We live in a desperately cynical world - christ, the Babble should know - but a few public figures remain untarnished, standing tall as beacons of trustworthiness while our shared consensus collapses around us. The O.G. Big Dave is perhaps the most trusted of them all, the mere idea of him lying too horrible to comprehend. Which is perhaps why, when *he* tells us the planet is on fire and it's all our fault - unlike, say, every climate activist - the message is heard, listened to, and...

You might think being dead is when you can finally stop worrying about your impact on the planet. You'd be wrong. Be it burrying, burning, or buggering off to space, there are myriad options for dealing with one's remains, and not all of them particularly courteous to the living organisms you leave behind. So, inspired by an email from the intriguing sounding www.earthfuneral.com, this week Dave quizes Ol on the different ways people (or at least, Americans) have come up with to...

In a rare bit of good news for the nation's youth, a new natural history GCSE means 16 year olds might one day appreciate fauna as much as they do Fortnite. Author & conservation goddess Mary Colwell is the driving force behind the 10 yr + campaign to persuade the UK government to introduce this new qualification, no mean feat given the introductions they prefer to make are between plutocrat A and party fundraiser B. ALLEGEDLY.We natter to Mary about how on earth she got this...

Kelp. That's what's gonna save the world. Not trees, kelp. Or seagrass. Or some other form of wibbly algae that lives in the sea and isn't a plant. Bingeing carbon; hoovering up chemical nasties in the water; being home for the ickle fishies; being turned into non-plastic plastic - seaweed does myriad very important jobs without so much as a sniff of inhofery. And, lest we forget, it can be damn tasty, especially if you're the Welsh. So why don't western countries pay...

Keep Out. Two little words that carry such unquestioned authority. But why are we so well behaved when what we're kept out of is often the thing we're all lacking - green space, the beguiling attraction of the natural world, things that aren't manicured and sanitised? How did England's green and pleasant lands come to be so hostile to most of us plebs? We quiz author and illustrator Nick Hayes, who has literally written the book on trespass. Two in fact - the latest, The Trespasser's...

Babble listeners are definitionally a wise and discerning bunch, so just occasionally we permit the besplurgification of our inbox with probing questions that we absolutely promise to answer on air - unless they're shit. This week, then, it's Dave and Ol doing the shutting up and listening, minus the shutting up bit, as we subject ourselves to interrogation by you, our loyal enablers. Lines of enquiry include:- why haven't you covered the most controversial enviro topic in UK...

"No please, tell me MORE about your cavity walls!" said absolutely no-one, ever. And that's kinda the problem for poor ol' insulation: it's dull. Yawningly, achingly, Michael-Owen-in-that-weird-Dubai-helicopter-video dull. And as such, few people so much as shrug when Governments comprehensively fail to insulate Britain. BUT any muppet can see it's a spectacularly good idea not to waste heat. Especially when there's a war on, fuelled in part by people paying for that wasted...

Suing national Governments for gross Inhofery, whilst simultaneously laying the smackdown on oil and gas companies, sounds daunting and, frankly, a lot of work. Thank bejeezus then that international environmental & human rights lawyer Tessa Khan is busy doing all this and more, with no little success. We natter to Tessa, who founded and directs Uplift, about Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its connection to all things fossil fuelled; the merits and pitfalls of trying to save the...

They're not birds, and approximately half aren't ladies. But ladybirds very much ARE beetles, and that alone is reason to celebrate them. Even if they do puke from their knee-joints. However, not everyone coos over these perfect shiny wonders. SOME PEOPLE (*cough* Dave *cough*) seem to think they're inhofes, especially the foreign ones coming over 'ere ruining aphid-munching for our natives species. So we delve into the mysterious world of Coccinellidae, from STDs to tooth...

What is a culture war? Are greenies like us now fighting one? Are we... the baddies? All questions we must, regrettably, now grapple with, because a phalanx of Tory MPs - ably assisted by their outriders in the shite-wing media - are labelling 'net zero' advocates as woke-ist elites, determined to heap misery on the poor. So who are these finger-jabbing inhofes, and how much support do they have? Why do they hate climate action so much? Do they... have a point? Show...

If you thought Bitcoin was confusing, wait 'til you hear about 'non-fungible tokens'. In fact you've probably already heard about them, after a major conservation charity decided to flog NFTs of pictures of tigers and the like, only to be met with the mother and father of all backlashes. NFTs are modern and confusing, for sure. But are they really environmental kryptonite? Was the backlash deserved? Also this week, two wonderful and separate examples of creative activism...

Very, VERY excitingly, this week we natter with one of the best climate communicators around, who also happens to be one of the planet's foremost climate scientists. Professor Katharine Hayhoe is a United Nations 'Champion of the Earth', chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, and one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people. Her new book, Saving Us, makes the case that the most important thing we can do about climate change is the one thing we're terrible at - talking...

It is bonkers that so much effort, land, water & energy is used to make so much food that never goes in anyone's gob. Bonkers and, as babble listener Alysia points out, VERY planety-imperilly. Alysia also notes that we've gone 236 episodes without focussing our babblenoculars on the matter, so this week we pinch our noses, gingerly approach the kitchen caddy and gag on the maloderous stench of the global food waste scandal. Question one, of course, is who are the inhofes?...

