Outrage + Optimism

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 SpeakPipe

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Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Edited by: Miles Martignoni
Show Runner: Caitlin Hanrahan
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

This 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.

Europe is burning. Wildfires are still alight in the hills outside Bordeaux and the countryside west of Madrid. More than 300,000 people across France and Spain have been forced from their homes, and both countries remain on high alert as they enter the fourth heatwave of the summer. As we publish this episode, new fires are breaking out across Greece and Turkey.

With the continent warming at more than twice the global average, a new frontline of the climate crisis has emerged. Meanwhile, nearly three in four UK newspaper articles about June's record heatwave made no mention of climate change, and into that gap come competing narratives: arson conspiracies, weather manipulation, "it was hotter in 1976". Are we being gaslit?

Tom is joined by Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution, to unpack what so much coverage is missing. Are these extreme events being caused by climate change? How do we know? And how can we tell a better story?

He then speaks with Emma Howard Boyd, former chair of the UK Environment Agency, now chair of the UK's new National Heat Risk Commission. She has spent her career translating slow-moving climate risk for institutions built to move fast - in government, in finance, and now at a commission created for precisely this moment.

Emma’s doesn’t claim to have the answers, but she does have ideas. She calls for a shift from emergency response to strategic planning, and for local, mayor-led heat plans like Heat Ready London to ensure schools, hospitals and railways are built for the temperatures now arriving.

Every decision we take now either builds in resilience or locks in vulnerability. Which are we choosing? How are we going to bring more people with us? And can institutions built for fast disasters learn to see a slow one?

Learn More:
🔎 Read the ECIU analysis finding three in four UK newspaper articles on the record June heatwave didn’t mention climate change
🔬 Check out World Weather Attribution, for more on latest research and attribution science.
🛰️ Get the latest data on wildfires in Europe from the EC Joint Research Centre
📊 See the rapid analysis from LSHTM, Imperial College London and the Met Office estimating more than 2,700 heat-related deaths in England and Wales in May and June
📋 Find out about the National Heat Risk Commission, chaired by Emma Howard Boyd, reporting later this year
🌍 Explore the London Climate Resilience Review and the Heat Ready London plan
⚖️ Learn more about ClientEarth’s work using the law to protect life on Earth

🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe

Join the conversation:
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Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Show Runner: Caitlin Hanrahan
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

This 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 MORE
On 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 be

On 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 Archipelago

On 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 £5

On 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 SpeakPipe

Join the conversation:
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Or get in touch with us via this form.

Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Edited by: Miles Martignoni
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

This 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.

Five years ago, a 21-year-old activist stood on a TED stage next to the CEO of Shell and accused him of making ‘evil decisions’ wreaking ‘devastation on communities around the world’. And then walked off.

Christiana was moderating. She went into that panel believing dialogue itself could be the mechanism for change - that an honest conversation could move a company like Shell. What she didn't know is that the activist, Lauren MacDonald, had a different plan. It wasn't a quiet moment to be talking about oil and gas. A couple of weeks later, COP26 would openan hour away, in Lauren's home city of Glasgow. Five months earlier, the International Energy Agency had said something it had never said before: if the world is serious about net zero, there's no room left for a single new oil field, anywhere. Lauren was campaigning to stop Cambo, one of the biggest North Sea developments in a decade. Ben van Beurden, Shell's CEO at the time, was there to argue that oil and gas revenue was what would fund the transition away from it.

Five years later, this is the first time Christiana and Lauren have spoken together publicly about that day. Cambo is paused, but it isn't dead. Its larger neighbour, Rosebank, is still waiting on a government decision - more than 80 UK MPs and MSPs signed a pledge against it this week alone. So what has actually changed - for Christiana, for Lauren, and for the fight itself?

Learn More:

📺 Watch Ted Countdown: Decarbonising Fossil Fuels
🔎 The IEA's Net Zero by 2050 report
📊 Institute for Government's explainer on the Jackdaw and Rosebank decision
📋 Uplift's guide to the Rosebank oil field

🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe

Join the conversation:
Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimism
Or get in touch with us via this form.

Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks and Caitlin Hanrahan
Edited by: Miles Martignoni
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

*This 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.

"Even if you are small in this society, there is something you can do."

Those are the words of Trixy Elle, a mother and a fisherwoman from the Philippines, and one of the claimants from the Odette case, named for the super typhoon she lived through. She may never win in court, but she says that isn’t the point. She is one of more than 100 claimants suing the energy giant Shell, demanding justice and accountability for the losses she has experienced as a result of climate change.

This week, Christiana Figueres sits down with Joana Setzer and Catherine Higham, two of the authors of the ninth annual Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation report from the Grantham Research Institute at LSE and the Sabin Center at Columbia Law School. And what they find is complex.

There have been cases that have captured the world’s attention. Last year’s ICJ advisory opinion on the obligations of states. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ landmark advisory opinion establishing a human right to a healthy climate. Or the 2015 case brought by the Urgenda Foundation, where a Dutch court told the government it had a legal duty to protect its citizens from climate change, and ordered it to cut emissions faster. But beneath the headlines, courts on every continent have been litigating how far that duty of care goes and what it looks like. More than 3,600 cases filed across 62 countries - last year at a rate of five a week. And of the 215 that have reached the highest national courts, more than half have gone in a direction favourable to climate action.

But a maturing field cuts both ways: for every Urgenda-style case there is now a countermove - laws to shield companies from liability, suits designed to stop protest, even governments weighing whether to walk away from their commitments altogether.

So what happens when the law gets ahead of the politics? And who holds the structure together when, as Christiana puts it, nobody is orchestrating the Jenga game?

Learn More:
🔎 Read the executive summary of Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation: 2026 Snapshot - or the full report (Grantham Research Institute, LSE / Sabin Center)
⚖️ Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands - the 2015 ruling, upheld in 2019, that a government has a legal duty to protect its citizens from climate change
📋 Our recent episodes on the ICJ advisory opinion, the Revolution Wind lawsuit, and the New Zealand pushback

🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe

Join the conversation:
Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimism
Or get in touch with us via this form.

Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Editing by: Miles Martignoni
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

This 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.