Speaking on The Responsible Edge, Charlie’s view is nuanced but clear:

“It is a bit of a shame that the government is considering airport expansion in the face of growth,” he said, cautiously.

He’s quick to acknowledge the economic rationale but even quicker to flag the climate cost: an additional 2.4 million tonnes of CO₂ annually by 2050 — and that’s with optimistic assumptions about cleaner fuels.

The SAF Mirage: Betting on Technology That Isn’t There

Central to the government’s climate mitigation argument is the promise of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). It’s a drop-in replacement that relies on waste oils and bio-feedstocks. But there’s a problem: “In the UK, we don’t have any operational projects in the ground,” Charlie warns.

“We’re relying on imported feedstock, creating a huge risk.”

The UK’s SAF mandate may be a step forward, but it’s more of a policy scaffold than a solution. For Charlie, it’s not enough.

“If the government wants to consider expanding Heathrow and Gatwick, we need to do more than just SAF.”

Crossing the Valley of Death

The real bottleneck, Charlie argues, lies in the “valley of death” — the treacherous chasm between innovation and scale. Early-stage clean aviation firms struggle to attract funding just when it matters most. It’s a familiar tale: venture capital dries up, institutional investors won’t take the risk, and the UK loses homegrown technologies to more supportive climates.

“We think the National Wealth Fund should co-invest at this stage,” he says, citing the UK Infrastructure Bank’s potential to bridge this critical gap. It’s not about blank cheques — it’s about risk-sharing to unlock scale.

Vision vs Delivery: A Nation Adrift

Charlie’s criticism isn’t just of a single policy decision but of the systemic inconsistency in Britain’s clean tech trajectory.

“You can’t keep changing the strategy every four years and expect stakeholders to trust you,” he notes.

His example? The indecision over energy grid pricing models, which stalled investor confidence and delayed renewable projects.

For a nation that once imagined itself a climate leader, Britain has yet to articulate a coherent green industrial strategy — let alone deliver on it.

The Case for a National Mission

“What are we trying to be?”

Charlie asks, echoing a deeper concern. Could the UK rebrand itself as a global clean tech hub? Could green growth be our export advantage?

“There’s not one sector the UK doesn’t have an opportunity to succeed in,” he says — provided the government stops gambling on future tech and starts investing in the present.

It’s not a romantic vision of degrowth or techno-utopia. It’s something more grounded: building a policy infrastructure that enables cooperation, coherence, and continuity across government cycles.

Lobbying Without Tribes

In his most passionate moment, Charlie turns his attention to the corporate world.

“We need to remove the tribal nature of lobbying at the expense of climate progress,” he argues.

In his view, competitive sectoral lobbying undermines unified climate policy — and with it, public trust in politics itself.

To fix it? “We need a new model of climate lobbying. One that values long-term thinking and shared outcomes.”

The Takeaway

Charlie’s magic wand wish isn’t flashy. It’s not a moonshot. It’s a call for better coordination, pragmatic realism, and long-haul investment. For those looking to lead responsibly in today’s messy world, that might just be the most radical thing of all.

When he says, “We’ve lost touch with the sense of the whole,” it’s not a lament—it’s a warning. The disease of misinformation isn’t just poisoning our political discourse or undermining innovation; it’s chipping away at the glue that binds societies together.

News as Theory, Not Fact

Most things in the news, says Rafael, aren’t facts. “They’re theories.” And that matters. We don’t need everyone to agree, he explains:

“Consensus is not good for progress.”

But we do need everyone to follow the same logic. That’s what Beehive provides: a transparent, objective framework to assess news articles based on consistency, context, and credibility—not ideology.

His pandemic example is revealing. When UK media declared Brazil’s Covid response a catastrophe, the headlines were technically true. But the omission of critical context—Brazil’s much larger population, regional disparities, and urban/rural divides—meant the narrative was misleading. It’s not fake news. It’s just incomplete. And that, Cossi warns, is the most dangerous kind.

The Slow Collapse of Trust

“Information is soft power,” Rafael reminds us. It shapes not just opinions but entire economies, voting behaviours, and social contracts. Today, he observes:

“A lot of young people in the UK don’t believe in democracy anymore.”

It’s not hard to see why. When truth becomes a battleground, the casualties are cohesion and common purpose.

Misinformation doesn’t need to be believed to be effective. It just needs to be seen. Cossi explains how emotional anchoring—what psychologists call “knowledge neglect”—can distort perception even when we know something is untrue. The damage is already done.

A Better Incentive: Pay for Quality

What Beehive is trying to do is simple, yet radical: create a marketplace where quality journalism is not just a moral imperative but a commercial advantage.

“When people use our app to read news,” says Cossi, “they’re 35% more likely to click on well-rated articles.”

That data doesn’t just help readers—it gives publishers a reason to care.

And some do. Beehive collaborates with media regulators and has already started nudging some major outlets towards better standards. But others? “They say, ‘You’ve correctly identified the flaws—but we only care about engagement.’”

This isn’t cynicism—it’s systems failure.

Beyond the Printing Press

To make sense of today’s chaotic information ecosystem, Cossi turns to history. The invention of the printing press, he notes, was followed by centuries of chaos, propaganda, and ultimately, regulation. The same must now happen with digital content.

“We review hotels, we review restaurants—why not the news?” he asks.

But his vision is not authoritarian. Beehive doesn’t decide what’s true or false. It simply makes transparent what’s missing. In doing so, it reintroduces a sense of shared informational ground—without flattening the complexity of diverse perspectives.

A Magic Wand for Holism

When asked what he’d change about the commercial world, Cossi doesn’t mention regulation or AI. He wants to restore a “sense of the whole”—a worldview that connects individual decisions to collective impact. The metaphor he uses comes from the Apple TV series Severance, where workers forget their real lives the moment they enter the office.

“We’ve siloed ourselves,” he says. “We’ve lost our sense of purpose.”

This is the moral heart of the conversation. Not just how we rate news. But how we relate to one another.