Denise Baden: 0:03

And if you write solutions in, a lot of people think, oh, well that will lead to complacency. But my research clearly shows it doesn't. It leads to much more effective behavior change. Oh, right. Something can be done. I can do this. I can follow the character here and do that

Tom Raftery: 0:20

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Climate Confident podcast. The number one podcast, showcasing best practices in climate emission, reductions and removals. And I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Don't forget to click follow on this podcast in your podcast app of choice, to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Climate Confident podcast. My name is Tom Raftery. And before we start, I would just like to welcome two new supporters of this podcast, Paul Walsh and Hal Good. Both Paul and Hal signed up over the last week to support this podcast. Thank you so much for that folks. If you'd like to become a supporter of this podcast to help me continue creating informative and engaging episodes, simply click on the support link in the show notes. Our go to tinyurl.com/climate pod. You can make a small donation starting at just three euros. And that's less than the cost of a cup of coffee, but it would really help me with this podcast. Okay. That out of the way. With me on the show today, I have my two special guests, Denise and Steve. Denise and Steve, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourselves with maybe Denise going first?

Denise Baden: 1:46

Hi there. Yes. Thanks Tom. I'm Denise Baden. I'm Professor of Sustainable Business at the University of Southampton. But the project that's been engaging me for the last five years is the Green Stories project where we've been trying to write climate solutions into stories to try and reach more people with the kinds of solutions that can really be transformative.

Tom Raftery: 2:09

Fantastic, Steve.

Steve Willis: 2:10

Hi, I'm Steve Willis. I'm a chemical engineer. I've been working in large scale industry for over 30 years, and I'm currently director of Herculean Climate Solutions, which we set up a few years ago to find hundreds of ways to do millions of tons of carbon capture or avoidance or sequestration or other solutions. In the Covid Lockdowns, I started writing some climate fiction as a way of exploring some of those questions and also exploring the climate problem from the outside in. So what would it take to do 10 gigatons of carbon removal, and if you work back from that, where do you have to begin in order to be able to reach it within 20 to 30 years?

Tom Raftery: 2:55

Okay, and we're on the podcast today because you published a book called No More Fairy Tales, Stories to Save Our Planet. And this book came out shortly before Christmas. I got a copy of it myself. And it's a little bit different from normal books around climate in a couple of aspects. The first I would say is it's not a book of a single story. It's a book of short stories. And second, they're more climate positive, I would say, than many climate books that have come out. You know, fiction books that have come out because most of the climate fiction books that come out are horrendously dystopian, right? So, Tell me about that. Tell me what was the thinking behind that? Why did you decide to go that route? And yeah, let, let's dig into that first.

Denise Baden: 3:49

Okay, well, well if I start the whole point of the Green Stories project was to address the very issue you point out, Tom. My background actually is psychology, and I began to worry when I read climate fiction and it was so dystopian is, look, these terrible things will happen, if we don't, take action. But the fact is fear does not generally give rise to very positive behavior. And when I did some research on this, on how people respond to catastrophic versus solution focused stories, whether in education or news or fiction. Yeah, the fear-based ones will motivate some, but they'll put just as many off and they go into this kind of avoidance or passive despair, or even worse, they go into this kind of prepping response, you know, buying up all the toilet rolls and being and not what the fiction writer is clearly hoping for. And if you write solutions in, a lot of people think, oh, well that will lead to complacency. But my research clearly shows it doesn't. It leads to much more effective behavior change. Oh, right. Something can be done. I can do this. I can follow the character here and do that. So basically five years ago, I realized we were doing it all wrong. So I've tried to address this issue through green stories writing competitions, but writers like conflicts, they like things to go wrong , and I still found it incredibly hard to get, stories through that weren't just all about the disaster. So I started writing a few myself. So when Steve got in touch with me saying, let's do an anthology and I want it done before COP 27, which only left about 250 days.

Tom Raftery: 5:30

Wow.

Denise Baden: 5:31

I thought this is an impossible task, but then, you know, so is addressing the climate crisis, but we got it done and we have a superb anthology of 24 stories. Some really top writers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi. We wrote a few independently and together, and lots of other experienced writers worked with climate experts and as all iterative fashion to make sure that each story was genuinely engaging. But also had a proper, decent solution, not just doing a bit of recycling , but a proper transformative solution. So, so Steve, you, you were the energy behind this. Do you want to add to that?

