Mindscape 252 | Hannah Ritchie on Keeping Hope for the Planet Alive

Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
Our planet and its environment are in bad shape, in all sorts of ways. Those of us who want to improve the situation face a dilemma. On the one hand, we have to be forceful and clear-headed about how the bad the situation actually is. On the other, we don't want to give the impression that things are so bad that it's hopeless. That could -- and, empirically, does -- give people the impression that there's no point in working to make things better. Hannah Ritchie is an environmental researcher at Our World in Data who wants to thread this needle: things are bad, but there are ways we can work to make them better.
Hannah Ritchie received her Ph.D. in geosciences from the University of Edinburgh. She is currently Senior Researcher and the Head of Research at Our World in Data, and a researcher at the Oxford Martin Programme in Global Development at the University of Oxford. Her upcoming book is Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.
Mindscape Podcast playlist: • Mindscape Podcast
Sean Carroll channel: / seancarroll
#podcast #ideas #science #philosophy #culture

[@njdarda]

Our World in Data is fantastic and so is Hannah.

[@HaHa-gy5vg]

We're fooked. Proper fooked.

[@MrPaddy924]

I recently read Hannah's book 'Not the End of the World' and found Hannah's case for optimism from our dire predicament quite strenuous and unconvincing, and she constructed a lot of straw men in the book in order to make her points. Her use of data in her book was selective to say the least. I also noted a number of inaccuracies (or at least significant divergencies from my own understanding of our predicament). She has also struggled to justify a lot of the positions she adopted in her own book. The section on de-growth was particularly ill informed, and the idea that renewables can replace fossil fuels, simply fanciful. I also struggled with her 'war' metaphor in the book, which I found bizarre. Her claim to absolute apolitical objectivity also, clearly indefensible. I don't concur with Hannah's definition of a 'doomer'. I regard myself as a doomer in that I think I have a realistic understanding of our predicament and tend not to seek solace in cognitive dissonance or denial. I try to be a grown up and face the grim reality of our predicament. That doesn't mean that I will ever give up hope in our ability to address some of the worst impacts of climate change - far from it - but I do push back against baseless optimism, which I regard as dangerous. Panic is an important human emotion as it can help us to conjure up the motivation and will to act on our worst fears. Buffering people from panic is unhelpful. In respect of the climate crisis, too much panic is not our problem, not enough panic is our problem. It's a shame, because I so want to encounter a positive narrative on the climate crisis in which I can believe. Hope is so difficult to come by, that I really willed Hannah to provide a convincing space for hope, but alas, I struggled to find it in her book. In order to make her somewhat plaintive case for optimism, Hannah found herself contorting and making use of accounting tricks and statistical sleight of hand. These strategies needed to be exposed. They are the same strategies used by climate deniers to such great effect. I think Bill Gates, and perhaps Elon Musk, had much more influence on this book than Hannah would ever admit. The book is a techno-optimist, neoliberal manifesto and highly ideological and, despite Hannah's assertions to the contrary, very political. She seems to be suggesting that there is a 'business as usual' route to addressing climate change and the book repeats the myth that 'we have the technology in place to solve this' - an assertion that, for me, has never stood up to scrutiny. I found it a troubling book.

[@teapot_]

I've watched this twice and found it a very good summary of the whole picture....well done.

[@remusracingro3884]

Such a great pleasure listening to this episode. Grat clarity and well spoken. Will definitely get the audiobook when it comes out.

[@Atheistbatman]

Horticulturist in Rome, Ga Past 3 yrs after nights warmer than days caused crops to stop growing. Day 75, nights 80. (In town microclimate) No earthworms in county after 5 year decline in health and qty 90% crop loss in pome fruits (peaches etc) in GA due to too few chill hours Too warm nights are the harbinger of NTHE Plants stop growing when nights are too warm

[@andanssas]

Trees/vegetation for shade and irrigation channels help... I watched recently some videos on @DiscoverPermaculture showing these techniques in one of the most arid, hottest and inhospitable places for agriculture (Oman).

[@GiornoJovani]

