Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast

Are flights across the world about to be grounded? Is a terrible war about to create an unlikely good news story for the climate? As conflict in the Middle East threatens the Strait of Hormuz, jet fuel shortages are forcing aviation to confront a structural vulnerability it has spent decades avoiding.

This week, Tom Rivett-Carnac, Christiana Figueres and Paul Dickinson examine what the shortage reveals: aviation's near-total dependence on fossil fuels, the structural reasons it has proved so hard to break, and whether it’s ever going to be possible to fix.

They speak with Karel Bockstael and Roxanne van Rijn, former aviation insiders who co-founded Call Aviation to Action, a movement designed to reach the industry’s senior leaders and push for much-needed change. They explain why kerosene remains the only viable option for long-haul flight, how thin margins trap airlines into opposing the very regulation they need, and why this fuel shock may be the scarcity event that finally forces the model to shift.

Could this crisis become aviation’s turning point? And in a world where up to 80% of people have never set foot on a plane - and 1% account for half of all aviation emissions - what would a truly fair future for flight actually look like?

Learn More:
✈️ Explore Call Aviation to Action - the movement co-founded by Karel and Roxanne and others, pushing for industry-wide transformation from within
📊 Read the UK Climate Change Committee’s aviation analysis, and understand why aviation is on course to become the UK’s single largest emitting sector by 2040
⛽ Get up to date on IEA data on global oil and jet fuel markets, including what the Strait of Hormuz disruption means for aviation fuel supply
🌿 Learn more about Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) via IATA: what it is, why it currently accounts for less than 1% of aviation fuel use, and what scaling it would require
💸 Pay the true price of your next flight via the Future Friendly Fund’s calculator, or check your CO₂ estimate on Google Flights.
Check out Bumprints for practical tips or Travel Alternative, Roxanne’s recently launched platform highlighting alternatives to flying

🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe

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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.

Monarch butterflies crossing a continent. Peregrine falcons above Manhattan. A giant lemur most of the world had never heard of, until one man pointed a camera at it. For seventy years, Sir David Attenborough has been asking us to look - really look - at the world we share with three and a half billion years' worth of other life.

This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac, and Paul Dickinson mark the 100th birthday of the world’s longest-serving television presenter. To celebrate, they're reaching into the archives to share the very first episode of the podcast - a conversation recorded in person with their friend Sir David himself, at the Attenborough Centre in Cambridge in 2019.

They also take stock of seven years of Outrage + Optimism, and on a world that’s changed since that first episode dropped. What's moved faster than anyone expected, what's gone sideways, and what still keeps us at night?

Then Sir David. On why young people's outrage is entirely justified. On what the natural world actually needs from us. On the rare moments in history when nations chose agreement over conflict. And on why understanding might be the thing that saves us.

Learn More:
🎂 Discover moments from Sir David Attenborough's life and career on the BBC
🌿 Watch Secret Gardens, Sir David's recent series exploring the hidden natural world of the British urban garden, mentioned by Tom in this episode (UK login required)
🐋 Explore the history of the International Whaling Commission moratorium, which Sir David cites as a rare model of nations choosing to act before it was too late
🌍 Learn more about the global youth climate movement Fridays For Future, from the early days mentioned in this interview to its activity today

🎤 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
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.

Europe plunged into a deep freeze. Life as we know it upended. The 2004 film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ gave a generation of terrified journalists an impossible task: how do you communicate the counter intuitive threat of dramatically colder winters caused by global warming? David Shukman was one of them.

This week, Tom Rivett-Carnac is joined by the veteran BBC Science Editor and author of the upcoming ‘The Response’, to explore the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC: the vast system of currents that helps regulate weather, rainfall and temperature across the Atlantic and far beyond. Recent research suggests it may be weakening faster than previously understood - with potentially profound consequences for food systems, ecosystems and global stability.

They speak with Dr Willem Huiskamp of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who explains what AMOC does, and what a much weaker system could mean in practice. Then Tom and David reflect on the harder questions. How do we communicate a risk this vast and uncertain without paralysing people or losing them entirely? Are we socially and politically prepared for -50C winters in parts of Europe? And are we even capable of responding to a threat that may unfold over decades rather than across news cycles and political terms?

Learn More:
🌊 Discover more about the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and why scientists are watching it closely
🔎 Read the latest paper referenced in this episode, which projects an approximate 50% weakening of AMOC by the end of the century
📘 Check out David’s book, The Response, which will be published by Witness Books on 7th May

🎤 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
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.

The Iran crisis continues to prove how dangerously dependent the global economy is on fossil fuels. But what will it actually take to move beyond them?

In this episode, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson look at what the latest oil shock continues to reveal. And they turn to the upcoming First Conference on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, where governments, campaigners and other actors are gathering to build new relationships and explore new routes towards a just transition in an age of geopolitical instability.

Christiana speaks with former President of Ireland Mary Robinson and Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, who lay out the big structural barriers still slowing the shift. From debt traps that make fossil fuel extraction a financial necessity, to vested interests, and subsidies flowing in the wrong direction.

The evidence is clear: the transition is happening. The question is, will it be political machinations or economic urgency that determines how fast?

Learn More:

🌍 Explore the official page for the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, including its aims, format and participants
🛢️ Understand why the Strait of Hormuz matters so much through the IEA’s Oil Market Report hub
📜 Read the UNFCCC summary of the 2023 COP28 agreement, which for the first time called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems”
⚡ See the figures behind the boom in renewables in BloombergNEF’s latest Energy Transition Investment Trends

🎤 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.

There are chemicals in your blood that weren't there fifty years ago. They are in the products you use, the water you drink, the food you eat - and for years, almost nobody was told the full truth about the risk.

This week, Christiana speaks to two women who found contamination in their communities and refused to accept it.

Emily Donovan and Sarah Alexander have spent decades fighting for greater regulation of PFAS or ‘forever chemicals’. Through their work, and the work of many others, some progress has been made on regulation, and on supporting the communities most impacted. But this story is far from over. Because these chemicals don't break down. They move through soil, through water, through the food chain and through us. And the impacts on our health and on our ecosystems are only beginning to come to light.So, with environmental protection rollbacks at the US federal level, can progress endure? And can community action take on the big companies and the big money behind this scandal?

This episode is about what happens when institutions fail, what accountability actually requires, and why the clean energy transition is incomplete if we trade one toxic system for another.

🔗Follow the work of Clean Cape Fear
🔗Learn more about the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association
🎬 Watch Dark Waters (2019) - the film that brought the DuPont PFOA story to a wider audience
📋Read the Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act

🎤 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.