Today, Matt speaks with Frédéric Samama, adjunct professor at Sciences Po and author of The Enigma of Climate Inaction, about a simple question: if almost everyone knows about climate change, why aren’t we acting?
Fred, a pioneer of green finance, explains his idea of “societal bubbles.” Like a rat that learns its way to the cheese in a maze, humans got so good at getting resources through farming, capitalism and modern science that we became overconfident in the models that got us here. Now those same models are working against us, and climate change is the first crisis that puts a limit on the resources we’ve built everything around. He and Matt also get into what astronauts’ view of Earth can teach us, why climate disasters can make people believe less in climate change, and his work with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz that helped bring $800 billion in investor commitments to the Paris climate talks.
Read The Enigma of Climate Inaction here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Enigma-of-Climate-Inaction-Why-Are-We-Doing-Nothing-or-Almost-Nothing-in-the-Face-of-Catastrophe/Samama/p/book/9781041030645
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CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold Open
0:35 Intro: A Climate Change Welcomes Frédéric Samama
1:24 From the Financial Crisis to Green Finance
3:44 We Beat the Ozone Hole, Y2K and COVID. Why Not Climate?
4:55 The Rat in the Maze and Societal Bubbles
7:59 Civil Society and the Overview Effect
14:10 We’re Part of Nature, Not Above It
15:34 Cave Paintings and When We Started Dominating Nature
17:43 Moral Values and Climate’s Biggest Opportunity
22:39 GDP and When the Means Become the End
25:17 How Fast Social Norms Can Shift
27:57 Why Disasters Make Us Believe Less in Climate Change
31:43 The Daycare Experiment: When Money Backfires
35:23 Working With Joseph Stiglitz
37:59 Sovereign Wealth Funds and $800 Billion at COP21
40:47 Outro
GUEST BIO
Frédéric Samama is an author, investor and financial innovator whose career has spanned capital markets, institutional investment and climate finance. He began his career at J.P. Morgan and Crédit Agricole CIB, then joined Amundi, where he headed Institutional Client Coverage and Responsible Investment and pioneered some of the first mainstream low-carbon equity indices. He later joined S&P Global and is an adjunct professor at Sciences Po. He co-founded a research initiative on sovereign wealth funds with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, has testified before the US Senate, and was named 2026 Personality of the Year by Environmental Finance. His latest book is The Enigma of Climate Inaction (Routledge).
EPISODE RESOURCES
- The Enigma of Climate Inaction (Routledge): https://www.routledge.com/The-Enigma-of-Climate-Inaction-Why-Are-We-Doing-Nothing-or-Almost-Nothing-in-the-Face-of-Catastrophe/Samama/p/book/9781041030645
- Frédéric Samama on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frédéric-samama-a81b644/
- A Climate Change on Apple: https://bit.ly/accapplepodcast
- A Climate Change on Spotify: https://bit.ly/accspotifypodcast
- A Climate Change on YouTube: https://bit.ly/ACCvids
