What the climate story gets wrong

0:02Hey everybody, it's Neil I. It's been a lot of fun being back on Decoder this fall and we've got a bunch of great episodes coming up to round out the year. I'm very excited about all of it. But we're off this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, so today we're going to share this episode of The Gray Area with you. This time, host Sean Illing is talking to data science Hannah Ritchie about climate science and how although the climate crisis is definitely real, it's not actually all doom and gloom. There are a lot of great indicators in the data that show real progress in limiting emissions and boosting clean energy.

0:30It's a nuanced, hopeful take at a time when, admittedly, it feels like most of the climate news we hear is pretty doom and gloom. Okay, The Gray Area. with Sean Illing. Enjoy.

0:42Most stories about climate change begin in the same place, with loss, fire, flood, extinction, collapse. That's what all the charts and graphs show us after all. But what if there was a different story to tell, one that began with what's working, with what we're already building. One based on a whole different set of numbers, the ones that show us how far we've already come. I'm Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.

1:23My guest today is Hannah Ritchie. She's a data scientist at Oxford and the author of Clearing the Air. She calls herself a data optimist, and her work shows that the world is decarbonizing much faster than we think, and that the real challenge now isn't necessarily the technology. It's belief. Belief that progress is still possible. The kind that isn't focused on shrinking our world, but expanding what's possible. The kind that makes you want to live in the future.

2:06Hannah Ritchie, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. Well, you have spent a lot of your time looking at cold, hard data, and somehow, miraculously, you've come out of that experience more hopeful, not less. Yeah. What changed your mind about the path we're on? the focus of my work is often on environmental problems and climate change in particular and i think before we even zoom in on the climate problem i think one thing you get from looking at data and specifically data over long time scales right but you know how have things changed over decades or centuries what you tend to find when you zoom out is that humans have made amazing progress in many ways actually if you look at almost any kind of human development indicator whether it's poverty or hunger or child mortality or saving mothers or life expectancy, the list goes on.

3:02We've made huge improvements over the last few centuries and in particular over the last 50 years. And I think it's often hard to get that perspective just following the day-to-day coverage of stuff or what people are speaking about happened in the last hour. We are capable of solving problems and making progress. And then I think specifically on the environment and climate, you know we're still in a very bad position on that you know we progress has been too slow but we have made progress in many different ways and i think that some of the very clear data there is on stuff like the price of renewables or the price of batteries and how competitive they are or actually now how quickly we are deploying this stuff um which again you just can only see through the data you know you're just not going to get that in a daily news headline you need to step back and look at the data to understand the scale of what's happening on these solutions.

3:58I do often feel like we are kind of toggling between dueling climate stories. There's either a story about denial or a story about despair and not much in between, present company excluded. Do you think we're just naturally attracted to extremes because maybe in some ways that's just a simpler, neater way to look at the world. I think so. I think we're often more fine-tuned, I think, to be pessimistic about the world in general. And I think there's some ingrained psychology in that, that in the past, it's definitely more advantageous to think about what's the next problem that's come in rather than saying, you know, oh, like how good we're doing.

4:40So I think there's that kind of psychological part in us. And then I think most people get their information from the news or from social media. And I think the reality is that often nuanced stories just don't do well in the media, right? Often it is one extreme or the other that gets the attention. And if you are, that's where you're getting your news on what's happening on climate or any other issue, then I think you are mostly seeing the extremes in one or the other direction, right? As you say, either, you know, this climate's not a problem, we're doing fine, or the opposite, you know, the world's going to collapse tomorrow and we're all doomed.

5:18And I've spoken to journalists in the past about this, right? And their response has often been, well, we kind of want to, you know, produce the more nuanced stories that don't have the really clickbaity extreme headline, but then no one reads them and no one clicks on them. So I think there is this kind of unfortunate dynamic between the people producing content and also us as consumers of content that we are drawn more to these kind of interesting extremes rather than the kind of nuanced middle. Yeah, I don't know how wild the marketing people were here when we came up with the name, The Gray Area.

5:54We're going to lean into the nuance. It's not the sexiest cell, for sure. But that doesn't mean it's the wrong way to look at things. I don't know, have you always been pretty level-headed when it comes to this stuff, even before you dove into the data? Are you just wired for reasonableness? I mean, definitely not. I've changed a lot on this in the last decade or 15 years, where now I'm framed as the kind of optimistic person on climate. But, you know, 15 years ago, I was very pessimistic. I was very much in that we're all doomed because of climate change, and there's just no way we're going to solve this.

