#743 - Hannah Ritchie - Why Does Everyone Believe The World Is Doomed?

26:09And one of the big ones there was the ozone layer. So kind of before climate change, the big environmental problem was the ozone layer and the growing ozone hole. And at the time, it was really politically controversial, a bit like climate changes today. They were kind of push back against scientists. There was really politically controversial. But we actually managed to solve it. Like we we brought in what's called the Monterey protocol. And we reduced the emissions of the gases that were destroying those only are by like more than 99 % so we've basically got rid of them and the ozone hole should just repair itself in the next few decades.

26:47There was another big problem of acid rain which when you burn coal you tend to produce what's called sulfur dioxide and that can dissolve in rain water and you can get acid rain. Again that was a big problem and we've been pretty successful in solving it especially across Europe and North America. And then there's the other problem of what we call local air pollution, which is like the pollution you'd find in your city, from like cars and burning fossil fuels and home heat and stuff. Now the story there is mixed, rich countries have gone through this process where as they tended to get richer air pollution increased.

27:26So if you think about London or Edinburgh where I am go back to the beginning to mid -20th century. These cities were so so polluted, like really unimaginable from what you would assume today. I mean there's stories of the great smog in London where you couldn't even see a few feet in front of you, like kind of shuffling, trying to find the curb by their feet. So these cities were incredibly polluted. And we've actually been really successful over the last 50 years or so and dramatically would just sign the amount of local wearplition, especially in rich countries. So a little bit of a different story in low and middle income countries.

28:03They're kind of going up that curve. The London or Edinburgh went through kind of 50 years to a century ago. An air pollution in general is a big killer in the world. So there are a range of estimates, but they're all in the range of millions of premature deaths per year. So it is a big, big problem. In some sense, today, in terms of a number of lives lost, it's arguably bigger than climate change, although that could change in the future. Wow. What do we do? How do you help pollution now? You can, I mean, the key one is stop burning fossil fuels. You can put kind of strict air pollution kind of standards on power plants.

28:51That was the big thing of acid rain. It's not that we necessarily just stopped burning coal, we managed to put what we called scrubbers on the power plant where it kind of took the sulfur out. So you didn't get the sulfur emissions. A big driver in rich countries has been just increased air quality standards for cars. So the amount of pollution spewing out the back of a car today is much, much less than it was in the past. And actually, a move to electric vehicles would decrease that even further. So even in rich countries, you know, the estimated deaths attributed to air pollution in the UK, for example, is still tens of thousands.

29:30So we know that we can still bring down that down further. And that would be by, for example, moving away from petrol and diesel cars. What about deforestation? Again, it's a bit of a story where countries tend to go through a transition where they would initially cut down forests for wood for energy, like before they have fossil fuels. But then the biggest driver of deforestation is just expanding farmland. That's by far the biggest driver of deforestation. You need more land to grow food, therefore you you cut down forests. Now the UK for example, we cut down our forests like a long time ago, like centuries and centuries ago.

30:09And actually there was really, really very little forest left. But then we stopped doing that and in many rich countries forests are regrowing. And most of the deforestation that's happening today is happening in the tropics and it's happening because we're again we're still expanding agricultural land. So deforestation rates today are still very very high but we think the global deforestation rates have fallen since around the 1980s but we still have a big challenge in our hands because deforestation rates are still high. What's the truth about the cycle between raising or rising CO2 levels with like re -greening and the increase in plant growth and tree growth, forest growth based on that increase in carbon.

30:58Yeah, there again is a little bit mixed on terms of like greening forests and natural habitat, not natural vegetation. It can't like see, actually see or to can increase re -growth to an extent. I think this is often also discussed in terms of agriculture. Like I was saying earlier that one of the big risks of agriculture is climate change. And it is true that to a certain extent more CO2 means can mean more higher yields and more crop growth. But it's about how much of that is outweighed by the detrimental impacts of drought of floods of temperatures. And for many crops, the increased temperatures will just outweigh the increased benefits of CO2.

