Not the End of the World - Ep147: Dr Hannah Ritchie

Transcript

Michael Liebreich

Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich and this is Cleaning Up. In a world dominated by bad news, it can be hard to remain optimistic, particularly on climate and the environment. My guest today not only manages the challenge, but has become an important voice in communicating why things are not as bad as they seem, and why we absolutely must not give up. Dr. Hannah Richie is Head of Research at Our World In Data. And she has a new book, Not the End of the World, which will be out in January and comes strongly recommended by Bill Gates. Please welcome Dr. Hannah Richie to Cleaning Up.

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Cleaning Up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation. So, Hannah, thank you very much for joining us here today on Cleaning Up.

Hannah Ritchie

Thanks very much for having me.

So could you do the following: the way we always start is, in your own words, describe sort of who you are and what you do the short version.

So I'm Hannah Ritchie. I'm an environmental data scientist, you might call me. So I work at the publication Our World in Data where we use data and research to show how the world is changing. And we often show these really long term changes on what we frame as the world's largest problems. So I cover mostly environmental stuff, so energy, climate, food, biodiversity, but we also try to link that to human development, so poverty, health, war, peace. And we try to use data to understand how the world's changing through these really broad long-term trends.

And anybody who has been involved in you know, the climate wars, the energy was the, I don't know, the hydrogen wars, they will know Our World in Data, because your charts get used as sort of the- as a tiebreaker in all sorts of conversations in social media, on Twitter, and so on, don't they?

Yeah, it's interesting to watch actually people arguing back and forward on different sides of the debate but using our own data charts in the middle. We- also important to know is like we don't produce the data ourselves. Like we try to- we're almost like a visualisation platform. So there's like amazing data providers doing work on this. So Ember Climate, Global Carbon Project, like many different organisations doing work, and we try to, like bring the data out, to make it accessible for people to use and policy and business and to debate on Twitter.

So you're a data aggregator, and in each of the areas that you cover, you've tried to find sort of the best independent data. But is it fair to say also that, you know, there's a little bit of a red thread through Our World in Data's work which is that kind of things are almost surprisingly better than people think, they're not as bad as you think in many cases, whether it's about literacy or infant survival or maternal mortality or democracy, it's actually quite a positive picture that you end up painting, is that not right?

Yeah, I think we're losing this image a little bit. But we used to be framed as like the good news guys because people just saw us as we just like tell good news about the world. I think that's not necessarily how we see ourselves now, like, I think we try to basically show how the world is changing and it just so happens that many, especially like human wellbeing metrics, so child mortality, maternal mortality, extreme poverty, if you look at the change over the last few centuries, for example, they're all basically heading in a very positive direction. And I think what we- I mean, this also builds on the work of Gapminder and Hans Rosling, where if you ask the general public like very basic questions about these long-term trends, they tend to get them wrong, like they tend to be more pessimistic than the data actually shows.

And Hans Rosling sadly passed away. He was this great Swedish professor who gave these extraordinary TED Talks and showed how little people understand and also showed some of the nuance, that even in a developing country, there'll be a sort of middle class- even a slow developing country would still have a middle class, and talked about how, you know, population growth has actually nearly topped out, but did it in an incredible sort of visual way.

Yeah, I mean, you know, presenting the data in an engaging way is what he did and he was very good at, yeah, showing that otherwise very intelligent people, and people who think of themselves really well educated, often got this stuff very wrong. But like, I think what he was also trying to show was, I think we tend to think of the world as like, haves and have-nots, so you're either rich or you're poor. And I think one of the key points he was trying to make is that like, within a middle- or low-income country, there's a massive difference there. He used to do this trick where he would like stand up on a ladder, and he'd say, like, 'us in the rich world, we just look down on everyone so that you like- you're all poor.' But the difference from someone living on $1, a day to $10 a day is absolutely massive in terms of their living conditions. So there's this- yeah, there's this really grey area in the middle that I think we tend to lose.

Right. And so you're doing similar sort of work, communicating and taking the best data that there is on topic after topic. One thing that you sort of- I don't want to say you've been accused of, but because- maybe it's because the world is just kind of much better than people think. Is there a political agenda? Because, you know, you've got all that kind of "degrowth" and everybody saying, you know, "the world is so screwed, that the only response is to slam the brakes on, don't have kids" and so on. And then, you know, certainly, Our World in Data first came to my attention for actually saying, "well, no," you know, but you could argue that what it was really saying is, "actually capitalism works." Is there a political subtext here?

No, I mean, we're very clear that we tried to be completely as non-partisan as possible, we don't take sides, we often also try- don't try to build- we often don't try to build specific narratives around the data in a certain sense. We don't try to say, "look, this has happened because of capitalism," or, "this has happened because of x." We often try to present the data in a very neutral way. And then people start to build narratives around that. And often they'll build different narratives, right? You can get show someone the- five people the same chart, and they'll find five different narratives around it. So I think what we try to do is present the data as a grounding for a discussion, and people then build on that and it's very fair that they then take that in different directions.

But I think it's fair to say also that there is this kind of- I don't want to say a dominant narrative, but in some of the circles I move in, it is a dominant narrative, that basically the world is screwed, and capitalism did it. So that's kind of, you know, the starting point is it- you know, you can say, "well, you know, we just bring the data," but the starting point is that capitalism is evil and is trashing the world. And so therefore, bringing data is almost a subversive act.

Right. I mean, I was in that position a decade or so ago, like my background is environmental science. And most of the trends there have largely been moving in the wrong direction. And I think coming from that background, I just had no idea about any of the positive human wellbeing trends until I discovered Hans Rosling. I took the environmental trends getting worse, and just extrapolated that. I just assumed, of course, poverty was rising, hunger was rising, child deaths were rising. And it was only when I discovered Hans Rosling and the data that like my perspective on that flipped.

So Hans Rosling was the sort of gateway drug, but then Our World in Data, Max Roser was then- that was where you sort of found your home as a data scientist.

