#21 - Hannah Ritchie - How We Can Become the First Truly Sustainable Generation

30:14There's a limit to how much light you actually need. And it's the same, for example, driving a car. If petrol costs go down, you might drive your car a little bit more, but there's a limit to how much you actually need to drive. So that rebound effect is rarely over 100%. You lose some of the efficiency gains, but you don't lose all of them. If you take the example of the International Energy Agency kind of maps out scenarios to 2050 of what it thinks the energy system will do. It has this kind of net zero scenario where they go through this transition where we try to massively reduce our carbon emissions.

30:55Now, baked into that model is people across the world are getting richer, the population is increasing, all of the stuff that is likely to happen. If you look at what happens in that scenario to road transport energy use, the number of global miles traveled doubles, right? So this is maybe this effect that you're describing, right? We get, people get richer, cars get more efficient. We double the amount of miles globally that we're driving. The amount of energy used in the road transport still halves, right? You might not get the 4x decline, but you get a half in because of these efficiency gains.

31:33Actually, yeah. So that brings us to the topic of climate change because Elon Musk recently tweeted, the only action needed to solve climate change is a carbon tax. And my instinct was like, oh, that can't be sufficient. But actually, if we think through what you've sort of suggested, that would be the way of, if it was some kind of progressive tax, whereby you're not, if you could like scale it so that the people who are producing the most carbon pay proportionally a lot more than, you know, basically make it not linear. I could see that being a way that would basically create the sufficient incentive structures to reduce the worst offenders without also harming the poorest people who need to basically, you know, to lift themselves out of poverty.

32:31Would you agree with his statement? probably not 100 % I mean I think carbon tax is one of the strongest levers we have I mean the problem with climate change is fundamentally that the cost that we pay for energy and fossil fuels is just not reflective of the true cost it doesn't take into account the externalities which are environmental and social and the point of a carbon tax is that you would start to fully integrate the cost of burning fossil fuels into the price that you pay on the market. And the aim there is that you basically try to rebalance it so you're more economically incentivized to go for the low carbon stuff than you are the high carbon stuff.

33:15I think implementing that would be a really strong political challenge. And I think how you do it in a way that doesn't penalize those at the lowest incomes would be really fundamental. You need to do really strong redistribution, redistributing the gains from high carbon emitters down to low carbon emitters so that they can still afford energy and increase living standards. I mean, a carbon tax would definitely work. I think just the political nature of it would be very difficult. So what do you think the most promising solutions to climate change should be then, if a tax is actually just never going to politically happen?

34:03I mean, some countries do have some carbon taxes on some sectors and there's carbon trading schemes. So it's not like completely unfeasible. It's just like setting a very high carbon prices is difficult and doing it like an economy wide, like international scale is difficult. I mean, it fundamentally comes back down to the price differential between fossil fuels and the low carbon energy sources that you want, right? So if you're not going to implement a carbon tax and make them more expensive, your low carbon sources need to be much cheaper. I think what's really positive about these low carbon technologies is they have got a lot cheaper, right?

34:44Over the last decade in particular, like the costs have just plummeted. that you're talking about a 90 plus percent reduction in solar, like 70 plus in wind, 90 plus in batteries, such that the economics of these solutions are just fundamentally different from a decade ago. I was sitting a decade ago thinking, how on earth will we ever tackle this? Because our low carbon technologies are just way more expensive than fossil fuels and people will never pay for them. We're in a completely different position today where they're at least competitive with fossil fuels and in many cases cheaper than fossil fuels.

35:19So I think ultimately, based on the pure economics, the energy transition will happen, and it could happen on its own. I think where policy comes in, where we need to shift the needle, is the speed. We don't have a century for these market forces to play out and for us to finally get there. It's how do we use policy and other levers to accelerate that process so that we manage to do it in decades. Right. Right. Until the last year, I was fairly chill on climate change, just because, as you say, it's like the market forces are moving so much in the right direction that it seems like it will be inevitability that we will switch over.

36:01And yes, we will have some warming, but its downsides are going to be likely capped. However, I don't know whether it's just the Twitter algorithm has figured out how to wind my brain up the most or something. But in my feed regularly are some climate scientists who are posting images or graphs of the latest ocean temperatures over the last year. And it seems like they're going absolutely crazy. I mean, even like four, five, even six standard deviations right now, the current ocean temperatures are above, I think, the 1982 to 2011 mean? That seems absolutely terrifying. How concerned are you about those?

36:43Like, are we seeing something that was outside of our predicted models? Yeah, I mean, I'm always concerned. And I think over the last year, yeah, I'd say, yeah, I've become like even more concerned. I think it's important to look at the drivers of the change over the last year. Last year was a very anomalous year in terms of temperature. I mean, nearly every year, it's the warmest year on record. So that's not surprising. But the size of the anomaly was quite surprising. Now, if you look at the projected models, there is a range, and you get variability year to year. So you never expect a completely straight line.

37:28Last year just snuck in the model. So it is within the kind of model range, but it's very much on the line. I think there are a couple of potential drivers last year. I mean, the fundamental driver is always the baseline as to human-caused climate change, but you do get fluctuations year to year for various reasons. The really fundamental one last year was the transition to what we call the El Nino. So there are kind of natural climate patterns called the Enso, which flips from a kind of cool Lenina phase into a warm El Nino phase. So in an El Nino years, we tend to get warmer temperatures. Last year was quite anomalous because we had what we called a triple dip La Nina event.