31:42So even if you increase CO2 a bit, you would still see negative effects from the temperature of it. It's interesting that everything's so interlinked here that, for instance, deforestation is intrinsically linked with food and hunger and agriculture. So what progress has been made with food and hunger as well? So I mean food and hunger, again, global hunger rates have declined substantially over the last 50 years in particular. We've kind of plateaued and progressed there and actually in some regions that has started to Regress. So we have around 800 million people in the world when they're nearly one in ten just don't get enough Food to eat and that's the key challenge with with deforestation and these problems is that again there You have this tension between people just need more food and we need more agricultural land and there's Well -tabata and there's forest in the way So that's the big challenge.

32:39One of these big solutions to that is just to make agriculture much more productive. So if you can increase crop yields by, if you could triple crop yields, then you can produce the same amount of food on a fard of the land. So one of the big necessities there is to just increase crop yields and productivity. And I think in many regions there is still a lot of scope to do that. I think the other big link to deforestation there is like animal agriculture. So a lot of the deforestation of the Amazon, for example, is clearing land for pasture for cattle grazing for beef production. And by far that's the biggest driver of deforestation.

33:18And in general, beef is just a really inefficient way of using land to produce food. What is the, what are you talking about crop yields there? How much truth is gathering top soil degradation and the quality of what we're growing are plants out of? Yeah, so there's been lots of headlines about soil loss and this, we've only got, the world's only got 60 harvest left, headline that went viral and that headline is not true and no soil, soil scientists would back that up. Across the world you have a mixed,

33:58again, stable and they're doing fine. Some are actually growing, so the topsoil is growing. And then there are others that actually are degrading over time and as a serious worry, but we're not going to get to this single point where just the whole in 60 years the world's harvest just stop because of topsoil. There's just a really large variation in soils across the world when you could that's something else that I've seen talked about an awful lot, that the fifth great extension of the set, whichever one we're in, this is the beginning of the set, whatever, that one. Six great extension, we're in the middle of that, and we've lost more species in the last X number of years than in the whole bigger number of years before that.

34:49Yeah, I mean, the trends on biodiversity loss are not good. I think they're like the area where I'm most pessimistic. So yeah, there's been five previous mass extinctions on earth and there's a question of like, are we in the six mass extinction? Now, in order to qualify as like a mass extinction, you kind of have this threshold of, you need to lose like 75 to 80 % of species. And you need to do it on a, it's called a fast timescale, but it's like two million years. Like it's fast on geological timescales, but on human timescales, it's obviously not. Now, we're obviously very, very far away from losing that percentage of species, but what you can do is you can look at the rate of change and say, we know roughly how many species have gone extinct over the last few centuries, for example, or 500 years or a thousand years.

35:42And you can say, okay, what's the rate of extinction there? And then you can compare that to what was the rate of extinctions in the previous five mass extinctions. And actually what you find when you crunch those numbers is that we are actually losing species at a faster rate than we were in the five previous mass extinctions. Now if we just continued to lose species at that rate, then yet I would qualify as being in the sex mass extinction. My optimism there is that we won't just continue to lose species at that rate because we will hopefully address deforestation, we will hopefully curb climate change, we will hopefully be able to restore natural habitats.

36:20So this kind of, I mean, it's reasonably fair to say that, you know, the trends point towards a six -mass extinction, if we just continue as we are, but my hope is that we won't continue as we are. What is driving this loss in biodiversity? Was it coming from? I mean, it's often referred to as death by a thousand cuts. So there's no like single driver of biodiversity loss. It tends to be a mix. I mean, the biggest driver is is food production. So that's either like either over exploitation, which is just like direct hunting or direct overfishing or kind of logging of forests, or it's destruction of habitats for farming and agriculture.

37:01culture. And that can be either cutting down forests or moving into well grasslands, but it can also be losing insects because of the use of fertilizers or pesticides on agriculture land. That's a very tricky problem to solve because there's two camps on how you produce food and a biodiversity friendly way. One, you could just use lots of fertilizers, lots also pesticides get really productive land. You could use less land by doing that. So basically say we're going to accept that we're going to have lots of biodiversity loss on this smaller bit of land. Or you can go for another approach where say we're going to lose less biodiversity, but we're going to spread it over a larger area.