Steve Willis: 6:09

Yeah, as we were saying, during the covid lockdowns, I'd written some stories to try and explore these issues. And as we've been exploring potential startups in the climate area we've been using three questions. So it's three awkward questions and they are, when we look at the solution, will it work? Will it do a million tons? And is it a negative emission broadly? And we're fairly flexible about exactly how those are applied. And we wanted to write stories and crowbar those solutions into the stories. So you've got something which is really big and illustrate it with some entertaining characters. So you've got a story which has got a powerful kernel of scientific truth in it, but it's written in a way that somebody actually wants to finish the story.

Tom Raftery: 6:56

so it is literally science fiction.

Steve Willis: 7:01

engineering fiction, I would say.

Denise Baden: 7:03

Well that's Steve's. So this is the interesting thing as the editor, because you know, you've got Steve from the engineering background who likes these big, bold, audacious solutions, and then you've got ecologists who think, well, why bother doing this? Let's just need nature alone. And then you've got the social scientists who's saying, well, there's no point drawing down with carbon or sequestering it, If we are consuming like mad all the time anyway, it's like pulling the plug while the hot water's running. So trying to manage those very different perspectives was incredibly educational, actually. Um, A challenge. I won't deny it, but I think we've got something there for everyone. So, I think at one of the talks I did at COP 27, I might have coined the term, someone will tell me, I'm sure if I'm wrong, social science fiction. So, you know, we are familiar with science fiction as kind of enabling us to look at technology and play out some of the pros and cons, winners and losers from it. Like black mirrors a great example of

Tom Raftery: 8:04

sure.

Denise Baden: 8:05

but I see fiction as a safe space to explore more systemic solutions. Perhaps politicians can't talk about in this kind of environment with a confrontational press cuz it doesn't fit into a sound bite.

Tom Raftery: 8:20

Mm-hmm.

Denise Baden: 8:20

So the way I've approached it is thinking, well currently our government will look at where we are. And they'll make an incremental change to make us look better, so we'll be slightly less unsustainable, but we won't be sustainable. I like to look at, and you can do this when you are a fiction writer, you imagine a world that is properly sustainable and then you think, well, working backwards from there, what do we need to do and how can we get there? And the first thing I think we need to do is have a way of enabling long-term decision making, which falls outside the electoral cycle. And I know, you know, Wales, I think Scotland are gonna join with future generations commissioners, I'm very interested in citizen assemblies, especially now we're talking about getting rid of the House of Lords. That would make a, a great replacement cuz they're outside the electoral cycle. So I've got one story in there called The Assassin set within a citizen's jury that's been given proper legislative power and they're debating climate solutions. The trouble is, one of them is an assassin . So it's uh, along Who Done It to engage the reader, but at the same time, you're seeing just how powerful a different decision making process can be. And, within other stories we talk about things like personal carbon allowances. Now when you look at how can we reduce consumption if there an equitable manner, it's quite tricky. If you add just taxes, it makes basically trashing the planet, the privilege of the rich. it's, it's very inequitable and most of our pricing mechanisms like energies is fairly expensive to begin with, but then as you use more, it gets cheaper. It should be the other way around, in terms of what carrots and sticks we want to be applying. So personal carbon mechanisms is something that was proposed back in 2008 with Defra and David Milliband and the Sustainable Round Table, and it was an idea ahead of its time. But now we have carbon footprinting. I mean, quite frankly, we are more scared. We're in a much better place to look at that, but the awareness is low and there's potential for so much misinformation, and vested interests. But it would, in one instance, galvanize, harness finance and business investment and innovation towards sustainable low carbon products. So it would be a root way, ground up way of transforming to a low-carbon society. You know, without hoping business will just step up because of their reputation. Or, and, and this is something I notice you talk about often in your podcast. Why would business do this? So you can't talk about these things easily in the political realm and, and again, you can think back, well, if personal carbon allowances are to look good, they will look bad against our current metrics of success, gross domestic product, as that is basically based on consumption. So before you do that, first we need to switch to some kind of Wellbeing Index or Happy Planet Index and other countries, New Zealand, and Bhutan, they've fled the way so you can get a real sense of what needs to happen and in what order. For all these projects that Steve would like to see to actually get funding in the first place. And you know, you can write as a kind of benign dictator, you'll manifest over the planet and already people are picking up on it. I've got a politics colleague who says, I work in citizen assemblies. I think they're the silver bullet, but there's low awareness. Can we adapt your story as a play to engage the public? And I'm thinking, yes, you can So it really is that the power of fiction to, to raise awareness of these sort of more transformative solutions. I think.

Tom Raftery: 12:06

Mm-hmm.

