Climate Unf*cked

Bob Ward is Policy and Communications Director at the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who started out as a science reporter at the Daily Telegraph, and one of the few people willing to take on climate sceptics in public, from debating Nigel Farage on GB News to addressing oil and gas executives at International Petroleum Week.

In this conversation, Bob explains why he thinks climate has become a culture war that leaves everyone stuck, why many sceptical arguments about the science are really proxies for fears about government regulation or daily life, and why he separates bad faith actors from people who have simply been misled. We get into the Frank Luntz memo, the shift from denial to delay and the rise of the “lukewarmers”, how climate got caught up in the culture war, and why Bob believes dropping the phrase “net zero” would be a mistake. We also cover the “less than 1% of emissions” argument, why the message of sacrifice doesn’t sell, what a warming climate could cost the UK economy, and why the insurance industry is so alarmed.

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Bob’s LSE Grantham Climate Institute (inc. all research, media and policy) https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/profile/bob-ward/

Subscribe to the Climate Unf*cked podcast at https://climateunfucked.substack.com/

And connect with me on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-coop/

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Chapters

0:00 Who is winning the climate culture war?
3:11 Why are culture wars bad?
6:09 Who is the villain?
12:14 Does debating sceptics actually change minds?
14:35 The memo that changed science denial forever
16:31 Should you share a stage with bad faith arguments?
20:06 Being right doesn’t win arguments
25:20 From “it’s not happening” to “just grow wine”
33:41 How the UK caught the US culture war
40:36 Should we stop using the phrase ‘Net Zero’?
44:29 “The UK is less than 1% of emissions”
49:38 Have we really failed to bring the public along?
56:20 Is consuming less the answer?
1:00:49 Is flying worth it?
1:05:39 What climate change could cost the UK economy
1:10:51 Why the insurance industry is sounding the alarm
1:15:12 Why you rarely meet a CEO who denies the science
1:18:35 The question Bob is sick of being asked
1:22:10 What Bob wishes more people would ask him

I had the privilege of hosting 3 incredible guests who each deserve an episode of their own. We tackled the topic of optimism, solutions and how the climate story needs to move on to the part where we’re saving the world, not just saying how f*cked we are.

Lucy Siegle is a journalist, broadcaster and author who has reported on climate, nature and the fashion industry's footprint for two decades, including as a reporter on BBC One's The One Show.

Angus Hervey is a political economist and the founding editor of Fix The News, the solutions journalism newsletter that goes looking for the progress the headlines usually miss.

Solitaire Townsend is the co-founder and Chief Solutionist of Futerra, the sustainability agency, and the author of The Solutionists, a book on how business can fix the future.

Together, we each brought a climate solution we’re excited about and discussed them.

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Links

Fix The News: https://fixthenews.com/

Futerra: https://www.wearefuterra.com/

Solitaire’s website for books, speaking and more: https://www.solitairetownsend.com/

Lucy’s Substack: https://theweathermakers.substack.com/

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We also cover:

The stat that 50% of under 30s think we're doomed, and what that has done to the youth climate movement

Why the climate movement has been stuck at the "inciting incident" of the story for 30 years

How Just Stop Oil briefly pushed climate coverage level with mentions of ghosts and cake

Why climate scientists are more hopeful than the public, and why recycling is still the solution people name most

Angus on why 2026 has been a low wildfire year globally, and why cameras in Western Europe skew our perception

Why Angus thinks the biggest climate story is China, from its EV boom to its emissions plateauing

How giving indigenous groups land tenure could keep carbon in the ground (only 14% have official tenure, according to Angus)

Why fear doesn't motivate most people, and the pioneers, settlers and prospectors model

Lucy on Suzanne Simard's forest research and a tourism-funded recovery project with the Hamalco people in British Columbia

Restage, a plan to recirculate the props and sets the UK film and theatre industry throws away

How writers and filmmakers can weave climate solutions into romance, action and everyday stories

The National Emergency Briefing and why it gives people something to do next

Why Solitaire and Lucy argue that dismissing personal action is sexist, including the women-led sugar boycotts

Angus on why the UK is doing better than most countries on cutting emissions

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0:00 Why doom does the same job as denial
3:58 Why half of under 30s think we're doomed
6:07 The climate story is stuck in act one
9:29 The fuck doom hats and the waiter who loved one
13:20 Why optimism is a political act
15:10 Ghosts, cake and Just Stop Oil
20:37 Why experts are more hopeful than the public
23:08 Why the world isn't actually on fire
24:50 Climate change is really a China story
27:30 Indigenous land beats locked off parks
29:31 Will good news make people complacent?
32:31 Climate people are the weirdos
34:18 Growing up on coal, now living on solar
37:53 "Is coal bad?"
40:37 Suzanne Simard and the mother tree
42:50 Using tourism money to heal and restore land
47:00 What happens to film sets after the shoot
49:41 On track for five to eight degrees in 1997
51:30 Storytelling is curated emotion, not facts
57:05 Where's the electric Aston Martin in Bond?
59:20 The National Emergency Briefing
1:04:10 Inside the room at the National Emergency Briefing
1:07:33 Why we need to drop the personal action divide
1:12:34 Who benefits when personal action gets dismissed
1:15:40 The UK is doing better than you think

Manjeet Dhakal is Advisor to the Chair of the UN's Least Developed Countries Group and Director of Climate Analytics' South Asia office. He’s been involved with climate negotiations and diplomacy for almost 20 years and now helps the world's most climate-vulnerable nations negotiate international climate policy. He's currently completing a PhD and recently published research on climate attribution in Nepal.

Dr Manal Shehabi, an applied development economist and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking, who also teaches Economics for Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and sits on Oxford's Children and Climate Initiative.