38:17So like the cooling phase, we had three years in a row where it was in that La Nina phase, which means you basically get lots of heat being stored in the surface of the ocean. And then what we had was a very, very sudden flip into the El Nino phase. So that heat then comes pouring out pretty quickly. You normally have, between a La Nina and an El Nino, you usually have what we call a neutral year or at least some neutral months, which kind of mitigates a bit of the sudden outpouring of the heat from the ocean. We didn't have that last year, which is why you saw a very, very fast increase in the anomaly of the temperature.

38:56There are other hypotheses that I think still need to be tested. like there was an underwater volcano. I think probably the impacts of that were quite small. There's like the impacts of like sulfur, reduction of sulfur dioxide emissions. I was going to ask about that. Yeah, because it was 2019 or 20 that this new law kicked in that basically reduced the number of sulfur particles that shipping released, right? They changed the fuel source of ships and that might have inadvertently created that sulfur was essentially creating, was it a reflective layer in the atmosphere preventing heat from being absorbed?

39:39And now we've actually removed that, so we've unintentionally worsened. But while we were trying to reduce acid rain, we worsened climate change. Is that correct? Yeah, so there's what we call the aerosol effect. So aerosols tend to reflect more sunlight, So they actually reduce warming a bit. So we've had this kind of balance of we've got climate change and we've had when we burn coal, another fossil fuel, we tend to get sulfur dioxide, which is an aerosol, and it has this reflective impact. So what we've had is this balance of we've had warming and some of that has been dampened by the fact that we've got the sulfur dioxide.

40:20Now, it wasn't just like since 2019. Like for decades, we've been reducing sulfur dioxide emissions because it causes acid rain and it's bad for human health. It has had the inadvertent impact that you take away that kind of masking of some of the warming. Now, we know this and scientists know this and it's baked into their models. But there was also this fundamental shift in 2019 or 2020 where the shipping regulations were changed and you saw quite a stark reduction in sulfur dioxide from that source. there's still lots of debate of we think that it could have quite a significant impact on that local area of warren but from the studies that i've seen the impact on global globally on temperatures seems to be quite small and like wouldn't in any way you know um make up that massive anomaly that we saw last year so i think that's i mean that's still a very like highly debated area so i think there's a couple of potential hypotheses about why last year was so anomalous.

41:24I think the next few years will be interesting. And I say that in a quite worried way, but I think it will take a few years for us to see now how temperatures evolve, whether it does cool back down, which we would expect it to after this El Nino event, and trying to work out what those contributions of those different drivers were. How concerned are you about potential feedback loops being kicked off because of this sudden extreme jump in warming? I mean, some feedback loops are already in action, like albedo type ones are already in action. They're just not a massive driver compared to our emissions of greenhouse gases.

42:04So they're fairly minimal at the moment. I mean, there are a couple of feedback loops and tipping points that we know they're there. We just don't know where in the climate system they are. We might have some idea. These are ones between 1.5 and 2 degrees. Some of the bigger ones we expect are probably beyond 2 degrees. So there's always the risk that we do tip some of these. I think there's a bit of nuance to that, that many of the ones that we think are near term, while they would increase temperatures somewhat, it wouldn't lead to this runaway warming where we go from 1.5 degrees to 5 degrees within a few decades.

42:45like some of the kind of feedback looks or tipping points we're looking at like the disappearance of arctic sea ice for example which would have really devastating like local ecosystem impacts and impacts on local communities but we think that you know the arctic being ice free in the summer would like increase warming by like 0.1 0.15 degrees celsius right so you go from like 0.6 to 0.7 okay now you could have several of these between 1.5 and 2 degrees and you could end up with like an increase of 0.3 or 0.4 degrees which is like really pretty bad um so but there's a bit of nuance there that you know that's probably what we're talking about rather than we get this runaway warming to five degrees within a decade phew okay i'm very glad to hear that Because again, looking into this, it made me wonder about, because right now our current sort of mitigation solutions are obviously reducing emissions, transitioning to cleaner energy.

43:45But there are also more active solutions such as direct carbon capture. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on the different methods that are being, what you think, which methods have most promise there. but then also beyond that you have the slightly more I guess extreme geoengineering potential solutions such as like managing actual solar radiation by for example putting some kind of non or at least net reflecting aerosol into the atmosphere you could even like really more extreme stuff do something in space whether it's some kind of like semi-transparent shade and so on so But I'm curious what your current thoughts are on the most promising developments in terms of solution technologies.

44:36So I think my first and foremost is let's decarbonize the economy as quickly as we can and as massively as we can. I think when we're talking about any of the other solutions, they're like second to that. And the fundamental, and they shouldn't in any way take away from the need to do that. I think people always talk about this kind of moral hazard. I think I'm not that convinced by the moral hazard argument of some of these other technologies. But I think there is the small risk that we just look at that and we forget about the decarbonization part and that should be our fundamental driver. Not just to tackle climate change, which is obviously fundamental, but for the other benefits that come with it, like reduced air pollution, the energy security, more stable energy systems, etc.

45:24But I think I try to also be realistic that we could need some of those other solutions. Like carbon, I think often carbon capture is often like chucked in with carbon removal and they're actually quite fundamentally different. Like the way I see carbon capture is like more of like a point source technology where you're like capturing it from a power plant. Right, before it goes into the atmosphere as opposed to sucking it back out. Exactly. I mean that could actually be a massive solution and actually we could actually fundamentally do that if we wanted to I think just the incentives are not there like if you look at fossil fuel profits if they invested that in carbon capture and storage they could be capturing a lot of that carbon I think it's just quite unrealistic to expect that that's ever going to happen so I kind of see that as a I'm just going to have to go around that rather than trying to force that solution.