6:28And I won't really have a, as a young person, I won't really have a kind of livable planet to grow up in. So no, it's definitely not been hardwired. I mean, I think this has been kind of taught, and a lot of it has come from stepping back to look at the data. And that has actually rapidly shifted my perspective on this. Yeah, I think I'm about 15 years behind you. I mean, I think you say pretty early in the book that the question you get the most from people is, are we doomed? And, you know, I think what people are really asking when they ask that is whether anything we do, innovation, growth, building, really makes a difference.

7:15How do you think about our agency at this stage of the crisis? How much of a difference can we still make? We can absolutely make a difference. So if you look at any of the kind of future pathways, the range of possible climate futures, you know, the trajectory we take is very much determined by the decisions we make today and tomorrow and the next day. And we're very much the driving force of the trajectory that we take, the final temperature rise that we end up in. I think people have a sense that there is often some single threshold in the system that once we pass that, it's over. There's nothing we can do to stop this.

7:57This is generally not how climate impacts work. What's really clear is that the higher the warming, the higher the impacts. right so going from 1.5 to 1.6 to 1.7 to one but all of those incremental increases in global temperatures make a difference to the impacts so I think people have this sense of you know if we're past 1.5 you know we're done we're doomed or if we're past two degrees you know we're done we're doomed that's not how it works right even if we're past 1.5 pursuing 1.6 or 1.7 these all make a difference to the final climate outcomes that we will have to deal with. So it's always worth making the effort to reduce those potential dangers and hazards as much as we can.

8:39Another question I get a lot is, you know, as individuals, do we have any agency in this, right? And here I often hear kind of polar opposite arguments where some people are all about individual behaviour change, right? This notion that, you know, if we all just do a little, you know we'll fix this I think that's incorrect you know it's not the case that if we all as individuals do something we'll fix this huge global problem but you also get the other extreme that says you know individuals don't matter this is purely about systemic change right so it's only on governments and businesses and economic systems to change this and I think that's a false dichotomy I think you both really really matter here what's really key is that governments companies investors etc they play a huge role in making the alternatives to the drivers of climate change so fossil fuels for example they play a huge role in making good decisions on what energy sources we build what products are available so you know an electric vehicle versus a petrol vehicle or public transport they play a huge role in making that available making that easy for people to switch and making it cost effective or affordable for people to switch they play a huge role in that But as individuals, if they put in that effort, as individuals, we can't sit in our hands and say, we're not going to move from the petrol car to the electric vehicle, or we're not going to shift to a more plant-based diet.

10:05As individuals, we play a key role in driving the systemic changes that are needed. One thing that really comes through in your work is that the world is actually improving faster than we think, than most people think. And yet, for some of the reasons you've already mentioned, the public mood still feels pretty grim. But there is, however, a chart early in the book that shows that most people underestimate how much others care about climate action, even in the U.S. And, you know, I confess that I've probably said many times on this very show that most Americans don't care enough about this issue.

10:49And that's a massive political problem for people who do. But am I wrong about this? I mean, how much do people actually care about the climate according to the data that you've seen? Yeah, so there are a number of international surveys on this where they ask people about whether they believe in climate change. Is it human caused? Should governments take more action? Do they care about us taking action? And what's really clear is that in every country, the majority of people say yes to all of the above. So they think climate change is happening and they want governments and people to be too. Even here?

11:26US, there's a majority, right? You can also look at the polarization in that, right? So generally, more, a higher share of people on the left say yes relative to the right. And that's the case in most countries. In most countries, that partisan gap is much, much smaller than people imagine. In some countries, it's basically non-existent. In the US, the partisan gap is still large, right? But even on the right, a lot of people do care about climate change. And actually, if you ask Republicans, they also vastly underestimate how many other Republicans care about climate change. So it seems to be this kind of underlying secret that, you know, you don't talk about climate change, but you do actually care and worry a bit about climate change.

12:09So that tends to be the dynamic. You can then argue whether people care enough, right? And I think that's a very relative term, you know, what's your enough versus my enough. But they generally say they care about climate change and want to see more action on it. And I think that is not portrayed very clearly to the public. It's not portrayed very clearly to politicians or the media. The one kind of key caveat I would make to that is that, you know, saying you care about climate change does not necessarily mean you follow through really strongly with, you know, climate-friendly behaviours or climate-friendly purchases, right?

