215. Hungry For Alternatives
Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast
Persephonica
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2023
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on O+O: UK Net Zero rollbacks, the rise of global populism and why we should all be hungry for (protein) alternatives. Pull up a chair to the table and tuck in to this week's episode.
With the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s recent announcement that he plans to ‘roll back’ Net Zero commitments, coupled with the disturbing rise of global populist politicians choosing to hack the climate crisis conversation, our hosts Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson, ask: why, and why now, are these leaders choosing to act against the scientific consensus and hit the brakes on progress? Tune in this week to hear the hosts’ lively and insightful analysis on this worrying trend in global politics.
Alternative proteins is the topic of this week’s guest interview. Bruce Friedrich from the Good Food Institute is interviewed by the unflappable Andy Jarvis from theBezos Earth Fund, using his expertise in this area to dig into this incredibly important and hugely influential issue.
Bruce, Andy and the hosts unpacked the outsized positive impact that alternative proteins can have not only on tackling the climate crisis, but also our health, animal well-being and nature restoration. He also issued a stark warning with regards to the huge quantities of antibiotics we feed our animals and the current and future on human health:
“The UK government said the threat to the human race from antimicrobial resistance is more certain than the threat from climate change. It's already killing 1.3 million people per year. It's predicted to be killing 10 million people per year by 2050, according to an article in The Lancet last year. Seventy percent of medically relevant antibiotics are being fed to farm animals. Now, former head of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan, has said the end of working antibiotics is the end of modern medicine.” * Yikes.
Music this week comes from Colombian Psychedelic band ‘BALTHVS’ and their track ‘Eclipse Solar’.
NOTES AND RESOURCES
* Bruce quotes an article published in Jan 2022 by The Lancet: Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis. This article in turn quotes the UK’s AMR review’s final paper:Tackling Drug-Resistant Infections Globally: Final report and recommendations (2016) which is the original source of the figures Bruce uses in the quote above.
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GUESTS
Bruce Friedrich, President and Founder of The Good Food Institute
The Good Food Institute
Andy Jarvis, Director of Future of Food at Bezos Earth Fund
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MUSIC
BALTHVS
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Outragean Optimism, I'm Tom Rific Karnak. |
| 0:15.5 | I'm Prisdiana Fijeres. |
| 0:17.1 | And I'm Paul Dickens. |
| 0:18.6 | This week we talk about the UK U-turn on net zero and the potential broader implications |
| 0:23.4 | of that for how the world's governments are dealing with the climate crisis. |
| 0:27.1 | We speak to Bruce Friedrich and Andy Jarvis about food and the rise of alternative proteins |
| 0:32.6 | and we have music from Balthus. |
| 0:34.6 | Thanks for being here. |
| 0:45.9 | So last week we talked about the UN General Assembly and the momentum or lack thereof in certain |
| 0:50.0 | parts of it and we recorded that in the middle of the week afterwards, something to my mind |
| 0:54.9 | rather shocking happened which is not only did Rishi Sunak the Prime Minister of the UK |
| 0:59.6 | not turn up to the UN General Assembly and we know why because he was very busy doing |
| 1:05.3 | exactly the opposite. |
| 1:06.8 | Doing exactly, doing the opposite. |
| 1:08.3 | So he picked the actual moment that the Secretary General was opening his climate ambition |
| 1:13.2 | summit to give a speech in the UK in which he rolled back many of the measures designed |
| 1:19.2 | to enable the UK to meet its net zero 2050 target. |
| 1:23.8 | Now this is, to my mind, a naked move of political ambition. |
| 1:28.0 | The UK is gearing up for a general election at some point in the next 50 months and he |
| 1:31.5 | has made an analysis that this is going to help him win the election. |
| 1:35.8 | So Paul, why don't we go to you first? |
| 1:37.9 | What was your reaction when we saw this egregious lack of leadership on the international |
... |
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