This week we're going to talk about how a strong platform on climate action could actually be winning elections. Hello and welcome to Outrage and optimism, a new podcast about dealing with the climate crisis and

remaking the world. My name's Tom Rivekarnack. I'm Christina Figuero. And I'm Paul Dickinson.

And today we explore the assumption that has been so long held that ambitious platform on climate change will lose you the election.

There is lots of evidence from around the world that this is now changing.

We'll explore what's going on and find out

what it means. Also we sit down with Governor J Inslee. Governor Inslee of the

state of Washington is running for the Democratic nomination to become President of the United States.

And he is doing so on a platform of climate change.

He says that all the critical issues of our time can be better understood through the lens of climate change.

So we sit down with him and ask him what his platform consists of and why he feels that United States

is now ready for a campaign of this time.

Thanks for being here.

Right, so we're going to get into this issue of whether you can now win elections with an ambitious climate platform,

but just before we do, there's been a really interesting development this week in Germany

in the Ungler Merkel has made a declaration that Germany will move to a

target of carbon neutrality by 2050.

Now she made this announcement at the Pettersburg dialogue, which is a kind of gathering of environment ministers to talk about climate change that happens every year in Berlin.

And during the discussion she said, we in Germany need to have a cabinet discussion about carbon neutrality by 2050.

The discussion should not be about whether we can reach it, but about how we're going to do it.

If this was adopted, Germany would then join eight other EU governments

with this type of ambitious commitment and what's interesting is just a few months

ago the EU Commissioner for Climate Action, Miguel Arias Caniete made a proposal that EU

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