0:00: ✅ There are reasonable solutions within our grasp to solve environmental problems. 6:42: 💡 Many young people and others feel at a loss about what they can do to address the challenges we face, and there is a danger of complacency or pessimism setting in. 11:40: 🌍 Human well-being metrics have generally improved, while environmental metrics have worsened. 17:21: 🌍 Air pollution is a major global issue, with millions of people dying every year from indoor and outdoor pollution. 23:11: 🌍 The US has reduced its emissions by switching from coal to natural gas, but it is unclear how long natural gas will serve as a bridge fuel before alternative technologies take over. There is also a geopolitical issue as industrializing countries like India and China contribute to air pollution. 28:57: 🌡 The video discusses the current policies and commitments of governments in relation to climate change and the need to bring down the temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius. 34:34: 🌍 The key point of the video is the potential impact of climate change on food security and crop yields. 40:58: 🔥 The risk of nuclear power is low compared to the constant deaths caused by fossil fuel burning. 46:40: 🚗 China is leading the way in the adoption of electric cars, with one in three new cars sold in China now being electric. 52:34: 💡 The primary focus is to reduce emissions as much and as quickly as possible, but there may be sectors where we struggle to eliminate emissions and may need to rely on negative emissions technologies to reach Net Zero. 58:02: 🌍 The world's population is projected to peak around 2080 and then decline. 1:04:08: 🚗 Electric cars are an easy sell and will likely take over, but changing dietary habits is more challenging. 1:09:57: 🌍 The aim is to achieve global equality and ensure everyone has access to a comfortable life and basic needs while reducing environmental problems. Recap by Tammy AI

[@zack_120]

17:19- Indoor pollution remains the biggest threat to the health of the dwellers including some big country claimed to have 'eliminated' poverty.

[@bryandraughn9830]

So many people are blind to the very idea of improvement. That's what scares me the most.

[@antifajesus]

For some reason I'm reminded of Pippi Longstocking

[@anttiharju3739]

It's always the narrative that makes people believe that that particular narrative is the one and the only one

[@4945three]

The humans who profit in the form of currency will be more of a challenge than the challenge to shift the form of current. Thank you for this thoughtful program.

[@odinata]

Humanity may not be doomed. But everything else is. Humanity only cares about humanty.

[@odinata]

"Poverty, infant mortality, lifespan....' Improvements here are exactly why we are doomed...Environmentally.

[@BUSeixas11]

Malthusian nonsense.

[@HarryNicNicholas]

oh dear. odd that i am totally optimistic.

[@HarryNicNicholas]

not many people have noticed we live right in the middle of LIMITLESS WEALTH.

[@TheMrCougarful]

Physics and human history have a great deal to say on this topic. At this point, individuals are almost helpless. Get to the lifeboats.

[@user-mm8vw1ow1x]

Money power and influence will always come before environment and community. As long as we have narcissist, this continues to get worse. Evil doesn't have a leg to stand on without stupid people buying in, and we're short on neither

[@thisistoofunny3454]

Can we have both social progress and not destroy the enviroment? That is the question... a couple of points about this. Ultimately social progress doesn't mean much on it own, because a degraded biosphere will eventually also have its consequences for our quality of life. This is I think why these snapshot numbers of Rösling or Pinker ultimately don't do it... if the trajectory leads to enviromental collapse, pointing to all these current improvements in quality of live doesn't mean a whole lot. It's like saying to people on the Titanic a couple of minutes before the ship sinks, "don't fret about that looming iceberg, look at all the luxury you have on this ship... it has never been better, objectively!". Hannah says we have been decoupling growth from enviromental impact in some of the more wealthy countries. While I don't deny some of that has been going on, the thing of real importance is how much decoupling is possible globally. Historically there has been a strong correlation between growth and enviromental damage, and only in recent years and only in rich countries we see some decoupling. And we have been exporting most of our polluting industry abroad. We need a whole lot more decoupling to meet those enviromental challenges and we need it on a global scale, because the enviroment doesn't care about borders. Based on what we do know, I don't think we can say with a lot of confidence that it is possible... or that it's not possible for that matter. And a final point. If we assume we could juggle all these balls theoretically and technically, the big question still remains if "we" can do it in practice given the world we live in (geo)politically. One world war, a couple of elections ala Trump, etc etc ... could effectively be enough to drop the ball. It's not as if "we" are one global entity with a unified will and agency.

[@mrglassscience]

Social progress has always come at the expense of the environment.

[@kylecarter1599]

Why does youtube put Wikipedia articles on videos from physicists?

[@walkingcarpet420]

Propaganda is most effective when it is frequently repeated. I see this link on tons of KZbin videos.

[@keithhanssen7413]

Perhaps AI has already taken control. We just haven’t realized it yet.

[@drzecelectric4302]

Well I know en mass everyone is not dying all the time but here in Massachusetts it’s now air alerts all the time as Canadian wildfires just haze out the whole summer and now fall

[@drzecelectric4302]

But I appreciate the optimism lol. I need it

[@hahtos]

"Things are getting be-eerr"

[@zorro5651]

"It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So" - attributed to Mark Twain. Plant food has increased 1 part in 10,000 over the last 100 years. But the sky is falling!

[@T_Dot94]

under capitalism, there is no hope. change the system and maybe there is hope

[@walkingcarpet420]

I wish we had capitalism. What exists now is crony capitalism that is enabled by our corrupt government.