46:28But I think carbon removal, if you look at any of the scenarios we look at out to 2050 or any of the kind of net zero scenarios, there is a chunk of them there that's carbon removal, which is basically sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. And this is primarily because there are some sectors for which we think we don't really have the decarbonization technology yet. plastics or aviation is possibly one where we don't know if we'll have that tech by 2050. And therefore, if you wanted to reach net zero, you would still have some residual emissions and you would need to offset that with removal, carbon removal.

47:10I think we will need some of that. And I think we should be investing some money in trying to make sure that that technology is there. I mean, when we're talking about the quantities that we can currently remove today, I think it's absolutely tiny. It's basically a non-solution right now, but I think we should be investing some in it to get there. But I should be clear that the carbon reductions were needed. We're still talking about 80%, 90 % from where we are today. It's just looking at how do we get that last 10%. And then geoengineering, that's another kettle of fish. I think there are massive risks to geoengineering.

47:53I think the risks are that we don't know. We don't know what the impacts actually would be to many of these technologies. I mean, the issue there or the concern there is that you play havoc with rainfall patterns and different weather patterns across the world. And actually, once you start doing that, it's really difficult to not do that without calling what we have like a termination shock. And I think that could be really fundamental. I think there's often, there will also be a kind of weird attribution issue there where we know that we are causing damage on other countries across the world over carbon emissions today, but we're often not given the receipts for it.

48:39There's often not the you're to blame for this. I think with many of the geoengineering techniques, it will just be more obvious, we've done this, this has been the impact on this country immediately as a result, therefore that's that direct attribution. So I think that's also a geopolitical danger. I would still be putting some funds into doing this, fundamentally to understand what the risks are. If there is at some point where we're like, this is just like we need to do something we we really don't want to roll the dice in the climate system we we need to do something and we'll choose to do this and i think the final reason why i'd be interested in funding some more research into it is that i think there's the geopolitical risk that at some point a country will just decide we've had enough and we'll just do it ourselves right like you can actually do this stuff pretty cheaply and i think the threshold that different countries would have for wanting to stop warming are very, very different.

49:43So you might get the case where just a country that's just a very high risk of climate. You know, there's a climate disaster. They can see it. Bangladesh. We've had enough of this. Summer flooded, yeah. We're going to do it, yeah. And I think the risk there is that we don't know what that global impact would be. So I'd rather we had like a little bit of an insight into what that climate system afterwards would look like. Pivoting more to solutions more generally for, because, I mean, there's so many different categories of environmental issues, right? You've got, obviously, the climate change issue and then the wider atmospheric pollution, but you've also got more land-based environmental issues like deforestation, microplastics in the ocean.

50:24What else we got? There's so many of them. Biodiversity loss. Is there one particular intervention or change in the way we do human, basically, that would solve a lot of these issues at once. What's the most low-hanging fruit out there? I mean, I think away from climate change, when you're talking about most of those other problems, probably not plastic, like the lowest hanging fruit is like eating less meat. Why? Basically, all of the environmental problems except climate and maybe air pollution and plastics. when you're talking about water use, land use, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water pollution, you're talking about food systems.

51:13And when you're trying to break down the impact of different foods within the food systems, meat is always much higher impact than plant-based foods. So moving from a more meat-dominant diet to a more plant-based diet would tackle five or six massive environmental problems at the one time. So, I mean, this comes back kind of to this tension between letting technology solve problems and requiring us to actually have behavior change. And again, I mean, when it comes to the topic of changing people's diets, asking people to eat less meat, that just doesn't seem likely to happen, or at least not likely to happen without immense and understandable pushback from people.

51:58because you're essentially changing any kind of sort of top-down centralized solution would be, by definition, incredibly draconian. So how do we manage that tension? So for example, that's why I interviewed in a recent episode, Uma Valeti of Upside Foods, which is trying to provide a kind of win-win solution to this tension. It's like people don't want to stop eating meat. People want that protein. They want real animal protein. But at the same time, if we keep, if current trends continue, where more and more people demand a sort of a US level access to meat, particularly beef and so on, it's going to be utterly unsustainable for the climate.

52:44And so doing cultivated meat, lab grown meat essentially, is one way of like balancing that equation. Is there another, because even that, like I was, I tweeted it yesterday, the, that, that documentary and people are still like, I'm not eating that, like that frankenfood stuff. Is, is there another way that is win-win that gives people, you know, like, is it possible to achieve that through more sustainable farming practices? I guess is my question. uh no okay i mean what's very clear is that if everyone in the world was to eat the average diet of an american like we just physically wouldn't have enough land like even if you caught down all of the forest use all the grassland like we would not have enough land for people to have the diet of the average person in the u.s um so dietary change at a global level is just like completely fundamental but i also get this tension and i should like say that i think i'm more pessimistic on this than i am on energy because i think behavior change on food is like so hard it's like such a core part of people's identity it relates to their health like people do not want to be told what to eat and i think that's going to be the real political challenge here i think previously i was probably a little bit naive and would think that if we just had like some good meat substitutes, people would see that they're pretty good and pretty tasty and they'd switch.

54:13And we're just not seeing that. You're maybe seeing some shift at the margins. But you're just seeing nowhere near the scale or the speed of change that you would need. Therefore, I'm very much now in the camp of I actually just think we'll need to produce meat without the cow or without the chicken, which very much leans towards like cultivated meat. You could argue that massive gains and the quality and reductions in price and the non-cultured meat substitutes may get you a bit of the way there, but I don't see it getting us all the way there. So I think that's fundamentally where we need to get to.

