WITH constant headlines about floods, wildfires and record-breaking temperatures, it isn’t surprising that many people think our current generation will leave the planet in a worse predicament than when we inherited it. But is that belief true? doesn’t think so. She is cautiously optimistic that we might be the first generation to pass on the environment in a better state than we found it.
She reached this counterintuitive conclusion after a decade digging into environmental records as a data scientist at the University of Oxford and lead researcher for influential online publication Our World in Data. In her new book , Ritchie lays out the graphs that show the positive steps we have already taken to change our behaviour and mitigate climate change, from cutting coal use to shrinking carbon footprints. She talks to Â鶹´«Ă˝ about her growing conviction that we can solve the world’s environmental problems and picks out some key trends that give her hope about us turning things around.
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Alison George: I’m talking to you on a day when it was that online searches related to “eco-anxiety” have increased dramatically. Yet you study long-term environmental trends and are somewhat optimistic.
Hannah Ritchie: I still have anxiety and worry, but I think it’s now paired with some sense of optimism that we can change things. The anxiety is completely justified and I get why people feel it. I feel it. But that feeling on its own is not that useful. You need to combine a sense of urgency and worry about the problem with a sense that you can actually do something about it.
One of the key messages in your book is that doom-mongering about the world’s environmental problems isn’t helpful.
The problem with the doom-and-gloom narrative is that it can lead people to a position where they feel like there’s nothing that we can do about the problem. We need to make people aware of the issues – we’re not going to make progress on climate change if no one thinks it’s serious – but also combine that with a sense of optimism that we’re capable of changing course and moving things forward. Some of the narratives around climate change only focus on the first part, just telling everyone this is how bad it is, and that doesn’t actually lead us anywhere positive.
What makes you optimistic that we can turn things around?
Over the past decade, I’ve been trying to understand the world’s environmental problems through data. What’s clear is that we’re not in a good place, we’re heading towards some pretty severe crises. But we have seen progress over that time.
You only really get a sense of that when you step back to look at the data. Why I’m more optimistic now than I was a decade ago – which might seem strange given the recent record temperatures – is that I can see we’re in a position where we have the solutions. I think the world’s environmental problems are actually very solvable when, a decade ago, they were not. Then, I just couldn’t really see any way forward where we could improve human well-being, reduce poverty and so on at the same time as keeping carbon dioxide emissions low. Now, I think we need to be cautiously optimistic.
From looking at the data, what makes you feel we have some solutions to our climate problems?
If you go back to the signing of the Paris Agreement [on climate change] in 2015, the most expensive energy technologies were solar and wind. I couldn’t see a way forward where countries would deploy them. Electric vehicles were totally out of reach. The technologies we needed to decarbonise were the most expensive ones.
Just 10 years on, and that’s flipped. The dramatic fall in the prices of electric vehicles, as well as solar and wind energy, has completely changed the game. Solar and wind are now the cheapest and we are starting to see that countries are scaling them fast. For example, this year alone, China has deployed enough solar and wind to power the UK or France.
You say in your book that one of the key improvements is that we are finally moving away from burning stuff to produce energy.
Yes, and this is fundamental for air pollution as well as the climate. We think of air pollution as a recent problem, but, in reality, it has been with us since humans discovered fire. When we burn stuff, whether it’s wood or fossil fuels, we generate not only air pollutants, but carbon emissions. Now we’re at the first point in history where we have the technologies to produce energy without burning anything at all. That’s a very unique transformation.
Even so, we are on track to a warmer world…
If we had done absolutely nothing at all, we’d have been on a trajectory for the world to be at least 4°C warmer [than pre-industrial temperatures] by 2100. But a better comparison is to look at the trajectory we were on when we signed the Paris Agreement. Then, we were on a trajectory for between 3.5°C and 4°C of warming. We are currently on course for between 2.5 and 3°C.
Obviously, that’s unacceptable and we need to move quickly to bend that curve downwards, but, even in the past decade, we have shaved around a degree off the trajectory that we were on. This notion that we’ve made no progress in the past decade is not true.
One of the points you make is that, historically, the richer you were, the more carbon dioxide you produced, but now we have broken that link.
It is true that rich countries tend to have higher emissions. But what’s changed is that we’re seeing what we call decoupling, where the rich countries have managed to reduce their emissions while growing their economies at the same time (see graphs, below).
