Power, Money and Influence: The Hidden Forces Shaping Climate Action
Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast
Persephonica
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Who really holds power in the climate transition? And how do money, politics, and influence shape the pace of change?
In this episode, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson use some of your most probing questions on the political economy of climate action to unpack what happens behind closed doors and to challenge some of the assumptions that often dominate public debate.
What does lobbying actually look like - and is it always a bad thing? What are we talking about when we refer to ‘fossil fuel subsidies’? And in an age of populist politics and shrinking attention spans, can complex climate solutions still cut through? Or are we drifting toward simpler narratives that are easier to sell, but harder to govern?
From negotiation rooms to national politics, and the economic systems beneath them, these are the forces both loudly and quietly shaping climate progress. And if we want to accelerate action, we first have to understand where power truly sits.
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Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Assistant Producer: Caillin McDaid
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to outrage and optimism. I'm Tom Rufitkanik. I'm Christiana Fierrez. |
| 0:06.2 | And I'm Paul Lickinson in the room with Tom Christiana. It's amazing. We are together in studio and today we are going to answer. It is a studio. It's a studio. We're all grown up. |
| 0:14.0 | Curtains behind us and cameras and sound checks and rate regulations. Yeah. |
| 0:19.0 | Duly intimidated. I actually feel duly intimidated. |
| 0:22.0 | I think you'll be fine. |
| 0:22.2 | Yeah. |
| 0:27.6 | So today we are going to answer some of your excellent questions on power and politics. |
| 0:28.3 | Not my questions. |
| 0:29.3 | Listener questions. |
| 0:31.0 | Not your questions, the listener questions. Yes. |
| 0:31.4 | Thank you. |
| 0:31.9 | Thanks for being. |
| 0:35.7 | Okay. |
| 0:36.1 | So this is the beginning of a couple of days we've got together. And we're going to start off, as is often the way we do these things, by answering some of the many questions we've had from listeners. Kristiana, you and I did a post on social media a few days ago. Paul, you've been posting about this as well. We've been announcing this on recent episodes, and we have had so many questions over the course of the last few weeks. |
| 0:59.1 | They're brilliant and they run the full gamut of all of the different things we're trying to deal with us. |
| 0:59.6 | We face a kind of crisis. |
| 1:01.1 | Hard to choose. |
| 1:01.7 | Yeah. |
| 1:02.1 | And our brilliant production team, Ben and Caitlin, have categorised these. |
| 1:06.0 | And today we're going to go through those questions, focus specifically on power and politics. |
| 1:11.6 | So let's go to our first question, which is from Eleanor. Let's have a listen. |
| 1:14.9 | My husband and I were listening to a piece about the recent cop on a program called Threshold |
... |
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