On August 26th, 2026, a catastrophic flood devastated Nepal's Langtang Valley. A mass of ice and rock detached from a Himalayan peak at approximately 5,200 metres and triggered a flood that has killed more than 1,300 people and left 5,000+ missing. This conversation walks through what actually happened, why the Himalayas are warming faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, why Nepal producing 0.1% of global emissions makes this a sobering example of climate injustice, and much more.

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Manjeet’s July paper Climate-induced loss and damage in Nepal: attribution analysis and institutional readiness for international support: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/climate/articles/10.3389/fclim.2026.1782991/full

Manal Shehabi: https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/people/manal-shehabi

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Subscribe to the Climate Unf*cked podcast at https://climateunfucked.substack.com/

And connect with me on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-coop/

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Chapters

0:00 What Manjeet saw on the ground
5:08 The new kind of disaster we're facing
9:18 Why the Himalayas are called the third pole
10:13 How permafrost collapse triggered the avalanche
12:07 Why 2 billion people depend on Himalayan glaciers, and the immediate human cost
15:32 Nepal's interconnection with China and India
22:07 Why mountain regions warm faster than the rest of the planet
24:38 The science behind ice, rock, and heat absorption
25:30 Climate justice: Nepal's 0.1% of emissions
26:37 Historical vs current emissions: who pays?
28:55 Why adaptation funding isn't enough, and intergenerational injustice
34:33 What a just response to this disaster looks like
35:34 Why the Loss and Damage Fund hasn't responded
40:55 Concessional grants vs debt, and why we can't treat disasters as isolated
44:32 What you can actually do

Holly Alpine spent a decade at Microsoft, co-founding the company's 10,000-strong employee sustainability group and running programs for data center communities. Then she discovered something that made her leave: the company was signing contracts explicitly designed to help fossil fuel companies extract more oil and gas, faster and cheaper, using AI. Now she's leading one of the only campaigns in the world working to expose what she calls the most underestimated climate threat of the AI era.

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The peer reviewed journal article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-026-00411-0

Enabled Emissions campaign website: https://www.enabledemissions.com/

Subscribe to the Climate Unf*cked podcast at https://climateunfucked.substack.com/

And connect with me on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-coop/

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Chapters

0:00 AI’s Climate Impact Isn’t What You Think
2:06 What Holly saw Inside Microsoft
5:13 The Emissions Nobody Is Counting
8:45 Why AI Helps Fossil Fuels Far More Than Renewables
12:16 Winning Sustainability Awards While Helping Exxon Drill More
16:10 What AI Actually Does Inside an Oil Well
19:34 The Undrillable Wells AI Made Viable
24:08 Why Fiduciary Duty Is Corporate Folklore
28:52 The Promises Microsoft Made and Didn't Keep
32:21 How Data Centers Became the Entire Climate Story
36:48 You're Only Looking at One Team's Points
40:33 The Biggest Loophole in Climate Accounting
43:36 The Climate Blind Spot Nobody Noticed for a Decade
47:42 Why Pension Funds Are Starting to Listen
52:00 The Coalition Forming Against AI Expansion
56:32 What Keeps Holly Going and What You Can Do

“A newsletter for people pissed off about the climate crisis” is the tagline of Emily Atkin’s newsletter, HEATED. She’s one of the foremost climate journalists in the US and the founder of Heated, an independent newsletter with 150k subscribers dedicated to accountability journalism on the climate crisis.

Originally trained in traditional mainstream media outlets like The New Republic, she left to build her own publication in 2019 after growing frustrated with the reluctance to cover climate change as the power and corruption story it really is. She now writes for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis and want to understand the forces blocking action.

This conversation goes deep into why Emily believes climate change should be covered as a corruption story, not an environmental one. We talk about how BP invented the term "carbon footprint" as a marketing campaign to shift attention away from corporate responsibility, why the fossil fuel industry has been allowed to privatise profits while socialising the costs of climate damage onto everyone else, and why that arrangement is profoundly corrupt. Emily explains why she thinks journalism's obsession with objectivity has made outlets wimps and cowards, why anger is her most powerful tool as a journalist, and why she refuses to comfort people with hope when what they really need is information to act.

We also cover why right wing billionaires buying up media outlets is creating an information crisis, why she spent months investigating an anti solar influencer with two million followers, and why she believes media literacy is one of the biggest barriers to climate action. Emily shares what it's like running an independent publication that refuses to paywall climate news, why she thinks individual action matters more than she used to, and why she wishes more people would leak her documents from inside their companies instead of asking her what gives her hope.

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Find Emily's work at Heated: https://heated.world/

Subscribe to the Climate Unf*cked podcast at https://climateunfucked.substack.com/

And connect with me on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-coop/

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Chapters

00:00 Why is climate change a sexy corruption story?

04:30 How BP invented the carbon footprint to shift blame

09:15 Why people feel relief when you reframe climate as a power problem

13:40 What Emily tells people who ask "what can I do?"

18:20 We need to support real journalism

22:50 What the billionaire takeover of media means for climate coverage

28:35 AI’s worst impact isn’t from data centres

34:10 The anti solar influencer with 2m followers

42:25 Why acknowledging downsides makes your argument stronger

48:15 Journalism is about telling the truth, not building bridges

53:40 Why Emily's tagline is "for people who are pissed off"

1:00:20 Compassion without anger becomes pity

1:06:45 How readers respond to emotional, personal climate journalism

1:11:30 Betting platforms are incentivising wildfire arson

1:14:50 Why Emily changed her mind on individual action

1:17:20 The fiction book Emily wants to write about climate absurdity

1:20:35 Why she's tired of being asked what gives her hope

1:23:50 What Emily wishes people would ask her instead