How Businesses Can Fix the Future

This is the Sustainable Futures Report for Thursday, the 30th of November, and finally, it's time to move on.   This is the 477th episode and the final episode after 15 years of publication. After careful consideration I’ve decided that the Sustainable Futures Report will not return. Before I go I’ll take the opportunity to comment on COP28, which starts this week, to suggest some books which you should put on your Christmas list and there's a couple of videos which you really must watch, one from Dave Borlace and another one from Oblivia Coalmine. Find all the details on the website.    

I need to take stock and make the Sustainable Futures Report as relevant and interesting to you the listener as I can. I'm going to develop ideas for the theme and the content. To do that I'm taking a break and aiming to be back in January.

This is an unexpected bonus edition of the Sustainable Futures Report for Thursday 17th August. Last Saturday, I was asked if I would appear on TalkTV to talk about the Greenpeace action when they sat on the roof of the prime minister's country house in North Yorkshire. You can hear what I said, what the other panellist said and what the public said as well. 

Sharon Lashley, managing Director of Climate Action North, explains how to make a difference. Choose things you can achieve. Attempting the impossible will only make you want to give up.

"Sunak is worse than a war criminal," says Just Stop Oil. "He knows new oil and gas will impose unimaginable suffering and destroy the lives and livelihoods of billions of people. He knows that it will push the world past irreversible tipping points, meaning that the consequences and suffering will echo for centuries. He is risking nothing less than the collapse of human civilisation."

I talk to Solitaire Townsend, co-founder of Futerra, author, sustainability expert and optimist. She explains how the professionals in PR, Marketing, Accountancy, Lobbying and the Legal profession can smooth the way for the fossil industries and major polluters, or use their power to oppose them. Some are doing both, as she explains. Other businesses have got the message and are doing all they can - but they're "green hushing". You'll find out what that is.

Thoughts on managing the message, political indifference, the UK's skills and infrastructure problems and a plea to the UN to act on inequality. Also the problems with charging your EV and startling insights from my barber.

Everyone knows about lithium, and about how it’s used in batteries for almost every electronic device, but lithium is only part of the story. I talk to John DeMaio, CEO Graphex Technologies and President of Graphene Division of the Graphex Group Ltd. 

Just Stop Oil. Are they getting it right or are they getting it wrong? I have a view from inside the oil industry. Can protest and free speech survive in the face of new laws, and legal procedures which can bankrupt protesters without even taking them to court? And a minister resigns just before the PM sacks him, but he claims it’s for a completely different reason

This week I'm talking about transitions with a webinar from Business Green and a warning from energy company, Ithaca. There's a report and a letter to the prime minister from the Climate Change Committee, and what did happen at that Paris Finance Summit? More worrying news about climate tipping points and a new film to cheer you up. Or not.