Climate Unf*cked

Afleveringen

1. Are Russia and the US Spending Your Carbon Budget? | Lennard De Klerk

   27 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 13 min

   Afspelen
   Lennard de Klerk is the lead author of the Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War and has worked on climate change for more than 25 years. Today, his focus is the emissions from war and the military, including the work of calculating the climate cost of the war in Ukraine.
   In this conversation, I wanted to ask Lennard whether NATO’s push towards 3.5% of GDP on defence can ever sit alongside net zero, and why most military emissions come from peacetime operations rather than active conflict. Lennard breaks down where the roughly 311 million tonnes of CO2 from four years of war in Ukraine came from, including warfare itself, landscape fires, reconstruction and rerouted flights, explains how fossil fuel dependence is also a security weakness, and shares what a post-war rebuild with hemp, recycled steel and low-carbon cement could look like. We also chat about the effort to have Russia held accountable for climate damage through the Council of Europe’s compensation process, what the social cost of carbon really measures, and why Lennard stopped flying within Europe.
   ——
   Find Lennard’s work: https://www.linkedin.com/company/warbon/?originalSubdomain=ua
   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/
   ——
   0:00 Does increasing defence spending shatter climate targets?
   4:40 The 2 competing worlds of defence and climate
   8:14 Why calculate the Ukraine war carbon emissions?
   12:35 Military emissions are 5.5% of the global total
   15:55 The war in Ukraine as another Finland
   17:15 What militaries say when you bring up their emissions
   20:53 Cutting fossil fuels is a defence strategy
   27:32 Biofuels, hydrogen and the alternative fuel problem
   29:36 Militaries have gone quiet on their climate targets
   30:16 Where the emissions from the war in Ukraine come from
   34:24 Wildfires fuelled by war and climate change
   37:00 Rebuilding Ukraine with cement and steel
   39:32 The flight de… Lees meer

2. The REAL Reason Climate Deniers Are Voting Reform | Bob Ward

   13 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 25 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   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.

   ——

   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/

   ——

   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 flyi…

3. Climate Fixes For Doomers

   29 september 2026 · 1 uur 19 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   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.

   ——

   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/

   ——

   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 Simar…

4. I Asked a Nepal Expert How The Devastating Floods Happened. What He Said Will Shock You

   16 september 2026 · 50 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   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

   ——

   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/

   ——

   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 tha…

5. She quit Microsoft to expose their insane AI cover-up

   8 september 2026 · 1 uur 2 min

   Afspelen
   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. Lees meer

   ——

   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/

   ——

   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

6. Top journalist: Climate Change Is a Sexy Corruption Story | Emily Atkin

   24 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 32 min

   Afspelen
   “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. Lees meer

   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.

   ——

   Find Emily's work at Heated: https://heate…

7. How food shortages could collapse the UK government | Professor Paul Behrens

   11 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 9 min

   Afspelen
   Professor Paul Behrens of the Oxford martin School at the University of Oxford works at the intersection of food systems, climate change, and food security. Originally trained in physics and astronomy, he spent years working on energy systems before turning his attention to what he now believes is one of the most fragile and underestimated threats we face: the food system that feeds us. Lees meer

   Paul is the author of the popular science book, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science (Indigo Press, 2021) which describes humanity’s current trajectory and possible futures in paired chapters of pessimism and hope. His research and writing on climate, energy, and food, has appeared in scientific journals and media outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, Thomson Reuters, Politico, Nature Sustainability, Nature Energy, PNAS, Nature Food, and

   We cover

   Climate change is already driving a third of food price inflation in the UK, with drought, flooding, geopolitical instability, and energy shocks potentially pushing prices to 1970s levels

   The UK holds between three days and three weeks of food storage; Finland has nine months

   A Joint Intelligence Committee report on ecosystem collapse was suppressed before being released in abridged form.

   Animals lose between 80–97% of the calories fed to them; that inefficiency becomes catastrophic as climate change shrinks the productive biosphere

   Shifting to a planetary health diet could reduce emissions by 61%, spare an area the size of Scotland, and save the NHS tens of billions of pounds a year

   We massively underestimate each other's willingness to act on climate — 60% of people intending to vote Reform support onshore wind turbines

   Over 40% of the UK supports a meat tax, despite politicians treating it as political suicide

   Food price spikes historically drive political instability and state collapse; climate change contributed to the Syrian conflict and is already destabilising politics world…

8. The temperature that kills people 65+ | Dr Mark Harber

   27 juli 2026 · 1 uur 4 min

   Afspelen
   Dr Mark Harber is a consultant nephrologist (kidney doctor) and the Royal College of Physicians' special adviser on healthcare sustainability and climate change. Lees meer

   He's spent years working at the intersection of medicine and the environment as a member of the Sustainable Kidney Care committee, a clinical lead for the NHS London sustainability group, and an advisor to the UCL Partners Climate Collaborative. Now, he helps shape how the RCP advocates and lobbies on healthcare's role in the climate crisis.