Yeah. So when I joined, it was 2017 and it was really a team of four of us. So it was very, very small back then. But yeah, Max has done amazing work building the platform, and we've just grown from there.

Indeed, and we're gonna get on to- you've just written a book, which comes out in January, we're going to talk about that and the thesis. But just before we get there, you've also done a TEDx Talk. I believe it's TEDx rather than TED? Was it the full-

It was, it was big TED, yeah.

It was big TED. Okay, well, I stand corrected, and I have even more respect for you than I had before. But you've also written some stuff about how, you know, people should stop telling kids not to have- not to have babies. What was it called? The article, Stop Telling Kids They're Going to Die of Climate Change. What got you to that point where you wanted to put your head over the parapet? Because it's also quite an exposed position.

Yeah, it is. I think part of it comes from my historical experience. Like I think, going back a decade or so, I was definitely in a position, having done environmental science, where I was kind of locked in this position where I thought the world was just getting worse and worse. I couldn't see any solutions to these environmental problems. I felt very much hopeless and like, possibly I actually didn't have a future left to live for because I was basing it on many of the messages that come through in the media. And I think, sense then, it's only continued to get worse. Like I get loads of emails in my inbox from people that are- young people, especially that are extremely worried, like they've given up university because they don't think there's a future there for them. You can see in surveys across the world that a lot of people, primarily young people, but across the spectrum, are feeling this really deep sense of anxiety. They're feeling extremely doomed. And I think not only is that really poor for people with mental health, but I think it's also just not useful and pushing us forward to solve these problems. So I felt compelled to try to push back against that narrative a bit, not to say that these problems aren't big, or they won't have big impacts, because they will. But I think we shouldn't sink into this feeling that there's nothing we can do about it and that societal collapse is inevitable, because it's not.

So I'm put in mind as you speak about a YouTube video of Rupert Read, who's one of the founders of, I don't know, Extinction, Rebellion, and all these good things. And he is in a school, a school has invited him to speak, and I can't tell quite how old the kids are but they feel like about sort of 12 years-old, something like that. And he jumps on a table at the beginning and says, 'I need you to remember this, the most important thing, the grown-ups have let you down, your parents will let you down, your teachers have let you down. And when you're asked what you want to be when you grow up, the correct question is, what do you want to be if you grow up?'

Rupert Read

This is about whether you have a future. People probably sometimes ask you, "what are you going to be when you grow up?" But we've reached a point in human history where the question also has to be asked, "what are you going to do if you grew up?" I'm really, really sorry to have to say this to you. It doesn't feel good. But this is the truth. And I think it's too late for anything but the truth.

If you met Rupert Read, what would you tell him?

I mean, I would ask him what on earth he was trying to achieve with that? I mean, I don't see what are people trying to achieve by telling young kids that message? One, it's not true, and two, it's just not helpful, in fact, it's very counterproductive.

But what he's trying to do very clearly, as far as I'm concerned, is recruit kids into Extinction, Rebellion, get them to sort of stick themselves to things and stop the traffic and do all those things.

The situation is now sufficiently desperate that it's not enough anymore to vote the right way. It's not enough anymore to have really great projects in your school. We need to seriously think about which rules we're going to break to draw attention to the crisis. So I was asked when I came here this morning, "tell the truth, Rupert, but you mustn't encourage students to break the law." So I'm not gonna encourage you to break the law. I'm simply going to draw attention to the fact that sometimes, when you do something disruptive, you can get people's attention.

I'm not sure if there's anything beyond that that he was really trying to achieve.

Yeah, I mean, it's similar to the messaging from Roger Hallam, for example, where- I think, he has a YouTube video: Advice to Young People Facing Annihilation or something. And in some of his talks, like I remember he gave a talk at the Oxford Union where his message was, "if you're a young person at university, going into business, or going into politics or any other industry, then what you're going into is- you're complicit in genocide." Like that's how he feels.

And he talks about the most violent things and says, this is the inevitable and near term outcome of climate change, is societal breakdown, and, you know, and he describes in the most graphic details what he thinks is going to happen, but there's no real basis in science for that, is there?

No, and I think- I think what he's saying there is, the only possible route of this is to go for a revolution. And I mean, to me, it's just- I mean, what it states to me is that it's actually not about climate change at all. Like if we're- if we're focused on tackling climate change, then we need engineers installing heat pumps, building solar panels, wind turbines, so we need people in business and finance pushing for solutions and embarking on low carbon technologies. We need people on politics who have a backbone that will stand up and set more ambitious climate targets. I mean, to me, it just- it very much states that it's actually not necessarily about climate change at all.

And the thing that I find most ironic about some of these people is that they are the same people who are making these outrageous claims for the near-term collapse of society and extreme violence, and then they will- and collapse of the environment as well, and then they'll say, "and the worst is the mental health impact on young people." And it's like, well hang on a second, who's actually causing that? Is it the world or is it people overtrading and overhyping the, kind of, quite bad situation we're in but not as catastrophic as they make out.

Yeah, I think the- I think you see the headlines all the time. I mean, I've accused The Guardian of this in the past, where I think they have a target of the number of like climate stories that they- a metric of success how many climate stories they publish, so there's this like constant barrage of climate stories, and then they will comment on a new report that's came out about like really high levels of climate anxiety and it's like the circular thing of like, yeah, because we're also propagating that at the same time. Now it's- to be clear, like I think, I mean, I'm a young- I consider myself still a young person, but I feel anxiety about it, I feel worry about it, but not to the extent that I felt a decade ago. And I think this concern and this worry needs to be balanced with a sense of agency that we can actually do something about it.

