Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast

"This will never work in India."That's what Indian truck manufacturers said about electric freight. Now they build the trucks.Something is going on here at a speed the rest of the world has not yet noticed. Solar capacity has gone from under three gigawatts to more than 160 in ten years. Across the same decade, 171 million people moved out of extreme poverty.But in eastern Delhi, a woman who has lived beside an open mountain of garbage for fifty years asks Tom Rivett-Carnac for one thing: tell the world about us.So, in the second of three episodes from India, Tom goes looking for what is really driving this change, what it looks like up close, and whether it can deliver for the people who need it most.A cement executive who set a net zero target in 2018, when nobody else in his industry had, will give you the business case that green is profitable. Ask him what is actually driving him and he gives a different answer. Truck drivers on the Bengaluru highway who can now hear well enough to talk in the cabins. A nine-year-old with a bicycle. This is the largest transition of its kind anywhere on earth, and it is happening right now.With Delhi-based journalist and filmmaker Adnan Bhat on the ground, and Dia Mirza, Shyla Raghav and Prachi Shevgaonkar on what it all adds up to.So what does it look like from the inside? And what happens to the people it hasn't yet reached?Disclosure: the electric freight programme in this episode, Laneshift, was founded by The Climate Pledge, which Global Optimism co-founded with Amazon, alongside the city network C40.Learn More⛰️ Read how Delhi's garbage mountains became heat bombs for the people who work them, Al Jazeera on the waste pickers of Ghazipur, a landfill now roughly as tall as the Qutub Minar💧 Watch The Waterman of India, Decode Mediacom's film on Dr Rajendra Singh, whose johads and check dams have revived five rivers across drought-hit Rajasthan🧊 Watch Sonam Wangchuk build an automated ice stupa, the artificial glaciers that freeze winter water into towers and release it when Ladakh needs it in spring🌾 Learn more about Andhra Pradesh's natural farming programme, which has moved more than 1.7 million farmers off chemical-heavy methods and won the 2026 Food Planet Prize🏗️ Understand why cement is so hard to clean up, from Chatham House🗳️ See what Indians actually think about climate change, the Yale programme's opinion maps covering 634 districts🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipeJoin the conversation:Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimism YouTube @OutrageandOptimismOr get in touch with us via this form.Senior Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksIndia Producer and translator: Adnan BhatShow Runner: Caitlin Hanrahan Exec Producer: Ellie CliffordThis is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The summer of 2026 burned the largest wildfire in Spain's recorded history and the largest France has seen since the Second World War. June's heat killed more than 10,000 people across Europe. A heat dome held North Africa and the Sahel above 45°C for days. In Assam, the Brahmaputra put 700,000 people out of their homes.But it was in the United States, in its hottest month in 132 years of records, that climate reporting found its biggest audience of the summer, in the least likely slot imaginable.Footballers at the FIFA Men's World Cup had to stop mid-half to drink, cool down and put on ice vests. Two US broadcasters held the rights to those three minutes. One sold them to advertisers. The other used them to explain why the players were stopping at all. This week Christiana Figueres speaks with Vanessa Hauc, Emmy award-winning anchor at Noticias Telemundo and creator of its climate unit, Planeta Tierra. Vanessa got Telemundo to hand her time during the hydration breaks. Forty seconds, Saudi Aramco's branding in shot, to tell viewers why the players needed to stop. While competitors sold advertising slots generating an estimated $1bn globally, millions tuned in to Vanessa explaining how human-driven climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels, was responsible for the crisis.Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson join Christiana to pick apart why simply reporting a hotter world is still treated as a provocation, and the three of them take stock of a summer of record heat, Spain's tumbling power prices and the case for telling the economic story better.What does it take to reach people who will never open a scientific paper but will not miss a match? And why is telling it like it is still the risky option?Plus, a first look at the next three episodes. Tom has been somewhere that holds the best and the worst of this transition at once. Stay tuned for the end of the episode.Learn More⚽ Read Climate Change Big Player at FIFA World Cup 2026, the World Weather Attribution study Vanessa's team built the reporting on📺 Watch Noticias Telemundo Planeta Tierra, the only Spanish-language environmental news programme streaming in the US, created and directed by Vanessa📰 Read The World Cup Story (Almost) No One Told from Covering Climate Now, on how Telemundo became the only US broadcaster to connect the hydration breaks to a warming planet🗳️ Explore NRDC's polling with Latino Decisions, which found nine in ten Latinos want government action on climate🌡️ Understand why Latino neighbourhoods