54:53There's the obvious question of what do we do in the meantime? Because that process will take some time. And I think, sure, there's the role there for trying to optimize for the most efficient and least environmentally damaging farming there. I think it would be naive of me to say we should only focus on moving people away from meat and not do anything on trying to reduce the environmental impact of the meat that we do have. There are lots of potential there. There are really large differences in the efficiency of meat production across the world and the environmental impacts. So there's definitely room for us, that being part of the equation, to get us there.

55:31But I think the end point needs to still be a significant reduction in global meat demand. One of the things you mentioned in your book is that you think one of the most overlooked environmental problems, or at least an area of maximum potential for improvement, is increasing sub-Saharan food production, specifically crop yields. Can you explain why you think that has so much promise? Yeah, so one of the massive gains that we've seen over the last 50 years or so has been just a dramatic increase in crop yields across the world. So when you were looking back in the 1970s or 1980s, you know, the polar ehrlich, the author of the population bomb, it was around the time we know there was just like, really wide concerns that we're going to have widespread famine, like population growth was out of control, we just wouldn't be able to feed everyone.

56:28Today, we have more food production per person than we had back then, and we've seen massive population growth. And that's really thanks to massive gains in crop yields. We can produce two, three, four times as much food on the same amount of land as we could 50 years ago. The fundamental problem there is that we've seen massive gains across North America, South America, Europe, Asia. Yields in Africa have increased a bit. It's not that they haven't made any progress, but they're way, way behind and haven't increased the rate of other regions. So you're talking about yields in sub-Saharan Africa for cereal crops being at least half of the global average.

57:11And you're talking about five times less than many countries or more. Why is that? Is it the soil? Is it just poorly implemented techniques? So some might argue it's just like a biophysical limit and you just can't grow stuff as well in African soils. Like we have a metric which we call attainable yields. Now researchers calculate attainable yields, which is basically the yields you could get with the best current practices and tech that we have available today. Now, the attainable yields for Africa are much higher than the actual yields. So that theory seems to be incorrect. There's not this biophysical limit that they can't go any higher.

57:56A lot of it relates to just fundamental agricultural inputs. So having access to good seeds that grow well, having access to fertilizers, having access to irrigation, like access to water and rain-fed water is really key across sub-Saharan Africa, and many farmers just don't have irrigation to do that. So it's mostly these kind of technological inputs that are holding yields back. And if we look into the future, like that's the region that we're going to see the most population growth in. Now, there's several issues they are compounding. There's like one is the environmental impact of not increasing yields, right?

58:34So Southern Africa will need to produce more food, right? If it doesn't increase yields, it has to use more and more land. Now, that more and more land is going to come from forests. It's going to come from wild grasslands, wild habitats. So you get biodiversity loss and deforestation from an environmental perspective. But there's also a fundamental human lens where Sub-Saharan Africa is a region with still very high extreme poverty rates. Most people there still work in agriculture. So the majority of the population are still working in agriculture and they earn very, very little. If you do not increase agricultural productivity there, people will be stuck in poverty.

59:16Most of the population will be stuck in poverty. So there's the fundamental environmental lens of why increasing crop yield is good. But there's also the fundamental issue of poverty, food access, and other socioeconomic gains. I think both of those, for me, make this, to me, one of the biggest problems we face over the next 50 years. So I'd love to pivot more to solutions and specifically some past success stories. Because it sounds to me like with all of these, well, at least the majority of these environmental problems, the main driver of them is, well, I mean, most people will be familiar with this concept, this moloch process.

59:59I call it the moloch trap, where basically the short-term incentives, you've got lots and lots of different people sort of competing for some kind of scarce resource, whether it's money, land use, some kind of resource that they can, you know, forests they can cut down and turn into money. because everyone's competing over this and the incentives are pushing them to do that action it creates these type of tragedy of the commons type scenarios and part of the purpose of this podcast is to find ways that we can escape Moloch's trap so I'd love to hear what you think are examples where we have successfully escaped these coordination dilemmas with the environment I mean I should say that it sounds like every environmental problem is basically a mullet trap, right?

1:00:47It's hard to actually think of an example that doesn't fit into that category it's just tragedy of the commons and I think the challenge of environmental problems is often the short term incentives don't line up with the long term incentives so you're incentivized to degrade the environment in the short term but often it obviously has long term consequences I think there are some success stories. I think the most obvious one, which was a fundamental coordination problem, was the ozone layer, where we were emitting chlorofluorocarbons and they were destroying the ozone layer and we had a massive ozone hole.

1:01:29Now, that was an international problem. That was not a local environmental problem, which means that you had to have global coordination to do so. In some sense, there was really no incentive for a single country to say, okay, we'll switch if the rest of the world wasn't also switching. But that is actually a problem that we solved in the end. We formed the Montreal Protocol. All countries got on board with the Montreal Protocol, and we've reduced the emissions of chlorofluorocarbons by more than 99%. So there's still an ozone hole there, and it will take decades to recover. but really there's nothing more that we can do.

1:02:11We've basically stopped emitting the gases that deplete it and we basically now just need to wait for it to recover. But that was very much this kind of mullet trap where there was no single incentive for a country to move, but we had to find this global coordination to do so. So what were the secret ingredients that made this happen? Because again, as you say, there wasn't a real obvious short-term incentive. So was it just that there was a small number of countries that were causing the problem and thus the coordination was easier? Was there something else? I mean, similar to like greenhouse gas mentioned today, there was obviously massive inequalities in the amount of these gases that countries were emitting.