Well, so, I consider myself still young person and I'm anxious about it. I've got perhaps a little bit fewer left- fewer years left on the- of the treadmill to run, but I am- because I think it's possible to be - I don't want to say quite anxious, it's possible to be extremely concerned and to get up every day and work on these issues without thinking that it's some near-term, as you say, you said it in your article, without thinking you're going to die of climate change. And there are people who will die unfortunately, and hugely, hugely tragic. It's not- because when I talk about these things, it's - sorry, by the way, this is well-trodden- this is a well-trodden path for Cleaning Up: we've spoken to Johan Rockström about how quickly or not quickly the really bad stuff could happen from climate and the worst things really are kind of in- on a centuries-timeframe. The really big feedbacks. We also spoke to Roger Pielke Jr who actually sort of dissected what the IPCC really says, which is nothing like what Rupert Read and Roger Hallam says, you know, think that it says, So- but it is possible to be very, very concerned, but also realistic about the timeframes, and as you say, to have agency.

Yeah, I think, on the time- I think the timeframe stuff is really important. I think there's a lot- a lot of words are thrown around like "tipping points", and I think they are- you need to be really aware of the timeframes we're talking about, because I think people when they hear the term tipping point, they assume that this is a really abrupt change, right? It's like, like the film Don't Look Up, right, which has the asteroid as the analogy for climate change. Like, that's not how climate change develops and that's not how tipping points develops. What tipping points are is basically a change, a systemic change in the system, a particular system, where it's very hard to then reverse that change. But that change can develop over centuries or millennia and that's the timeframe that we're talking about many of these tipping points is developing on. It's not that we hit a tipping point and then five years later the world goes up in flames. Well, I think what's important is the timeframe for these tipping points to develop is very different from the timeframe that we need to act. We still need to act on the order of decades, because that locks in essentially the climate path we'll be taking for millennia. But it's not that the impacts then evolve on that same time scale.

That's right. And in fact, Johan Rockström is very surgical about this. And he talks about the commitment time being a few decades, when you might commit to a tipping point, but the impact time being potentially a few, in fact, even many centuries, you know, the Antarctic ice sheet and everybody's, 'ah it's the sea level bomb",it is, but on the other hand, it's so big and so thick that it actually takes a millennium or more to melt to the point where you get these kind of extreme sea level rises. So he's very good and we'll put a link in the show notes to his episode, because it's so pertinent to the conversation that we just had. So talk to me about- you've got a book which is coming out in January, where you try to sort of synthesise, and it's not just climate that you're talking about in this book. Talk us through it.

Yeah, so my book coming out in January is called Not the End of the World, and yeah, it takes a data-driven look at our environmental problems and how to solve them. And it takes problem one by one. So we've got like air pollution, climate, deforestation, food, biodiversity, plastics, over-fishing. And chapter by chapter, I've tried to explain, through data, how we got to where we are, where we are now, and how we tackle this problem. And the basic framing of the book is Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. And my main kind of thesis in the book is that we have this- I think we have in our head that we've only become unsustainable very recently, right? This is over like a post industrial revolution, or even like the last 50 years, we've just suddenly went into this really unsustainable state. And kind of what I've tried to argue in the book is that actually, we've never been sustainable in the sense of- if you think about sustainability, as an environmentalist, I often think about it as just this environmental lens of not degrading the environment for future generations or other species. But there's another half to sustainability, which is we also want to provide a good life for people living today, right, and historically, we've never actually achieved both of those things at the same time. It's been one or the other. So yeah.

Is the Gro Harlem Brundtland- I'm not sure exactly the phraseology from the Earth Summit, 19- what was it, 1992 summit, saying that sustainable development is meeting the needs today without jeopardising the ability of future generations to live well?

Yeah. And I think, yeah, and I think there are some controversies around what the definition of sustainability is, people might just want to go for the environmental one, but I like people, and I don't want to see humans suffer. And I also think if you are to- were to make any progress on on tackling environmental problems, I think we need to take people with us. I think it can't be this framed as this one or the other. And what I argue in the book is that we've never achieved both at the same time. So very far back in history, human living standards were low, like one of the examples I use is that half of children died before reaching puberty, and this was across most of human history. That's now less than 5% globally, and in rich countries, it's much, much lower. Over the last few centuries, as we said, we've seen massive improvements in human wellbeing, but that's come at the cost of the environment. So like the tail- the skills have tipped the other way. And what I'm arguing in the book is that going forward, I don't think those two goals are incompatible anymore, I think we can provide a good life for 8, 9, 10 billion people, and we can tackle environmental problems at the same time.

So I mean, it's a little bit like Kate Raworth's Donut in that you've got- the outside is "don't be unsustainable" and the inside is "give people social protection and justice and so on", except that she's essentially saying that the problem is capitalism, and we've got to slam the brakes on, and we've got to increase taxes and tax the wealthy, because the real problem is actually rich people. But you don't go there. You avoid that and you give examples, or at least a path that you think is going to be more kind of- that's going to bring people along with these changes, give them agency, is that right? Is that fair?

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think where I differ there is, like I'm quite explicitly against degrowth as a strategy I think for two reasons. I think one is you can't do global degrowth, because you leave bones and poverty. And even if you- even if you only look at that through a climate lens, the people left in poverty are the people that are going to feel the impacts of climate change more strongly. And the way that they become more resilient is to lift themselves out of poverty and become richer. So then you have the question, should rich countries go for degrowth? And they are I think, okay, you can be slightly agnostic on GDP growth - I'm sure there are other metrics that you might want to use to measure human progress by, it's not just a GDP lens - where I don't think that's ever going to go forwards, I just don't see it as being politically feasible, especially not on the timescales that we're talking about for actually really getting a grip on global carbon emissions. You're not going to dismantle capitalism and convince the world to go for degrowth in a space of 5 to 10 years, for example. So to me, like, it just doesn't seem a feasible strategy going forward.

So I think that we should be using, as metrics, a whole range because it's not, I mean, GDP growth clearly doesn't tell us about the quality of our forests, or the quality of our teachers, or the quality of our motorway or the quality of our savings or nothing, which are very important things. What I would say though, is those people who want to just move away from GDP: GDP growth correlates with job creation really well. And jobs are really important for everything from, you know, equity, justice, spreading money through the economy, mental health of people, and so on. So the only people who ever asked- that I've ever seen argue for degrowth, is people who've never had to stare unemployment in the face, they've never really understood what it means to have a job or not have a job.

