Outrage + Optimism Podcast Episodes
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379: What’s India Building?: Tales from the Biggest Transition on Earth
"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.
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Season 12 Health, Wellbeing + Climate
378: India: Life Inside Delhi's 'Airpocalypse'
27 August 2026
In Delhi, lung cancer is no longer a smoker’s disease. It’s a breather’s disease. But the most polluted capital on earth sits in a country running five years ahead of its Paris clean power target. In the first of three dispatches from India, Tom Rivett-Carnac is joined by Dia Mirza, one of the biggest names in Indian cinema and a UN Environment Goodwill Ambassador, and Shyla Raghav, formerly Chief Climate Officer at TIME, who describes "a mix of pride, a mix of heartbreak, and, as well, possibility."
Season 12 Adaptation + Climate
377: The Clock is Ticking: Forty Seconds to Explain the Climate Crisis
20 August 2026
The summer of 2026 burned the largest wildfire in Spain's recorded history and the largest France has seen since the Second World War. June's heat killed more than 10,000 people across Europe. A heat dome held North Africa and the Sahel above 45°C for days. In Assam, the Brahmaputra put 700,000 people out of their homes. But it was in the United States, in its hottest month in 132 years of records, that climate reporting found its biggest audience of the summer, in the least likely slot imaginable.
Season 12 Policy + Climate
376: Beyond Politics: Should we take the heat out of the climate crisis?
13 August 2026
Somewhere along the way, acting on a threat to all of humanity became a political act. Not a simple matter of science and economics, but a signal of whose side you are on. So, what would it take to change the political narrative around climate? This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson answer some difficult questions gathered for our live event at Bath Abbey, postponed when extreme heat made the venue unsafe - as if we needed another reminder of the urgency of this crisis.
Past Episodes
Season 12
375: Cheapest Energy in History. Still Heading for 3 Degrees?
Season 12
374: Europe’s Summer of Fire: The New Normal?
Season 12
373: China, COP31 and Chagos: What’s happening behind the headlines?
Season 12
372: Rosebank, Cambo, and the Conversation Christiana Never Got to Have
Season 12
371: Whose Side Is the Law On? How the Courts Became a Climate Battleground
Season 12
370: Is It Over? A Direct Answer to Climate Despair
Season 12
369: London Cooking: A Climate Action Week, a Resigning PM, and the Future of Climate Diplomacy
Season 12
368: From SpaceX to City Streets: Who Pays for the AI Data Centre Boom?
Season 12
367: Extreme Heat Breaks: The hidden climate story behind the World Cup
