Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change
Once a week, Michael Liebreich and Baroness Bryony Worthington sit down with a leader in clean energy, mobility, climate finance or sustainable development. These in-depth interviews are illuminating and inspiring, and with a catalogue of nearly 200 episodes, there are few better guides to the net-zero transition.
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Cleaning Up
We are a media and events platform dedicated to:
• Helping identify scalable climate solutions and exploring their challenges and trade-offs.
• Facilitating the creation of networks for action, bringing together different players and actors
• Amplifying the influence of those offering real solutions in order to accelerate their uptake.
Watch our latest episode on YouTube (or find it on your favourite podcast platform):
Recent Episodes
Oct. 12, 2026
How Ukraine Can Survive Another Brutal Winter | Ukraine Deep Dive 01
It's been over four and a half years since Russia unleashed its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and still the war shows no sign of stopping. This week on Cleaning Up, we launch a new Deep Dive looking at Ukraine and how its people and energy systems cope through the war. In this first episode, Michael Liebreich travels to Kyiv to find out what is happening on the ground. How are people coping with these desperate and difficult circumstances? How is the energy system coping? What can we in the
277
Oct. 7, 2026
Is Nuclear Fusion About To Have A Theranos Moment? Ep 277: Sir Steven Cowley
There's an old joke that energy from nuclear fusion is 30 years away and always will be. For many decades, the industry did little to spoil the fun, running mammoth and unwieldy research projects, hoovering up a few billion dollars every science funding cycle and announcing breakthroughs that were scientifically interesting, but did little to move us towards actual production of electricity. Then three things happened. First, perhaps emboldened by Elon Musk's successful disruption of the space
276
Sept. 30, 2026
Is The Earth Warming Faster Than We Thought? | Ep276: Peter Cox
This week on Cleaning Up, Bryony Worthington is joined by Peter Cox, Professor of Climate System Dynamics at the University of Exeter and Director of the Global Systems Institute. A former lead author of the IPCC climate reports, Peter has spent decades studying the complex feedbacks between the climate, carbon cycle and natural world. They delve into some of the biggest questions in climate science today: Is the planet warming faster than we thought? What is the role of forcing versus feedba
275
Sept. 23, 2026
The Scandal at The Heart of The Energy Transition | Ep275: Jan Rosenow
Around two-thirds of the energy we put into today’s energy system ends up as rejected heat. So are we measuring the energy transition all wrong? Professor Jan Rosenow joins Michael Liebreich to unpack the “primary energy fallacy”: why focusing on the energy going into the system can obscure the useful energy we actually get out. They explore why electrification can dramatically reduce energy demand, and what genuine systems thinking means for efficiency, waste heat and infrastructure. They
274
Sept. 16, 2026
The Race Is On To Control AI | Episode 274: Afonso Salema & Sam Winter-Levy
More than 80% of the world’s advanced AI compute is concentrated in the US and China. For Europe and other middle powers, the question may no longer be how to win the AI race, but how to avoid becoming dangerously dependent on those that do. This week on Cleaning Up, James Cameron, Chair of Cleaning Up’s Editorial Council, takes over as guest host. He speaks with Sam Winter-Levy, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Afonso Salema, CEO of Exus Digital and founde
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