I mean, yeah, I mean, I think the- I mean, GDP also correlates with lots of other positive thing, not just job creation. I think, probably then what they would argue is like, you could go for a universal basic income where employment is less important. I mean, I'm not going to advocate for degrowth on these grounds, because I don't believe in it going forward.

Let's get back there. So you then- so this is your- your thesis is, you know, we used to be unsustainable, because lifestyle was- and you know, all these terrible indicators of mortality and so on, but at least we didn't have a sort of terrible footprint on the planet. But now we've sort of made a lot of progress on the first, on the lifestyle and outcomes for humans, but we have had this terrible impact. And then you go through, I mean, are you giving a formula for what to do in each of these areas that you've outlined, from pollution up in the higher atmosphere and climate all the way down through to the deeps of the sea?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's not just a "let's feel good about where we are book", it's a "how-to" it's a- this is like understanding how we've got to where we are today, and actually what that then tells us about how we need to move forward.

And so that's the one that- obviously you know, this is Cleaning Up: leadership in the age of climate change, so the one that I'm most interested in is climate. Let's start there. What's- how does that kind of thesis map onto the particulars of climate, which is all about energy and transportation and so on?

Yeah, so climate is mostly about energy and also food, but we can take that out for now. So climate is mostly about energy. If you look at historically where we got our energy from, we've never managed to get energy without burning stuff, right. First, it was wood, and then we moved to fossil fuels. And in both situations burning stuff, 1) creates CO2, and 2) creates local air pollution, both of which are bad. We are essentially in the position of being the first generation where we can produce large amounts of energy abundantly, cheaply, without burning stuff, which is good for climate, and is good for air pollution.

So the pushback there- I mean, you're the numbers person, so I can come at you with kind of numbers. So you say that we are in a position. Marvellous. You know, problem solved. But if you're talking about renewables, they are now, well wind and solar is 15% of global electricity, if you add in hydro, you get to, I don't know, I'm gonna guess about almost exactly 30%, and, you konw, there's a few bits and pieces like geothermal, they're very small. But that's not job done. Because of course, even if it's- even if it's 30% that you take as renewable, certainly if it's 15%, from wind, and solar, that's just electricity, which is only 20% of all energy that we need. So 30% of 20%: 6%. So we've done all of this stuff, my entire career for the last 20 years has been sort of, you know, explaining to people that this is the direction of travel, but we're only 6% in so we are miles from solving this problem, are we not?

I mean, we're far away from solving the problem, it's not that it's solved, but we do have the tools there now to solve it. I mean, I think it's framed as- often framed as, you know, "we've spent decades working on this and we're kind of in the same position that we were. I think what's important to note about those decades is that those decades were basically a training- we were basically training to qualify. If you take the example of a sports event, we were training to qualify for the World Cup. And that training was trying to get the cost of these sources down to be competitive with fossil fuels, right? If you go back 15 years, they were not competitive with fossil fuels so it was obvious why we weren't deploying them. The cost of these technologies have plummeted. They're now below the cost of fossil fuels. So in some sense, we're just at the base- we're just entering the competition, despite working on this for decades. But what that means going forward- so you look at the the curves, we might think they might follow like a I don't know how or where the audiences is with like different curve shapes, like an S curve is what we would call it, where you're starting at a very, very low base, but you start to accelerate very, very quickly. And we're just entering the stage of that acceleration. Now- yeah.

No, I was just gonna- I thought you were- continue, because I thought you had stopped.

Yeah, no. So we're starting from a very low base base, we can expect that those sources will grow very quickly, and I think what's also really important to know is that we're- there, we're looking at an energy system on the basis of primary energy demand. And I think what's important to know is that most of that energy is completely wasted. Like it's not actually going towards energy services which is what we actually want. So if you took a ballpark figure, it's around two thirds of the primary energy is wasted. And then if you think about it in terms of final energy demand, which is closer to the amount of energy that we might actually use, there's another step, but we can ignore that: final energy demand. So recently, there's a paper by Nick Eyre at Oxford looking at: if you take the global energy system today, and if you just electrify it, right, you electrify it and you maybe go for hydrogen and some of the really hard-to-abate sectors, final energy demand would drop by 40%. So electrification takes out many of the inefficiencies that we have in the current system. And a way to explain that is to take like a car, for example. So a standard petrol car, you put a pound of petrol in: 20 pence of that actually goes to moving the car. 80 pence of that is wasted. If you take an electric car, it's almost the flip of that. So you maybe get around 20%, 20p is wasted, but 80p actually goes into moving you which is what you want, you just want to move from A to B. So that means that the energy you would need to move the same distance in an electric car is three to four times less than in a petrol car. So once you start to electrify these sectors, a lot of these massive inefficiencies go away and our actual energy demand in the end will be much lower than the big stack of energy that we're looking at today.

You're- I don't know what I would say, singing from my song sheet. This is absolutely- this is one of the things that gives me hope is that there is so much waste in the system. And in fact, we did- we've done two episodes with Jonathan Maxwell, CEO of SDCL, Sustainable Development Capital, and he's the premier investor in this kind of resolving energy efficiency. If we just- if we could just stop being so inefficient, then we would already have solved two thirds of our problems. And, in fact, there's lots of nice things like 40% of all shipping, actually, is moving iron ore, gas, and coal around the world, and oil around the world. So you know, if you do go to a clean system, then you also reduce lots of the kind of- 15% of energy goes to actually extracting fossil fuels. So there's lots of different ways in which the kind of the system starts to help you once you get past that tipping point.

Yeah, I think like, similar to the degrowth conversation, I think there's lots of focus on trying to reduce energy demand from a consumer side, and that's looking at standard, like energy efficiency stuff, or actually just cutting out stuff that people want to use. And I think, to me, behavioural change is very hard in that domain, and I think we might see some gains there but I think they will be fairly marginal. I think what we're completely missing from the conversation is exactly this, that even if you keep the amount of energy services that people want the same, you can massively cut the amount of energy that you demand.

