Not the End of the World - Ep147: Dr Hannah Ritchie

Dr Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist and science communicator. Her focus is on the largest problems that shape our world, and how to solve them. Most of her work focuses on environmental sustainability, including climate change, energy, food and agriculture, biodiversity, air pollution and deforestation. She is Deputy Editor and Lead Researcher at Our World in Data, where, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she built the Our World in Data COVID-19 information dashboard. She is also a researcher at the Oxford Martin Programme in Global Development.
Her new book, Not the End of the World, is out in January 2024.
Links
Hannah’s TED talk - “Are We the Last Generation - or the First Sustainable One?”: • Are We the Last Genera...
Hannah’s WIRED piece - “Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change”: www.wired.co.uk/article/clima...
Rupert Read - How I talk with children about climate breakdown: • Rupert Read: How I tal...
Roger Hallam - Advice to Young People as they face Annihilation: • Advice to Young People...
Roger Hallam at the Oxford Union: • Extinction Rebellion F...
Hannah’s new book - Not the End of the World: www.penguin.co.uk/books/45365...
Related Episodes
"The Inconvenient Truth about Climate Science" - Ep93 with Roger Pielke : www.cleaningup.live/ep93-prof...
“Pushing Planetary Boundaries” - Ep49 with Johan Rockström: www.cleaningup.live/ep49-joha...
“Poet of the Low-Carbon Transition” - Ep13 with Morgan Bazilian: www.cleaningup.live/episode-1...
"Lord of the Net Zero Transition" - Ep110 with Adair Turner: www.cleaningup.live/ep110-ada...
“From Moore's Law to Moo's Law” - Ep136 Jim Mellon: www.cleaningup.live/ep136-jim...

[@gronkotter]

How positively reasonable!

[@anakissedboyle3067]

At 29:42 she cites a Oxford paper. Can anyone put a link as to how these unbelievable figures were arrived at ? Electrification has huge resistance losses and capacity issues. Unless your talking about lots of local sources. What’s this magic bullet she’s referring to? And if it’s dependent on Hydrogen ? Please ? What kind of Hydrogen ? Grey ? Blue? Not green I doubt?

[@CleaningUpPod]

Hi there, please find the paper here: link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12053-021-09982-9

[@FranzJStrauss]

Danke@@CleaningUpPod

[@guyhargreaves6591]

Good to hear a relatively positive, or perhaps more accurately less negative voice! Less convinced that distilling big long term trends into short term indicators of how we should feel about our predicament is such a valuable approach. Recent James Hansen research - hardly Rupert Read - points to an alarming increase in EEI over the last decade and calls for young people to understand and take action. Dr Ritchie (and many other mainstream IPCC-aligned scientists) might downplay this as short term data/noise, but if we are on Hansen’s trajectory Read and Hallam won’t look quite as extreme in a decade as they do now. Feels like bad blood between Read and this podcast which isn’t constructive. “Read is a hysterical alarmist doomer”, whereas this podcast “wouldn’t know the truth if it bit it” Read reflected on social media recently. A constructive discussion with Read on this podcast might establish common ground. We should be fighting common enemies not each other, whether we share each other’s exact views or not.

[@dige62]

Michael is quite right in casting doubt in what Read claims to be aiming for. Children shouldn't be traumatised with the sentence "the question isn't when you grow up, but if you grow up". The problem alone is depressing and that stifles positive responses. Positive focus on the solutions can much better motivate people to take enthusiastic action.

[@guyhargreaves6591]

I agree children shouldn't be traumatised, and Read's more recent work seems to appeal to a much broader mainstream section of the community, which is positive. Michael previously hosted Tony Abbott who has done infinitely more damage with his decades long, relentless, highly polarising, denial politics, which included senseless wanton destruction of Australia's world leading carbon pricing scheme. If we're going to attack the extremes it would be nice to hear Michael wind up as aggressively against the Abbotts as the Reads. Better still, perhaps tone both down and try to find common ground as he did with Abbott. Anything less looks like bias.

[@pictureworksdenver]

Magical thinking will not save us from ourselves.

