Outrage + Optimism

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 simple. Donald Trump says it looked like “another rigged election”. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former president, announced he wants the result annulled, before boarding a plane to the US despite a Brazil Supreme Court order to surrender the travel documents. This week, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac ask how much of his forest agenda Lula can get past the most conservative Congress since the 1980s, and what to make of reports that Washington is floating Viktor Orbán for UN Secretary-General.Just days before the vote, satellite data showed the Brazilian Amazon had lost 3,335 square kilometres of forest in a year, the lowest since records began in 1988. The global picture is grimmer. The world promised to end deforestation by 2030, and since 2021 it has cleared 10.7 million hectares more than its own pathway allowed. That’s an area roughly the size of Iceland that should still be forest.Christiana speaks with Nicola Ranger, Executive Director of Earth Capital Nexus and Professor in Practice at the Grantham Research Institute at LSE. In GDP terms, a forest is still worth what you get for cutting it down. Bond markets seem to disagree: Nicola’s research finds countries that degrade their nature are paying more to borrow. Why are the poorest countries paying the most? And will the money for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility arrive in time to change the sums?Tom, who lives in a country with 13% forest cover, wants to know how Costa Rica nearly tripled its own. And if forests were once thought too big to fail, are we now ready to treat them as too critical to lose?Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimismYouTube @OutrageandOptimismLearn more🌳 Read the Forest Declaration Assessment 2026, the annual check on the 2030 forest goals, which found around 7 million hectares lost in 2025 and $410 billion a year going to potentially harmful farm subsidies🛰️ Read Al Jazeera on Brazil’s record-low Amazon deforestation, the satellite figures from Brazil’s space agency showing clearing down 42% in a year and 71% since 2022💰 Understand the race to fund the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, the Brazil-led fund still chasing its first $10 billion, with at least 20% of payments ring-fenced for Indigenous peoples and local communities📉 Read Kicking away the green ladder, Nicola’s research with Alexander Wollenweber and Dieter Wang, which finds nature degradation raises government borrowing costs, by up to three times the average in lower-income countries🌧️ Explore Too big to fail, the Earth Capital Nexus paper arguing that some ecosystems are so central to the economy that we should monitor and protect them like critical infrastructure🇨🇮 Discover Côte d’Ivoire’s sustainability-linked finance framework, which ties the country’s borrowing to keeping forest loss below 300,000 hectares between 2025 and 2030🐟 Explore Trase, which follows the soy, beef, palm oil and cocoa linked to deforestation through global supply chains, all the way to the countries that buy them🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipeOr get in touch with us via this form.Senior Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksAssistant Producer: Saoirse WilsonShowrunner: Caitlin HanrahanThis is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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.Learn More🎬 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🗞️ Read ECIU's analysis of UK heatwave coverage, which found 72% of national newspaper articles on June's record heat didn't mention climate change✊ Explore Erica Chenoweth's 3.5% rule, including her own cautionary update on what it can and can't tell us📱 Watch the trailer for The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin's film about the Facebook Files, which Paul recommends🌳 Read the Dasgupta Review, the Treasury-commissioned study of the economics of biodiversity and the case for counting nature in a nation's wealth💡 Read IRENA's Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2025, which found over 90% of new renewable power added last year was cheaper than fossil fuel alternativesJoin the conversation🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipeInstagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimism YouTube @OutrageandOptimismOr get in touch with us via this form.Production creditsSenior Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksAssistant Producer: Saoirse WilsonShowrunner: Caitlin HanrahanThis is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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.Learn More🧺 Discover The Washing Machine Project, Nav Sawhney's organisation bringing the hand-cranked Divya machine to families who wash their clothes by hand📊 Read CAST's new study of The People's Emergency Briefing, which found nearly nine in ten viewers left more motivated to act🎬 Find a screening of The People's Emergency Briefing, the film on the UK's climate and nature crisis that Lorraine Whitmarsh advised on🌡 Read Lorraine Whitmarsh and Bella Zanin on whether this summer's heat made more people worry about climate change🎓 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 scientistJoin the conversation🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipeInstagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimismYouTube @OutrageandOptimismOr get in touch with us via this form.Production creditsSenior Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksAssistant Producer: Saoirse WilsonEditor: Miles MartignoniShowrunner: Caitlin HanrahanThis is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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.Learn More🎬 Watch All Rise, the documentary narrated by Christiana that follows the Pacific law students who took climate change to the world's highest court🎟️ Register for our Bath Abbey event livestream on 14 October, Powering the Next Generation to Lead Climate Action🎧 Listen back to our earlier episodes on the road to the world court: Sovereignty and Survival: A Spotlight on Vanuatu, The Climate Case of the Century, and The ICJ Climate Opinion Explained ⚖️ Read the ICJ advisory opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, the unanimous July 2025 ruling that named 1.5°C the primary temperature goal under the Paris Agreement🌺 Read the 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🌊 Understand the 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🛂 Learn more about the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union, the treaty behind the climate visa ballot that most of Tuvalu's population entered🌡️ Read UNEP'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 mattersJoin the conversation🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipeInstagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimism YouTube @OutrageandOptimismOr get in touch with us via this form.Production creditsSenior Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksAssistant Producer: Saoirse WilsonShowrunner: Caitlin Hanrahan Palau birdsong recorded by JVMoore via xeno-cantoThis is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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.Learn More🎟️ Register for the Bath Abbey livestream on 14 October, Powering the Next Generation to Lead Climate Action🌍 Read Climate Home News on Guterres's farewell speech to the General Assembly🌊 Find out what's in the new UN Declaration on Sea Level Rise🏛️ Explore the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee's inquiry, Building support for the energy transition⚡ Read Climate Outreach on what a Burnham government means for climate change in the UK🏖️ Learn how campaigners stopped the Druridge Bay coal mineJoin the conversation🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipeInstagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimism YouTube @OutrageandOptimismOr get in touch with us via this form.Production creditsSenior Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksAssistant Producer: Saoirse WilsonShowrunner: Caitlin Hanrahan This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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?Recorded in New York during Climate Week NYC, as part of the Be Hope Podcast Takeover for a second year.Learn More🗳️ Read PassBlue's report on the third straw poll, with results from all three rounds🔍 Discover how the straw polls work in Security Council Report's What's In Blue briefing🏛️ Compare every candidate's vision statement and CV on the UN's Selection and Appointment of the Next Secretary-General page🌡️ Find out what the Secretary-General nominees reveal about climate change in PassBlue📊 Explore GWL Voices' Women in Multilateralism 2026 report, including data on every Secretary-General candidate since 1945📣 Follow 1 for 8 Billion, the campaign for an open selection process and the first woman Secretary-General🏙️ Catch up on Climate Week NYC 2026Join the conversation🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipeInstagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimism YouTube @OutrageandOptimismOr get in touch with us via this form.Production creditsSenior Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksAssistant Producer: Saoirse WilsonShowrunner: Caitlin Hanrahan This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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?🔎 Read more from Erin Sikorsky on Substack🌍 Learn more about Climate Action Against Disinformation's tracking of climate narratives across the northern summer 🔎 Read Manjeet Dhakal of Climate Analytics, on why Nepal's tragedy has to change what happens at COP31🎬 Watch Christiana on how to twiddle your thumbs. 🎤 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.Edited by: Miles Martignoni Assistant Producer: Saoirse WilsonShowrunner: Caitlin Hanrahan This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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?Learn More📄 Read Carbon Brief's analysis of India's new climate pledge, filed after the country hit its non-fossil target five years early 🔨 Revisit how COP26 ended in Glasgow - the compromise deal, the last-minute change from phasing coal out to phasing it down 💰 Understand what the $100 billion was actually worth, the Oxfam analysis finding that of $83.3 billion reported for 2020, the real value was at most $24.5 billion 📉 Check the Climate Target Update Tracker, the running record of every 2035 climate target filed so far⚖️ Read the International Commission of Jurists on India's foreign funding law, under which thousands of organisations have lost their licences🎤 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.

"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.