So you avoided earlier; you said there's primary energy, final energy and something else, but I won't go there, but you did go there then, which is energy services. And I think that's really important for this audience, that what you've got: this primary energy is how much coal you dig out of the ground, how much oil you get out of the ground, how much gas you get out of the ground. Final energy is what you sell to a user. But they don't use all of it, because they have inefficiency as well. In that example of the car, they stick the petrol in their petrol tank and then use 20% of it to actually drive. And then what we really need is energy services. And I think that is just such an important message, because I think that human wellbeing, human activity, everything we do correlates with those energy services. Energy services is actually when you go and you visit your grandma, you know, whether you do it by train, or car, or walk, the energy service is what you need to do that, or the light that you need for your homework or whatever it is. That, I think, we want to increase enormously because it correlates with all the good things in life. But that doesn't mean either final energy or certainly not primary energy, those can go down and they should because those are the ones, that's what gives that the horrendous environmental impact. So I don't know, I think we're furiously agreeing, we could go off on a sort of- on a conversation about that, but it's so important that people understand how little of the coal that we dig out of the ground, ends up doing anything useful for us.

Yes, globally we can increase the amount of energy services that we're getting without increasing the total amount of energy that we're burning.

And it does astonish me, by the way, how few of- I mean you get these kinds of generalist commentators, I'm talking about people like Bjorn Lomborg, even Vaclav Smil, who don't seem to understand. And Lomborg repeatedly talks about primary energy, you know, "renewables will never be able to meet the need for primary energy." It's like, well they don't need to because that's mainly waste, two thirds of it's wasted. I don't understand how he continues with that.

I mean, because it makes renewables look bad, right? Like there's often like a motive behind it.

Well, yeah, you're right, in fact, the answer to the question is pretty simple. But what do you say - to come back at you, though - what do you say to those who say, "well, there's not enough minerals and that, you know, we're going to replace an over-dependence and unsustainable dependence on fossil fuel with an absurd volume of required extraction of minerals with inevitable environmental planetary consequences?"

Yeah, I think, I mean, I will come back specifically to your question. I think where I see some danger in the space is that I think people are often looking for perfect solutions that don't exist. I think the reality is, we're not going to find any alternatives that don't require some land, don't require some inputs, don't have small amounts of waste. And if we're looking for those solutions, like they're not there, and I think one of the dangers is that we slow this process down, because we're unwilling to accept that there will be small trade offs, and there will be some small impact. I think you need to take the counterfactual of, is this much, much better than the alternative of continuing to burn fossil fuels? But yeah, in terms of mineral demand, yes, it's true that we will require a large amount of minerals. I think even there, you need to put a little bit into context, how does that compare with the 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels that we're hauling out the ground every single year? And actually, there's been some recent papers on this looking at how will the total material requirements, which is the the minerals, the fossil fuels, and also the waste rock that you would take out from trying to extract those, how will that change through decarbonisation. And I actually think people will assume that it would increase. But several of these papers have shown that, in a decarbonized world. that is going to go down. So total material requirements are going to go down. But we are going to move to a wide and diverse range of minerals with- could be large impact. On the question of are we going to run out? From the studies that I've seen long term, no one seems to be coming to the conclusion that we're going to run out. So there's the Energy Transition Commission did a big report on this. That wasn't the conclusion. There's Morgan Bazilian at the Payne Institute who does great work on this, I have never seen him say that we're going to run out. There was a paper earlier this year by Seaver Wang and Zeke Hausfather and several others looking at material requirements in the electricity system. Again, they did not come to that conclusion. So the general consensus is that long term, total material demand is not the issue. I think there are certain issues that we need to illustrate: one is short-term supply and demand where, in the short term, we could possibly have severe bottlenecks, just because we're not managing to scale-up our mining and refining capacity quickly enough. And then there are obviously geopolitical issues around that we cannot ignore. So yeah: long term, I'm not concerned, short term, I think there are a range of risks.

So I could add to the list of studies that have said there is no long term shortage, the IEA has done great work, Bloomberg New Energy Finance has done great work. Morgan Bazilian, whom you mentioned, was actually one of the early guests on this show. And Lord Turner, Adair Turner has already been on once and he's coming on, again, shortly just will be our last episode before Christmas. But there is a rate-limiting problem in that, you know, we do have to scal-up the mining, but also, what is your responsibility or what is your response when people say, "well, what you're sort of saying is okay, we're going to move to a climate safe, clean future, and you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs - there's nothing perfect, but the problem is that those eggs that are gonna get broken will be in Papua New Guinea, there'll be in Bolivia, there'll be in, you know, places that are mineral-rich and governance-poor, but we'll be okay in the wealthy world, you know, we'll stop emitting, but-" another one would be DRC Congo, where there might be sort of appalling impacts locally. What is your response to them, and what is our responsibility as advocates for this dramatic increase in mining?

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I mean, the point is, we can't just move away from one system and move to another system that's incredibly damaging socially and environmentally. I think the response there is that it is a challenge to create sustainable supply chains in many of these minerals, but it's a challenge, and we need to take responsibility for that. I don't- I see it as a significant challenge and problem, but I don't see as an insurmountable one. And then, I mean, I think it depends a little bit on the local examples. I think there is probably significant room for technological innovation to actually specifically move away from areas that are poor governance, geopolitically unstable, like the example of cobalt that you gave, I think it's possibly inevitable that many manufacturers move away from cobalt in batteries, like we've seen that with Tesla, who are starting to move away from cobalt. So I think there will be possibly innovations that will move us away from certain supply chains, where there is just large geopolitical risk.