[@MrPaddy924]

I 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. Ritchie states in the book, as cause for optimism, that the EU and USA have significantly reduced their greenhouse gas emissions. Which is, of course true, but not the cause for optimism that she suggests. Since the rise of China as the world's manufacturing powerhouse, countries like the USA, those in the EU and other developed nations have essentially delegated all of their manufacturing to China which has resulted in their own emissions reducing and China's growing. Overall, global emissions are still rising - it's just that the manufacturing component of those emissions have shifted from other G20 nations to China. This makes China look like the bad guys, when actually all they are doing is producing all of our stuff for us. Against that backdrop, you can understand why it is disingenuous for Ritchie to pick out EU and US emissions to support her case for optimism when these wealthy countries are contributing to record global emissions by buying more stuff than ever from China. At no point in her book does she caveat her positive message with these ugly truths. She's set out to write a positive book and has evidently cherry picked her data to support that thesis. This is why Greta Thunberg urges people to keep their eye on the global emissions data and nothing else. This clarity of focus makes one immune to the positive spin that the likes of Ritchie churns out. 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. I recommend listening to her interview with Rachel Donald on Mongabay. Ritchie is utterly exposed. It's excruciating.

[@DesignDen12]

Thanks for sharing your opinion, I was thinking I am only one. Although I have not read her book in whole, it seems counter-productive the way she is trying to justify the case so positively . Further I guess her more examples of improvements and availability of technology are coming from only EU and USA, what about Africa, Asia and middle east with all the on going wars. These wars are emissioning more carbons than anything else. I will surely listen her interview with Rachel Donald as you recommended. I also agree with your point of influence by the billionaires, as interesting as even I read about this book from Bill gates notes for year 2023. Being climate change activist myself, I do believe that, there's alot to do on climate emergency by all nations, and not only developed countries. We need to look at our energy consumption and also look for adaptation in a better way.

[@AlienPsychoPacifist]

It's always impressive how "experts" who have the priveleged time to research can just skip accurately describing other's stances before dismissing them. Some of us have actually read Raworth (who is actually "growth agnostic"), Hickel (degrowth does not apply to Global South poor; starting from the production side not the consumer side, etc.), etc., it's not that difficult smh

[@iutubiutampoc]

Plastics come from oil.

[@alan2102X]

For the record: degrowth scholarship/community is not Malthusian and has never called for people to have fewer children. It is also not about "slamming on the brakes" on anything that is good and useful. It IS about slamming on the brakes wrt waste, wild inequality, destructive activities, etc.; i.e. evil things. Global degrowth would not "leave billions in poverty"; the opposite of that is true. Degrowth calls for building sane provisioning systems, addressing all authentic human needs, for everyone, most especially the poor and marginalized. It would be nice if Michael and Hannah learned something about degrowth. It is clear that they know nothing about it. An easy problem to remedy. Just read! PS: by far the worst thing about degrowth is the WORD "degrowth", which is awful and unrepresentative, causing much confusion.

[@paullafreniere3393]

I can sign up for Decoupling of economic growth & environmental & resource impacts. I & vast majority of world poplulation will never support degrowth. Yes the useful idiots & rent seekers will continue to mumble along.

[@alan2102X]

@@paullafreniere3393 You need to know something about degrowth in order to reject it. The only people who know what it is AND reject it are themselves rent seekers, 1%ers, greedy, etc. No decent human being would reject the idea of a more equitable and abundant world FOR ALL which is what degrowth calls for.

[@FranzJStrauss]

for the record! our neoliberal right wing nazsi friends from the AFD party are not obviously saying they want the world leadership back! But they do want. The same semes for me with the neonmalthusiam degrowth people like just stop oil, FFF, XR, LAst gen, occuoy wallstreet they want to kill capitalism and they want the opposite of what they are saying! they do not want to go green energy they want to destroy the green opinion of the normal people maybe they work together with big oil as PRopaganda agents!

[@anakissedboyle3067]

@@alan2102XI like the idea of SeeDgrowth as in Seeding the ideas around which waste and good practise could be distinguishable. And absolutely dropping the obsolescence that has been accepted. Instead of learning about how the resources might be best used fairly.

[@MLiebreich]

Whenever you challenge degrowthers, they start spurting about all the things they want to grow, rather than going into details about exactly how they intend to force down consumption among the groups they disfavour. But we see them. Alan is an extreme example. He doesn't even think it should be called degrowth - so it's just redistributive socialism masquerading as environmentalism. Whatever.

