True Love Is The Greatest Thing In The World, Except A Nice Holiday Special (They’re So Perky, I Love That)
Don’t rush us, Summerupperers. You rush a Holiday Special, you get rotten summaries.
Give the gift of LMSU BoCo to your loved ones!
In the awkward position of forgetting a Christmas gift for your beloved? Want to set your climate conscious friends up for success in 2026? Look no further than a one year subscription to LMSU’s Patreon which gets you bonus, subscriber-only episodes - unpacking the sector decarbonisation plans with special guests - and all manner of additional absolute silliness, like our recent bonus episode of Luke, Tennant and Frankie’s Dungeons & Dragons adventure. Hop to it!
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The 2025 Wonky Award
It’s that time of the year when your intrepid hosts dole out the Wonky award for our favourite paper of the year! We revive the recurring argument about the criteria for the award and don’t let the fact that two of our three finalists weren’t even papers stop us. Our finalists and highly commended for 2025 are:
- ‘Abundance’ by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
- ‘Quarterly Essay 99: Woodside Versus The Planet’ by Marianne Wilkinson
- ‘The New Energy Trade: Harnessing Australian renewables for global development’ by Reuben Finighan at The Superpower Institute.
While there was no denying the zeitgeisty vibe impact of Abundance on the political discourse in Australia and all-round appreciation for Marianne Wilkinson’s thoughtful provocation on the influence of gas giant Woodside, your intrepid hosts all rallied around the seminal ‘New Energy Trade’ paper from the Superpower Institute as having a clear-eyed vision and significant and ongoing impact on policy thinking around Australia’s green export potential. Bravo to Reuben Finighan and colleagues at TSI for winning the 2025 Wonky Award! A custom meme will find its way to your socials in the not-too-distant future!
Holiday Movie Special
We’ve always wondered how many of our eagle-eyed Summerupperers got the movie reference in our podcast title ‘Let Me Sum Up’, taken from none other than the iconic, swashbuckling fantasy fairy tale "The Princess Bride" - so it was INCONCEIVABLE that we choose any other movie for our 2025 Holiday Special. From the origin story around choosing the pod name (including the names that didn’t make the cut), how this movie has influenced us and where we saw it first, to our favourite moments from an all-star cast and the endless choice of banger quotes, we go long! Such is our mutual love for this movie, there was no containing the joy of this Holiday Special.
One more things
Tennant’s One More Thing is: a bit of light holiday reading with the equally zeitgeisty and current The Secret History by Procopius? You tell us which current Australian political figure comes to mind when you hear Tennant’s quote from the book.
Frankie’s One More Thing is: a very late to the party endorsement for Stranger Things on Netflix, which she is just getting around to watching. Better late than never!
Luke’s One More Thing is: Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another which is nothing short of masterpiece and still showing in the odd cinema. LMSU says – see it on the big screen.
And that’s it until the New Year, Summerupperers. Don’t forget we are convening a summer book club, diving into ‘Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing And How To Fix Them’ by Jessica F. Green, and will be recording an episode to discuss sometime in January together with sometime co-host Alison Reeve.
And don’t forget there is now a one-stop-shop for all your LMSU needs: head to
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P.S. don't big shout out to our friends at The NEMchat Singers, who have a proud tradition of summing the energy year in song. We hope you enjoy one of their 2025 contributions at the end of this episode, and be sure to check out the other here!