Not The End Of The World

by Hannah Ritchie

Read on March 25, 2024

Rating: ★★★★★

Summary

Doom and gloom. That’s the story told by nearly every book on the climate crisis. I was pretty tired of hearing about the fact that we are doomed and there is nothing we can do about it. I refuse to believe that.

Enter Hannah Richie. She’s the lead researcher at Our World in Data and a treasure trove of well researched and actionable information around the state of the climate crisis. I’d compare Ritchie to Steven Pinker - incredibly optimistic and willing to use data to back up their optimism. She’s also very inspiring in her writing. Ritchie lays out a well researched argument on why things are bad, how they could be better, and why things are already trending in the right direction. She also provides very actionable and attainable steps every person can take to make an impact.

Anybody who wants to know better understand the current state of our climate crisis and how they can participate in the solution should read this book.

Key Takeaways

  1. In order to lift everyone out of poverty with a level of equality like Denmark, the global economy would need to increase five-fold.
    • This was a staggering statistic to me. Some people throw around fake statistics that America has a big enough GDP to pull the entire world out of poverty and we just aren’t doing it. Those claims are bogus and the world economy is going to have to grow substantially to lift everyone out of poverty.
    • The biggest and most interesting thing here is that economic growth and redistribution of wealth shouldn’t be at odds with each other. We need both. Without both, we’ll never pull people around the world out of poverty because there won’t be enough wealth to make it happen. This should impact how we view economic policy to support both of these initiatives as first-class issues.
  2. The frequency with which we hear about disasters around the world being reported doesn’t directly correlate with an actual increase in occurrences of those disasters. Sometimes these things are correlated, and sometimes they aren’t. It’s important to look at data and understand how frequently disasters are happening before we draw any conclusions.
  3. 50% of the world’s ice-free land is used for farming. This is astounding!
    • Compare this to the 0.2% of ice-free land that is currently used for global electricity production today.
    • If the world moved to 100% nuclear energy (which is carbon free), we would only need about 0.01% of the ice-free land for electricity production.
    • If all of our electricity came from solar panels using roofs and land, it’d be only 0.02 - 0.06%.
  4. There are some things that make us feel good about “saving the planet”, but have very little impact on climate change. They aren’t bad to do, but they just don’t make as big of an impact as we’d like to think. These things include:
    • Recycling your plastic bottles
    • Replacing old light bulbs with energy-efficient ones.
    • Using less TV or less internet time.
    • Reading on a kindle or audiobook versus paper books. (phew… because I really like paper books)
    • Washing your dishes in the dishwasher
    • Eating local food
    • Eating organic food (in fact, this is almost always worse for your carbon footprint)
    • Leaving your electronics on standby mode
    • Using paper bags - your plastic bag actually has a lower carbon footprint, but not by much
  5. Biodiversity loss has a huge impact on climate change. And overhunting and agriculture have been responsible for 75% of all plant, and animal extinctions since 1500. This is likely a much easier problem to solve for than reducing our global reliance on plastics, which also isn’t great for the climate.
  6. Eat one fewer meal a week with meat. This would made a gigantic dent in the global carbon emissions. And when you do eat meat, opt for chicken. Chicken actually has a lower carbon footprint per kilogram of food than cheese, chocolate, and coffee.
    • Also, how your food in transported doesn’t really impact it’s carbon footprint much. It’s a relatively small part of the whole equation at about 5% of total emissions of your food (hence the eating local not having much of an impact).

Favorite Quotes

The world has never been sustainable because we’ve never achieved both halves [human well-being and environmental proctection] at the same time. If we only focus on the second half, it might seem like the world has become unsustainable in the very recent past, when carbon emissions, energy use and overfishing accelerated. We think that the world used to be sustainable but our environmental damage has kicked things out of balance. That’s the wrong conclusion. For thousands of years - more so since the agricultural revolution, but also before then - humans haven’t been environmentally sustainable. Our ancestors hot hundreds of the largest animals to extinction, polluted the air from burning wood, crop wastes and charcoal, and cut do huge amounts of forest for energy and farmland.

- Page 18

The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution kills 7 million people every year: 4.2 million from outdoor air pollution, and 3.8 million from indoor air pollution from burning wood and charcoal. […] To put these numbers into context, this is similar to the death toll from smoking: around 8 million. It’s six or seven times higher than the number of people that die in road accidents: 1.3 million. Hundreds of times more than the number that die from terrorism or war each year. Air pollution is the silent killer that doesn’t get enough headlines.

