Small Things Big Climate

Plastic is a miracle substance that’s revolutionized healthcare, keeping things sterile, and has replaced glass and metal packaging, reducing carbon emissions from shipping goods. It even keeps produce fresh for longer, reducing waste and the carbon emissions that come from rotting food.   But those positives have for too long overshadowed the negatives. Some plastic is toxic. It’s building up in the ecosystem and in our bodies. Today, plastic can be found in virtually every aspect of our lives. Not only in shopping bags, pop bottles and straws, but in places you’d never expect, like furniture and construction materials, and clothes. Yes clothes. Join us for a shopping trip to learn how your pants are contributing to climate change.   Guests: Kelly Drennan, founder of Fashion Takes Action and Max Liboiron, a professor of geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland and director of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR).

The way we talk about climate change needs to, well, change. Everything is either invisible, like emissions, or incomprehensible, like megatonnes, or inconceivable, like reductions of national emissions 25 years in the future. The cause of climate change is simple: it's fire. To end global warming, we need to stop burning things.   Guests: Tim Stezik of Toronto Fire Services, Lytton fire survivor and author Meghan Fandrich and Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Fire Weather, John Valliant.

Guests: David Langille and Julia Morgan, co-chairs of the Pocket Change Project. Peter Tabuns, former head of Greenpeace Canada and the Ontario NDP's environment critic.   The Star is often inundated with emails from readers asking what they can do to fight climate change. While there are lots of things people can do to lower their personal carbon emissions – and it's important to feel like you're part of the solution – individual action cannot end global warming on its own. So in this episode we take a look at community groups working on scaling up individual action to the neighbourhood level, and ask a former environmental activist turned Member of Provincial Parliament whether writing politicians actually makes a difference.

Climate change: a problem so huge, how could the choices of an individual make any difference? But, then again, doing nothing feels defeatist and cynical. So, what can we do that would actually matter? Join Marco Chown Oved, climate reporter with The Toronto Star, as he navigates some of these questions on the Small Things Big Climate podcast.