The Carbon Watchdog Podcast

Crowd-funded Green Investing with Abundance Investments MD Bruce Davis

Abundance Investments is a crowd-funding platform that lets people finance green infrastructure. Bruce Davis is joint managing director. He has great experience and deep knowledge about money, finance and the Energy Transition, as the next 30 years will sees the economy shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. 

If you have a little money and you want to make it do good and earn something back, then listen on! We talk about:

- crowd-funding and making people aware of risk
- solar, wind and the complexities of wind turbines
- the unfulfilled potential of tidal power
- EV charging
- the nuts and bolts of the green infrastructure
- capitalism, socialism and money (and even Sharia Law)

UK Schools need Low Carbon Buildings

• I talk to Robin Nicholson, who is an architect at Cullinan Studios, an architecture co-operative which has been designing innovative low carbon buildings for 65 years, some of which are now listed, using design strategies such as passive solar as early as 1970. He was a key force in the creation of the Edge Debate, a round table that encourages the Professional Institutions to work together to greater effect on public policy, setting standards like the Cross-Institutional Climate Action Plan for the construction industry and the Collaboration for Change report. We talk about:
• zero carbon schools and retrofitting
• are there enough tradesmen and engineers who can do the job? Er... no.
• whole life carbon calculations
• some of the techniques, technologies and materials for low carbon or low energy buildings
• how to smash energy efficiency targets in schools by putting an electricity display meter in the entrance and paying the kids to keep it down
• the UK government's success or lack of it with low carbon building policy
• regulations are good - so the industry can break them 😬
• the biggest challenge - making buildings that can be taken apart again and re-used
• Masdar, Teach The Future, user interaction design for machinery... 

The Cumbria Coal Mine Debacle, UK Climate Policy & Other Snafus - with Chris Friedler of Decarbonise Now

Chris Friedler is a UK environmental campaigner at Decarbonise Now with an extensive working knowledge of the UK climate policy - if that's what it can be called nowadays. We talk about climate policy ranging from the new Cumbria coal mine (Britain's first in decades) to energy policy, housing, transport, electric cars and everything in between.

What is Climate Justice?

Kelo Uchendu is a Nigerian student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and an active member of a broad coalition of student climate movements across the world that held the MOCK-COP. This was the youth climate movement's answer to the vacuum left by the UN's delayed COP26. Kelo is a member of Grey 2 Green Movement in Nsukka and Students Organising for Sustainability. Being in a youth climate movement in the Global South, Kelo knows about climate justice and explains in the podcast how the lack of climate justice in the world today plays out in Africa. While westerners in the Industrial North think of the threats to their pensions and property from climate change, most are unaware of the impacts that are already playing out in other parts of the world, affecting people who played practically no part in creating the issue. And that, by every reasonable definition, is a dire injustice.

Days of Coal in Calgary, Canada

Hugh Archibald White was born and brought up in Calgary, Canada in the 1940s and 50s. He gave me a run-down on their almost universal dependence on coal, illustrated with some great anecdotes about his grandfather, a coal and gas merchant, including:

- the vastness of Canada’s natural resources
- the railways and development
- low prices and infinite availability of fossil fuels
- Canadian winters, minus 20°C for half the year
- why you didn’t insulate your house

Sorry for my sound quality – I used the wrong mic – doh! But Hugh’s quality is good. 

How Green Is My Tesla?

This week I persuaded my old friend from Germany, Dirk Carstens, to give me the run-down on the pros and cons of owning a Tesla. He’s a trained physicist so there’s not much about the EV technology that phases him.

Some of the stuff we discussed:

• the low bills
• the all-important battery, how to treat it, how long it lasts, how much it’s worth
• the amount of data Tesla accumulates on you, your car, your driving…
• when autonomous driving goes wrong
• hydrogen fuel (not for the Tesla…)

Mangroves - vital coastal forests - with Bremley Lyngdoh

Dr. Bremley W.B. Lyngdoh is Director Microfinance & Ecorestoration of Earthbanc, which invests capital from their savers via microfinance to enable smallholders to plant mangroves and build sustainable livelihoods. He's made a career out of bringing people together to create environmental and agricultural projects. I caught up with him online in his home state Meghalaya, north-east India - just before he left to check on leaking uranium waste tanks that no-one will take responsibility for in the jungles of South West Khasi Hills.  We covered ...

• just how many million mangroves people can plant
• how cyclones made the people of Myanmar suffer where they had destroyed their mangroves
• saving money with Earthbanc funds local smallholders to plant trees
• how Earthbanc monitors progress using satellite data
• whether local people would really want tigers in the forests they plant!
• the beautiful wilderness of Meghalaya, with its living root bridges and 25m (75 foot) annual rainfall
• if Bremley is in fact one of the Na'vi and Meghalaya is Pandora
• the evils of uncontrolled uranium mining

Go to the website for more: Carbon Watchdog

Everybody Loves The Ocean - The Most Important Natural Resource In The Fight Against Climate Change

My guest on this week's podcast is Danny Badger, fisheries scientist, educator and jellyfish nerd, who's worked at the New England Aquarium in Boston, USA and the National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI).

We discuss everything (almost)!

• from the size of sea-lions to dead zones
• talking to angry people
• protecting the blue planet
• maximising your chances on a first date by visiting an aquarium
• and how sushi restaurants use jellyfish to hypnotise their customers.

Turning a Victorian London terrace house into a green Superhome

I interview Kate Calvert, Superhome creator and North London, UK resident:

 - what happens when you do a green retro-fit on a 19th Century terrace house

 - solar panels, wall insulation, electricity bills

 - local council planning regulations, bad buildings and bombs

 - holding corporate building developers to their eco promises

 - is carbon rationing like war-time rationing?