Climate Unf*cked

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.

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.

——

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 than the rest of the planet
24:38 The science behind ice, rock, and heat absorption
25:30 Climate justice: Nepal's 0.1% of emissions
26:37 Historical vs current emissions: who pays?
28:55 Why adaptation funding isn't enough, and intergenerational injustice
34:33 What a just response to this disaster looks like
35:34 Why the Loss and Damage Fund hasn't responded
40:55 Concessional grants vs debt, and why we can't treat disasters as isolated
44:32 What you can actually do

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.

——

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

“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.

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://heated.world/

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

00:00 Why is climate change a sexy corruption story?

04:30 How BP invented the carbon footprint to shift blame

09:15 Why people feel relief when you reframe climate as a power problem

13:40 What Emily tells people who ask "what can I do?"

18:20 We need to support real journalism

22:50 What the billionaire takeover of media means for climate coverage

28:35 AI’s worst impact isn’t from data centres

34:10 The anti solar influencer with 2m followers

42:25 Why acknowledging downsides makes your argument stronger

48:15 Journalism is about telling the truth, not building bridges

53:40 Why Emily's tagline is "for people who are pissed off"

1:00:20 Compassion without anger becomes pity

1:06:45 How readers respond to emotional, personal climate journalism

1:11:30 Betting platforms are incentivising wildfire arson

1:14:50 Why Emily changed her mind on individual action

1:17:20 The fiction book Emily wants to write about climate absurdity

1:20:35 Why she's tired of being asked what gives her hope

1:23:50 What Emily wishes people would ask her instead

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.

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 worldwide

Trump's election and the current political atmosphere are partly driven by climate impacts we're not naming as such

Denmark's food transition plan is the most credible government approach in the world

New York hospitals made plant-based meals the default and found them cheaper, healthier, and more popular

Far more grazing land could support arable agriculture than commonly assumed

Heritage arguments about land use are recent and shouldn't override future food security

Rewilding and nature management could increase farmer incomes while restoring biodiversity

——

Find Paul's work and research at the University of Oxford

Read the National Emergency Briefing at https://www.nebriefing.org/

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

00:00 Should we be worried about food system collapse?

04:03 Are we choosing this change or being forced into it?

04:33 The thermodynamics of a shrinking food supply

07:22 What the "planetary health diet" looks like

09:30 How to rewild land the size of Scotland

11:54 Why food decisions are emotional

13:48 We wildly underestimate how much people care

16:25 Meat Tax

18:52 The purpose of misinformation

24:47 How much bad diets are costing the NHS

27:12 The supressed gov. report on food collapse

33:11 The link between food prices and state collapse

36:04 Trump, cost of living and the politics of instability

38:33 Is any country actually food secure?

41:01 The UK has 3 days of food storage. Finland has 9 months

46:19 Could we grow crops on grazing land instead?

51:07 Why plants = electrification for humans

55:58 Denmark's groundbreaking plan

59:10 The NYC hospital expreiment

1:01:02 Paul's billboard message to the world

1:03:48 The one paper Paul wishes everyone would read

1:05:14 What to actually do today

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

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/green-physician-toolkit/

Find the National Emergency Briefing at https://www.nebriefing.org/

Find Real Zero's 7 Acts to Save the World at https://www.realzero.earth

Subscribe to the Climate Unf*cked podcast at https://climateunfucked.substack.com/

And connect with me on LinkedIn at: /rob-coop https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-coop/

——

Chapters

0:00 Why 24°C Already Raises the Death Rate
2:52 The Grim Maths Behind 2,900 Excess Deaths
4:17 Why Big Climate Numbers Feel Meaningless
6:20 Should We Be Scaring the Public About Heat?
8:13 The Delhi Cooling Rooms Saving Tuk-Tuk Drivers
10:41 Why Flights Are Up 80% in 20 Years
12:15 The Healthcare Sector Emits More Than Aviation
15:43 Why Institutions Fear the "Art of the Possible"
18:43 Why Your Dialysis Machine Has a Bigger Carbon Footprint
23:13 The Hospital Built to Handle Only 28°C
25:09 The Mosquito Bringing Dengue to Britain
27:35 Methane Is 80 Times Worse Than CO2
29:53 You're More Likely to Leave Your Partner Than Your Bank
33:18 Why Doctors Won't Sell You on Climate
37:12 How One Kilo of Plastic Costs Three of Oil
40:22 Why Politicians Won't Just Tell Us the Truth
44:50 The Hidden Kidney Risk in London's Air
49:43 The Hospital That Stopped Mowing Its Lawns
53:20 What Climate Activism Can Learn From Medicine
56:30 Why "What Can I Do?" Is Almost Enough
59:43 Tell Your Canvasser Climate Change Matters