Your Brain On Climate

My new podcast! Your Brain on Climate: human brains vs the climate crisis. Each episode explores an aspect of basic human psychology – what we think about things like food, conflict, change or grief – with someone who actually knows things (ie, not me). Then I come in, chatting to them in a reasonably ingratiating fashion about what light that …

Climate Outreach Engagement Lab

Since July 2021 I have worked as the lead for Climate Outreach’s new Climate Engagement Lab. It’s an applied research project to give civil society campaigners and advocates insights and advice on how best to reach those parts of society that climate campaigns tend not to – ie, most of them. I worked on and off for Climate Outreach for …

The happy death of petty idiocy

On the day the Government announced it was banning a thing I have called to be banned for very many years, I wrote a blog about the strange feeling of being told you’re wrong while knowing history will judge you to be right. https://powellds.medium.com/the-happy-death-of-petty-idiocy-4c245e649bb1 It always was completely and utterly loopy to say that we weren’t doing things like subsidising …

For the love of the planet

To coincide with World Mental Health Day, a piece about eco-anxiety. Hopefully does a bit more than just wibbling quietly and saying “cheer up, might never happen”. Thing is it might happen, and it’s OK to be a bit terrified about that. For the love of the planet: for the New Economics Foundation Perhaps it’s not, at root, the vastness …

Partly Political Broadcast

I’ve been a guest on Tiernan Douleb’s Partly Political Broadcast three times now, most recently in September 2020. And jolly good fun it was too. I recommend his show, and if you’re going to start anywhere start with the ones with me in ’em, obv: Episode 202, Everyone’s Problem (2020) – wildfires in America, and reasons to be optimistic despite …

Sustainababble

Sustainababble logo

I’m the producer and co-host of one of the UK’s best loved, silliest, and longest-running podcasts about the planet: Sustainababble. It’s been running since 2015. I set it up with my friend and then-colleague Ol, because we a) liked podcasts b) liked the sound of our own voices and c) wanted to make a programme about doing something about climate …

What if climate change was not this thing but another thing

The problems of thinking about the vastness of climate change as simply one kind of problem. On my Medium blog: https://medium.com/@powellds/what-if-climate-change-was-not-this-thing-but-another-thing-e539868a647a “given no metaphor for climate change will be anything other than desperately partial and constraining, perhaps the most useful thing to do is not to try to pick the ‘best’ metaphor, but to always just be acutely aware that …

Covid-19 and the entelechy of rapid transition

What lockdowns can teach us about climate change. For the Rapid Transition Alliance: “sometimes in the rush to point out the policies that should be put in place to deal with the climate crisis it feels like we forget how important it is that we make acting on that crisis feel vibrant, essential, inclusive, and if it entails any whiff of a …

Reprotecting Europe (2019)

Is it feasible to deregulate whilst also acting on the climate crisis? Not really, is the conclusion of this major report (NEF/EEB). I was lead author, in partnership with the European Environmental Bureau. It was the culmination of a 3-year research and mobilisation project to build opposition in Brussels, France and Germany to national and European programmes of environmental deregulation. …