Denise Baden: 12:07

Steve, I've Rabbited on over to you. I'm sure you've got something to say

Steve Willis: 12:11

that's never happened before. Denise, I've forgotten what the question is now.

Tom Raftery: 12:16

Well, let me, let

Steve Willis: 12:17

your question?

Tom Raftery: 12:17

well, no, let, let me, lemme throw a different one because this reminds me very much of, this is gonna sound weird, or maybe not, but this kind of style of writing reminds me very much of Star Trek. So Star Trek is very, Almost utopian in that it, it pictures a, a world where humanity has overcome the problems of climate. It has overcome the problems of racism and all these kind of things. And we're in this fantastic world where we have federations of planets and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. It's, and it's, it's, it's, so do you wanna, do you wanna respond to that? Is that just insane thinking on my part? Or is that very.

Steve Willis: 13:01

No. No, not, not at all. I mean, I, I visualize it that way many ways, you know, so it's like you go on the holodeck and you're running, you're writing your own program of what you want it to be, and because it's a holodeck, you can go around again, you know? So in couple of the stories, we go around the loop again. So there's a, a story about the Titanic called Saving the Titanics, and it looks at how the Titanic might actually have been saved in a number of different ways. And it's also threaded into a discussion about climate anxiety. So it's set in an Alcoholic's Anonymous session for climate anxiety. So you borrowing somebody else's tool. But it's not about, I'm an alcoholic, it's, you know, I have climate anxiety and they're using the Titanic stories as analogies for saying, this could have been done, this is the level of effort that it would've taken to save the people. Now are we doing that for the climate? And, going around those loops a couple of times, so the first time, first story, they save all of the people, not spoiling it for anybody. The second time they go around the loop, one of the people is missing. So the idea doesn't catch. So they all fail. And this story proceeds in its current timeline. So the uh, two thirds of the people die, but the third time they go around, there's a little bit more traction in the story and they save the ship. And ultimately, you know, if the Titanic is an analogy for Earth's society and climate anxiety and the climate that's the goal that we have to achieve. We have to save the titanic, and this is a way of showing that it is possible to do, but the effort that goes into actually doing that and the realization that the huge effort is required is like, you know, where does the seed come from and how do you stitch it together to get the effort done within the time? That's the challenge that we're facing.

Denise Baden: 14:59

I think also with Star Trek, I mean, I was a bit of a treky back in the day, have to admit. They were very hazy on the details of how you got there. And I think one of the things that we've done in our anthology is we've really specified it. So Steve had this wonderful idea of the ocean having nation status and Steve you wanna talk about that?

Steve Willis: 15:23

Yep. Yep. So, um, Four years ago I went to the uh, World Ocean Summit, that, the economist organizers and it was in Mexico and we were trying to promote a, uh, artificial reef project at the time. And I was trying to raise a couple of million bucks to do a trial. We didn't succeed, unfortunately, cuz it was either too small or too big for the pots that were available. So by the third day, it got to the stage where I sat down by this old American guy and said, how would you fix it? And it turned out that he was the sustainability director for one of the big American banks, and he said, well, America only became great after it became independent from its colonizing country. By analogy, the ocean will only solve its problems when it becomes independent from the colonizing countries around it that are extracting resources for free. The ocean needs to be an independent state. And that was a seed that got planted three, four years ago. And we've written it into four of the stories in the collection here. So there's the, how it starts, one of the early stages one of the more problematic periods and then 40 years in the future where it's all worked great. And there's a new president a president of the ocean and the ocean is part of the United Nations and negotiating on equal terms and calling the tune. So it changes the way the the whole scenario works. So if you think 40 years into the future and it's worked, and the ocean isn't a, in independent state. It, it doesn't work. The story doesn't scan anymore, so you've broken the tune. But if you have an independent ocean, the story does work because it has such large influence across the whole world and everybody's trying to cooperate, with the ocean. And so it's aim is not to defend its resources, its aim is to charge for its resources. So if you are a country or a shipping company, we just send you a bill, you've got your net zero commitment. Okay? Here's your bill. And you either pay it or you don't., no, I'm not coming after you. But some people will pay and once the ocean as a state has some revenue from that kind of thing, it becomes large enough to have much larger positive engagement. So the money to actually fix the ocean and money to do the big restoration projects just doesn't exist at the moment. But the services which should be charged for do exist and are being used, and all we need to do is send out a pile of bills.

Tom Raftery: 18:03

Right. Nice.