This fundamental trade-off that we’ve had for most of human history – as you get richer, you inevitably emit more CO2 – is starting to break down. Countries can reduce emissions without crashing the economy. This isn’t just because they’ve offshored their emissions elsewhere, which is when a country moves its industry overseas, so that the emissions from producing those goods are allocated to the producing country, even if [those goods] aren’t consumed there. They have managed to make their economies more energy efficient and to decarbonise their energy mix.
What is another trend that makes you feel optimistic?
Global carbon dioxide emissions per person peaked around a decade ago (see graph, below). However, total global emissions are still rising.
When do you reckon total emissions will peak?
I think it will be this decade. It’s very hard to predict peaks and people will always get it wrong, but some people are suggesting that it could be this year or next year. A lot comes down to China, and there are suggestions that China’s emissions could peak in the next few years. That would also mean that global emissions would peak in the next few years.
For me, one of the most fascinating graphs in Not the End of the World is one that shows how your carbon footprint is half that of your grandparents (see graph, below). How is that possible?
Two changes have happened. One is that our economies have become more energy efficient – we get more value from energy. TVs and cars are more efficient than they were in the past. But the big thing that’s happened in the UK has been reducing coal. In the past, most of the UK’s electricity was coming from coal – by far the dirtiest fuel, both in terms of carbon and air pollution. The use of coal to generate energy is also dying out in other countries, such as the US, Belgium and Spain. Today, China is the biggest emitter from coal, but its emissions per person are just a fraction of those of the UK and US in the past.
We have talked a lot about emissions, but what does the data show about species loss?
Biodiversity loss is a massive problem. One question I address in the book is whether we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction. What’s important to highlight is that species are going extinct at an alarming rate, higher than in any of the previous five mass extinction events. So, if you extrapolate that trend, you see that we are on course for a sixth mass extinction.
But what’s different about the current situation, compared to the previous five mass extinctions, is that we are the handbrake. We can stop this. We have the solutions to maybe not eliminate biodiversity loss completely, but dramatically reduce it by tackling climate change and stopping deforestation. We can use much less land for farming.
In your book, you come to a startling conclusion: we could be the first generation to leave our planet in a better state than we found it in. Really?
Historically, our ancestors did not have any option but to use environmentally damaging practices to progress. There was this trade-off: you either maintained poor living conditions for humans or you developed and reduced child deaths and reduced poverty, but with an increasing environmental impact. If you wanted more food, for example, your only option was to use more land or hunt more animals.
I think we could be the first generation that meets the needs of everyone – and that could eventually mean 9 or 10 billion people – and we can do that while reducing our environmental impact. We have the opportunity to be the first generation that achieves both of these goals at the same time.
In agriculture, we now have alternative technologies to produce meat and much higher crop yields, so we can use less land and have less deforestation. The same applies to energy. Energy sources of the past involved either cutting down wood or burning fossil fuels. We are the first generation in history that can produce energy without burning stuff.
For you, this is linked to a different way of thinking about sustainability.
Sustainability is basically not degrading the environment. That’s the traditional definition, and I think that’s fine. But the reality is that we also want to live well and to reduce human suffering. So, to me, sustainability is this two-pronged goal of providing a good life for everyone and having a low environmental impact.
In the book, you make the controversial claim that humans have never lived sustainably. What do you mean?
You could argue that there are many generations that had a low environmental impact. That’s certainly true. But the reason they had a low environmental impact was often that the populations were really small, and this was because child mortality was very high. For most of human history, you had around half of children dying before reaching puberty. That’s why you didn’t have growing populations.
So I think that comes back to what our definition of sustainability is. To me, we want to reduce human suffering. Having half of our children die is not doing that. In the past, environmental impact was low, but human suffering was high and our living standards were low. Over the past few centuries, we’ve gone the other way. Human well-being has improved, but we’re now facing lots of environmental crises.
What can we, as individuals, do to make a difference?
Lots of people have good intentions, they want to make a difference. What I think is important is that we put that energy in the right places. There are a range of things that people think have a big impact but don’t, such as how you choose to wash your dishes.
I use the example of going to the supermarket. Everyone focuses on the plastic bag, when what they should be focusing on is what they are putting in the bag. Most of your environmental impacts come from the food you eat not the plastic bag that you take to the shop. Similarly, if you ask people what they are doing to help the environment, they tend to see recycling as top of the list. But in terms of impact, it’s the bottom.
