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Outrage + Optimism

Persephonica

Face the climate crisis head on, but understand that we have the power to solve this. From former UN Chief Christiana Figueres and the team who brought you the Paris Agreement, this podcast...

Episodes

20 of 418 episodes

JUST IN: Trump’s midterm wipeout. Was climate secretly on the ballot?

“I wasn’t on the Ballot, and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” So says President Trump, who was “a little bit surprised” by the m...

43:49Nov 5, 2026

Lula Has Four More Years. Does the Amazon?

Lula da Silva has won a fourth term as President of Brazil, and Ursula von der Leyen says democracy has won in Brazil. But things are never...

44:00Oct 29, 2026

Digger's flop, Big Oil and the bots: What actually moves people?

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 Fig...

45:01Oct 22, 2026

What World Will They Inherit? Live from Bath Abbey

Before she was Christiana Figueres, architect of the Paris agreement, who was she? What did believe in 2015 that she no longer believes? In...

42:53Oct 15, 2026

How Can a Country Survive Losing Its Land?

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...

40:28Oct 8, 2026

The Easy Wins Are Gone. What's Actually Next for Net Zero?

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...

40:42Oct 1, 2026

Who Runs the World?: Inside the UN’s Secret Leadership Race

The news cameras may be following rising tensions between President Trump and President Pezeshkian of Iran, but deep in the bowels of the Un...

58:47Sep 24, 2026

Inside the New Security Thinking: The Weaponisation of Disaster?

This summer, extreme heat killed tens of thousands of people across Europe. The number killed by terrorism was, as our guest puts it, very v...

44:16Sep 17, 2026

Blocker or Blueprint? India on the World Stage

At COP26 in Glasgow, India famously asked to change one word in the final text. ‘Phase out’ became ‘phase down’. The COP President fought ba...

40:37Sep 10, 2026

What’s India Building?: Tales from the Biggest Transition on Earth

"This will never work in India." That's what Indian truck manufacturers said about electric freight. Now they build the trucks. Something is...

32:40Sep 3, 2026

India: Life Inside Delhi's 'Airpocalypse'

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 r...

38:51Aug 27, 2026

The Clock is Ticking: Forty Seconds to Explain the Climate Crisis

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'...

33:46Aug 20, 2026

Beyond Politics: Should we take the heat out of the climate crisis?

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 s...

46:22Aug 13, 2026

Cheapest Energy in History. Still Heading for 3 Degrees?

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 economic...

57:23Aug 6, 2026

Europe’s Summer of Fire: The New Normal?

Europe is burning. Wildfires are still alight in the hills outside Bordeaux and the countryside west of Madrid. More than 300,000 people acr...

33:27Jul 30, 2026

China, COP31 and Chagos: What’s happening behind the headlines?

In the nine hours after the Los Angeles wildfires, before the climate movement could get its shoes on, the narrative was being written. Thro...

45:22Jul 23, 2026

Rosebank, Cambo, and the Conversation Christiana Never Got to Have

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 ‘de...

40:59Jul 16, 2026

Whose Side Is the Law On? How the Courts Became a Climate Battleground

"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 t...

49:50Jul 9, 2026

Is It Over? A Direct Answer to Climate Despair

Is it already too late? If you follow the climate crisis closely, despair is a reasonable and rational response to what you're looking at. T...

38:14Jul 2, 2026

London Cooking: A Climate Action Week, a Resigning PM, and the Future of Climate Diplomacy

London Climate Action Week doesn't usually have to compete with extreme weather. But this year, the case for climate action was abundantly c...

57:56Jun 25, 2026