12:46So even if you say you care about climate change, you know, you might not be willing to spend a ton of money on, you know, a more climate-friendly alternative, for example. So what I always try to make really clearly there is that people are receptive to climate solutions and taking action. But what's really, really key is that the alternatives, they need to be available for people and they need to be cheap and affordable for them. They will generally not pay more for those solutions. And many people cannot pay more, actually, for the climate-friendly alternative. Well, that's a huge point, right?

13:20Getting people to stop doing things they like or stop doing things that they're accustomed to is hard. It's a hard sell. But if you can offer them substitutes for the things they like, instead of asking them to sacrifice, is this part of what makes you an optimist on this, at least politically, that maybe increasingly we do have the tools to create these cleaner substitutes? And that changes the politics of climate. Absolutely. So when I was looking at this 10 years ago, even when globally we signed the Paris Agreement, you know, these really ambitious climate goals, we were in the situation where the alternatives to fossil fuels for electricity, like solar and wind, were hugely more expensive than coal or gas.

14:05And to me at that time, it seemed totally implausible that the world was just going to pick these really expensive energy sources in order to solve climate change. What's happened over the last decade is that the cost of these substitutes have plummeted. Right. So solar has fallen by around 80 to 90 percent, wind by 70 percent, batteries, which is really key for building out electricity grids, but also really key for the transition in road transport to electric vehicles, has fallen by around 90 percent as well. and what's happened is that solar and wind have gone from being much more expensive which I didn't think people would choose to actually being the cheapest choice right so now your short-term incentives in terms of economics are now also matching up with these longer-term goals for climate and politically that's a much much easier sell than trying to tell everyone there's this problem that's coming down in the future but you could you should sacrifice stuff today in order to do that.

15:05And generally, I don't think that human psychology lends itself well to those long-term problems. But now this short-term economics are also matching up with the long-term climate ambitions that we have.

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18:18growth and climate action are not opposites maybe they were but they're not any longer um it seems like more of the the bottlenecks are almost emotional right like we have the means to grow differently just not enough of us believe it yet how much of a problem is this in your mind? I think in some countries, it's more of a problem than in others. I think the US is a good example where I think the US does very much still have this mindset that its growth has been based on fossil fuels and drill baby drill. And that's how it's became this economic superpower. and therefore, you know, going for, you know, the kind of tree-hugging green stuff would be a step backwards.

19:06And I think that's a very, very different psychology from how many other countries in the world are viewing this. So the contrast there is China, where China, I think, is now seeing fossil fuels and petrol cars as the technologies of the 20th century and it wants to build the technologies of the 21st century. And that is solar and wind and batteries and electric vehicles and basically electrification, right? So some countries like the US are stuck in this mindset where they see the kind of green transition as a step back and incompatible with growth because they are used to growth being powered by huge energy giants and fossil fuel use.

19:50And I think that's disconnected from reality. I can see that starting to shift slightly, but it's certainly shifting much slower in countries like the U.S. than elsewhere. Well, which is baddening, right? Because it's not like this is an alien concept, but I guess there's just a lot of headwinds for various reasons. the psychology of this is hard i mean what a lot of the data suggests is that often to i guess if you want to say win the psychological argument um some of the recommendations there are actually not to focus on the climate problem but instead to just focus on the kind of energy energy security innovation technology dimension of this which for many people seems progressive right you know moving forward, building new stuff, rather than focusing on the climate problem, which is focusing, I guess, on the negative, right?

20:47And especially in more sceptical audiences, as we said earlier, you know, the promoting the good stuff tends to work better than really restricting what we would frame as the bad stuff, like the fossil, basically banning fossil fuels. That messaging tends to not work very well for particular audiences. Also, it's kind of stupid, but in American politics, at least, the climate problem is just left-coded. It just is. And so, like everything else, it gets polarized and split along ideological lines in that way. It doesn't have to be like that. The political situation has shifted a lot in the last year.

21:27But if you were to look at the build-out of renewable power across the U.S. from historical data, the majority of this stuff was being built in red states. And it wasn't necessarily because they were really focused on getting to net zero or reducing their emissions. Often local air pollution would come up as a key problem. So a lot of people are more motivated by addressing local environmental problems than global climate change, but also the focus on energy independence for landowners in states along the wind belt. You know, it's just an additional source of income, right? So why not put up a wind farm and get some extra income, generate some clean energy, right?