1:02:53So like richer countries were emitting the most and poor countries were contributing very little. I think there was like a couple of really crucial ingredients. I think one was public pressure. so I mean the story was actually very similar to climate change in many ways where initially scientists were like raising the alarm on this and they were getting shut down and DuPont who was producing CFCs was saying this is nonsense especially the American government were saying this is nonsense and they were ignored for a long time and a really crucial turning point was the first image we got of the ozone hole and it was published in the New York Times and everyone went oh my god it's actually happening and then that's kind of kick-started this public pressure of okay we need to do something about this but there was another kind of overlap that ended up working really well which was this interplay between like industry action and then governmental action the story at the time was that DuPont like basically had a monopoly on producing chlorofluorocarbons.

1:04:01Their patent was about to run out, so they were at risk of losing their monopoly on CFCs. They could quite easily work with the US government to say, you know that now this is a problem and you're under pressure to tackle this, we can produce an alternative to this, but you kind of need to set up this political framework that helps us to do so. They then could produce what we call HFCs, which is basically a replacement for chloroferocarbons, but without the downsides of depleting the ozone layer. And then they had a monopoly on that. So there was this, like, very much this interplay of it was in DuPont's favor and industry's favor for this switch to happen, and that could coincide with political action which was spurred on by public pressure.

1:04:51Yeah, so once again, you need to have... the people who are causing the problems in the first place, you need to offer them some kind of positive financial incentive incentive. or at least lubricate the way for them so that it's very easy for them to switch. Yeah, like that seems like a sort of consistent theme throughout this is that you have these companies that will almost stick their head in the sand or even put out, you know, like how Exxon, there's evidence that they knew. that burning oil was causing climate change, and yet they did this whole campaign to completely discredit climate science.

1:05:38And it was a very successful campaign that probably stalled a lot of the interventions that we're now doing by a number of decades. What is the solution to that? Is it more, because I mean, arguably, we're in the day and age of boycotts in ways that we never were before. We have the internet that enables people to coordinate and create these big campaigns. So is boycott, should we be leaning more into this idea of public shaming of big corporations when they do, like Volkswagen? The fact that no one went to jail over the Volkswagen emissions testing scandal is astonishing to me. Because I mean, that is like a humanity level crime that they did.

1:06:23Same with 3M and the PFAs. I'm not actually that. But, yeah, are you familiar with the PFA 3M scandal? No. Oh, you're not? Okay. So how I understand it is it was known that PFAs, these forever chemicals, were likely to be, basically are impossible to break down. And yet there's growing evidence that they, again, sort of like pushed this issue aside, said that it's fine. and now these chemicals are found everywhere. They're even found in Antarctica, they're in our bodies. We don't really know what the long-term health effects are of them, but it's likely not positive. It's either neutral to negative, maybe very negative.

1:07:11And there seems to be this huge gap in terms of actual criminal repercussions to these companies when they knowingly are either greenwashed or cheated. So do you think there's potential? Should we be leaning more into this idea of boycotting and public pressure against these? Or does it all just need to come through a positive incentive? I mean, I think you're seeing an interesting trend now of like climate litigation is becoming a thing and it wasn't a thing in the past and actually becoming more successful. So I think there are more successful routes to that. I think the challenge with boycotts is that you do need an alternative to be in its place, right?

1:08:00The fundamental problem that we have is that if you have a petrol car and you need that petrol car, how can you boycott the whole company? It's very hard for individuals to do that. The only way they can fundamentally do that is if there is a better alternative there. So I think, yes, there is room for this negative pressure, but it can't be in a vacuum, right? It needs to be alongside the building of solutions that people can then move to and have the option to move to. It's interesting as well, you mentioned a key, sounds like a key part of the ozone layer success or at least banning CFCs and switching to a non-ozone destroying alternative was this image that was on the front page of New York Times.

1:08:49So having some kind of very clear, salient thing that people can go, oh, wow, this is actually a real problem. Because coming back to this topic of food, which sounds like one of these problems that we really don't have a clear solution to right now. And it's a growing problem with meat consumption. So is there some kind of image that could have the same effect of making the public wake up? because right now people just have their heads in the sand. They think that there's no issue. The marketing companies just show a picture of a cow in pasture when the reality is actually there's just reams of slurry going into rivers and a massive amount of environmental degradation.

1:09:35So what would be the equivalent of the ozone hole layer maybe for food? I think the fundamental challenge with food is that most of us now are so far away from it. right like in the past like most of us were living on farms and actually growing the food ourselves and you know most of us now don't and like you'd be lucky to actually go to a farm or see a farm um i mean i think i'm more coming from the environmental lens but i'm sure the kind of animal welfare lens would say like if you want to eat meat you go into the slaughterhouse and you see what's happening there or you actually kill an animal um i think for for many people that would be the kind of like visceral like oh god this is how this system works and we just don't see that like we kind of know peripherally okay i'm sure that's how this meat ended up on my plate but there's like no like tangible connection that we actually see or feel so i think like it would be more of the experiential like actually going into a slaughterhouse and seeing the conditions that the animals live in um and also seeing how they're they're physically slaughtered like i think if you I think if like a test for people eating meat was like can you actually kill the animal you know meat consumption would go down a lot.

1:10:48On the topic of deforestation one of the key focuses people talk about in terms of reducing the rainforest being cut down is palm oil and how it's a huge problem but in the book you you actually discuss how that's yet another one of these sort of confused, a topic that people are confused on and that actually palm oil might be our best current solution in terms of if we boycotted all palm oil, it might actually make deforestation worse. Can you explain that? Yeah, it's kind of a counterintuitive finding. And I should say that in the past, I was very much in the like, palm oil's really bad. Let's just boycott it.

