Episode 212

Your Shopping Superpowers with Diane Osgood

In this episode of CarbonSessions, we welcome Dr. Diane Osgood, sustainability strategist and author of Your Shopping Superpower. Diane has spent decades working at the intersection of business, sustainability, and consumer behavior. Through her work, she explores how everyday purchasing decisions can influence markets and drive meaningful environmental change.

Diane shares how volunteering early in her career sparked her passion for environmental stewardship and eventually led her to focus on how companies and consumers interact within the sustainability ecosystem. She explains why businesses often struggle to balance sustainability goals with profitability and how consumer demand plays a critical role in accelerating change.

Together, we explore how shopping choices, transparency, and trust influence corporate behavior and why small individual actions can scale into powerful collective impact.

In this episode we discuss:

  1. Diane’s journey into sustainability and environmental advocacy
  2. Why consumer choices can influence corporate sustainability strategies
  3. The role of certifications and labels in building trust
  4. The challenge companies face balancing profit and sustainability
  5. Why packaging, plastic waste, and everyday purchasing decisions matter
  6. The gap between what consumers say they want and what they actually buy
  7. How communities can influence change through collective action

Diane also reminds us that change doesn’t always start with governments or corporations—it often begins with individual choices that reshape markets.

About Diane Osgood

Dr. Diane Osgood is a sustainability expert, strategist, and author focused on helping businesses and consumers create positive environmental impact through informed choices

  1. Your Shopping Superpower – available through major bookstores and independent booksellers

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For more information on the project and to order your copy of the Carbon Almanac, visit thecarbonalmanac.org

Want to join in the conversation?

Visit thecarbonalmanac.org/podcasts and send us a voice message on this episode or any other climate-related ideas and perspectives.

Don’t Take Our Word For It, Look It Up!

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Featuring Carbon Almanac Contributors Olabanji Stephen, Jenn Swanson, and Jennifer Myers Chua

Olabanji is from Lagos Nigeria. He’s a Creative Director and visual designer that helps brands gain clarity, deliver meaningful experiences and build tribes through Design & Strategy. He founded Jorney - a community designed to help people stay productive, accountable, and do their best work.

From Langley in British Columbia, Canada, Jenn is a Minister, Coach, Writer, and community Connector, helping people help themselves.

Joining us from Toronto, Jennifer Myers Chua helps organizations creating positive change make a bigger impact with better creative, smarter strategy, and thoughtful solutions.

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The CarbonSessions Podcast is produced and edited by Leekei Tang, Lilli Querker, Steve Heatherington, and Rob Slater.

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Jennifer Myers Chua

When it comes to the climate, we don’t need more marketing or anxiety. We need established facts and a plan for collective action.

The climate is the fundamental issue of our time, and now we face a critical decision. Whether to be optimistic or fatalistic, whether to profess skepticism or to take action. Yet it seems we can barely agree on what is really going on, let alone what needs to be done. We urgently need facts, not opinions. Insights, not statistics. And a shift from thinking about climate change as a “me” problem to a “we” problem.

The Carbon Almanac is a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between hundreds of writers, researchers, thinkers, and illustrators that focuses on what we know, what has come before, and what might happen next. Drawing on over 1,000 data points, the book uses cartoons, quotes, illustrations, tables, histories, and articles to lay out carbon’s impact on our food system, ocean acidity, agriculture, energy, biodiversity, extreme weather events, the economy, human health, and best and worst-case scenarios. Visually engaging and built to share, The Carbon Almanac is the definitive source for facts and the basis for a global movement to fight climate change.

This isn’t what the oil companies, marketers, activists, or politicians want you to believe. This is what’s really happening, right now. Our planet is in trouble, and no one concerned group, corporation, country, or hemisphere can address this on its own. Self-interest only increases the problem. We are in this together. And it’s not too late to for concerted, collective action for change.