37:45And I think the kind of jury on that is still out on how you best manage that. Yeah, that's a difficult, a really difficult balance to strike. Have you got any idea what types of animals have contributed most to this biodiversity loss? Is it being segmented out? Is it being the fish? They're all falling off, but mammals are fine, or is it mostly insects and reptiles are fine? Have you got any idea? It's kind of mixed. The mammals are not doing well in particular. If you look over the course of human history, the big change has been what we call the downsizing of mammals. So we've tended to just lose the big mammals, so that should they're getting smaller and smaller over time.

38:29That's because we predominantly hunt larger animals and they tend to go extinct and they also take longer to reproduce. So smaller animals can kind of recover because they can reproduce really quickly, whereas larger animals take much longer. So we've tended to lose the largest mammals, birds are not doing particularly well, neither are amphibians. Insects, like the general trend there is not looking good. I think insects in general are just harder to count. It is very hard to get really long -term data on insects. You can count elephants pretty well and get goose historical records, but it is really hard to do for insects.

39:08I think insects are pretty on certain but I think they're definitely in decline. There are very few, very few good trends here in biodiversity. I was trying to find a silver lining in the biodiversity lost but it doesn't really seem to be there. I can give you one. Like in some regions like Europe for example, we lost a lot of mammals but we're actually bringing a lot of them back now. There's been lots of like restoration programs and you know the European bison is on its way back. So I think there is stuff that you can do and that is possible to restore a lot of these populations, but they overall trend is down.

39:47I had a conversation a couple of months ago with a guy who is bringing woolly mammoths back to life. Was it brand? No. No, it wasn't. I can't remember the name of the place. Colossus. Colossum. Colossus I think. is the name of the company. And yeah, they've sequenced it from a bunch of frozen bone, and I think maybe something else samples. And then they're going to use an Asian elephant, maybe, and they're going to implant, and then over time they will have this, and then maybe they can go up north, and they're good at compacting down the earth, and compacting down the earth changes the way that he hits it, and then they help with fertilizing and moving.

40:34So that's, and he also wanted to do, yeah, this really cool idea of wanting to bring back the dodo bird. And the reason he wanted to do that was as a symbolic gesture to remind people about biodiversity loss. So thinking basically explaining this huge process that you would have to go through and we'd have to do this, and we'd have to do this, and we'd have to do this, and then finally we would get something that looks like the dodo bird. I think there was one other type of tiger, maybe that you're thinking about doing it with. And then to basically use that as the tip of the spear to say, do you see all of this work that we've just had to do to try and bring this bird back to life, like just try not to kill it this time type thing?

41:15Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit the same story with forests where I think we often think about like planting trees and re -growing forests, whereas like the best thing we can do with forests is just like not to cut them down in the first place. And in some sense, it's the same about adversity where it would take a massive effort to be able to bring back a species or even restore a population. So the obvious best thing is not to push it to extinction in the first place. What about ocean plastics? I mean, whether microplastic, like we can Alex Jones our way into salads and the water all that we want, but Ocean Plastics, I'd heard this story about this island, the same size as Texas, that's somewhere and it's swirling around and then there was that guy that made the ocean scraper thing and he was doing really great work.

42:02But what's the story there with Ocean Plastics? Yeah, I mean, I can't solve the plastic problem. I think plastic is a really tricky one. It's like a really amazing, environmental material which I think is why it's, we produce so much of it, it's so hard to get off of it. But the simple problem of like plastics flowing into the ocean is a very, very like tractable one. We do have significant amount of plastics flowing into the ocean, like the latest estimates are like around 1 to 2 million tons a year. Now for a perspective that's about 0 .5 % of the plastic waste to be produced. So I think the notion that all of our plastics are flowing into the ocean is not correct.

42:48It's quite a small percentage, but in absolute terms, it's quite big. The key problem with plastic ocean plastics is not necessarily using plastics, it's like how they're managed. So if you can store plastics in landfills or the recycled or they're incinerated, then they don't leak out into the environment and they don't end up in the ocean, rivers or ocean. The problem is often that in many countries the waste management infrastructure is not there to deal with the amount of plastic that's there, such that it's often dumped or it's in an open landfill and blows into the ocean. Now, I mean, to some extent, that then is social listening is quite simple.