[@SumFugaziSalt]

While I agree moving towards cleaner energy sources is a necessary pursuit, and there definitely is a lot of waste in our current system, the fact is the last 3 decades of COPs have done little to nothing in way of meaningful policies to lower global emissions despite the foreboding climate related forshocks that have been reverberating throughout the planet.. Most climate scientists would probably disagree that the last 3 decades of COPS were "trial runs" as stated, as much as they were sorely missed opportunities. While optimism in itself is a good thing, Last years 1.48C should evoke a sense of urgency and ideally more research into risk and impacts . Global emissions rose over 1.1% to 36.8 billion metric tons of CO2 from fossil fuels in 2023 and projected to continue rising with no clear end in sight until we are seemingly forced to use less energy. To promote economic growth as we know it , in this current paradigm, it will require hydrocarbon energy for decades to come which happens to be the exact trajectory we are on, which in turn will continue creating a much more hostile planet for not only mammalian habitat, but for entire ecosystems and the myriad of species that support us writ large , so its a real catch 22 . I just cant quite understand this view of the future Dr. Ritchie is painting as being anywhere close to reality, because in order to have viable large scale solutions, the risks and impacts need to be clearly, unapologetically transparent , assessed and stated , there has been far too much sugar coating and far too much linear forecasting of complex adaptive non linear systems . A good paper written on some of the risks we can expect to encounter in the near future ( most of which are in clear sight today ) were outlined in the 'Chatham House Climate Risk Assessment paper' from 2021. At our current Growth rate assuming a 3% growth per year world wide, we will need to double both our energy demand, our food production and double our raw material usage by 2050 , but this doesn't take into account all the on going maintenance on existing things within our society ( homes) that need constant upkeep and energy to maintain. Even if we became 30% more effecient we would still be using more fossil fuels that we are today, So while I think there are adaptation strategy's, The reality is a rapidly warming and bio depleted planet is becoming far less agreeable with these goals and pursuits in a multitude of ways here today, and with every passing year. The Israel Weizmann Institute had a great study several years ago, pointing out that there is more man made mass on planet earth than ALL living biomass. I really have no idea how becoming more efficient while growing our gross energy consumption, will be a viable path forward because it is the exact path we have been on for 100 years and it seems to be the path forward Dr. Ritchie is suggesting . Efficiency has NOT led to decreased gross hydrocarbon energy use but rather more hydrocarbon consumption. The crux we seem to face is that there is definitely a rather short window of time to limit warming to somewhat adaptable levels. Its highly debatable whether 2c is even an adaptable threshold for our current civilization, but we will likely know how adaptable 2c is by 2038 or so, If James Hansen's research proves true .

[@MLiebreich]

I bet you're fun at parties.

[@karlwheatley1244]

" I really have no idea how becoming more efficient while growing our gross energy consumption, will be a viable path forward because it is the exact path we have been on for 100 years and it seems to be the path forward Dr. Ritchie is suggesting " Although I love most of Ritchie's work, she is cherry-picking data points and not looking at the bigger trends. Total ecological overshoot has increased--including in places like the US, and we are now overshooting six of Earth's nine major planetary boundaries, when not long ago it was only three that were in overshoot. Even very smart people can find ways to fool themselves and ignore the elephants in the room.

[@SumFugaziSalt]

@@MLiebreich Actually, I prefer my social interactions to be with inanimate objects. They don't judge my dance moves.

[@SumFugaziSalt]

@@karlwheatley1244 well stated. I also agree that most everything she suggests, is good and worth perusing as part of an adaptation strategy but her "solutions" seem to be missing the bigger picture as you point out. We are currently trending between rcp 6 and 8.5 so It makes me cringe hearing her talk about adapting to 2c in 2080 and suggesting that tipping points happen over hundreds of years , when these impacts are very much upon us right now. I consider myself pragmatic when facing reality, and sometimes a really bad diagnosis is the only catalyst for meaningful change . We are currently tracking somewhere between RCP 6 and 8.5 ( bad diagnosis) . which leads me to my main point of contention with Dr Ritchie's work, which is that is in order to suggest realistic solutions, the problem needs to be accurately defined...When I hear her talk about 2 degrees C in 2080, it seems almost like either willful cognitive dissonance at the expense of rationality or logic...or an outright deception with focus on rather insignificant social behavioral changes in a make believe world. To Dr Ritchies credit her book was likely written before some of the most recent climate data has surfaced, however she doesn't appear to reference or incorporate any of the newer climate science data into her field guide of surviving and flourishing on a largely unlivable earth.

