Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast

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

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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:
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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.

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.

This week, we’re being led by you. We gathered the messages you've been sending and let them set the agenda. They're heavy ones, and we wanted to stay with them rather than rush past. Is there still hope, or is it over? If this civilisation ends, won't nature simply restore itself without us? How do you keep going when the grief feels total?

None of them have easy answers, and we don't pretend otherwise. Along the way, one listener pushes back on the phrase "pre-traumatic stress" and offers a truer one: earth grief, the other side of the coin from love. Another thread reaches for deep time - William MacAskill's claim that we are barely 2% of the way into humanity's story. How does that perspective change what matters now?

So - what can we actually do? From the language we use, to how we give our time and resources, to the places where each of us touches power. Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson challenge each other and us to find actions that make our shared climate grief easier to carry.

LEARN MORE

👀 Still looking for new terminology? Producer Ben suggests 'climate disruption', which captures the shift from the stable Holocene to a more uncertain world. 'Climate sabotage' can also be useful, if we want to shift focus to the perpetrators.

📘 Read What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill - the case for deep time and long-term thinking Tom draws on

📗 Revisit The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac - including the idea of the places where you "touch power"

🔗 Follow Stephanie Klotz on LinkedIn, whose letter reframed "pre-traumatic stress" as earth grief

🌊 Listen back to our AMOC episode

💷 Listen back to our philanthropy episode, the starting point for the question on giving small amounts

🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe (https://www.speakpipe.com/OutrageandOptimism)

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(Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outrageoptimism/ | LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/company/outrageoptimism | Contact form: https://www.globaloptimism.com/contact?hsLang=en)

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.

London Climate Action Week doesn't usually have to compete with extreme weather. But this year, the case for climate action was abundantly clear: a red heat warning, schools shut, trains cancelled, and temperatures breaking the UK's all-time June record. A prime minister's resignation on the opening day only added to the sense that events we’d once considered rare now seem to be happening all the time.

This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson report from LCAW 2026, where 75,000 people gathered to work on exactly the crisis unfolding outside. They dig into the politics swirling around the event and the UN Secretary-General's speech that opened it. And with the future uncertain at the UN as well as in Downing Street, Christiana walks through all six candidates to succeed António Guterres, and what each of them actually believes about climate.

They also speak with Kate Gallego, Mayor of Phoenix, who alongside last week's guest Nick Reece of Melbourne launched the C40 Global Urban Data Centre Pact at LCAW: a commitment signed by 41 cities to push back on unchecked AI infrastructure expansion in communities that haven't always had a say.

And Tom sits down one-on-one with Rachel Kyte, the UK's Special Representative for Climate. She argues that we forgot ‘the second half of Paris’, explains how climate diplomacy is shifting gears, and tells us why, against the odds, she still finds reasons for optimism.

Learn More:
📢 Read the UN Secretary-General's full LCAW address.

🌐 Browse the UN's official Secretary-General candidate page, with vision statements and CVs for all six current candidates.

🏙️ Explore the C40 Global Urban Data Centres Pact, signed by 41 cities across six continents at London Climate Action Week.

🤖 Read the UK government announcement of the new FCDO/Met Office AI weather forecasting partnership, designed to bring 10-day early warning capability to the countries most exposed to the climate crisis

🎤 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.

SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO has just created the world's first trillionaire. But for families in Morgan County, Georgia and Boxtown in South Memphis, the AI investment rush seems to look rather different: brown water, diesel fumes, and higher bills.

This week, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson take on the data centre boom - now one of the fastest-moving forces in the global energy system. Why exactly do so many of these buildings need to be situated so close to population centres? And why do the communities that end up hosting them so rarely get a meaningful say?

We hear from Nick Reece, Lord Mayor of Melbourne, one of the most vocal city leaders addressing the challenge head-on. He explains the costs and the unrealised promises, and shares his vision for what a genuinely good deal between the tech industry and host communities could look like.

What would it take for communities to actually share in the benefits of the AI boom? How do cities avoid a race to the bottom while national governments court the biggest investors? And is the world heading for the same story it has seen before: transformative technology reshaping society, with the legislation catching up 20 years too late?

Learn More:
🎥 Watch Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez present contaminated drinking water from Morgan County, Georgia at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing
📋 Read the Southern Environmental Law Center's reporting on xAI's Colossus and how an illegal gas-fired power plant was built in Boxtown
⚡ Explore the IEA's Energy and AI report for the full data on how global electricity demand from data centres is set to double by 2030
🏙️ See the City of Melbourne's C40 initiative for responsible data infrastructure, co-led by Lord Mayor Reece alongside mayors from nine other cities worldwide
🔌 Understand why NERC issued a rare Level 3 alert on the grid stability risks posed by large computational loads that can drop hundreds of megawatts in milliseconds
🎙️ Listen to the Volts podcast episode "Why is NERC so worried about data centers?" for a deep dive into the grid engineering challenges Paul raised in this episode
🌍 After recording, we remembered there IS a precedent for legislation moving fast enough. Read about the Montreal Protocol

🎤 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
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.