EmpathyMedia Podcast Unknown

'Camino to COP' was a multi-faith pilgrimage designed to be both a personal commitment to walk together for 8 weeks and also a chance to take messages of climate justice to the world leaders in COP26.

Anuradha Vittachi asks psychotherapist Chris Robertson why we keep refusing to take proportionate action in the face of looming calamity. He explains our need to distance ourselves from the guilt of complicity – and points us to Sally Weintrobe, who links our uncaring to neoliberal economics and its roots in Exceptionalism. 

Meaning It: How the UK’s financial sector enables the world’s fossil fuel addiction. Is the UK the climate innocent it claims to be or a fossil fuel enabler? Donnachadh McCarthy reveals to Anuradha Vittachi the shocking reality that the UK, far from contributing only 1% of the world’s carbon emissions, is one of the prime enablers of our addiction to fossil fuels. Young climate activists from Green New Deal Rising are unimpressed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s financial announcement at COP26 – and Juice Media hilariously satirizes the gap between the Morrison government’s pro-climate claims and what it actually does.

Meaning It: Behind the scenes of COP negotiations . Simon Maxwell is both a COP outsider and an insider: he has spent his working life pressing for socially just development in the global south – and, as a world expert in development, he has also chaired COP negotiations. He explains to Anuradha Vittachi, step by step, the complexities of the vital process of planning socially-just transitions out of fossil fuel based economies.

Ahead of COP26 in November 2021, Anuradha Vittachi is in conversation with award-winning science author, Mark Lynas. What are real issues confronting the negotiators, and what is their chance of a successful outcome?

Journalist and author Nury Vittachi discusses his fascinating new novel with a quantum physics theme with Peter Armstrong.