In this episode, Philippa talks to Ben Wynn, co-founder of Glad Climate, about why guilt and sacrifice will never be enough to drive climate action at scale, and how a prize-draw-funded nonprofit is trying to make atmospheric cleanup something ordinary people and ordinary businesses can actually participate in.
Ben spent more than two decades in the tech world building products, teams and marketing across early-stage startups and scale-ups in FinTech, transport and home services. A “midlife climate crisis” during lockdown left him asking a different kind of question: what is he actually working for? Glad Climate is his answer. It is a UK-based nonprofit on a mission to remove one billion tons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and his argument runs the whole episode: climate change is not a communications problem, or an awareness problem. It is a human motivation and system design problem.
In this conversation, you’ll hear about:
- The simple mechanics of Glad Climate: a membership-based prize draw where fees fund greenhouse gas removal, brand partners contribute prizes, and a Blue Peter totaliser-style season target unlocks a £10,000 cash prize when the community hits it
- The current season target of 250,000 kilograms, the roughly 65,000 kilograms already banked, and early-stage brand partners like Meaningful Planet and Naked Paper
- Why Ben believes most climate messaging today only speaks to activists and advocates and why the real work is reaching the “amenables”, the big middle of the bell curve who care but aren’t yet acting
- The three levers Ben says climate action must pull to move the middle: simple, convenient and motivation and the honest admission that convenience alone wasn’t enough, which was Glad’s own first big lesson
- Why humans flow like water, taking the path of least resistance and why the recycling bin only works because everyone else is already doing it
- Ben’s “take, balance, give” framework for working lives, and his honest reflection that most of his career has sat in the “take” column
- The agency years when the stated purpose was to “flip in three years” and the moment Ben realised he was spending 12 to 15 hours a day making someone else rich
- The cathedral mindset: why Ben keeps coming back to the people who laid foundations knowing they would never see the spire, and why he thinks modern society has lost the long-term shared-purpose muscle it needs
- The honest trade-off: why Glad does not yet fund Ben’s family, why he still works fractionally, and why he describes doing purposeful work as both a privilege and a choice
- How Glad Climate works for businesses: minutes to sign up, a benefit for employees, a credible line in a sustainability report and a very different scale of impact than persuading one person at a time
- Ben’s advice to his younger self: earn as much as you can in a do-no-harm environment, and give as much as you can of your experience, energy and attention back
Key takeaway
Ben’s argument is that climate action will not scale on guilt, shame or sacrifice. It will scale when it becomes the easy, obvious, slightly rewarding thing to do the way putting the bin out became normal, not because every household cared about recycling, but because everyone else did it first. That requires three things: making participation simple, making it convenient, and giving people a positive reason to join. The job of today’s climate community, in Ben’s view, is to lay the foundations of a cathedral whose spire today’s generation will not live to see and to make sure that laying each stone feels less like deprivation and more like showing up for something that actually matters.
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