43:34And it's not sexy. It's just like, build landfills or build waste management structures. But like that doesn't tend to get a ton of investment because it's not like flashy. But there is also projects trying to do the opposite. One is, as you said, as a guy called Boy in Slat and he created the Ocean Cleanup Project where they are basically trying to scoop plastic out, that's already in the ocean and get it out. And I think they're doing a really good job. I mean, they haven't got all the plastic out yet, but they are being quite successful in getting some of it out. And then they've also generated a kind of separate project, which is trying to stop it going into the ocean in the first place.

44:14So a lot of this waste tends to come down through rivers. And what they've done, they've like modeled to try to work out like what are the biggest rivers that are contributing to the ocean plastics? Then they have what's called an interceptor where they basically try to stop the plastics going in at the end of the river before it reaches the ocean. So I think there are, I think he's done an amazing job and he's kind of came out of nowhere and decided, I mean, we're all just watching him say, oh, that's really bad that there's plastics in the ocean. And he's like, no, there doesn't have to be plastics in the ocean.

44:45And he's kind of tried to engineer a solution out of it. Have you got any idea which were the rivers that were contributing heavily? I mean, it's changed a lot. Our understanding has changed a lot over time. I mean, initially, there was estimates that most of it was coming from 20 rivers. Now, actually, that's quite good because then you only need 20 interceptors. But I think more recent studies have shown that it's coming from a thousand different rivers, which is a much trickier problem to tackle. Most of these rivers from the latest study from Boy and Slat and his colleagues tend to show that a lot of them tend to be in Asia or South America or Africa.

45:30They tend to be in middle income countries where people have got richer. They're now using much more plastic, but again, the waste management infrastructure hasn't managed to catch up. Rich enough to buy the things that are in the plastic, but not rich enough to be able to work out how to deal with it once you've used it. Right, is that it? What about overfishing?

45:54They are, again, there's a little bit of a split where overfishing is a tractable problem. It is a problem that you can manage. the key for that is being able to balance fish populations so that you know how much you can catch without massively reducing the population of the fish. You want to be in a state where for fishing you're fishing and the population is not decreasing. Now if you've overfished, so if you fish too much, that population will start to decrease and decrease and decrease. Actually, even from an economic perspective, that's only good in the short term, right? Because in the medium to long term, the amount of stuff that you can fish will just decline over time.

46:40So it's like a really short term benefit for a medium to long term detriment. Now, many regions fish populations are actually doing fine because we can do that quite well and we have policies in place and quotas on how much fishermen can catch. In other parts of the world, that's just not there. And you would expect often that the fish pop and populations they are declining. So the estimates that are around around a ferd of the world's fish populations are being overfished. Now there is a slightly different story to that where in the past you know our only way of having fish was to like catch wild fish.

47:22What we've seen over the last few decades is the rise of what we call acloculture which is fish farming. Now, a little bit like on land where we would normally just hunt animals, we then decided, you know, we'll grow animals, so we'll have livestock and we'll raise our own animals. That's kind of what fish farming is all about. We're rather than only catching wild fish, you basically farm your own fish. And actually, now fish farming produces more than wild fish. So most of the growth in global fish production over the last few decades has come from fish farming. has not come from catching wild fish.

47:58It seems to me like thinking about all of the stuff that we've spoken about today, this tragedy of the commons thing really just comes back to the fore that we are individual nations who are not always even coordinated internally but definitely not coordinated effectively externally between all of us and that by trying to improve the quality of the shared environment that requires different actors and agents to behave in different ways. And it can feel to some, like they're having the breaks pressed on them while other people are getting away on a free ride. You've got this free rider problem.

48:39How do you suggest that especially developed countries that are going to have to potentially go to their citizens and say, hey, your quality of life is going to stagnate or perhaps even get more difficult, more expensive, more whatever. Have you thought around necessarily from a public messaging standpoint, but just like culturally, how do you deliver this message to people? Because we're not, it's not in our nature to say, oh, like, sorry, the people in Chad or Zimbabwe or whatever needs to have better access to whatever. Don't worry people have Chad, like I've got you, that's just not in our nature and it's very difficult in an age of the internet and sort of quippy sound bites and TikTok length videos.

