Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast

The UK, Ireland, France, Spain, and Portugal shattered their May heat records last week. Scenes reminiscent of high summer arrived months early, across Western Europe. And like all extreme weather events, there was a human toll. Infrastructure under strain, health services stretched, and lives lost. 

But as records fell, the political conversation was moving in the other direction. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair publis...

When climate wins happen, we often credit the market. Or the policy. But is philanthropy the most underappreciated force in the climate fight? And can less than 2% of global giving actually change anything?

Behind the headlines, people like Jennifer Kitt of Climate Lead are identifying where finite resources can be spent in order to make a real difference, and helping to grow the pie. Tom Rivett-Carnac, Christiana Figueres, and ...

An unprecedented government move to outrun the courts. A country racing to write AI into its constitution. And a global energy crisis that's already moved faster than any possible fix. Are our institutions and the rules they rest on still fit for the world they're supposed to protect?

This week, Tom Rivett-Carnac, Christiana Figueres, and Paul Dickinson look at three stories the headlines may be missing.

In New Zealand, the g...

Are flights across the world about to be grounded? Is a terrible war about to create an unlikely good news story for the climate? As conflict in the Middle East threatens the Strait of Hormuz, jet fuel shortages are forcing aviation to confront a structural vulnerability it has spent decades avoiding.

This week, Tom Rivett-Carnac, Christiana Figueres and Paul Dickinson examine what the shortage reveals: aviation's near-total dep...

Monarch butterflies crossing a continent. Peregrine falcons above Manhattan. A giant lemur most of the world had never heard of, until one man pointed a camera at it. For seventy years, Sir David Attenborough has been asking us to look - really look - at the world we share with three and a half billion years' worth of other life. 

This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac, and Paul Dickinson mark the 100th birthday ...

Europe plunged into a deep freeze. Life as we know it upended. The 2004 film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ gave a generation of terrified journalists an impossible task: how do you communicate the counter intuitive threat of dramatically colder winters caused by global warming? David Shukman was one of them.

This week, Tom Rivett-Carnac is joined by the veteran BBC Science Editor and author of the upcoming ‘The Resp...

The Iran crisis continues to prove how dangerously dependent the global economy is on fossil fuels. But what will it actually take to move beyond them?

In this episode, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson look at what the latest oil shock continues to reveal. And they turn to the upcoming First Conference on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, where governments, campaigners and other actor...

There are chemicals in your blood that weren't there fifty years ago. They are in the products you use, the water you drink, the food you eat - and for years, almost nobody was told the full truth about the risk.

This week, Christiana speaks to two women who found contamination in their communities and refused to accept it.

Emily Donovan and Sarah Alexander have spent decades fighting for greater regulation of PFAS or ‘...

Sea-level rise is often spoken about in centimetres, forecasts and future scenarios. But what if we understood it as a health emergency that is already reshaping lives, harming bodies and minds, and displacing entire communities?

This week, as a landmark Lancet Commission launches, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac argue that sea-level rise must be understood not just as a climate threat, but as a health crisis currently...

As headlines warn of a possible ‘super El Niño’ later this year, we ask: how do we respond to a warning before it becomes a catastrophe? 

The last major El Niño brought record heat, crop failures, flooding and deepening food insecurity across large parts of the world. This time, the question is not only what may be coming, but whether we are any better prepared to act on the warning?

Tom Rivett-Carnac and Pau...

We used to be shocked by this. Hundreds of thousands displaced, millions affected, whole communities washed out. But somewhere along the way, extreme weather events have become background noise.

This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson explore what it means to live in a world where extreme rainfall, displacement and repeated flood damage are no longer rare shocks but part of a rapidly changing climate...

War in Iran has triggered another global energy shock. Once again, conflict has exposed the deep instability built into the fossil fuel system. And once again, the world is reminded that these fuels are not only polluting, but precarious.

In this episode, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson unpack why the threat to oil infrastructure and the Strait of Hormuz matters so much, and why these moments keep repea...

The climate crisis is not one problem. It is a crisis of water, food, energy, language, justice and power - all colliding at once. So how do we respond when climate solutions create new trade-offs of their own? And are we even using the right words to describe what is happening?

In this episode, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson take on some of the knottiest questions in climate. From water stress and bio...

This week we acknowledge the US strikes on Iran and the escalation that has followed. The immediate human cost is what matters most right now. But this crisis is unfolding within a global system still shaped by oil markets and fossil fuel dependence - a dependence that amplifies regional instability and turns into global vulnerability.

The same structural tensions sit at the heart of this week’s conversation, recorded befo...

Climate concern is not the problem. Most people have it. What's missing is everything that turns concern into action - and understanding that gap turns out to be a lot more complicated than it looks.

This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson sit down with Lorraine Whitmarsh, Professor of Environmental Psychology and Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations at the University of B...

The Trump administration last week announced the repeal of the ‘endangerment finding’ - the 2009 determination that climate change threatens public health and welfare. It may sound arcane, but this piece of legislation empowered the US federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This decision weakens the regulatory backbone of American climate policy, and may reshape the country’s emissions trajectory...

Who shapes climate action when old systems begin to strain? And where does power really sit - with governments, financial institutions, communities, or individuals?

Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson explore climate leadership in a more fragmented geopolitical moment. Picking up the threads from last week’s episode, they ask what happens when multilateralism is threatened - and whether smaller coalit...

Who really holds power in the climate transition? And how do money, politics, and influence shape the pace of change?

In this episode, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson use some of your most probing questions on the political economy of climate action to unpack what happens behind closed doors and to challenge some of the assumptions that often dominate public debate. 

What does lobbying actually ...

World leaders are flocking to Beijing. In the first weeks of 2026, Canada’s Mark Carney, the UK’s Sir Keir Starmer and South Korea’s Lee Jae-myung have all made high-profile visits - an unmistakable signal of global power recalibrating.

China’s dominance in clean energy manufacturing is already well established: from solar panels and batteries to wind turbines. The question now is whether this transition ...