June’s issue of New Internationalist magazine features a series of articles on the ‘Rio+20’ UN conference on sustainable development. Regular contributor (and author of our new No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change) Danny Chivers presents an unofficial guide to the conferences and examines corporate greenwashers like Shell and Monsanto.

In this podcast Nyan Storey interviews Danny about how these corporations are attempting to hijack the conference and greenwashing themselves – disguising their reprehensible ecological irresponsibility with a veneer of greenness – while in reality proposing solutions which are merely new ways of exploiting the environment for profit.

In his article Danny compares the actions of Brazilian Mining Giant Vale to ‘someone holding a grand launch event for a daffodil they have planted on your front lawn, to distract you from the fact that they have dug up your back garden and trundled it away in the back of a truck.’

However, as Danny explains in this interview, we have reasons to be hopeful, and we as citizens are not as blind, stupid or powerless as these large corporations would like us to think. By making sure that we and people around us know what is going on, we will be able to take action to make a difference.