So I would like to think maybe I'm being sort of Pollyanna-ish; I would like to think that, rather than just kind of say, "well, you know, DRC is impossible and we'll move away, we'll technically- we'll technologically innovate, you know, that the DRC would become wealthier, that governance would improve, to the point where- because we've dealt with this with the clothing industry, you know, horrendous abuses, but then you get to the point where, you know, the Bangladeshes of the world, the Vietnams of the world, they're actually becoming wealthier and better-governed and better able to protect themselves. And also, all of the activists in the supply chain work, you know, that actually- because, you know, a response that says, "DRC is so awful, we're going to just kind of cut it off from the economic system," is also not appropriate.

No, and I've written an article previously on looking specifically at the cobalt issue in DRC. And yeah, the conclusion I came to was the same, that I actually think for the DRC just us like abandoning cobalt in EVs and moving to something else is actually very bad for DRC. I mean, there you've got the situation where the majority of the population live under the international poverty line, so under $2 a day and child labour rates are a problem in artisanal mining in particular. But the reason the kids are in the main are not in the school is because the family is in such deep poverty that they've literally got no other option. And actually, by moving supply chains away from DRC, you're actually taking out the rug from beneath them. And actually, they probably fall then below the poverty line. So a much better approach would be to say, "we're gonna massively improve supply chains and DRC, we're going to not allow child labour, we're going to provide better finance so they're not living on $2 a day." But I'm actually quite afraid to actually be- that just seems too hard and technological change is often easier than doing social social change.

I mean, in a sense, the good news is that, you know, if it is net-zero 2050 we're talking about, there are 27 years. So these- it's not like every problem is going to be, or has to be, solved overnight. What I'd like to do is you've got in your book, it's not just climate, you've got these other areas. Can we do sort of- we've talked a little bit about air pollution along the way, as we talked about climate and energy. But can we rapidfire talk about some of the other ones that interact? So the closest interactions, I think there's food, deforestation, plastics, you then get into biodiversity and overfishing, but let's do rapid fire. Let's start with food. What's the thesis in the book? What will people be reading about if they, you know, when they buy your book, which they will in the chapters on food?

Okay, so, early food, huge pressure on wild animal populations. So you saw actually really significant declines in large mammals in particular through over-hunting and various other classes of animals. Then we move to farming. The problem with farming for most of us history is that yields were extremely low, right, we had no way to increase crop yields. What that means is, if we wanted to grow more food, we just had to use more and more and more land which links into deforestation. So you start to deforest, resulting in large habitat loss because you can't increase yields. Over the last century or so, we've managed to massively increase yields, and we're talking about like a tripling, quadrupling, depending on the country. We're now in a position where we could feed 10 billion people easily on much, much, much less land than we currently do. We could regrow forests, we could give wildlife back its habitat, and we could still feed 10 billion people at the same time.

I mean, is this just a an advertisement for more and more fertiliser use? Because, I mean, fertiliser we've done that using fossil fertiliser.

We've partly done that through fertiliser. Like it's been, like the haber-bosch process and being able to create synthetic nitrogen in particular was like a key unlocking of this, but it hasn't been the only driver. And I think we have reached the point global- so if you look at global trends of fertiliser-use, since 1960, they've approximately quadrupled, rightm, so large increases in fertiliser use. Over the last five or so years, rates have not really increased. We're using about the same amount of fertiliser. Now I don't want to call it a definite peak, but we're kind of reaching this kind of plateauing. We've seen in rich countries, in particular, that we can produce more food while reducing fertiliser use. So UK fertiliser use is down by about a third, we've seen the same across Europe, you actually see a narrow drop in China, US fertiliser is where it was in the 1970s. So we are starting to see this decoupling where it can produce more and more using less and less fertiliser.

An astonishing proportion of fertiliser is wasted. It just becomes runoff and either just sublimates I think into the air or it goes into the rivers and into the streams, rivers and sea. I mean, it's some enormous flow 40%, 50%, something like that. And of course, you know, if we go to clean fertiliser, which could well be more expensive, we're likely to be more frugal in our use of fertiliser.

I think, just one additional point there is like a massive driver of food impacts globally is meat, and meat and dairy production and consumption. And there again, we might be a wee bit off from this, but we are in a position where we could produce protein, we could produce synthetic fats, basically with no land at all, like we could- and again we would have no fertiliser or no manure running off into the oceans. So we we are in a position where we could produce lots of food without using much land.

We did an episode with Jim Mellon of agronomics on exactly that issue of synthetic foods, synthetic proteins and so on. Just while we are on food, is there any sign of what Rupert Reed and Roger Hallam would no doubt be delighted to see, which is some sort of collapse in harvest and yields due to climate so far?

No collapse, no. If you look at future projections, we would expect that, holding everything else constant in certain regions, increased temperature will reduce yields. That's what we expect that's holding-

Holding everything constant means no adaptation, is that correct?

No adaptation. And you might be able to argue that some of these impacts you could offset with different crop varieties, more irrigation, maybe more fertiliser. So yeah, there are potential ways that we could mitigate a lot of those, sorry, adapt to a lot of those impacts. So we do expect in the future that we'll see crop yield declines. And that would be- that's actually one of my biggest concerns when it comes to climate change. As to where we are today, we're still recording record harvests, like this year has been an extremely hot year, we've seen lots of impacts across the world. We're still recording basically record harvest this year.

So that's an interesting version of the Erlich-Simon Bet, might be whether crop yields are higher in 10 years or lower in 10 years. And you're saying that you would not accept that bet? You might be concerned and think they could be lower?

I think they could be lower. Yes.

That's an interesting one. I'm wondering whether we should bet because I'm pretty sure there'll be higher, but we'd have to define the bet very carefully because single years can bounce around, obviously.

I think it also depends on like where you're talking about, I think there's some regions where there's still a lot of room for yield growth, there's like a lot of what we call the "yield gap" of like where yields are and where they could be with more inputs, more irrigation, etc. And I think in some regions that's big, I think for other regions like North America, for example, or maybe Europe, I think we may start to see like a plateauing of yield.

