Outrage + Optimism is for anyone who is not ready to give up on making the world a better place. For unrivalled conversations with decision makers, visionary thinkers and a community of like-minded climate optimists, join former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, political strategist Tom Rivett-Carnac and sustainable business consultant Paul Dickinson. Each week they make sense of all the top climate news stories, go behind the scenes at crucial talks and ensure you stay informed and inspired ahead of what is set to be the consequential year for climate action.
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Digger's flop, Big Oil and the bots: What actually moves people?
Season 12 · Episode 72
Thursday, October 22, 2026 • Duration 45:01
In Digger, Tom Cruise plays an oil tycoon whose rig sets off a tsunami. Within days of release, it was written off as a flop. Christiana Figueres has seen it twice, and she has questions about how quickly that verdict arrived. As she sees it, the film puts the fossil fuel lobby squarely in the frame.
This week, Christiana, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson meet in person, with a stack of your questions and a bigger one underneath them all: what actually moves people to act? Is it fear, or hope? And what are the hidden influences behind the messages that move us?
If evidence on its own changes so few minds, what does? Christiana has a theory involving cake, but Tom and Paul have different ideas in the oven.
Christiana once asked a Saudi minister what his country needed before it would let the Paris Agreement through. The answer fitted on a napkin. And why does she want to take back the word "tribalism"?
Nearly three in four UK newspaper stories on June's record heatwave didn't mention climate change. Oversight, or a firewall of the kind Christiana saw on screen in Digger? Would a general strike cut through? And what happened when Paul stood at a G8 summit, alone, with a 20-foot sign?
Is there a film or a book that speaks to all this for you? Send it our way. And if you think something stranger is going on with Digger's reviews, Christiana would like to hear from you.
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🎬 Watch the trailer for Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's black comedy starring Tom Cruise as a tycoon trying to save the world from a disaster he caused
What World Will They Inherit? Live from Bath Abbey
Season 12 · Episode 71
Thursday, October 15, 2026 • Duration 42:53
Before she was Christiana Figueres, architect of the Paris agreement, who was she? What did believe in 2015 that she no longer believes?
In June, an event about the next generation of climate leaders was postponed because of extreme heat. This week, Outrage + Optimism comes to you live from Bath Abbey, weeks before COP31 and ten years on from Paris. What is one generation of climate leaders really handing to the next? And will it be enough?
In front of an audience of school children, students, parents and teachers, 22 year old, Xandi Drysdale, asks Christiana to reflect on the differences between her own youth and the world that his own generation is stepping into. And, 16 year old Isla asks: Why we should trust the leaders of today the political and economic systems they have maintained are the very systems that created this crisis?
Young people keep being told they must lead. So what is stopping them? Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson put the question to environmental psychologist Lorraine Whitmarsh and University of Bath Vice-Chancellor Phil Taylor. Then they meet Nav Sawhney, an engineer who promised his neighbour in India a washing machine and built one. Is he a model others can follow?
Paul, Christiana and Tom are in the hot seat in front of a live audience - seated in Bath Abbey, in the UNESCO World Heritage Site, what do they see as the biggest opportunities for the next generation? And what responsibility do we have to the generations after theirs?.
Thanks to the University of Bath for hosting us as part of its 60th anniversary Adelard Series, and to Bath Festivals, Bath Digital Festival and the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution for partnering on the evening. Thanks too to Bath Students' Union, and to everyone who came along or sent in a question.
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🧺 Discover The Washing Machine Project, Nav Sawhney's organisation bringing the hand-cranked Divya machine to families who wash their clothes by hand
How Can a Country Survive Losing Its Land?
Season 12 · Episode 70
Thursday, October 8, 2026 • Duration 40:28
A ship rams a canoe. The canoe starts to sink. The ship's crew lean over the rail and offer a loan to repair it.
That is how Surangel Whipps Jr., President of Palau, describes climate finance in the Pacific, a region responsible for around 0.03% of global emissions. He speaks to Christiana Figueres a few weeks into his year as Chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, and as pre-COP talks wrap in in Fiji and Tuvalu ahead of COP31.
In Palau, on his islands, high tides are already flooding the taro patches with saltwater, and the main hospital sits at the water's edge.
This week, Christiana returns to the fight that wrote 1.5°C into the Paris Agreement, a limit the small island nations won while most of the world's biggest economies pushed for two degrees. A decade on, the UN expects the world to overshoot it. What does this mean for entire countries that sit just a few metres above sea level?
President Whipps explains why diesel power costs his country close to 30 cents a kilowatt hour, when solar is the cheapest energy in the big markets, and what he says to young Palauans who are no longer sure they should have children.