1:11:31That's the solution here. I mean, without downplaying the negative environmental impacts that palm oil has had. I think that's too simplistic an image of this. To fundamentally start, palm oil has caused large amounts of deforestation and large amounts of environmental impacts. There's no disputing that, especially in Indonesia and Malaysia, where most palm oil was grown. It has led to tropical deforestation and the destruction of really biodiverse habitats. The question you have to ask there, though, is if we weren't producing that vegetable oil from palm oil, what would the alternative be? And would the alternative scenario there be better?

1:12:12Now, what's possibly fantastic, but also the downfall of palm oil, is that it's a really, really productive crop. You get really, really high yields per hectare. Now, if you compare it to other vegetable oil crops, you're talking about the extent of five to 10 times more oil per hectare than some of the other crops, especially some of the other tropical crops. Now, what that fundamentally means is if you were to boycott palm oil and the amount of vegetable oil demand stayed the same, you would have to replace that with something else. And if you were replacing it with any of the other oils, you would need to use a lot more land to produce the same amount.

1:12:53Depending on where you produce that and what crop you select, that could lead to more deforestation and more environmental damage than we're currently seeing for palm oil. So I think this approach of just completely boycott palm oil, we'll just produce it from something else, I think is too simplistic. I think really the message there is if palm oil is a really productive crop and in some sense a land-sparing crop, the fundamental problem is that can we produce palm oil in a way that doesn't lead to more deforestation while we also harness the benefits of its productivity? So that leads you more towards solutions like There's the RSPO, which is the Roundtable of Responsible Production, or something like what the acronym is.

1:13:38But it's more focused on, can you get palm oil producers certified to make sure this hasn't been grown on deforested land, it's not causing more deforestation and destruction. And for me, that's probably a more effective approach than just boycotting it and saying we won't use any of it anymore. Yeah, so it sounds like... In many of these cases, we do need bottom-up incentive drivers coming from the population driving political will. Ultimately, we need more, at least a certain degree of smarter, top-down regulatory solutions. Are there any cases where regulation is a clear non-starter? Because I'm currently in the weeds, in the trenches on Twitter of talking about the AI safety problem, right?

1:14:42And this is one where there's a lot of people saying that regulation is basically always harmful because it gets co-opted, it creates regulatory capture, it opens up the risk for tyranny and so on. And I imagine that maps quite well onto some of the pushback for the environmental movement as well. Because it feels like, in many ways, a lot of these culture wars we see is ultimately, if you boil it down, it's between people who want to, who think that the solution to these problems is to decentralize power, reduced amount of top-down control, and people who believe that the only solution are top-down.

1:15:23We need more sort of centralized governance and top-down control. So I'm curious whether there are any instances within the environmental movement, and I suspect that with environmental cases, because they're tragedy of the commons, top-down coordination is like some kind of incentive structures that enable us to coordinate, which usually come from on high, are the better solution. So are there any cases where that's not the case, clearly? I think it depends on whether you want an optimal solution or a solution that might be realistic and get you some of the way there. I think you can even look at the history of global climate agreements, and you can see this very, very clearly.

1:16:05We used to be in a process where it was top-down. So the way that these climate negotiations used to work was that rich countries, which are totally valid countries, historically have emitted the most and were the biggest emitters, the responsibility was on them to reduce emissions, quite rightly. But you ended up with a framework that was top-down and would basically impose this on rich countries. And other countries actually didn't have any really obligation to try to reduce emissions or have any targets in place. And this top-down approach really didn't work. What was so, I think, pivotal about the transition to the Paris Agreement is that it was bottom-up, right?

1:16:49There wasn't this top-down target of, like, globally, we will say what countries have to do. It was this bottom-up approach of, like, countries have to come to the table and say, this is what we're willing to do. Now, I think that's actually really crucial in getting a global agreement, right? I don't think China or India or many other countries would have accepted this top-down approach of globally, but also rich countries saying, this is what we expect of you, you have to do this, even though we have fundamentally caused the problem historically. That just wouldn't have worked. But the bottom-up approach did work.

1:17:22There are some downsides to that in that we might have got an agreement, but the position we're in today is that the targets are too loose.

1:17:35Now, what was agreed with the Paris Agreement is this, what we call, ratcheting up approach, where we knew that the initial commitments on the table were too weak and governments were supposed to ratchet them up over time and make them more and more ambitious. So we eventually got to the stage where they were actually in line with what we need to do for carbon and climate targets. We're currently falling short of that because governments aren't bringing strong enough policies to the table yet. So there's two edges to that sword. One is that the bottom-up approach actually allowed us to get an agreement and allowed people to get around the table.

1:18:14The downside is that with a bottom-up approach, approach. It doesn't necessarily lead you to the optimal outcome, which you would say if you had a top-down global level, if you just told everyone you have to do this and they achieved it, you could get to that final number that you needed in 2050. But that's not how it pans out from the bottom-up approach. Fivoting back to our world in data, what's the most surprising fact you've personally found while you were working as a data scientist? Oh, that's a good question. We have a lot of statistics on the site across a really broad range of topics.

1:18:55I mean, I think for me, the statistics around the food stuff, I actually didn't know coming into this. And actually, I think fundamental for my journey has been I kind of had a scientific understanding of environmental science, but I actually didn't know the high-level numbers. I didn't know how much land we were using for agriculture or what the differences between different products were. So I think actually putting numbers on those was surprising. I think some of the most surprising numbers recently have been around reductions in air pollution in given countries and how quickly some of these solutions are coming through.

