Is the battery the energy pill of the green transition?

Batteries promise cleaner transport, renewable energy storage and a more electrified future. But every battery begins long before it reaches a vehicle, a power grid or a home. This episode explores the hidden systems behind the battery revolution.

What if every economic transformation creates a place that carries the cost of everyone else’s progress? From Appalachia and the Niger Delta to the critical mineral regions powering the energy transition, this episode explores the geography of sacrifice zones , places where prosperity is built, but not always shared.

Ports used to move trade. Now they concentrate power. Singapore, Rotterdam, Jebel Ali are not just infrastructure, but systems where logistics, energy and capital converge. The real question is no longer how fast trade can grow. It’s how long that growth can be sustained before the cost of keeping the system running becomes the constraint.

Extraction never stopped. It just became invisible. We call it progress, transition, clean energy. But everything still begins the same way, with land opened, rock broken, and something left behind. The system tracks what we take. It ignores what remains. This episode asks a simple question. Are we building the future, or extracting it?

Europe thought the worst of its energy crisis had passed. Instead, energy is quietly returning to the centre of economic life, shaping where companies invest, how industry competes, and what growth may cost in the years ahead. This episode explores why Europe’s next business challenge may not be energy prices alone, but learning to compete in a world where energy risk has become part of the new normal.

Delayed and Cancelled explores what happens when economic life ends before environmental life does and why abandoned consequence continues acting long after industry walks away.

We throw things away and call it disposal. But nothing truly disappears. Buried explores landfills, toxic waste, underground chemistry, and the hidden inheritance civilisation leaves beneath its feet for future generations to manage.

Air travel has recovered, but the economics beneath aviation have changed. From aircraft shortages and engine bottlenecks to rising fuel costs and the growing price of decarbonisation. The New Economics of Flying explores why the future of air travel may be defined less by demand, and more by what it costs to keep the system airborne.