49:30It's way too nuanced and subtle to get across, but the alternative is to kind of use a more doomsday scenario which kind of just blanket coverages everything with fear and terror. And that also is not only not accurate, but doesn't necessarily have the desired outcome. So have you kind of conceived this, what a climate culture 3 .0 would look like? Yeah, I think part of this has come down to the fact that I think we've often not been very good on our messaging on this. I think coming from a, and I'm part of the environmental movement, I think often it's framed as a sacrifice, right? It's like, you have to sacrifice this in order to solve this problem.

50:12And I think again, again, I think in the past that might have been true. I think the only solution in the past would have been you just have to use less energy and you have to have less stuff when you have to, it's all about less, less, less, less. And I think we're moving to a stage with the development of many of these technologies where you can switch and it's not necessarily less and it's not necessarily a sacrifice, it's just better. Right? So there are technologies where you could actually just reduce energy bills, you could create employment opportunities. Like in many of these growing industries, like they are creating a job boom and they are creating employment opportunities, you could get lower energy bills.

50:51The cost of running your car would be lower on electricity. So I think there are a range of solutions there where it's not necessarily a massive sacrifice, it actually can just benefit in handslave. So I think we've done quite poorly on the messaging on that because it's all been about less, less, less sacrifice, sacrifice sacrifice. I think in terms of the role of rich countries and how they contribute to this dilemma and lower income countries is that, I think the responsibility of rich countries is they need to get their emissions down first and foremost, right? They've had high emissions, and the UK we've had have had high emissions for a really long time.

51:26We've managed to get to a stage where we're rich. We have really high living standards, and in some sense, I think it's just a responsibility to get our domestic emissions down. But having the role that they all, rich countries can also play, is that they can also be the drivers of innovation and deployment of these low -carbon technologies that we need. And these tend to follow what we would call a learning curve, where solar or batteries are, when, for example, the more you deploy them, the lower the price gets. So it's like a self -fulfilling trend where deploy more, prices fall, deploy more.

52:01So what that means is that by pushing these technologies and innovating on these technologies, we're basically drive down the cost for the rest of the world. So we can invest money, we can deploy them, we can make solar, batteries, electric vehicles really cheap, such that people in lower -income countries don't need to face that trade off anymore. They can develop, they can follow a pathway to a really high standard of living, but they won't follow the pathway that the UK or the US Followed because they won't have really high coal emissions. They won't necessarily drive a petrol or a diesel car So I mean, that's the big role that rich countries complain again.

52:40I don't I don't think it's necessarily this big Sacrifice that's often made out to be what about China? Obviously, it's often brought up in this discussion as a country that is quite developed, but also, you will probably know how much truth there is in it. They built more coal plants or whatever plants in the last, however many years than it's done and so forth. The point being that the free rider or free riders would be China. What's the truth about that? I don't think China is a free rider. I mean, it's true that they're in their produce. They're in the highest emitter and they produce a lot of coal.

53:19And they are still building coal plants. But I think the kind of paradox there is that they are actually just leading completely on low -carbon technologies. Like they're building solar and wind so fast, they are pushing really hard on electric vehicles. So the biggest electric car company now is not Tesla, but BYD, which is a Chinese company. They are dominating the supply chains for these minerals. They are seeing this as an economic opportunity. In some sense, they're going to start pushing a lot of Western manufacturers out of the market because they've been sleeping. I think that's the general trend of where that's going.

54:01China is deploying these technologies really quickly. As an example, last year, China produced or installed enough solar and wind to power the UK or France and they're adding that in one year. So they are building the stuff the quickly and to the extent where and we're really bad at predicting peak so I'm not going to put a definitive peak on it but some people have been talking about well of China's emissions could peak this year or next year just because they're building low carbon technology so quickly. So that's the paradox of China or that they are still producing lots of coal but they're also so really leading the way on low carbon technologies.