1:19:33I think China is a very clear example. I'm just always blown away by the latest numbers from China's energy system. One is just the dramatic reductions in air pollution over the last decade, which is just really, really quickly. What sort of numbers are we talking here? So if you're looking at reductions in local air pollution, you're talking about cuts of two-thirds within seven years. Yeah, it's been really, really fast. What's been the main driver of that change? So I cover in the book the story of Beijing, where Beijing's air pollution levels have fallen really quickly and really dramatically.

1:20:15And again, the story there sort of ended up coming from public pressure. So Beijing hosted the 2008 Olympics. And at the time, it was extremely polluted. China's cities were extremely polluted. The Chinese government obviously realized, oh God, everyone in the world is going to be looking at us at the Olympics. and athletes are going to be competing in this world stage, we better try to reduce the local air pollution levels. So they brought in a lot of quick-term measures and actually did reduce air pollution levels quite a bit. It was still, I think, one of the most polluted Olympics ever, but it was actually fundamentally much lower than the levels before that.

1:21:02The issue is that then when the athletes went home and the world stopped watching, the pollution levels came back. several years on and uh and uh citizens in beijing you know kind of realized okay you can actually reduce the pollution levels because we did it for the olympics why are we putting up with this on a day-to-day basis like we're actually like chopping years of lives off years off our lives uh with this level of pollution and there was like really strong political pressure like even in the media to get like air quality, even just measurements in place so people can see the air pollution levels.

1:21:38And there was this fundamental drive to reduce air pollution levels. And it's been like really, really effective. And actually the estimates there are like citizens of Beijing have like increased life expectancy. You're talking about like four years or more from these massive reductions in air pollution. And that's the thing, again, what people often don't appreciate is that helps grow their economy fast. In the long run, that's going to pay off dividends, having your population healthier and more able to work. People often lose sight. You've got, again, the short-term incentives of like, well, if we don't let these factories pollute, then we're taking a hit to our GDP.

1:22:22But it's these hidden costs, long-term costs, that actually are often presumably much larger. Have you tried to, how would you go about trying to calculate the increased benefit, for example, for having the citizens of Beijing live for an additional four years? Is that something that would be calculable? Yeah, it's difficult, but some researchers do it. I mean, the opposite way to do that is to calculate what's the economic cost of air pollution. And that comes from various ways. It comes from health impacts. It comes from productivity impacts. It can come from just disruptions in a city if it's really polluted.

1:23:00And actually, less so in high-income countries, because we've massively reduced our levels of air pollution. But in middle and low-income countries, you're talking about several percentage points of GDP, and actually more in some countries that are much more polluted. But of course, that's just not the economic cost that we necessarily see, and we don't really see it on the balance sheet, because it's an alternate reality of what would be like without air pollution. But that's obviously a counterfactual, so we just don't see it. But the economic costs are pretty high. Pivoting away from the environment, one section you have on Weldon Data is about the rates of war and conflict on Earth.

1:23:45and sort of intuitively, again, if you're following the news closely, it feels like we're trending towards more conflict and war. The world certainly feels a bit more hostile than it did, let's say, five, 10 years ago. Does your data back that feeling? And if it doesn't, what are the mechanisms you think that have basically created this disconnect? I mean, I should caveat this initially by saying this is really not my area of expertise, and you'd probably be better to speak to someone else in our data on this. I mean, I think if you're looking at the longer-term trends on conflict and war, and beyond that to long-term violence, so if you also look at homicide rates, there is an overall general trend downwards.

1:24:40I think with conflicts and war, what's really crucial is there is this volatility to it. So it's not just linear downward trend, there is an overall downward trend, but you obviously get these fluctuations and there's volatility in the system. I don't actually know what the latest figures look like in that overall trend. I mean, I would guess it would be elevated relative to previous years. But I think, yeah, the overall trend to some extent is downwards. I think the flip side of that is that even if the actual trends playing out are downwards, you could quite easily argue that the risk of conflict and very, very large scale conflict is arguably as high as it's ever been.

1:25:30So there's a dimension of what's actually going on and what you might project as future risk. And is that because of technology? I mean, technology, fundamentally just people having nuclear weapons and nuclear arsenal, and how that plays out in geopolitics. I think there's just fundamental risk there. You could argue, yeah, we've had that over the last 50 years or so, and that's always been there. But prior to that, that risk wasn't as high as it is now. I think that's the overall risk in just looking at trends and just extrapolating and just saying, oh, of course this will continue to go down.

1:26:14Fundamentally, no, and that's not how these volatile risks work. On the topic of competition, I always like to get a sense of my guest's own personal relationship with it. Would you describe yourself as a competitive person? I think in the past I was very competitive like I've always done a lot of sports and I mean like when I was much younger like it was very much in a competitive spirit like I wanted my wanted my team to be winning I wanted to be the best I think I definitely had that competitive streak in me I think I've had always had a very strong self-competitiveness like I'd say I'm like quite a harsh critic of myself and I kind of always want to be doing better and better so I think there's a very strong self-competition critic lens to the stuff that I do I think now person-to-person competition I think I've mellowed a lot and I wouldn't say on that matter I'm a very competitive person anymore What do you think was the driver of that mellowing?

1:27:16Because I experienced the same thing myself I think at some point I started to have a fundamental shift from seeing the world as zero-sum and seeing how important that shift is. Not when I'm talking about sports, because that's fine, but a more broader fundamental level. I think there was just a flip in my head of, okay, the world is actually not zero-sum. And actually stopping thinking about it in the zero-sum way would really help us to find solutions to many of these problems. And I think that kind of feeling started to sink in at just a more personal level as well. Was there a moment where you sort of had a light bulb moment that you can pinpoint?