On a regional basis, I'm gonna say- year by year it'll bounce around. I just, you know, I think what- because what's interesting is, if you summarise the first part of the conversation about things not being as bad as is made out, is that fundamentally, there is a race between adaptation and climate change. And until now, just in terms of numbers of people killed by weather-related disasters, or whether it's the harvests and yields and so on, up till now, adaptation is winning. Quite clearly in your data, that kind of the World in Data figures would show that adaptation up till now is winning, and I suppose what you're saying is, you know, not necessarily forever, though.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, historically, and up til now, adaptation and resilience is winning. I would be always be cautious about extrapolating that to assume that it's going to be that way in 10 or 20 years.

Yeah, who knows, we might need some huge climate model or something like that. Let's just do our rapid fire: deforestation. I want to cover a couple more, deforestation. Where are we and what are you saying in the chapters on deforestation?

So deforestation, since the end of the last ice age, we've cut down around a third of the world's forests. Now, half of that was pre-1900 and we've seen a big acceleration over the last century or so. So half of that is post-1900. You tend to see this general trend of deforestation where rich countries in particular, so if you take the UK, for example, we cut down our forests centuries ago. We cut down, I think so Scotland, for example, was about 20%, forested, that went all the way down to 5%. So we cut down three quarters of our forest, and now that is rebounding. So you tend to see this general trend where countries cut down their forest, they reach this low point and then it starts to reforest again. What that means is that globally, temperate regions have already peaked in deforestation, and it's fallen naturally, we're regrowing in forests. So most of the deforestation that's happening in the world is in tropical regions. And the primary driver of that is, as we just discussed, is agriculture. So it's mostly about farming. It's about clearing forests to produce either grazing land or cropland. And the argument there is that we could get deforestation very close to zero, largely through dietary change, or improvements in agricultural productivity.

And are we net- today, are we net adding or net still losing wood mass in woodlands, in forests?

We are still net losing.

Still net losing, but it's become much- the rate of that has become much slower, has it not?

Yeah. So global- if you look at FAO figures, sorry, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, global deforestation peaked in the 1980s. And it has been slowly declining since then, but it's still very high.

I have to ask you, in your book, do you deal with population as well? Because, you know, it's a dangerous subject, because as soon as you say, "well, kind of obviously we had a bigger impact because population grew," then people start to immediately say, "aha, you're one of these people who wants to control and one child per family and eugenics," and there's a horrible discussion that people try and impose on you the moment you, you know, mentioned the word population. And you know, I think you've said it: you like people, I like people. So I'm not one of these people who thinks that population holds the key. But do you have a discussion of population in your book?

Yes, I do. There's- so each of the chapters are tackling one environmental problem after another. What I do at the beginning of the book is tackle two arguments that are like more sweeping ones that are not engaging with the specific problem, it's just the problem is population or the problem is economic growth. And I basically say, "we're not going to tackle this population change. We're not going to tackle this through degrowth." I mean, I think on population, the story there is, yes, probably impact would be lower if we had a population of 1 billion, of course they would. But in terms of where we are today, and how we're moving forward, global population is going to- like I think people assume that population is still rising exponentially. It's not rising exponentially. In many regions, population is going to decline, and globally, the latest projections from the UN is that population will peak in around the 2080s. And the question is, if you wanted to tweak that population number, like, if you look at the pace of demographic change, you're not going to manage to shift that significantly with any major intervention.

And in fact, there's a whole load of research and modelling that just says, "well, even if you wanted to shift it, the best way to do it is to educate women," which has all sorts of other environmental and social benefits. So it's kind of, you know, I don't think one has to go directly for population, you just have to kind of solve the problems, the real problems of the impacts, and that will solve itself.

Yeah, as I say in the book, yeah, the fertility rates tend to decline as women move into education, they get access to contraception. The point is, we should be advocating for that anyway, and we don't need to claim an argument built on top of that, we should just do it, because that's the right thing to do.

It's the right thing to do. Exactly. The last one of the major topics in your book that I just want to touch on plastics. We hear a lot about plastics, you know, we could solve the climate issue, and I suspect that the people who don't want to be happy will move seamlessly on to saying that "ah but the big problem is plastics."

Yeah, so I'm quite specific in my book that I'm tackling the problem of plastic pollution, which is the big pictures of plastics flowing out into rivers and flowing out into the ocean. What I'm not tackling in the book is how to end plastic use. 1) because I don't think that's desirable, and I think it has lots of negative consequences, and 2) I just don't know how to do that. But the problem of plastic pollution is a very, very tractable one. So I think we often overestimate the amount of plastic that's going into the ocean. So about 0.5% of the plastic waste we produce each year goes into the ocean. That's the recent estimates. Now, that's a very tractable problem. The problem of plastic is not plastic use, it's plastic waste management, right? It's a waste management problem. And most of the plastic that's flowning into the ocean is coming from lower-middle income countries where they've developed rapidly, so plastic use has increased, but waste management has not managed to keep up. So they're using lots of plastics without waste management to put it into landfill or recycle it or to incinerate it. Now, if we wanted to solve that in the next five to 10 years, we could easily do that, right, we just put money into waste management and the problem's solved. Some of the issue I take is that I think often people see this plastic pollution problem, and their first go-to is, "we need to stop using plastic." And the point is, to solve the 0.5% of plastic problem, you're not going to get there by tackling the top of that chain, right. You could probably halve plastic use and it might not actually have any impact at all on the amount of plastic that's flowing into the ocean. So what I'm arguing for is, if your concern is plastic pollution, do a really targeted focus on that 0.5% instead of focusing on the 300 million tonnes that we use each year.

So your figure of 0.5%, and that's the stuff that sort of flowing down the rivers and into the garbage- the great garbage patches- and I agree with you I mean plastic: the problem you get rid of plastic and immediately you have an increase in food waste. So it's a very- we use plastics for a reason and it's not clear that just stopping using plastics will be good for the environment. In fact, it's fairly clear that it wouldn't be. But you're talking about- you're talking there about the plastic that flows into the seas. What about microplastics, which are so pervasive, and I don't know whether it's, you know, 0.5% of plastic that ends up as microplastics, but we do know that they are all over the place. They're in the Antarctic, the Arctic, the deep sea, the deserts, they're on the glasses, they're in our bodies, they're in our brains, they're in my testicles. They're in- they're everywhere. And surely you have to have some concern about that?