   This conversation goes deep into the surprisingly stark relationship between heat and human health: why the death rate in London starts climbing at just 24 degrees, why 2026's June heatwave in the UK heatwave produced an estimated 2,900 excess deaths, and why chronic conditions from epilepsy to kidney failure get dramatically worse as the mercury rises. Mark explains why big national statistics can feel strangely meaningless next to a single hospital admission, and why he believes there's little point terrifying the public without giving them something practical to do about it.

   We talk about the NHS's own outsized carbon footprint (around 5% of the UK's total, more than the aviation industry) and why it became the first health system in the world to commit to net zero, back in 2019. Mark explains the hidden environmental cost of kidney dialysis, which can use 400 litres of water per session and carries 16 times the carbon footprint of an average NHS patient, and why the UK is on track to be 6 billion litres of water short every day by 2050. We also cover the less obvious ways climate change threatens healthcare itself: 90% of English hospitals at risk of overheating, a tenth to a third at risk of flooding, and disease-carrying mosquitoes now established in France and Italy that never used to survive this far north.

   ——

   Learn more about the RCP's Green Physician Toolkit at https://www.rcp.ac.uk/policy-and-campaigns/our-policy-priorities/climate-and-sustainability/gr…

9. A psychologist’s guide to avoiding moral superiority - Per Espen Stoknes

   7 juli 2026 · 1 uur 25 min

   Afspelen
   Per Espen Stoknes is a psychologist, economist, and one of the world's leading experts on why climate change feels so hard to act on—and what actually works to break through that paralysis. He's the author of ‘What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming’, ‘Tomorrow's Economy: A Guide to Creating Healthy Green Growth’ and ‘Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity’ Lees meer

   He’s associate professor and co-director of the BI Center for Sustainability and Energy, and someone who's spent decades unpacking the psychological barriers that keep us stuck: distance, doom, dissonance, denial, and identity.

   This conversation goes deep into the mechanics of climate psychology—why telling people what to do almost always backfires, why inequality is one of the biggest accelerants of climate inaction, and why the pendulum swings of history might be our strangest source of hope. We talk about why comedy and messengers like Joe Rogan matter more than scientists think, why AI and privacy loss mirror the climate crisis psychologically, and why Per believes the next frontier isn't just decarbonisation—it's rewilding finance itself.

   We cover why attacking someone's identity shuts down climate conversation immediately, how social trust is the variable that determines whether governments can actually implement climate policy, and why the UK cutting 2% of global emissions matters far more than the math suggests. Per explains why the five barriers to climate action—distance, doom, dissonance, denial, and identity—also apply to digital privacy and AI, why inequality creates a vicious cycle that makes climate action nearly impossible, and why universal basic income might be one of the most powerful climate policies we're not talking about.

   We also talk about why Per thinks Trump's second term might accidentally be the pendulum swing we need, why possibilism is a better philosophical framework than optimism or pessimism, and why the people with the answers—indigenous commu…

10. Does laughing about the end of the world help? Stuart Goldsmith & Professor Lauren Feldman

    23 juni 2026 · 1 uur 12 min

    Afspelen
    Stuart Goldsmith is a stand-up comedian with 20 years of experience who's spent the last five years doing something almost no other comic attempts: making audiences laugh about the climate crisis. Lees meer

    Professor Lauren Feldman teaches Media and Climate Change at Rutgers University, where her students regularly bring in clips of Stuart's work to dissect in class. She's the co-author of A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice, and her research unpacks why comedy is one of the most powerful tools we have for breaking through climate denial, fear, and apathy.

    This conversation explores why it's so hard to make people laugh about something that genuinely terrifies you, why comedy works when facts and fear don't, and why the brand of climate action is so catastrophically bad that we desperately need comedians to fix it. We talk about the psychology of counter-arguing, why charged information shuts down the prefrontal cortex, and how comedy creates a kind of social lubricant that lets unpalatable truths slip past our defenses.

    Stuart explains why he had to convince himself not to cry on stage, why his climate confessions format helps people admit their hypocrisy without shame, and why he's trying to write the perfect joke about how activists are the only professionals not allowed to fly. Lauren shares research showing that comedy increases engagement, makes messages more memorable, and helps people feel less alone in their climate anxiety. We also talk about why partisan comedy backfires with skeptical audiences, why the tabloid press treated Britain's hottest May on record like a beach party, and why Stuart believes the more you learn about climate change, the less paralyzed you feel.

    ——

    Find Stuart's work and UK tour dates at stuartgoldsmith.com

    Find Lauren's book A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar on Amazon and University of California Press

    Subscribe to the Climate Unf*cked podcast at https://climateunfucked.s…

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