Outrage + Optimism

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?

Learn More
🌍 Read IQAir's World Air Quality Report, which has ranked New Delhi the world's most polluted capital for eight years running
📈 Understand what air pollution costs India on the Lancet Countdown's India data sheet
👩‍👧 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
⚡ See how India passed 50% non-fossil power capacity in July 2025, five years ahead of the target it set under the Paris Agreement

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Senior Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
India Producer and translator: Adnan Bhat

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.

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 SpeakPipe

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

Senior 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.

Somewhere along the way, acting on a threat to all of humanity became a political act. Not a simple matter of science and economics, but a signal of whose side you are on.

So, what would it take to change the political narrative around climate? This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson answer some difficult questions gathered for our live event at Bath Abbey, postponed when extreme heat made the venue unsafe - as if we needed another reminder of the urgency of this crisis.

They ask: can we lift the climate out of party politics altogether? Does real leverage sit with the decisions made in national capitals, or is it only on the COP conference floor while the cameras are rolling? And if vested interests and lobbying can’t be removed, how do we meet them head on, with an equal and opposite force.

This episode tries to answer the challenge we all face: do we seek to depoliticise this crisis, or fight for it in the open? And, now that the climate crisis has become a political hot potato, can we change course in time?

Learn More
🌍 Explore the Earthshot Prize, Prince William's platform for scaling climate solutions
🗳️ Read about Climate Assembly UK, the citizens' assembly that brought 100+ people together to shape how the country reaches net zero, and why the format keeps vested interests at the door
🚭 Understand Article 5.3 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the treaty clause Paul points to that shields health policy from the tobacco industry
📢 Read how The Hague banned fossil fuel advertising, a world-first local law that survived a court challenge in 2025
💸 Revisit the fossil fuel divestment movement, the student-led campaign, which pushed institutions holding trillions to pull money out of coal, oil and gas
🎬 Watch The People's Emergency Briefing, the film built to give the public the same starting picture of the crisis their governments often will not explain

🎤 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.

Senior 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.

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

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

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

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.