carry the heaviest heat burden, UCLA research showing more than twice the share of workers in heat-exposed jobs like agriculture and construction⚡ Get up to date on Ember analysis’s about how Spain decoupled its electricity prices from gas🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipeJoin the conversation:Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimismOr get in touch with us via this form.Senior Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksEdited by: Miles MartignoniShow Runner: Caitlin Hanrahan Exec Producer: Ellie CliffordThis is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Solar power now costs a thousandth of what it did in 1976. Batteries are down more than ninety percent in a decade. By the logic of economics, the climate problem should be close to solved. It isn't. We are on track for close to three degrees of warming, and politics is sliding in the wrong direction.Few people have thought as long, or as clearly, about the economics of climate change as Lord Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission and first chair of the UK's Climate Change Committee. This week, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac sit down with him to work out what’s going wrong. Turner doesn’t soften it. The "electrotech stack" of solar, batteries and motors keeps collapsing in price in a way fossil fuels never can. Sub-Saharan Africa could leapfrog the fossil era outright. China's bet on electrification makes America's wager on cheap gas look like a costly mistake. But the movement he has spent two decades inside has also sold a story it never should have: that the transition would cost no one anything.So what closes the gap between what the technology makes possible and what our politics will allow? Who pays for the parts that aren't cheap? And if money alone can’t avoid a 3°C hotter future, what can?Learn More🎧 Watch Adair Turner’s three LSE lectures, the full “Limiting Climate Change While Growing Prosperity” series this conversation distils.⚡ Explore the Energy Transitions Commission and its “Protecting Paris” work on staying well below two degrees.🌡️ Read the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2025 to see where the near three-degree current-policies trajectory comes from.🚢 Understand the IMO’s Net-Zero Framework, the global shipping carbon price that stalled in London last October.🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipeJoin the conversation:Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimismOr get in touch with us via this form.Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksEdited by: Miles MartignoniShow Runner: Caitlin Hanrahan Exec Producer: Ellie CliffordThis is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the nine hours after the Los Angeles wildfires, before the climate movement could get its shoes on, the narrative was being written. Through social media, podcasts and talking heads on cable news, the truth was buried behind a deliberate strategy of disinformation. In the twenty-one months since China's emissions have flatlined, everyone is asking whether this is a blip or a trend. And across 640,000 square kilometres of protected ocean, nobody is quite certain what happens next.You have probably seen these stories reported. But what is actually going on out there?This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson go after the questions underneath the headlines. What is actually changing, who is blocking progress, who is telling the story? And who holds power? Can a COP presidency really be split between two governments, one holding the diplomacy and the other the logistics? Christiana, who has run a few COPs, thinks it collapses over furniture. Is the addiction to profit an economic problem or a psychological one? Tom and Paul fight (amicably) about billionaires.Meanwhile, 1,600 communities across the UK have screened a film briefing the public on a crisis their government will not explain to them. If they can move that fast, what would it take for the rest of us to match them?LEARN MOREOn China's emissions 📉 Read Carbon Brief's analysis showing China's CO2 emissions flat or falling for 21 months, the data behind Christiana's answer; and their more recent finding that China's CO2 climbed 2% in early 2026 because of wasted wind and solar, a reminder of how bumpy a plateau can beOn the Chagos Marine Protected Area 🐠 Explore the Chagos Trust on why the archipelago holds some of the healthiest coral reefs left in the world🌊 Read the Living Oceans Foundation on plans for a new multi-use marine protected area in the Chagos ArchipelagoOn local power🏘️ Browse Carbon Copy, the climate charity co-founded by Ric Casale, mapping place-based action across the UK💷 Read how Warrington funded local renewables through community municipal bonds, open to residents from £5On briefing the nation🎬 Watch The People's Emergency Briefing, the 50-minute film built from the November 2025 Westminster briefing📍 Find a screening near you on the National Emergency Briefing's interactive map🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipeJoin the conversation:Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimismOr get in touch with us via this form.Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksEdited by: Miles MartignoniPlanning: Caitlin Hanrahan Exec Producer: Ellie CliffordThis is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.