1:28:00Or was it more of a gradual shift? I think it was a more gradual shift. And I think you then start to also get feedback, like small feedbacks from personal actions and collaborations. And you can start to see the benefits of not viewing yourself as in competition with others and actually see the benefits of working on this together. and you know like I've been really lucky to like have followed been have like had amazing mentors and people that would like prop me up and now I also feel like not view I should not view other people as this kind of in this competition nature and I actually if I prop them up that also gives them benefits so I think like you start to then see these kind of personal feedbacks of this is actually moving us forward and to me it's also like beneficial I I like collaboration I like promoting other people um and I think that that was a fundamental shift how does competition manifest in the data science world if at all I would normally say not at all but I think that's not true I think at least in the academic world there's quite fierce competition right like there's way too many PhDs for academic positions.

1:29:19There's way too many academic positions for tenure. There's this constant fight for the latest funding, like getting your papers in the latest, like the top journals. So I think actually many aspects of academic research are really highly competitive. I think when it comes to data science and our own data, I would say what we are now really conscious of and I want us to continue to do better on this is doing better at promoting the underlying data sources and researchers that we rely on. Our own data would just not be able to do the work that it does if there weren't tons of amazing people out gathering the data or publishing the data, doing the research.

1:30:07And fundamentally, those should be the people that are getting the credit not us that are like making a map and putting it on the website um so i think trying to more like in a better way like highlight who's actually fundamentally doing the work here and making sure that journalists or other sources are crediting them and not necessarily crediting us is really fundamental but i also know that for them they're often like pretty small teams constrained budgets and actually their work being used in a very public format can possibly do a lot to maintain their funding. So I think for that, on that basis, I think highlighting their work is really crucial.

1:30:48And to some extent, we want to reduce competition. Would you say that that sort of data infrastructure, those people, are the sort of key bottleneck or area of concern for you in your work at Old World in Data? Not the people producing the data. I think the key bottleneck is like the data gaps where we just don't have data. and actually for many metrics there are really massive gaps in the world like primarily in lower income countries where there's just not what we call the statistical capacity of like, it just costs a lot of money to go around and gather data and put that into a system and if you're on a constrained budget that's just really not your priority.

1:31:27So I think for us that's a key constraint of being able to get the data we need in order to show the metrics that we think are most important to understand the problem. What does living win-win mean to you? I mean, I think it comes back to the sustainability equation that we discussed at the start. Win-win for me is being able to provide a good life for everyone that's on the planet today, but doing so in a way that's environmentally responsible and doesn't take that opportunity away from the generations that come after us and the other species on the planet. And I think the way I frame it in the book is that I don't think that future is inevitable.

1:32:10Like I can't say that this is going to happen. But I think what I wanted to present is like this massive opportunity that we have ahead of us. Like, as I said in the past, I think it's always been win-lose. It's either been like lose for humans or lose for the environment. And I think we're now in this kind of unique position where I can see a future where it actually is win-win. It just, you know, needs us to like get a move on and put it into action. So what call to action would you give to people listening who are inspired by your work and or feel inspired to help contribute to environmental problems?

1:32:48There are a bunch of amazing solutions already there. It's about implementing them. And I think what's really fundamental to that is really highlighting the non-environmental benefits. I think it's pushing against many of the misconceptions people have about these solutions, which ultimately I think will just delay us over the next few decades if we don't start to try to squash those. So I think it's promoting the solutions that we already have there, not just for the environmental benefits, but for the other stuff that people care about. We need to get the short-term incentives lined up by the long-term incentives.

1:33:25And I think they're there, it's just that people don't actually see that these are now aligned because 10 years ago they weren't aligned, but they now are. and then I think there are still problems out there that we just don't have the solutions to I can see us getting there but there are like a vacuum for solutions there now and I think it really just takes people saying this is a problem I'm going to work on it and I think there are some amazing individuals, I know you've had Boyan Slat on the show before where he was just a guy that saw a problem like there's plastics in the ocean there shouldn't be plastics in the ocean how do I solve this?

1:34:05I think he's just done whether he fundamentally succeeds or fails I think he's already made a massive positive difference and it's just from seeing a problem and being determined I'm going to find a solution to this I think there are a range of problems today where it just needs people really intelligent really determined people to go out and try and find solutions Beautiful Thank you so much Hannah Thank you there we go everyone huge thank you to hannah for letting me pick into her amazing brain i mean i've been a kind of a fangirl of her work for for a while i've been using our world in data funnily for many many years it's it's informed a lot of my thinking so i'd highly recommend uh if if you've gone to this point in the conversation that you go and take a real just dive of their site it's not just about environmental stuff everything economics politics rate of change of war there's also nice things on there too.

1:35:01It's not, you know, again, it's just about trying to get a clearer picture of what's actually going on in our world. If you also want to take a deeper dive into Hannah specifically, I deeply recommend her book, It's Not the End of the World. It's so jam-packed with incredible statistics and facts and especially many counterintuitive things that you would not have heard of. If you want something briefer, you can also check out her TED Talk. It's only 13 minutes long, but it really beautifully summarizes like her point about this sustainability equation and how we can balance it and turn it into what seems like a win-lose, a trade-off into a true win-win.

1:35:35So very apt topic. That's why I'm so pleased to have her on here. As always, if you enjoyed this, please tell your friends. Let's keep this win-win whole ball rolling. But either way, thank you so much for being here, and I will see you next time.

1:36:00Thank you.