: Sewage
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...
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#229: Bugs
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...
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#228: Road to COP26
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...
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#227: Circular Economy
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...
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#226: Gas Prices
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...
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#225: A History of Motion
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...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Sustainababble have?
Sustainababble currently has 276 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Sustainababble about?
A funny podcast about the environment, sustainability, and all the total guff people talk in the name of saving the planet.
How often does Sustainababble release new episodes?
Sustainababble publishes regularly with 276 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Sustainababble?
You can listen to Sustainababble on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Sustainababble?
Sustainababble is created and hosted by Sustainababble: comedy, nature, climate change..
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