And, Tom Rivett-Carnac joins Christiana to ask what is actually required of the rest of us. Last year, the world's highest court sided with the islands. Last month, the UN agreed that a country does not stop being a country once the sea takes its land. Why hasn't the money followed?
Thanks to our friends at BE HOPE Podcast Takeover, bringing podcasts around the world together to explore the theme of hope and how we can continue to make progress in a rapidly changing world.
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🎬 Watch All Rise, the documentary narrated by Christiana that follows the Pacific law students who took climate change to the world's highest court
The Easy Wins Are Gone. What's Actually Next for Net Zero?
Season 12 · Episode 69
Thursday, October 1, 2026 • Duration 40:42
Net Zero was once a radical idea. Now it’s both an accepted global target, and an increasingly toxic political faultline.
This week, Tom is back from the UN General Assembly and New York Climate week, where António Guterres used his last speech as UN Secretary-General to call for every country to set a timeline for quitting fossil fuels. But around the world, politicians are turning against the very idea. In Britain, a committee of MPs now wants the government to stop saying "net zero" altogether. Should the climate movement let the phrase go, or will its opponents simply come for whatever replaces it?
Christiana Figueres and Paul chat to Professor Phil Taylor, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath and a member of the government's Net Zero Innovation Board. Phil grew up in a North East England still living with the fallout of its last industrial transition. He warns that the cheapest, easiest progress has already been made. And so far the households gaining the most from the energy transition are the ones who can afford the shift.
So, with energy bills set to rise again, what happens when a shift sold as painless starts to hurt? And can politicians be honest about the costs and still win?
Outrage + Optimism will be live at Bath Abbey on 14 October, after this summer's extreme heat forced the original event to be cancelled. Join the livestream from anywhere using the link below.
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🎟️ Register for theBath Abbey livestream on 14 October, Powering the Next Generation to Lead Climate Action
🌍 Read Climate Home News on
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Who Runs the World?: Inside the UN’s Secret Leadership Race
Season 12 · Episode 68
Thursday, September 24, 2026 • Duration 58:47
The news cameras may be following rising tensions between President Trump and President Pezeshkian of Iran, but deep in the bowels of the United Nations, fifteen countries are about to choose, in private, the person who speaks for 8 billion people.
It’s a process so opaque that even the candidates can't see who is voting for or against them, and - bizarrely - rumours are spreading that the eventual winner could be someone who hasn't yet entered the field.
This week, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Christiana Figueres are together in New York for the UN General Assembly and Climate Week NYC, joining the Be Hope Podcast Takeover for a second year.
As the race to replace António Guterres heads towards a fourth straw poll, Christiana - who ran for the job herself in 2016 - takes the mechanics apart: the five vetoes, the ten members whose preferences can be overruled, and the 193 countries who ‘approve’ a winner, but never get a choice. Tom and Christiana size up the race, while Christiana remembers the question that probably cost her the job in 2016, and the day she slid a sealed brown envelope across the desk of Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.
And Christiana speaks with her old friend Susana Malcorra, who was Ban Ki-moon's chef de cabinet before becoming Argentina's foreign minister, and running for Secretary-General alongside her in 2016. Despite multiple qualified candidates, the United Nations has never been led by a woman. Susana co-founded GWL Voices, and she has spent the years since campaigning for the first Madam Secretary-General.
Whoever wins inherits a defunded institution in a fractured world, and a first task Christiana calls unavoidable and painful. What is the UN actually for now? And if multilateralism as we've known it has stopped working, who convenes the world on climate instead?
Will the next leader be more Secretary or General?
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Inside the New Security Thinking: The Weaponisation of Disaster?
Season 12 · Episode 67
Thursday, September 17, 2026 • Duration 44:16
This summer, extreme heat killed tens of thousands of people across Europe. The number killed by terrorism was, as our guest puts it, very very small. So why are the institutions built to keep people safe still organised almost entirely around the second one?
Erin Sikorsky is the Director of the Center for Climate and Security, a former deputy director on the US intelligence officer who led long-range strategic analysis at the National Intelligence Council, and now sits on the UK's climate security task force. She tells Tom Rivett-Carnac, Christiana Figueres and Paul Dickinson that we are moving into an era where climate is no longer a threat multiplier, it is the threat.
Between January and July, militaries in 49 countries were deployed more than 110 times to fight fires. Spain sent 1,200 soldiers and 400 vehicles to a single blaze outside Madrid. Militaries are already responding to the climate crisis.
Then there is the weaponisation of the disasters. Why would anyone lie about a flood? Within days of the Nepal glacier collapse that killed more than a thousand people, a false claim was circulating that a Chinese dam had been released. This pattern has repeated in Canada, Portugal, the United Kingdom. Sometimes it is a rival state looking for advantage. Sometimes it is a government deflecting its own failure onto migrants, bad actors or a neighbour state. After Hurricane Helene in the US, disinformation about the federal response led to threats against the emergency workers trying to help.