[@real_pattern]

in the trivial sense, sure, it is imaginable that we collectively change at such a rate and magnitude that we may somewhat decrease the risk of civilizational collapse, earth tipping into the hothouse earth stable state, and an accelerating sixth mass extinction due to a clusterf*ck of overshot planetary boundaries, but so what? we can imagine many many stuff. whatever. all the stuff about any measure that is getting better, is not that relevant wrt what we must do to decrease the risk of what i mentioned above, because they are a result of a wholly unsustainable, omnicidal one-off cheap energy superabundance extravaganza. the growth rates of industrial civilization just cannot be sustained on earth. this is simple thermodynamics. it's just incompatible with stable, civilization-enabling planetary conditions. the growth and the development of our globalized industrial civilization on earth is as fitting an analogy to an immensely rapid cancerous growth in an organism as one can get. and the cause isn't abstract concepts like capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, oppression, greed, indifference... althrough these and several other ideas are of course useful concepts in analysing how exactly groups of humans behaved at any given point. but they are not *the* cause(s) of the situation. it's just humans humaning, or evolved particular cell clusters doing evolved cell cluster stuff. at no point in our history did any human do anything that wasn't human nature, or was inhuman, or supernatural, or transcendental or whatever.

[@OccamsPlasmaGun]

Hans Rosling and his org are a bright light of reason in a world of unreason and ignorance. Stephen Pinker beats the same drum, but we need a lot more voices to help humanity keep a reasonable perspective and act accordingly.

[@WetDoggo]

I think you might enjoy music from Skinshape, Khruangbin and possibly Babe Rainbow 👌

[@user-he1qr7jg1y]

Wow, this episode exemplifies our little ideological bubbles. Clearly not enough people care about the world. That's really very disappointing. :D

[@user-he1qr7jg1y]

What happens to the world is much less of a concern to me than what happens to me in the world, to be frank. If we're focusing on the big issues and ignoring the small ones then we will fail. Every big issue is composed of smaller ones. I'd suggest asking people not to focus on how to solve the big problems we face but to focus on helping themselves. If we can do that in a way that doesn't make things worse, that's good. It's better to do only that and nothing more than to ask people to do things they don't want to do or bother them with things they don't care enough about.

[@c.f.3503]

Not first

[@shpadoinkel577]

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

[@sunroad7228]

Thinking Centrally for the world is the problem. This far, we ended up today living in a Nanny-Civilisation. Humans cannot fight fossil fuels powered by fossil fuels. Stopping thinking in "We" - is the first step to let the laws of Physics take their course - naturally; War-torn Iraq ordered recently many brand new crude oil tankers from Norway and others. The country also recently signed with TOTAL to inject additional 1 million cubic meter of sea water daily into one of Iraq's oil reservoirs - no matter how engineers state that the oil coming up to the surface is already half-water. The oil burned to build the new ships, high-pressure sea water pumps and running them to get the half-water oil - is telling us how energy-intensive this disastrous "We" is. The US Fifth Fleet has arrived in Iraq's region last month to tell everybody to - behave or else. Hannah Ritchie et al need to understand the bigger picture and the real energy cost - when saying "We" and choreographing for the world - a Nanny-Civilisation. kzbin.info/www/bejne/ioO4g6CHqttpZ9k "In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future" (2017).

[@HagobSaldaldianSmeik]

wrong perspective. the planet is fine, no matter what. we cant even help ourselves. "Hannah Ritchie on hope for keeping man alive"

[@odinata]

If by planet, you mean the dead rock. It's what lives on the rock that is doomed

[@hokiturmix]

This type of argument is in Stargate by Dr. Jennifer Keller but if we define Earth as a Living Planet and we want to save life then the video title is perfectly fine.

[@driftlesshermit9731]

Biodiversity loss was last on her list. Makes me wonder Hannah has looked at the 9 planetary boundaries.

[@HarryNicNicholas]

i'm surprised how many gloomy pessimists occupy the comments section, life is demonstrably getting better, despite the occasional putin.

[@ullrichfischer5796]

I just finished listening to this podcast on my phone in audio only. It was, as is common with Mindscape podcasts, excellent. However, I was shocked to hear that Sean retains a gas guzzler out of range anxiety (justified somewhat given his EV is a BMW). Surely he could afford a Tesla which would give him immediate access to the ubiquitous Tesla supercharger network thereby eliminating that range anxiety. He may share the fairly common disagreement with Elon's latest not terribly well considered comments or actions about or on X (formerly known as twitter) but that should not detract from a rational consideration of the benefits of owning a Tesla car, nor of the huge service Elon (whatever you might think of him) has done to humanity by pretty much single handedly proving that Electric cars are a better choice than gas guzzlers by pretty much all considerations one might pay attention to while deciding on which type of new car to buy.