Friday, December 22, 2017

Touring the Archive

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Happy Christmas! 

Well very nearly. This is the final Sustainable Futures Report for 2017. The next episode will be in mid to late January 2018. This is for two reasons. The first is that I am travelling a bit between now and then and the other is that I have just been accepted by Leeds Beckett University to research for a PhD in sustainability. It's a part time course, but it will still require considerable work. I'm going to have to weigh things up and see whether or not it is compatible with continuing to do the Sustainable Futures Report on a weekly basis.
This year I have published 43 episodes and I thought you might not have caught up with them all. With all the time you’re going to have over Christmas and New Year it's an ideal opportunity to have a look through the archive. In fact if you go into the archives you’ll find it goes right back to 2007 with about 200 separate episodes.

You might also want to watch this TED Talk...

... which Catherine Weetman brought to my attention. There are so many good things on TED Talks that it’s horrendously difficult to find the time to watch enough of them. This one is called: “Got apocalypse fatigue? How to have a real conversation about global warming.” It’s by psychologist Per Espen Stokes, and it’s well worth the 15 minutes.

Let's look what I've covered in 2017.

 If you've listened to this you've obviously found where all the audio files are. If you are going through iTunes you will actually find there is more detail about each individual episode on WWW.SUSBIZ.BIZ . And of course the text of nearly every episode, containing the links to my sources, can be found at www.sustainablefutures.report . I've put the links in for your convenience and also to help me remember where I got my stories from.

I’m quite proud of some of my titles. 

Greenwash Backwash Backlash - Keep on Keeping Left - Islands of Dreams - The Only Way is Ethics - How Smart is your Meter? - Baby it’s Coal Outside. These episodes covered a wide range of issues. Was I right to attack Greenpeace over their criticism of HSBC financing palm oil? A courier company plans its routes in the UK to maximise the number of left turns because this minimises delay and minimises fuel consumption. (It’s right turns in other countries which drive on the right) Then there are plans to build an island in the North Sea to be the central point for the cables coming from all the wind farms, and what are the business ethics of dealing with global warming and sustainability? How Smart is your Meter? Well, at the second attempt, our supplier has now installed a working smart meter in our house, monitoring our gas and electricity consumption and giving us a constant read-out. Some say that the whole of the UK smart meter programme is ill-conceived, over budget and technologically lacking. Sounds like another episode on that will be coming up. Energy has had wide coverage, from the US decision to promote coal at the recent COP 23 climate conference in Bonn, continuing comments over the Hinckley C nuclear power station, likely to be the single most expensive object in the world, and I've also spoken about transport–everything from HS2 the UK's high speed rail system to electric cars and just a couple of weeks ago hydrogen powered cars.
I have talked about weather and climate change, about plastic pollution and waste, about insecticides and bees. My most popular episode came in June, called “Who's afraid of the big bad Trump?” We've certainly moved on since then. Not sure how happy we all are with the direction of travel.

That's just a very brief summary of topics covered. 

If you go to susbiz.biz you can search for your favourite keywords and find the episodes of most interest to you.
And I'm going to leave you to go and do just that. Before that, let me wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and let me thank my patrons whose contributions have helped me cover some of the costs of running this podcast throughout 2017.

If you would like to be a patron... 

pop over to patreon.com/sfr and find out all about it. Well, this is the season of giving after all.
And that's it for now.
I’m Anthony Day, that was the Sustainable Futures Report and I'll be back with you all next year.