Denise Baden: 18:05

And what's exciting about this is, is one, I think the ocean is, there's less awareness of it. We talk about planting trees that conflicts with habitation, with food growing, but there's way more place to plant sea grass, kelp and so on in the ocean, or just leave the stuff that's there without destroying it. And You know, we already get, so Steve, you were saying you were at the, the Ocean Summit last

Steve Willis: 18:28

year and people Yeah, so I, I went to the World Ocean Summit Singapore just in December November, December. And spent two entertaining days just chatting to people saying, have you ever thought of this? You know, so people have been involved in the topic for a couple of years and.

Tom Raftery: 18:42

right,

Steve Willis: 18:43

Oh, that's a good idea, So, we're gonna see if we can get some more traction. So, if you know anybody, Tom, please encourage them in that direction.

Tom Raftery: 18:52

will do

Denise Baden: 18:53

And I've got a, our head of our law school again, you know, showed him the anthology the stories. He was inspired and he was saying, well, actually, yes, giving legal status to nature is a very effective way to protect our earth. So what is lovely is, as writers, we dream that what we write will come true. But then when you see the impact of the anthology out in the world, it is starting to inspire people to think along these lines.

Tom Raftery: 19:21

Yeah, very much. Very much. And you've used the, expression anthology now a couple of times. And I mentioned it's a se a series of short stories. Can you talk a little bit about the authors themselves and because you managed to get some really interesting authors to write some short stories for you?

Denise Baden: 19:37

Yeah, so Kim Stanley Robinson Stan as he calls himself he was a real coup, he wrote Ministry For The Future, and if you talk to anyone about climate fiction, they always say, oh, have you read Ministry for the Future? And he was one of the first people I came across. And it's a very recent book, I think came out in 2020 where he imagined the UN had a ministry for the future. And then he imagined what they might do. And you know, he takes us over decades and there's ups and downs. You know, there are mass deaths and extinctions, but it's broadly optimistic. So at the end we do kind of crack it and I think he would did a really good job of showing the jigsaw of activities. You need to harness the power of science. You need to harness the power of finance. You need some way to recompense people. He talks about carbon offsets and the Carboni as a carbon coin. He talks about refreezing glaciers, which is something that inspired one of Steve's stories. So he talks about it from every angle. Cultural, scientific, technical, financial there's even a Dark Wing , dark Ops So, he was very inspiring and he was more than happy for us to use, you know, a few selected chapters from that that we could use a standalone stories and Paolo Bacigalupi is another excellent writer. He wrote a lovely story. It's kinda like a family drama. Meets sort of futuristic cities, so it's like Star Trek, but on the city it's like imagined a sustainable society. You don't have individual transport, you have super-duper on demand, public transport, so you don't need your own, you know? It talks about different forms of renewable energy, like using gravitational force, which people are talking about now. But at heart it's a family story. It's a father son tale. And it brings in AI. So you've got that intriguing notion of how far can we trust artificial intelligence? Is it friend or foe? So there's that hook as well. And also he's just a wonderful writer. So we, you know, we're really pleased to have had, you know, so many writers say, yep, you can use this story, you can have that one. Andrew Dana hudson wrote a nice story for us Our Shared Storm and you know, he does a lot of sort of speculative fiction, science fiction set in the future. I tend to write set in the present day

Tom Raftery: 21:58

Okay.

Denise Baden: 21:59

Yeah. So, and what was lovely is engaging with all these authors because it can be quite a lonely world, you know, writing stories. And what impressed me was they were so willing to put so much effort in. And instead of us coming back saying, what a brilliant story, we'd come back saying, actually, can you big up the climate solution , can you, this is great story, but we need a bit more, it needs to be a bit more transformative. And they were happy to work with our climate experts to say yes, you know, we can amend it this way, that way, and so on. So very patient and

Tom Raftery: 22:33

Nice, nice. And it, it must have been, I mean, you, you were the editor, so it, it must have been challenging to, work both with the writers and with the climate experts. You put them in touch with.