SPOILER ALERT! This week we natter about the Netflix film 'Don't Look Up', so EFFIN' WELL WATCH IT it before listening. The second most viewed Netflix film ever, Don't Look Up tells the story of two astronomers attempting to warn humanity about an approaching - and, more to the point, LARGE - comet that will go bang on planet earth. The writer, Adam McKay, says the crashy comet is an allegory for climate change, and the film is a satire of various inhofes' indifference to the climate...

A statement from Dave and Ol: "All Sustainabaubles complied with the rules at the time of recording. Not that there have been any Sustainabaubles. But should there have been, they would have been babble-secure. And, just to be sure, we've instructed Arabella to investigate a Sustainabauble that definitely didn't happen, in case it in fact did." RIGHT, ON WITH IT. **You can still watch Dave and Ol in a livestream event, together with access to watch the wonderful film The Atom: A...

The blood diamonds of Mexico. A hipster's fever dream. Compressed mushy peas disguised as a gonad. Is there *anything* to commend the avocado? A fruit, we'll remind you, that CAN'T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO TASTE SWEET. And that's before we consider 'avolattes', an invention every bit as infuriating as the people who drink them. Well hang on just a vegan-bashing minute. Why does the humble alligator pear cop so much flack? Sure, the practice of growing billions of the blighters is, in many...

It's here! Black Friday-mas is finally here! Thank the lord. Thank Jeff Bezos. Thank f*ck.Sigh. It's probably not OK to go warm and fuzzy in our special areas at the thought of being hoodwinked into buying sh*t we don't need just a month before we all lose our minds over the next orgy of mindless consumerism. And it's probably right and proper to get het up and misanthropic about it.BUT hang on. Is Black Friday actually that bad? And don't all the people who hate Black Friday also hate...

Is it OK to feel sorry for teary Alok Sharma? Which country's delegation parties the hardest? Who put China in the shed? And was anyone at all standing up for the dormouses (dormice?)? Not a single one of the 15,276 hot takes already published about COP26 has addressed these serious and urgent questions, but my god the babble is not in the business of hot takes. So sit back and allow yourself to be taken on a retrospective, warts 'n' all, aural tour of Glasgow's shed of sheds...

"So Dave, Ol, what IS your favourite tetrahedral molecule?" is not the most F of AQs we get, but the answer - since you asked - is of course CH4, or methane to its mates. It may lack the celebrity cachet of CO2, but boy does methane pack a punch in the warming stakes. In fact it packs 84 times as much of a punch, which is one reason sleepy men in suits have started announcing plans to gaffa tape some of the places from whence it guffs. So this week we don our lab technicians'...

There are few childhood rules that continue into grownupness, but 'don't shit in the sea' is definitely one of them. Which is why it's such a shame that all Brits' s***s diligently done not in the sea seem to end up there regardless. Perhaps even more dispiritingly, politicians have proven themselves disinclined to do anything, actively voting *against* a thing that would have forced water companies to stop flooding the oceans with our motions. We role up our sleeves and plunge...

Bugs in all their freaky forms do a staggering range of critical jobs that keep the planet from, among other things, quickly becoming a massive pile of corpses and poo. But humanity is nausing 'em, and we really, really need to stop nausing 'em. Yes, because bugs make it possible for almost all other animal species - including humans - to survive, but also because they are mesmerically wonderful in their own right. At least that's the view of this week's guest, author and head...

A year late, for obvious reasons, but the imminent Glasgow climate shindig is still seismically important. But will this cauldron of egos be any more productive than the previous 25? Yes. No. Possibly. Probably not. Oh Jesus we don't know do we. But what we DO know is that countries were set homework at 2015's Paris get-together, homework that's very much overdue. So we canter through who's the class swot, who's too cool to comply with artificial constructs like 'deadlines', and who's...

What shape best represents the absolute lunacy that is humans and their economic activity? Something Jackson Pollock-esque? Mr Messy off of the Mr Men series, perhaps? Either way, probably not a nice, clean circle. But when you think about it, it really really should be. Cos unless we start (re)learning how to work with what we've got - i.e. sending things round and round in virtuous circles - rather than what we're about to drill / dig / blow up, we're gonna be in an awful...

Everything's running out in Blighty. Gas (as in gas), gas (as in petrol) and everyone's patience. As far as we can tell, the two crises are unrelated, other than their shared connection to the climate. But crikey moses they are getting people in a tiz, not least because - and brace yourself for some advance economics here - when things run out, things get more expensive. So in a daredevil move, and with one eye on the oh-christ-this-could-be-dull-ometer, Ol and Dave simultaneously...

Four wheels good, two legs bad. For a hundred years, the gas-guzzling car has been king. But its days are numbered - no-one seriously disputes that - and what comes next will determine the scale of biospheric butchery in the post. But what if The Car 2.0 turns out not to be flying cars, autonomous cars, or Richard Branson Cars, but instead a happy mishmash of whizzy things and old-fashioned things that you don't own? Y'know, bikes, e-bikes, scooters & hire cars all available at the...