Outrage + Optimism

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 mine

Join the conversation
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Production credits
Senior Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Assistant Producer: Saoirse Wilson
Showrunner: Caitlin Hanrahan

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 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 2026

Join the conversation
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe
Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimism
YouTube @OutrageandOptimism
Or get in touch with us via this form.

Production credits

Senior Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Assistant Producer: Saoirse Wilson
Showrunner: Caitlin Hanrahan

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.

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 SpeakPipe

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Edited by: Miles Martignoni
Assistant Producer: Saoirse Wilson
Showrunner: Caitlin Hanrahan

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.

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 SpeakPipe

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

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.

"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 SpeakPipe

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

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.