Denise Baden: 22:45

It was a wonderful challenge actually, because I struggle myself writing eco fiction. And you can make a good story and get solutions in there and you often, something has to be sacrificed. And this is where you gotta think, well, first and foremost, the reader's attention is the primary currency here. So unless it's really good in terms of the writing, we're not gonna read on to find out all the marvelous solutions. But I also find that I can't just rely on my judgment. I mean, what's amazing is how people are so different. Like we've been gathering feedback all the time on the different stories, and there's very little consensus. Someone says, oh, I hate this one, but I love this one. And someone else will love this and hate another. So there's a great diversity of stories and I think that's its strength. There is something for everyone. There's a romances, there's tragedies. One of our other authors wrote, a beautiful story actually about a man you know, rich guy, very sort of self-interested in the oil industry, but with a really lovely wife who cares and inspired by her, know, he does wonderful things. He takes over an island, he transforms it with mangrove, forests and so on, and then at the end you find out his wife has died. And it's like, it was the story that made me laugh at the start. And then by the end I was crying. And then I realized later it was a true story. The reason he was writing this in the first place, giving his time to it was exactly. I mean he wasn't a rich millionaire with his own island, but in all other respects, the emotional truth of it was there. And you know, you find out about people writing this cuz we always bring something of ourselves to the story.

Tom Raftery: 24:25

fascinating. And of course we're in a time now where people are more time poor and we've have, we have this whole attention economy. So I think the fact that they're short stories, a series of short stories as opposed to one long story probably makes it more digestible as well. Easy to, to get through, no?.

Denise Baden: 25:18

Yes. Yeah, that's right.

Steve Willis: 25:20

And, and part of the intention is that the story should become Netflix programs. So in the corner of my mind was that, Black Mirror is a really good model. And so we want Black Mirror for climate crisis stories, you know, where you show these are the steps that need to go through and and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But those kind of topics, there's very little in the larger media about, the climate crisis. You know, there's, there's loads of crimes, there's loads of forensic stuff. There's more cooking programs than you can shake a dog at, but there's very little about, actually, the mindset that's needed to get through the climate crisis. So one, one of the objectives that I had for with the stories was to, to write about lots of different types of characters so that when someone sees the stories or hears them or reads them, they can say, oh, you've got an accountant in this one . I'm an accountant. I can do that. I wanna stop doing what I'm doing. I'm gonna find a company that's doing the climate stuff and I'm gonna be their accountant. And get people to say, yeah, my whole career is going to be that now. So when, when we've been doing work with startups and various uh, seeking financing, so on, we've come across quite a few people who are in that position. But only because we're speaking to VCs and those kind of guys, the vast majority of the population isn't coming across that. And we need to get the point where, 10 people are working on a climate crisis, just off the top of your head, whoever you are rather than nobody knows anybody and nobody's doing anything.

Tom Raftery: 27:00

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Denise Baden: 27:01

That would be wonderful. To have a Netflix series like Green Mirror It, it is perfectly designed for that. And because we've got ones with, young characters where the, you know, the main character's, 18, we've got ones with old characters. We've got a real diversity. It's set in all different countries, from Egypt to Australia to America to uk. It would be a, a lovely sort of jigsaw of solutions. And we've got a backup webpage as well where, if anyone likes a story, they can click on it, they can find out more about the story. Many have audio versions they can access, and then any solutions that they want to progress they can click on the website and they can think, well, how can I make this happen? And we've sort of put all the ideas we can think of, whether you are a funder, policymaker, business member of the public, you know what you can do to help make this happen. So we are really trying to tie these ideas to solutions.

Tom Raftery: 27:55

Cool, cool, cool. And where to from here?

Denise Baden: 27:59

Well, Steve, you are a man of big dreams.

Tom Raftery: 28:01

The Netflix series we've already heard of

Steve Willis: 28:04

Yeah. So wanna do Netflix? Yeah. The, the Titanic story particularly, which we've already talked about, be ideal for that. So there'd be a nice little film in there with Leonardo di Caprio and so on So that'll be great. The Refreezing The Arctic stories, though we're speaking with a company, which is at the moment in the process of raising money to do exactly that. So you spoke to David King last year, didn't you? So, David works with this group and we were talking to them and they see, oh, so we'll keep using the stories to illustrate what they want to attempt to do because as well as ocean as a nation. We believe Refreezing, the Arctic is now absolutely central, if we're going to get control of the uh, the climate again. So again, from our Herculean Climate Solutions point of view, there's four things we need to do to fix the climate crisis, which are reduced consumption, switch to renewables, remove co2 and refreeze the Arctic. And we're not gonna like any of them, they're all difficult. But oddly, I think refreeze the Arctic is something we can do relatively straightforwardly. You know, if you go above 75 degrees north, nobody lives up there at all. There's no indigenous question really, because it's too cold for people to live up there. So you get to 80 degrees north and some of the furthest islands and just start producing large quantities of ice. And/or doing the the cloud brightening that they're also talking about and finding some other solutions that we've yet to develop, you know, but putting big equipment and tough teams up there and throwing, billions of dollars at it, will produce lots of ice and we'll buy us a bit of time.