Erin's case for optimism is that security money and climate money are the same money, and that Generals can be won round on those terms. But Christiana isn't convinced - the military was making this argument five years ago, and Munich, NATO and the Security Council have all held the briefings without producing a single decision.
So if this summer wasn't the thing that changed it, what will be?
At COP26 in Glasgow, India famously asked to change one word in the final text. ‘Phase out’ became ‘phase down’. The COP President fought back tears, as country after country branded this a moment of shame. For many, India has been a villain of that story ever since.
But like all stories about this country, the truth is far more complex.
In the last of three episodes from India, Tom Rivett-Carnac asks what the world gets right and wrong about the pivotal role that India is playing on the global climate stage. And Christiana Figueres returns to the microphone to trace the argument India has been making in every negotiating room for three decades - and where it might go next.
We meet Ambassador Manjeev Singh Puri, who was at Copenhagen in 2009, when the rich world promised billions of climate finance to the developing world. But much of that money never came, and what did arrive came mostly as debt. He has a theory about why India still doesn't get the credit he believes it deserves, and it has nothing to do with the climate.
Harjeet Singh, who has campaigned on this for twenty years, shares why his own government treats coal as a matter of national security rather than energy policy.
And Dia Mirza tells us what she did when the Chief Justice of India called people like her a ‘lobby’.
So is India the blocker, or the blueprint? And what happens to the rules when the countries that wrote them stop keeping them?
What’s India Building?: Tales from the Biggest Transition on Earth
Season 12 · Episode 65
Thursday, September 3, 2026 • Duration 32:40
"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.
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.
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India: Life Inside Delhi's 'Airpocalypse'
Season 12 · Episode 64
Thursday, August 27, 2026 • Duration 38:51
In Delhi, lung cancer is no longer a smoker’s disease. It’s a breather’s disease.
But the most polluted capital on earth sits in a country running five years ahead of its Paris clean power target.
In the first of three dispatches from India, Tom Rivett-Carnac is joined by Dia Mirza, one of the biggest names in Indian cinema and a UN Environment Goodwill Ambassador, and Shyla Raghav, formerly Chief Climate Officer at TIME, who describes "a mix of pride, a mix of heartbreak, and, as well, possibility."
With Delhi-based journalist Adnan Bhat guiding and translating, Tom traces the path India is trying to build - development founded on renewable energy, clean transport, and a refusal to accept that getting richer has to cost the earth.
We meet Bhavreen Kandhari, who stopped relying on the government's air quality figures and started keeping her own. Now, she says, every citizen is a scientist. On a good day, indoors, her monitor reads six times the safe limit.
And, Dr Arvind Kumar, who has been operating on Delhi's lungs since the 1980s. Here, he says, “a child becomes a smoker from the first breath.” But he has yet to see dirty air written onto a death certificate in India.
And in Old Delhi, Bilkis drives a lavender electric rickshaw. She switched because it was cheaper and easier to drive, she says. Which may be how this actually gets done.
Can India grow, bring a fifth of humanity with it, and build a better road than the one the West took and then closed behind it?
The Clock is Ticking: Forty Seconds to Explain the Climate Crisis
Season 12 · Episode 63
Thursday, August 20, 2026 • Duration 33:46
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 about Fossil Free Careers, People & Planet's campaign to end fossil fuel recruitment on UK campuses
🏛 Explore the University of Bath's Adelard Series, marking its 60th anniversary and named after the 12th-century scholar often called England's first scientist
Join the conversation
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe
🌺 Readthe Palau Pledge, the promise every visitor signs to the children of Palau on arrival, and the text that has inspired a movement in Costa Rica to write its own
🌊 Understandthe UN's first declaration on sea-level rise, Just Security's analysis of what its presumption of continued statehood means for countries that could lose their land
🌡️ ReadUNEP's Emissions Gap Report 2025, which found the world will very likely pass 1.5°C within the next decade, and why the size of the overshoot still matters
Join the conversation
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes onSpeakPipe
💧 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
👩👧 Explore Warrior Moms, the network Bhavreen Kandhari co-founded in 2020, now 38,000 mothers across 19 states, with guides on filing air quality RTIs and writing to your MLA
🩺 Learn more about the Lung Care Foundation, set up by Dr Arvind Kumar after black deposits started appearing in the lungs of patients who had never smoked
⚖️ Read about Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, the first person anywhere to have air pollution recorded as a cause of death, the precedent Dr Kumar wants India to follow
🛺 Get up to date on Delhi's switch to electric autos, under which only electric three-wheelers can be newly registered in the city from January 2027
📺 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
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