Is Money Betting Against Our Future? Matt Winning Brings Finance and Climate to the Fringe
By Nina Purton
“All of the money in the world is betting against his future.”
These words, spoken by comedian and academic Matt Winning about his son’s future in his Fringe show Solastalgia, stuck with me long after the lights went down. Not sure why exactly — maybe because of how human they felt, how simple and relatable.
It was one of the first things we talked about over coffee in George Square Assembly Studios this August. With money fuelling decisions that could either tip our planet towards inhospitable conditions — at least for us — or help us change course, how do we actually talk about financing change?
Because despite the sea of innovations and positive headlines, the biggest stakeholder of all — fossil fuels — is still sitting steady. Yes, our old “friends” oil, gas and coal. But how do we unhook ourselves, especially when so much of the world’s wealth is tied up in them?
That’s the question Matt has chosen to tackle:
“I wanted to make a show about how you get rid of fossil fuels from a financial perspective. And I also wanted to talk about the entirety of how we have historically made money from energy.”
“I wanted to place people within the timeline historically within the past and the future to make them realise that they are one person at one point in history, to contextualise the whole problem.”
But first things first: who is Matt Winning?
From Academia to Comedy
Matt is a lecturer in the Economics of Sustainability at University College London (UCL) — who better to talk about money, right? He’s been working on climate change in academia since 2008. But, as he puts it, PhD life can be lonely.
About nine months into his PhD, he tried comedy. Not climate comedy — just comedy. (This was almost a decade ago, when climate jokes weren’t exactly mainstream.)
Fast-forward to 2017, and Matt put on his first full-hour show on climate change. It was a personal experiment with no expectations. The response surprised him. There was an audience for it. He gave it a few more runs until Covid hit. During that period he was already working on his book, A Hot Mess, published in 2021 (more on that later).
Solstalgia is his first full-month run at the Fringe since 2019, he tells me, and the show is very much about figuring out how to incorporate the changes brought about by the pandemic which decentralised climate from the order of priorities. He’s figuring out how to talk about it again — how to make people aware of the planetary conundrum we’re in.
His early shows were what he calls “powerpoints with a lot of jokes.”
“That’s what I did because that’s what I know how to do. I’d write a lecture and just add jokes to it. I had to write the lecture as an academic, go away for a week or two, come back and think, how do I make this thing and pretend someone else had written it.”
It worked — for a while. But this time, he wanted something deeper.
Solastalgia: Finance, Family and a Warming Planet
Solastalgia is a word used to describe the grief of losing one’s home or roots due to climate change — a bit like nostalgia, but climate-focused.
From the very start, the show feels personal. Pension funds take centre stage — the perfect metaphor for how money we set aside to protect our future is quietly undermining that very future.
“We just hand our money over to people, and these people, most of them, don’t understand the future — what’s happening in the world — enough to look after your money properly. That’s what I’m trying to hammer home to people.”
Here’s the paradox: if our pensions are invested in fossil fuels, then keeping them might secure us income — but at the cost of burning the planet we hope to retire on. Cut ties, and we risk the pension itself. So what do we do?
Matt’s answer is to embrace the contradictions. Face the mess, imperfectly, but bravely.
“I wanted to marry these really massive things like the history of industrialisation, the oil industry and PR, as well as where the world is going in the future with a very personal story about me essentially having personal choices and decisions to make, becoming more desperate as the show goes on, and not knowing what the right choices are.”
At the heart of it all is family. For Matt, this is about what it means to bring another life into the world — ironically one of the most carbon-intensive choices a person can make — and then wrestle with the bigger question: what kind of world are we building for those who come next?
This is not a show about despair or martyrdom. It’s about placing yourself in the system, contradictions and all, and asking: where does my money go, and what does that mean for the future?
“If you can do that and do it with other people at scale, you’re having an impact and you’re pushing the world in the direction that you want the world to go in.”
Beyond pensions, Matt looks at sectoral agreements as a possible lever for systemic change: “The shipping sector this year has agreed to work together through the UN’s International Maritime Organisation. That’s where I see real change able to happen. We have countries, but countries have so many balances and trade-offs,’ he explains.
‘But if you’re looking at industry level, if you can get a few key players around the table, then you actually might be able to get people to work together to be like, ‘how do we all do this in a way that none of us lose and we can move forward.’”
It’s a hopeful glimpse that collective action is possible — and that sometimes industries can lead where politics stalls.
Why Comedy?
At the time of writing this article, I’m about halfway through reading his book, A Hot Mess. As someone who works in sustainability but isn’t from a scientific background, I find the humour lifts the weight off the page. The science is complex, the stakes are heavy — but a joke cracks the tension and gives you room to breathe.
Admittedly, I don’t understand all the jokes as someone having been raised partially in Brazil. But even the ones that fly over my head take the pressure off the subject, and the ones I do catch make the process of educating myself in climate science unexpectedly enjoyable.
The jokes make the book approachable to all sorts of people, attesting to Matt’s goal: to deliver “an accessible book if you wouldn’t read a book about climate change normally.”
As he puts it, “I feel like we have a lot of the science. I’ve spent 17 years working on the science. One of the major obstacles is communicating it — engaging people, making them feel part of the conversation. I enjoy doing comedy, and it’s a skill set I have. I feel like my time is going to be well used doing that.”
Comedy, in Matt’s hands, isn’t about making light of the climate crisis. It’s about letting people lean in without fear of drowning in data. It opens the door to conversations most of us would rather avoid, and keeps us listening long enough to care.
Takeaway
Walking out of Solastalgia, I felt hopeful — not because the problems felt smaller, but because they felt more human.
What stuck with me was the reminder that connection instigates change. For Matt, it started with comedy. Over time, he realised comedy alone wasn’t enough.
“Comedy is not enough in itself, I don’t think. It’s a good tool. The other thing is storytelling and trying to make connections with other people, revealing a bit about yourself and what motivates you. People come to see other people because they care about what their opinions are.
“I am interested when I hear someone talk about why they care about something. What is driving them? And then the thing they communicate might stick better with me, because I’m linking it to something I can empathise with.”
His words left me wondering: how many messages remain unsaid because people feel they don’t have the right voice, or because they’re too busy telling someone else’s story? How many forms of expression – poems, dances, research papers, songs – are out there waiting to be seen or heard? And how hungry is our world for these personal stories?
More importantly, it left me asking myself: what callings do I have to touch people — and scale my own steps toward a better relationship with this planet?
About the Author
As a sustainability, innovative materials and well-being writer, Nina Purton is an avid investigator of all things circular. She is set on researching behavioural patterns, pioneering materials and initiatives that are revolutionising the way we produce, consume, and relate to other human beings and the natural environment.
You can find out more about her on her LinkedIn profile and website.