Your Brain On Climate
by Dave Powell
Latest episode
Clocking it, with Colin Strong
Clocking it, with Colin Strong
About this podcast
A show about climate change and climate psychology. But sideways. Explore human brains doing amazing or awful things, learn why, then see what it means for the planet.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 77 episodes
- Clocking it, with Colin Strong · 52 minYour brain spends every microsecond sorting information into two buckets: useful and believable; and everything else. Alas, if you're a bit of data about the world and you're…
- Your Brain on Fast Fashion, with Lucy Siegle · 57 minFast fashion: terrible for the planet, awful for its workers, and hypercharged by the infinite marketing potential of social media. But we love to look cool (well, I don't, but…
- Make Environmentalism Dangerous Again, with Nicholas Beuret · 57 min**Warning: this episode contains swears** My guest on this episode of Your Brain on Climate says it's time environmentalism grew some teeth. He wants YOU to actively disrupt…
- Dinosaur Time · 15 minCome with me for a walk around Crystal Palace Park in London - home to the world's first ever life-sized models of dinosaurs, built in 1854. It's hard enough imagining what last…
- What Lies Beneath, with Renée Lertzman · 52 minYou're a mature, rational adult who can face massive, existential problems head-on, right? Or is your brain more like a medieval dungeon: a deep dark place in which you chuck…
- The Psychology of Flying · 18 minWhy do people who care about climate change still jet off on planes (including, occasionally, me?) This is an excerpt of me attempting to answer that surprisingly complicated…
- The War on Net Zero, with Becca Massey-Chase · 1 h 2 minFor most of the last two decades, the right of UK politics were all for climate action. Heck, in 2019 a Conservative Prime Minister signed us up to net zero emissions by 2050!…
- Thick Description · 10 minIf you've ever caught yourself writing off a group of people with a simple and dismissive description of why they do what they do - or been thusly written off yourself - then…
- The Activist Script, with Anthea Lawson · 55 minI am good. I protest. I save people. I must save the world - now. If this even slightly feels like something you've told yourself, then this episode is for you. Author and…
- In Praise of Being Bored · 11 minWhen's the last time you were bored? Thanks to our phones, it's easier than ever to be distracted, stimulated, and fed attention calories of varying quality so you never have to…
- The Pilot who Quit for the Climate, with Joel Walker · 1 h 5 minIn this episode I go for a walk in the woods with a former airline pilot who packed it in because of his climate anxiety. Joel Walker flew for years but could never quite ignore…
- Discounting the Future · 12 minWould you rather have a fiver today or a tenner this time next year? That kind of calculation is called 'discounting', and the more you'd rather have the fiver today, the more…
- Use Your Fear, with Sarah Jaquette Ray · 1 h 1 minClimate change is REALLY SCARY, right, but that doesn't mean you have to wibble helplessly in the corner. While the go-to currency of most climate awareness campaigns is 'hope' –…
- The Dutch have a word for your flimsy excuses · 12 minA few years ago I learned the Dutch word 'goedprater': the excuses we give to justify something to others, which we can barely justify to ourselves. I do it all the time and I…
- Hope, with Pancho Lewis · 60 minHope! What is it good for? (Absolutely every'thin). We ain't doing much about the climate crisis without it. Movements are founded on it, and most campaigns are about wanting us…
- Eat a Proper Lunch · 11 minYour brain is literally made of the food you eat. And *how* you eat it - slowly, or wolfed down at your desk - will affect how well you digest it. So way before any of the…
- Fear of Numbers, with Rob Eastaway · 54 minThe history of humans arguing about climate change is often just people throwing large numbers at each other. So it's time for an episode about how we think about numbers, why…
- Bonus episode: Climate Magic, featuring me · 1 h 1 minI recently had the honour of being interviewed about what I've learned from 4+ years of doing this show - about human brains vs the climate crisis and how to bring them closer…
- The Weight of Nature, with Clayton Page Aldern · 1 h 0 minBrain-eating amoebae are only the start of it. Just you wait until Clayton Aldern talks you through the ways big and small that climate change is changing what it means to be…
- Change It Up · 9 minHappy New Year! And before your resolutions crumble into ash, here's a short episode about why change is hard - but yet it's the only thing we ever really do. Back in 2021 I…
