The Green Dream is an Award Winner!
Best Host - Current Events at the Signal Awards
Well, how about that? A mere 18 months since its debut, The Green Dream has won Best Host - Current Events at the Signal Awards, from a jury of power players in podcasting. We tied with Jon Stewart’s The Problem with Jon Stewart and Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale: Brand While You Build for the Silver Award.
Not bad, I’d say, considering Jon Stewart has heaps of writers, producers, PR and marketing over at Apple TV+ to put out his podcast, and The Green Dream is me in my Paris home office, my magnificent producer Tavia Gilbert and her A-plus team at Talkbox Productions in New York, and my smart, witty contributors Hannah Elliott, luxury car writer for Bloomberg Pursuits; Stephanie Zacharek, film critic for Time magazine; Hermione Hobey, literary critic and author of Virtue, which was shortlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. That’s it.
For the listener’s choice, we also received the Silver Award; Stewart won the Gold, which is understandable. He’s been on national TV for years. I’m a new kid on the broadcasting block, with you, dear readers, as my listeners. If you took the time to vote for us, thank you!
The Hollywood Reporter kindly gave us a shout out in its coverage of the awards. Other winners include Michelle Obama’s The Light Podcast, Kevin Hart’s Gold Minds, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Wiser Than Me and Snoop Dogg’s Snoop Dogg W+M. So, as you can see, The Green Dream is in pretty amazing company.
Of course, we could have never gotten this far without the support of our founding sponsor, Another Tomorrow, the New York-based sustainable women’s fashion brand founded by Vanessa Barboni Hallik. Vanessa helped me cook up The Green Dream during Covid-19 lockdowns. It wouldn’t exist without her.
Our other sponsors—Chloé, Stripe and Stare, Lenzing, Sky Diamond, and Phlox—and the paying subscribers to this Substack page (all 66 of you) have made The Green Dream almost financially sustainable. I thank you all for your support.
I truly believe what we are doing here at The Green Dream is the Good Work, bringing listeners and readers an optimistic take on a subject that is heavy on doom and gloom. There are so many courageous innovators, activists and entrepreneurs out there who deserve to have their story told and be celebrated, and we want to continue to welcome them on The Green Dream podcast, so we can spread their message of hope to a broader audience. If you’d like to join those 66 supporters and subscribe—we just want to break even, so we can keep this award-winning podcast (!!!) going—you can do so right here:
For readers who have recently subscribed to my Substack, The Green Dream is a fortnightly podcast and newsletter on sustainability and climate change. The podcast is on hiatus right now, but with your support, it will return in the New Year with a fab new season. You can find all our episodes here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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In the meantime, I’d like to highlight one of the episodes that helped us win our awards: Shaunak Sen, the award-winning director of All That Breathes, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film.
The film is about a pair of middle-age brothers, Mohammad [who goes by Saud] and Nadeem, and their cousin Salik, in New Delhi, India. The three men rescue and rehabilitate injured birds, some who has fallen from the sky, asphyxiated by the city’s epic air pollution. All that Breathes won best documentary awards at both the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals – a first in cinema. It is one of the most poetic movies I have ever seen. You can stream it on HBO.
Green Notes:
One million electric vehicles have been sold in the US this year, Bloomberg reports. And more than 14 million EVs will be sold worldwide, compared with 700,000 in 2016. Let’s keep going!
In the Ugh News Department: Lego, the world’s largest toymaker, has canceled its plan to make its plastic bricks out of recycled plastic bottles. Why? Because, after years of experimentation and prototyping, the company says using recycled PET won’t reduce its emissions. Legos currently uses 2kg of petroleum to make 1kg of plastic.
Lego CEO Niels Christiansen told the Financial Times that the family-owned company is looking at other possible replacement materials that are less toxic than PET, and that it still aims to be carbon neutral by 2050. That’s right: 27 years from now. Double Ugh. I’m waiting for the day someone decides it’s time to boycott Lego for continuing to pump out millions of plastic bricks that it knows will never biodegrade.
Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed two bold new environmental laws: the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, which requires American companies that do business in the state and have annual revenues of $1 billion or more to report direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, and the Climate-Related Financial Risk Act, which makes such companies generating $500 million or more in revenue to file climate-related financial risk reports. Both begin in 2026. Given that California, with a $3.6 trillion gross state product, is the largest sub-national economy in the world, and the fourth largest of all, this legislation will actually have a serious impact on businesses that pollute—you know, like Lego. Well done, California.
Thanks for reading, and listening,
Dana
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