22:14So framing it in that way in red states has actually been, and especially having a kind of legislative environment that allows you to build stuff relatively quickly without large bottlenecks has been really, really key. And red states have taken that on and built a ton of clean energy, regardless of the climate reasons for doing so. Yeah, isn't Texas deploying solar panels faster than California currently? I mean, that's wild. Yeah, Texas is going hard on solar power and batteries. And a bunch of other red states have been really forthcoming with wind. So they've built a lot of wind power. So actually the majority of the U.S.'s wind power is coming from red seats.

22:59That's wild. I mean, it's awesome. I mean, it sounds like the politics are sort of already changing. Maybe we just haven't caught up with it yet, or it's changing so quickly. It just takes some time for everyone to readjust. But it seems like the political argument is almost won here. It's just a question of how and where and how quickly. I think in the US there's a big difference between the national politics of this and the state level politics of this. Yeah, what do you mean? Often what's been effective is basically states having the capacity and the power to build what they want to build and set the kind of rules they would like.

23:39And that's kind of naturally resulted in lots of states building renewables. so if you I think if you went down to the state level lots of governors and legislators there were very happy to build out clean energy right but in the last year definitely the national level when it comes to politics I mean basically there's a ban on building new renewable energy products and they've been put really far down the list so I think there actually is a very clear disconnect there between what's now the national political take on building out clean energy and actually what at a state level many people would want to do?

24:20Well, on the international level, I mean, we have or we have had this problem of rich world hypocrisy. You have countries telling poor nations not to develop in ways that they did. Is that kind of hypocrisy still holding back the global energy transition? Or for all these technological reasons, is it just not the impediment it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago? I think, yeah, I think there has been this rich world hypocrisy where countries like the UK, where I'm from, we have basically built our prosperity on building energy system running on fossil fuels, right? I have the life I have today, which is a nice life, because my ancestors used fossil fuels to build infrastructure, to build up an economy.

25:12They burned a lot, right, to get us to where we are now. And they basically had free reign of that, where they could do that without any global climate agreements or without any countries telling them, oh, that'll put you over the carbon budget. You know, there was none of those constraints, right? So many of the world's richest countries got to do that without any limits or constraints. And now we're in the situation where many of the world's poorest countries basically want to do the same. They have large amounts of their population living in energy poverty. Naturally, they want to escape that.

25:47Naturally, they want to prosper. And there is this sense of, you know, but you can't use fossil fuels to do that. Of course you can't use fossil fuels. Now, you know, we have global climate change. and that hypocrisy is still very, very clear, because even if you were to argue countries like the UK or the US, historically we used fossil fuels and now we're transitioning, but if you compare the amount per person of fossil fuels we're still using, it's vastly, vastly, vastly more than the poorest countries in the world. So even if you look at the situation today, there's still a huge inequality in the amount of fossil fuels that different countries are using.

26:29But there has been this case where rich countries often, if there are loans or financial agreements for poor countries to build out energy systems, basically won't support anything that includes any fossil fuels at all in those agreements, which does, I think, highlight this hypocrisy. I think some of the dynamics of that are changing, where this deadlock is breaking. I think you're starting to see actually quite promising data where especially countries like Pakistan, for example, is a good example, or many countries across Africa, you've started to see in the last year or two quite large exports of solar panels from China to those countries.

27:18Actually, a quite rapid uptick, which is very promising and does, I think, give some opportunity for those countries to what we would make call leapfrog, where they basically develop an energy system that leapfrogs fossil fuels, you know, the energy sources that many other countries in the world use to develop and go straight to the cleaner sources. I really like that you point out that a lot of these developing countries might actually have a head start in the clean energy race, precisely because they are not locked in to the old, shitty, dirty infrastructure, right? Which it kind of flips the usual story about who's ahead and who's behind and what sort of growth could happen over the next, you know, few decades or so.

28:05Yeah, I think it will take some time for that to play out and see how the dynamics of the energy systems in those countries work. One of my concerns there, I think this is generally quite positive, you know, seeing solar panels being exported from China to these countries is very positive. I still have some concerns about the inequality of some of those dynamics where actually for those countries, you would like them to build a centralized grid system that makes it able to supply energy to industries, develop a large national economy, make sure that everyone has access to electricity and low cost electricity.