54:40Again, not necessarily because they really, really care about climate change. They're doing it for the economic opportunities, they're doing it for employment. There's an opportunity there, which to me in some sense is a positive, right? Because it's really hard, I would love everyone to be really passionate about climate change, but that's just not the reality. So you need to create other incentives for people to act. And the key point there is that people will just act because it's economic to do so. and you get the side benefit of yes, we reduce carbon emissions and we also reduce air pollution.

55:12So for me in some sense, that's also a positive. I mean, this seems to be the kind of like one of the laws of physics of climate change or of impacting it in an effective way, which is show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. You know, before Tesla came along, at least in the West, driving an electric car wasn't a state a symbol. So the incentive of I want to buy a vehicle that I look cool in and it gives me prestige and people think that I'm like trendy or whatever for driving it wasn't happening so much with a Prius. It was like a political statement to drive a Prius was a political statement.

55:53Whereas if you can make the thing that you want people to do, also the thing that they want to do, then you're swimming downstream. And yeah, totally. If this is the way that it is and if getting reliable energy from solar, from wind, from other stuff, I've heard a lot of criticism around the reliability of it, Germany's problem that they've had, where they've had to retrofit gas and then obviously they became super dependent on an area of the world that was dominated by a war for two years and then that meant that their prices were going up and that all the Germans are going to freeze in the winter and all this stuff.

56:27But presumably all of these are just, I would imagine teething problems that are only going to be made by one country and moving forward. It's like, ah, don't do a Germany. Like, if you ever make yourself into, you know, like one of those quotes, that's if you've memed yourself into an energy, energy strategy, that's probably a bad idea. But yeah, if we can get it to the stage where it's both more economically viable and also impact the environment in a positive That's a literally the best. If the people that we, and I know, I've been super critical of China, but I do sometimes find myself like leaning into the, they're almost like immoral.

57:08It's like an immoral country somehow and that they, because they're antagonistic or adversarial with the West, that they're doing things to try and completely disregarding the environment, that's not necessarily the case. like I need to kind of fact check mine, thought check myself when I do do that. But the point being that we presume China has more priorities than simply the climate. And yet if they've managed to build sufficient renewable energy to power the UK or France in the last year, you're okay. That if we can encourage them to do it, then countries that are part of the G20 or whatever other organization, it should be pretty easy.

57:49Yeah, I mean there's a range of examples. Like I, I in the book I give the example of like on a personal level like my brother, now my brother bought a Tesla and he didn't buy a Tesla because like you really, really cared about climate change. He just bought a Tesla because a Tesla was cool and it was a really nice car to drive. Like he sat on one and was like, this is the best thing I were. I'm going to get a Tesla and obviously massively caught his carbon footprint. But it wasn't necessarily because of climate. And again, another like clear example there is that like in the US there's obviously there is a very quite strong partisan divide on climate where like left are really pro climate policies and a lot of people on the right are less so.

58:29But then you look at what which states in the US are producing the most renewable power. And the top five states with the largest amount of wind and their energy sector are all Republican. And again, they're not doing that for climate. They're doing it just because landowners commit money, there's an economic opportunity, the community starts to get behind it. And actually, when you look at messaging around climate and these kind of contexts, the language you use is so important. So if you just talk about clean energy, many more people are behind it. On the left and the right, everyone loves clean energy.

59:09what they don't necessarily all like is talking about climate. And actually, you ruin the chances of the clean energy being deployed if you try to push the climate message too far. So I think really gearing the climate message to whoever you're talking to is so important. If you're talking to someone that's really into climate change, of course, talk about climate. But if you're talking to someone that's got a bit skeptical, but they're pretty in favor of clean energy, then you actually can actively push them away from it if you try to force the climate message too hard. Yeah, use the right language with the right audience.

59:39Very interesting. Let's bring this one home, Hannah. I really appreciate you for today Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the stuff that you do. Why should you send them? I have a newsletter called Sustainability by Numbers and I tried to break down all the stuff by numbers. I have a new book out called Not the End of the World where I discuss all of this and then I work at our or order data where you can find all of this data and research on how all of the stuff is changing. Oh yeah, thank you, Hannah. Thank you.