Outrage + Optimism

It's the end of COP31's first week, and from a distance the biggest story looks like the buses. More than 92,000 people registered for Antalya, and not all of them seem to have reached the venue. We wonder whether that's where the real deals get done.

Ed King, author of the Climate Diplomacy Brief, joins Tom Rivett-Carnac, Christiana Figueres and Paul Dickinson from Antalya with the gossip and the announcements (and some reassurance for those of us who stayed home).

Türkiye holds the gavel and Australia runs the negotiations, so who's actually in charge? The flagship pledge to get electricity to 35% of global energy use by 2035 doesn't say the power has to be clean. Campaigners call that a flaw. Christiana calls it creative ambiguity. Countries still can't agree whether there should be a cover decision at all. And with the UK's Andy Burnham the only G7 leader to make the trip, the clearest leadership so far has come from the Solomon Islands, with $400,000 for the Green Climate Fund.

Afterwards, the hosts ask whether the COP is turning into something other than a negotiation. Christiana has a name for it. Tom confesses to a heresy about what really keeps fossil fuels in the ground. And a question from former US negotiator Holly Kaufman goes to the hardest part of Brazil's fossil fuel roadmap: will it stop anyone drilling new fields?

UN climate chief Simon Stiell keeps saying a COP isn't a silver bullet. After a UN warning that 1.5°C will be overshot, what would count as a COP31 success? And with no US in the room and China keeping quiet, who leads in week two?

Learn More:
📰 Subscribe to the Climate Diplomacy Brief, Ed King's daily dispatches from inside COP31
📺 Watch our full conversation with Chris Bowen, COP31's president of negotiations
🎧 Listen to our episode with Palau's President Surangel Whipps Jr. on what climate finance looks like from the Pacific
⚡ Read Climate Home on who's backed the 35-by-35 electrification pledge, Türkiye's non-binding target, and the row over whether the extra electricity needs to be clean
🌍 Read PINA on the Solomon Islands' pledge to the Green Climate Fund, the first pledge to the fund's next round of funding
📊 Read Carbon Brief's analysis of COP31 delegations, which counts more than 92,000 registered attendees, possibly the most at any COP
🛢️ Read Carbon Brief's Q&A on Brazil's fossil fuel roadmap, the plan Lula wants Türkiye and Australia to pick up and run with
🌳 Explore the Brazil-led deforestation roadmap, its companion on ending forest loss, and why some countries didn't sign on
🌡️ Read UNEP's Emissions Gap Report 2026: The Point of Return, on how to keep the overshoot of 1.5°C as small and as short as possible
🏆 Discover the 2026 TIME100 Climate list, featuring quite a few friends of the podcast

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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.

“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 midterms. The results were unambiguous. Democrats comfortably took the House and the Senate, and won the popular vote by 13 points: the widest margin in a nationwide election in half a century.

This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson pick through the Blue-nami. Trump blames fuel prices, pushed up by the war in Iran. Nobody on the campaign trail called that a climate issue, but Christiana doesn’t think they needed to. So is climate now winning elections without ever being named? And with plenty of the new Democrats running on “all of the above” energy, what does the win actually mean for the second-biggest emitter on the planet?

From January, Democrats can block Trump’s bills, hold the purse strings and investigate his administration. But he keeps the veto, and he still runs foreign policy - including whatever the US does, or doesn’t do, at COP31.

And with COP31 opening in Antalya on Monday, Christiana talks to Chris Bowen, Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy and the man running the negotiations (while Türkiye hosts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Can he convince Christiana that a split presidency can work?

Learn More
📺The full conversation with Chris Bowen on our YouTube channel (coming soon).
🔎 Marianne Lavelle at Inside Climate News on why climate is on the ballot, even if it's not in candidates' campaign messages
⚖️ Dan Farber at Legal Planet on why the midterms matter for energy and environment, and which climate rollbacks a new Congress can and can't stop. Not discussed in the episode, but it sets out the detail behind Christiana's list of what Congress can do.
📊 The UN Environment Programme's Emissions Gap Report 2026, the overshoot findings Chris Bowen responds to
🔗 Turkish Minute on how the Türkiye-Australia leadership split raises questions over COP31, including Murat Kurum's view of who has the final say
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe

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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.

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?

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YouTube @OutrageandOptimism

Learn 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 SpeakPipe

Or get in touch with us via this form.

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.

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 alternatives

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.

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 scientist

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
Editor: Miles Martignoni
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.