I have some concern about that. I mean, you're right that microplastics are now everywhere. I have some concern about that, but concern because it's an unknown known, right? We actually- we don't know what the impacts of plastics are. So far, there has not been a large body of evidence saying that there are negative impacts on human health from microplastics. In fact, there was a big review by the WHO last year that came out looking at: what's the evidence for negative health impacts of microplastics? And the conclusion was, there's insufficient evidence to say anything, which does not mean that there are no impacts, or we haven't seen any significant ones to date.

But if you type into Google Scholar, "microplastics, endocrine", because some of these- the plastics may not themselves disrupt endocrine function, but a lot of the surfactants, a lot of the chemicals that are used to change the characteristics of the plastic, make it hard, make it soft, make it biodegrade- those chemicals do have endocrine- and that's, I mean, that's been shown in animal trials, in models. It doesn't look good.

Yeah. Animal models and trials does not necessarily mean that you see those impacts in the real world. Like I'm not saying that there are no negative impacts, like I say explicitly in the book that this is like an open area of research, and I actually think it's under-invested area of research, because if this is a major problem, then we're actually quite screwed, and we need to get working on it now. But so far, there has been very limited evidence on the negative health impacts on microplastics.

But doesn't this raise one of the really big sort of issues, one of the big problems, which is that, supposing there were some negatives of microplastics, or there are some negatives of plastics, they end up in the, you know, some proportion is always going to end up in the sea, jow do we conduct a discussion that says that the benefits are so overwhelmingly large? And of course, you know, fossil fuel advocates will say, "well, yeah, there might be a bit of climate change but there's no really-" if you go through the IPCC results, as I did with Roger Pielke in his episode, the actual negatives to date of climate change, which are real, but they're still relatively minor compared to the vast increases in human health, wealth, happiness, that have emerged from fossil fuels, how do we conduct a discussion, how do we manage those trade offs between some disadvantages and some potentially very substantial advantages? Society seems ill-equipped to have that discussion.

Yeah, I mean, it's difficult, and you will often get different answers like from different people on what the trade-offs and priorities should be. I think on the climate question, I think there was some legitimacy to that argument when you didn't have viable alternatives to fossil fuels, right? There, it was a question of you either burn fossil fuels, or wood, or you have no energy at all. And we want energy, because energy is really important for human development. The position we're in now is that there's no longer that trade-off, right? We have alternatives. And I think you might argue the same for plastics. I mean, it would depend on what is the magnitude on human health, If the was enormous impacts on human health, then yeah, you would be like, we need to stop using plastics. If it's small impacts, there, then, the question is, are there alternatives to plastics where the benefits would justify ending the use of plastics? So I think it's a difficult question, but it's about are there alternatives that you'd switch to and weighing up what are the pros and cons on either side.

And in fact, I could even- I could play devil's advocate, I could also argue against myself, and say, "in fact, society is quite good at making those choices. We've done it time and time again, you know, when we discovered about the ozone hole, when we discovered about DDT, and there's a sort of societal process, which ends up with a decision." And I suppose, you know, you would argue that your book is part of that process, and that, you know, it's not kind of- we don't live in a single global dictatorship where one person decides, there's a societal engagement that ends up moving us forwards.

Okay, I'm gonna be the devil's advocate on you now, and then- but I think there you need to be cogniscent of who's making the decisions, right? Because here you're talking about global problems where the impacts are felt very differently across the world. So it's- it's not necessarily the poorest countries that are going to be hit by climate change are not making the decisions about how much fossil fuels we're burning.

Damn, it's usually me who gets to sort of claim the moral high ground and say that we've got to be very careful about issues of justice and, you know, particularly as. you know, you know, I don't want to say post-colonial but a world struggling to kind of heal after colonialism, you're right. Absolutely. What I was going to do with that comment about your book being part of this discussion was I was actually going to ask us to wrap up by you giving a very explicit plug for your book. What's it called? When does it come out? How can people buy it?

Yeah. My book, Not the End of the World is out in January. It takes a data driven but optimistic look at how we can solve our environmental problems while improving human wellbeing at the same time, and you can buy it all good retailers.

Very good. How about it's been a huge pleasure speaking with you.

Thanks very much, Michael.

Thank you. Bye bye.

So that was Dr. Hannah Ritchie, Head of Research at Our World in Data and author of a new book, Not the End of the World, which will be out in January next year. As always, we will include links in the show notes to the episodes mentioned during our conversation. So that's episode 93. With Roger Pielke Jr. Inconvenient Truth About Climate Ccience, Episode 49 with Johan Rockström, Pushing Planetary Boundaries, Episode 13 with Morgan Bazilian, the Poet of the Low Carbon Transition, Episode 110 with Lord Turner, that's Adair Turner, Lord of the Net Zero Transition. And you should also look out for the episode we'll be recording at the end of this year to close Season 10 with Lord Turner, and Episode 136, with Jim Mellon, From Moore's Law to Moo's Law. We will also include in the show notes, links to Hannah's TED Talk, her WIRED piece - Stop Telling Kids They'll Die From Climate Change, and to some of Rupert Read's and Roger Hallam's most egregious scare-mongering. And of course, we'll also include a link to Hannah's upcoming book, that's: Not the End of the World, which I'm sure you'll want to pre-order.

If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please remember to like, share, and subscribe to Cleaning Up or leave us a review on your chosen podcast platform. And do please please spread the word on social media or by telling your friends and colleagues. And if you want more from Cleaning Up, sign up for our free newsletter at cleaningup.live, where you'll find our archive of over 160 hours of conversations with extraordinary climate leaders.

Cleaning up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation.

Not the End of the World - Ep147: Dr Hannah Ritchie

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