LMSU Holiday Special 2023: Explosion’s Eleven

By popular demand we are joined once more by marvelous guest host Alison Reeve to round out 2023 with our BUMPER HOLIDAY SPECTACULAR SPECTACULAR! That’s right Summerupperers, ‘tis the season for the Highly Anticipated and Much Sought After awarding of the second annual Wonkies! This year there were several contenders for top honours but your intrepid hosts have sent up the smoke signal and unanimously declared our favourite climate paper of 2023 was…DRUMROLL…

Getting off gas: why, how and who should pay? By Tony Wood, Alison Reeve and Esther Suckling of the Grattan Institute!  This paper was covered in Episode 28 of the pod and your hosts noted the timeliness and influence the report has had since its release in June 2023 on the thorny issue of getting 5 million Australian households off fossil gas. Honourable mentions for our runners up go to “Rethinking markets, regulation and governance for the energy transition” by Dr Ron Ben-David (Episode 32), the Climate Change Authority’s  “Reduce, remove and store: The role of carbon sequestration in accelerating Australia’s decarbonisation” (Episode 33) and Discounting the Distant Future: A Critique of the EPA’s Analysis of the Social Cost of Carbon’, by Geoffrey M. Heal, Noah Kaufman and Antony Millner at Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy (Episode 27).

Our climate-themed christmas cracker of a caper for you Summerupperers is the controversial and critically acclaimed How to Blow Up a Pipeline! An Ocean’s 11-esque heist movie in which the caper crew are a rainbow coalition of diverse young environmental activists, and the Big Score is to disable a crucial oil pipeline and strike a blow for the climate. Will they do it? Will they get away with it? And is that even the plan???

You can watch it on Stan in Australia and also have a listen to this interview with the film’s director and co-writer on The Big Picture podcast.

Frankie’s One More Thing is Alan Kohler’s quarterly essay The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It and admission of trash TV consumption: Yellowstone (apparently the stepping stone to true trashiness) + The Block.

Tennant’s One More Things are Netflix trash show about upgrading trash (and not so trash) cars “Car Masters; Rust To Riches”, and non-trashy pop-sci book “A City On Mars” by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.

Alison’s One More Things are the quirky Aussie heist movie, Malcolm: the only movie you’ll ever see featuring a Melbourne tram as getaway vehicle, and Long Live Chainsaw a brilliant doco about the very short life and career of Canadian downhill mountain bike racer, Stevie Smith.

Luke’s One More Things are the excellent, unabridged Tolkien audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis: The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King and The Silmarillion. Or if that’s all a bit 1950s high fantasy for you, try the Murderbot Diaires!

And that’s all from us in 2023! We are taking a break in January but will be back with ever more reports to read in Feb 2024. In the meantime, happy holidays to all our wonderful Summerupperers. While you rest up, send your hot tips and suggestions for papers and climate-themed pop culture to mailbag@letmesumup.net, xeet ‘em at @LukeMenzel, @TennantReed and @FrankieMuskovic, or blu ‘em at @lukemenzel.bsky.social @tennantreed.bsky.social and @frankiemuskovic.bsky.social