130. Opening Hearts with Elizabeth Wathuti
Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast
Persephonica
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2021
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With the ink still drying on The Glasgow Pact, we’re already hearing the results from Glasgow being labeled in binary terms like “Success” and “Failure” While we know that some stunning pledges and progressive language in the Pact came from some of the negotiations, it is also true that historically these pledges have not been met completely, or have been missed entirely. Full stop.
So with millions of humans suffering under the systemic injustice of rising global emissions, how do we meet this moment to reduce those global emissions and break those unjust systems of oppression? And how does the COP process make those necessary changes politically possible? And in the next eight years?!
Maybe it’s as simple as starting with silence.
This week we speak with Elizabeth Wathuti, environmentalist and climate activist from Kenya. She is the founder and president of Green Generation Initiative, and Head of Campaigns and Daima Consortium Coordinator for the Wangari Maathai Foundation.
Elizabeth brought the house down at COP26 this year with her speech in which she led a moment of silence followed by the urgency to every Head of State in the room to “ please open your hearts”. You won’t want to miss what she has to say to us on the show!
Stick around ‘til the end for an incredible music track from Knomad Spock!
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Excerpt from Elizabeth Wathuti's speech at COP26, reproduced courtesy of the UN.
Excerpt from the Opening Ceremony of the World Leaders Summit at COP26, November 2021.
Available here: Elizabeth Wathuti at COP26 “Please Open Your Hearts” Speech
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Christiana + Tom’s book ‘The Future We Choose’ is available now!
Subscribe to our Climate Action Newsletter: Signals Amidst The Noise
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Mentioned links from the episode:
Read: Martin Wolf’s piece in The FT
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Thank you to our guest this week, Elizabeth Wathuti!
Elizabeth Wathuti
Environmentalist | Climate Activist
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The incredible Knomad Spock is our musical guest this week!
Knomad Spock
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Keep up with Christiana Figueres here:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Outrageant Optimism, I'm Tom Ravicana. |
| 0:16.0 | I'm Cristiana Figueras. |
| 0:18.0 | And I'm Paul Dickinson. |
| 0:20.0 | This week we talk about the road not yet taken. |
| 0:23.0 | At COP26 and what we need to do to get us back on track. |
| 0:27.0 | We speak to Elizabeth Wthuti, climate activist from Kenya, and we have music from Nomad Spot. |
| 0:33.0 | Thanks for being here. |
| 0:37.0 | So great to be here everybody. |
| 0:39.0 | And we were back of course two weeks ago and we gave you a bit of an update in terms of what we understood happened at COP26. |
| 0:46.0 | And we're going to stay on that theme for the next few weeks. |
| 0:49.0 | This is obviously the big event in climate of 2021, although of course there were many others. |
| 0:55.0 | But we're going to spend a few weeks kind of unpacking it from different perspectives. |
| 0:59.0 | And this week we want to really honour a name, the fact that there were hundreds of thousands of activists in Glasgow and around the world who were deeply frustrated with what came out of the negotiations and had a deep level of skepticism around the commitments. |
| 1:17.0 | And a sense that what was announced there cannot be trusted. |
| 1:20.0 | And even if world leaders claim that we are now on a path to dealing with the worst of climate. |
| 1:26.0 | Actually those pledges are not yet of an order and of a certainty that can make us think that we have really gotten anywhere near where we need to go. |
| 1:36.0 | So we're going to dig into this for a bit now and then we have an incredible interview that we recorded earlier today with Elizabeth Wthuti who spoke at the opening of COP26. |
| 1:45.0 | And there's an incredible climate activist from Kenya. |
| 1:49.0 | But I'd just like to start by naming the reality that Glasgow was a city of two tales. |
| 1:56.0 | There were those on the inside who claimed we were making real progress that we'd brought the emissions trajectory down from 3.7 to 2.4. |
| 2:04.0 | But at the same time what we saw both in the climate negotiations themselves and around the outside was a complete collapse of trust. |
| 2:13.0 | That those pledges first of all they don't go far enough. |
... |
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