Denise Baden: 29:49

So my plan is to try and promote the anthology No More Fairy Tales - Stories to Save Our Planet and try and get wide readership of that, and engagement with it. And use it as a resource to raise awareness of the issues. So I'm particularly keen on citizens, juries or assemblies. Getting proper legislative power. And it's a really great time to be spreading that message because I think when we look at political leadership internationally, it's not necessarily going in the right directions, we want it to, and if it does, it then swings right back and we're back where we started and, and you, you can't ignore this as an issue. So, I'm very keen to, to use the, the book as a resource. I'm working with Vesta. And Albert, who are the sustainability wing on editorial content. We're doing a project called hashtag Climate Characters where we're raising awareness of the, the role of fictional characters in either presenting excessive consumption as an aspiration, you know, your female characters with walk-in wardrobes and male characters, private jets, and so on. Or the other way around quite often. You know, is that, is that problematic now? And they invited me to participate in this competition that's taking place, and I'm looking to develop scripts that embed climate solutions. So Habitat Man is a book I wrote about a guy who gives up his job to help make gardens wildlife friendly. That's going in there . And also I'm rewriting the assassin as a TV series to the Who Done Its, cuz Who Done Its are really in at the moment as a lovely way to, you know, engage people in climate solutions. So I'm hoping that this will raise awareness of the issues themselves and generate a sort of bottom up idea, hang on a minute. We need to be more transformative than just tinkering around the edges. So big dreams.

Tom Raftery: 31:46

Nice. Nice. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, folks. Is there any question that I have not asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of or think about?

Denise Baden: 32:02

Well, where to buy the book So, there's a number of places. OurGreenStories.org.uk is the website for the Green Stories project. And we've got link to the book there. We've got it. This is anthology for Cop 27 cuz that's how it started. And our publications Habitat press.com is the publisher. We can get it. And also it's available now on Amazon. So I think that's, that's quite important. Steve, anything else?

Steve Willis: 32:31

Going back to your question earlier Tom, about What's the longer term? You know, I think it, it's important that we think in terms of solutions that are big enough to actually solve the whole problem or, make an enormous contribution to it. So little bits don't make enough difference. You know, we need to think in terms of very large Geo-engineering scale changes and we've been geo-engineering earth at least 10,000 years. This is geo engineering a number of forms, and one of the crucial things that I think we need to do is accept the fact that we need to try an awful lot of experiments and that they're not all gonna work. Some of them are gonna be a bit untidy and do that at the thousand ton a year kind of scale. So XPRIZE was running a scheme to do thousand ton a year projects. A thousand ton a year of CO2 removal is the same as running three trucks for a year. So it's not, not a very big project, and we need to pour money on as many of those projects as we can find, because there just isn't the time to do all the little picking and judging and all that sort of stuff. We need to open the fire hydrant and knock people. Let me down the ground with it, you know, as we need to fund lots of projects across a very broad front, very quickly. We've been far too timid.

Tom Raftery: 33:49

Nice. Nice. Cool.

Steve Willis: 33:51

Oh, not nice.

Tom Raftery: 33:55

Awesome. Folks, at this point in the podcast, I normally say to people, if people want to know more about yourselves or the book or any of the stuff we discussed on the podcast, where would you have me direct them? You've all me already mentioned a couple of links to the book. Are there any other sites or links about yourselves or about the book or anything else you want to mention.

Denise Baden: 34:15

So look, well, I'm myself, the work I do is on da baden.com. The publishers habitat press.com and the green stories project is green stories.org.uk

Tom Raftery: 34:28

Lovely. And Steve

Steve Willis: 34:29

and I'm easily found on LinkedIn

Tom Raftery: 34:33

Perfect. I l

Steve Willis: 34:34

an engineer. Twitter is a mystery to me.

Tom Raftery: 34:40

It's becoming more,

Steve Willis: 34:41

understand how that works at

Tom Raftery: 34:42

it's becoming more mysterious to all of us every day. Anyway, try Mastodon it's getting better. Okay, that's brilliant folks. I'll have those links in the show notes of the podcast. So thank you for that. And thank you both for your time and for coming on the podcast today.

Denise Baden: 34:57

Thank you, Tom.

Steve Willis: 34:58

You're very welcome. Thank you very much.

Tom Raftery: 35:01

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to Tom raftery@outlook.com. Or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please, don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks, catch you all next time.