- Page 52

This means eating locally can actually be worse for the environment, especially when we opt to grow food where it’s not supposed to be grown. The UK is never going to be the place to grow cocoa beans or bananas. We could create a tropical environment in a greenhouse, but that would need lots of energy - far more than is needed to ship these foods from Africa or South America where they grow brilliantly.

- Page 187

What makes us different from our ancestors is that economic and technological changes mean we have options. We’re not stuck with the default of whale oil, coal, or cutting down trees. […] A sustainable future is not guaranteed - if we want it, we need to create it. Being the first generation is an opportunity, but it’s not inevitable. […] Ignore those who say that we are doomed. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let’s turn that opportunity into reality.

- Page 299

Personal Thoughts

How this book changed my perspective

First, this book was such a breath of fresh air and was really insiring to me that there is hope amongst a crowd of doomsdayers. I was reminded about the John Stuart Mill quote: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” I think this is exactly the case in the climate crisis and Ritchie has decided to be a voice of hope.

This perspective shift is crucial because it empowers readers to take action rather than succumbing to eco-anxiety or climate despair. Ritchie’s approach aligns with the growing field of solution-focused climate communication, which research suggests is more effective in motivating behavior change.

Second, I’ve taken away a lot of actionable behavior changes I can do to lessen my impact on the environment in a meaningful way, and not in ways that simply make life inconvenient. The inconvenience of climate-neutrality was something Ritchie had a strong opinion on that I agreed with as well. She mentioned multiple times in this book that in order for carbon-neutral products and lifestyles to take hold, they need to be better than the alternative. This is why electric cars are starting to take hold… they are actually better than their gas-powered counterparts: faster acceleration, no gas stops, quieter, and (my favorite) you can leave them running anywhere to cool off the car in the summer.

Third, I really appreciated Ritchie’s data on growing the GDP of the world and the impact that has not only on climate but also on pulling people out of poverty. When a country begins to grow their GDP, they start producing more and more carbon emissions because growing the GDP of the country and lifting people out of poverty is front and center, as it should be in my opinion. However, as a country hits a tipping point, they then start to invest in better, and cleaner sources of energy and their climate impact decreases, even as their GDP continues to rise. This is something we need to account for as we try to balance the climate crisis and the crisis of global poverty. Thus, making carbon-neutral energy sources cheaper and better than the alternative will accelerate the switch as countries mature.

Practical applications

There are two categories of applications for me in this book. The first is simple: Be more optimistic in achieving unlikely feats. Being a naysayer brings everyone else down and fills people with despair, furthering the unlikeliness of achieving the thing you’d like to.

The second category of applications is in my behaviors.

  1. Reevaluate my food choices: Focus on reducing meat consumption, particularly beef, and opt for more plant-based meals or chicken when eating meat.
  2. Support policies and initiatives that make sustainable choices more accessible and affordable: This could include advocating for better public transportation, renewable energy incentives, or sustainable urban planning in my local community.
  3. Invest in or support companies developing innovative, sustainable technologies: This aligns with Ritchie’s emphasis on making eco-friendly options superior to their conventional counterparts.

Questions for further exploration

  • What are the best industries to invest resources in to grow global GDP to both help pull people out of poverty and positively impact the climate crisis?
  • How can we accelerate the development and adoption of carbon-neutral energy sources in developing countries without hindering their economic growth?
  • What role can artificial intelligence and machine learning play in optimizing resource use and reducing waste across various industries?
  • How can we better communicate the complex relationship between economic growth, poverty reduction, and environmental impact to policymakers and the general public?

Connections

  1. Poverty, By America by [Matthew Desmond]
    • Desmond has some great ideas in this book about how we can help lift our fellow Americans out of poverty in a way that would have minimal or zero impact on climate initiatives. This book isn’t about the climate, in fact it isn’t mentioned at all as an impact to poverty in America, which is a shame.
  2. How To Drive a Nuclear Reactor by [Colin Tucker]
    • This book is a technical narrative about how nuclear power plants work from the perspective of a newly recruited operator. It has a lot of insights on the climate implications of nuclear power and it’s safety and efficacy as a power source. While not about the climate crisis, but is addressing the issue from a tangential point of view in energy production.
  3. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by [Bill Gates]
    • Gates is one of the world’s foremost thinkers about climate change. In fact, he endorsed Ritchie’s book. He takes a bit of a different angle, being more educative in his book, but they are a great one-two punch.

Last updated: 2024-07-29