[@MLiebreich]

@@SumFugaziSalt Your comment is exactly why we need people like me, Hannah Ritchie and Roger Pielke Junior . We are NOT trending between RCP 6 and RCP 8.5 - we are trending below RCP4.5. It's not me saying this, it's the UNFCCC - look at the Synthesis report by the Secretariat, 26 October 2022, published just ahead of COP27 Sharm el Sheikh. Buried on page 29 you'll find Figure 8, "Comparison of scenarios assessed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report with projected total and per capita global emissions according to nationally determined contributions" you'll see that the existing emissions trajectories and the aggregate of NDCs is tracking BELOW RCP4.5. They don't even bother showing RCP 6 and RCP8.5 because these are so wildly improbable. unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/cma2022_04.pdf If you want further examples of how you have clearly been misled over the IPCC scenarios, then read this: Distorting the view of our climate future: The misuse and abuse of climate pathways and scenarios. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629620304655 And if you have not yet watched the episode with Professor Pielke Jr, please do so. It will either help you open your eyes or drive you into entertaining paroxysms of anger. kzbin.info/www/bejne/gWOvoYCmoNeDZ9k

[@PJCafaro]

There will always been a big audience for happy talk about environmental issues. Add in attractive graphics and the pitch becomes even more appealing. But I think Dr. Ritchie and Mr. Liebreich spend too much time knocking down straw men and not enough honestly discussing the central issues: can industrial capitalism continue to expand without severely degrading Earth and the ecosystem services humanity depends upon? Do people have the right to extinguish many of the world's species by commandeering most of Earth's resources and crowding them out of their last remaining strongholds? It's a lot easier to remain optimistic if you don't care about other species. Dr. Ritchie repeatedly refers to good trends in human wellbeing; she doesn't seem to have much to say about the trends for amphibians, birds, insects, wild mammals ... Those trends are uniformly terrible and show no signs of improving. That doesn't appear to matter. Even keeping our focus selfishly on human wellbeing, there is plenty to worry about when we turn to the basic ecological framework that supports us. Current atmospheric carbon levels are at 422 parts per million, higher than any time in the last 2 to 3 million years. The last time atmospheric carbon was that high, Earth was 2.5 to 4 degrees Centigrade warmer and sea levels were 8 to 25 meters higher than today. At the start of the modern environmental movement, back in the 1970s, there was a robust discussion around limits to growth. Subsequently, the environmental movement chose "optimism": we could protect the environment, other species, our own wellbeing, just through greater efficiency and smarter management. We didn't have to limit our numbers or our economic demands on the world. That approach, win/win or happy talk environmentalism, seems to have passed its shelf life some time ago.

[@MLiebreich]

Nonsense. There's a much bigger audience for climate porn than there is for data-driven commentary.

[@karlwheatley1244]

@@MLiebreich "There's a much bigger audience for climate porn than there is for data-driven commentary." I think the biggest audience is for ignoring the problem. Unfortunately, Ritchie isn't showing us the big picture, which is that ecological overshoot has gotten worse in nations such as the US as has total ecological overshoot (as a percentage of Earth's carrying capacity, overshoot is now up to 75%--was zero 53 years ago and 70% just a few years ago; and Earth's boundaries transgressed is now 6 of nine--was just three of nine boundaries overshot not long ago). I love lots of her work, but she has cherry-picked data points. Also, as carbon intensity goes down, other types of ecological harms go up. We could fix the climate crisis tomorrow and we would still be heading for ecological and societal collapse until we fix the root problem of ecological overshoot. Take care.

[@DrSmooth2000]

@@karlwheatley1244 I'll have to look into this 9 Boundaries but to quibble on first point -- by definition those who Ignore are by definition the least relevant audience-activist-commentary creators-science nexus as they are only glancingly participating. there is a Denier niche I suppose but not as robust by far as compared to Doom "P0rn" Adaptation has like nothing... the algo led me here because straining for content. Are some dusty FEMA NGO Municipal videos from a flurry 09-14 but nothing 'organic' or ongoing. May stake a lane since 'climate positive adaptation' does not exist. No one speculates on upsides here (though IPCC6 makes mention of 'taking advantage of new opportunities presented'