252 | Hannah Ritchie on Keeping Hope for the Planet Alive

0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. The world, you may have heard, is in a bit of a mess. I know you're immediately thinking, well which way is in a mess? Is it because democracy is dying, or because the climate is falling apart, or because there could be another global pandemic? All of these, AI extinctions, solar flares, there's a worry that bad things are happening to the world. So today's guest, Hannah Ritchie, is here to tell us that not everything is necessarily completely impossible to solve. So today's guest, Hannah Ritchie, is here to say that for certain problems we might actually be able to solve them, in particular the environmental problems.

0:00:47.1 SC: Now this is one of those things where it's a subtle, careful, very specific message that is easy to caricature. So let me try to get it right. Hannah is saying that when it comes to the environment, so climate change, food sustainability, pollution, things like that, the situation is bad. No doubt that the situation is bad, and getting worse in some ways, but not necessarily going to continue to get worse. That there are reasonable solutions that are within our grasp if we make the effort to do it. So her point is that there's a kind of inaction that comes from just ignoring the problems, but there's also a kind of inaction that comes from being too sad, too bleak in one's outlook.

0:01:36.9 SC: If you don't think the problems are addressable, you don't do anything either. So Hannah has a new book coming out called Not the End of the World, where she makes the point that if we do certain things, we can actually bring some of these things under control, the climate and so forth. In other words, there's not a threshold that we reach where things just become so bad that everyone's gonna die, okay? Rather, every little bit makes things worse, and therefore every little bit that we do to make it better is worth the effort. Hannah started out actually, as she says briefly in the episode, as kind of depressed about the environment. That's what she studied for a living, but it was videos by Hans Rosling. I don't know if you know Hans Rosling's work. He shows these wonderful videos where... He passed away, he's no longer with us, but he would do these videos showing data that indicates that in many ways the world is a much better place now than it used to be when it comes to poverty, infant mortality, lifespan, things like that. On the human side, we actually are doing better. So this inspired Hannah to look for the ways that we can actually do better, and in the environment maybe there are some of them. It's not necessary, right? It's not inevitable. It's not just gonna happen, but we can pursue solutions that will have a real impact.

0:03:03.1 SC: And that leaves us plenty of other things to worry about, whether it's democracy or AI or whatever, but you know, the feeling that you can do something and make the world a better place is a good one. So Hannah is the head of research at Our World in Data. Our World in Data is a wonderful organization that helps people understand what's going on, not just from the vague impressions they get from newspaper headlines, but from actually looking at the data. That's always a good thing to do. In this case, the message is mixed, of course. There's bad things going on, there's good things that we can do. Let's not let the bad stop us from pursuing the good. With that message in mind, let's go.

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0:03:58.1 SC: Hannah Ritchie, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:00.7 Hannah Ritchie: Thanks very much for having me.

0:04:01.4 SC: So you're gonna tell us that we are not all doomed, that in fact the world is not going to end anytime soon. This is a radical claim. How confident do you feel about this?

0:04:14.3 HR: I'd like to caveat by saying here I'm talking about environmental doom. I'm sure you've had other guests on speaking about other ways that the world could end, but I'm pretty convinced that on the environmental stuff, we do definitely have the chance to avert crises.

0:04:31.0 SC: Good. I was gonna ask about that, because of course we hear about threats from AI, nuclear war, pandemics, and so forth. So you're explicitly leaving open the door to the world ending that way. You're just specifically focusing on the environmental worries.

0:04:45.9 HR: Yeah, exactly. I'm gonna deal with environmental stuff and I'll leave other smart people to focus on the other stuff.

0:04:51.3 SC: That's fair. That's a big enough thing to worry about. And because I want to make sure, because you're trying to say something subtle, and I know that it's very difficult to say subtle things in the public sphere when people want to simplify everything, so you're not saying everything is fine, right? It's a little more nuanced than that.

0:05:09.8 HR: Definitely. Yeah, I mean I'm from an environmental background, like all of my degrees are in environmental science, and I definitely come from a place of feeling like we were doomed and on a trajectory that we couldn't move away from. So I'm definitely not coming at this from the angle of everything's fine. I mean, I've dedicated my whole life to this because I'm really concerned about it, and I think it's a big problem. But I think these are solvable problems, and I think there are signs for optimism for how we can tackle them.

0:05:39.6 SC: Let's just get in on the plate, like, why this kind of stance is necessary to be said so clearly. Like you point out in your book which is called Not the End of the World, which I like as a title, many young people have the impression that humanity is doomed. That is the message that is coming across.

0:05:58.3 HR: Yeah, and I definitely had that perspective as well, like even after going through environmental degrees where I was studying this stuff full-time, and I actually felt, but at the end of my degrees I was kind of at the stage where I felt like I'd put all of my heart and passion into this, but I actually couldn't make a difference. We were pretty much doomed and there was nothing really that I could do about it. So yeah. I know from the emails I get, the interactions I have, that I know that a lot of, especially young people, but I guess people in general feel this way. I get emails from young people, from parents, from grandparents, that just feel kind of at a loss of what they can do about this.

0:06:38.2 SC: And part of your claim, which I'm not sure quite how one backs this up, but it seems to make logical sense to me, there is a complacency that sets in. If we think we're doomed, we actually don't work as hard as we can to make things better.

0:06:54.3 HR: Yeah, I think there's a sweet spot in the mentality of how you actually drive action. I like to call it cautious optimism. I think there's one side of optimism, which is a very complacent one, where it is just that everything's fine, then you just sit back and assume that things will get better and they won't get better unless we actively do that. But I think there's a flip side to that, where there's a pessimism can set in, where there's no sense of agency. There's this feeling of, "Well, we're doomed, we may as well just give up." I think that's what I'm really trying to push back against.

0:07:26.7 SC: As a sort of political issue, it's tricky, right? Because there are people on different sides. There are people who think that everything is fine, and you definitely do want to push back against that, and there's people who think there's nothing we can do, you wanna push back against that too, you're pushing in different directions.

0:07:42.8 HR: Yeah, exactly. I think there are definitely political divides. I think they are closing to some extent. I mean, I think over the last decade or so, I've seen in various areas them closing. And what I think I like to communicate is that the solutions that we have to go for here need to be palatable for people across the spectrum. And often the solutions, actually, whether people care about climate change or air pollution or any of the environmental problems or not, many of the solutions they will adopt anyway because they will be cheaper, they will be better. So I think there are ways that you can actually cross that divide without having people, everyone on the side of, "Oh, we really need to tackle climate change."

0:08:24.7 SC: And what is it that did change your own perspective from thinking that we're more or less doomed to thinking that we can potentially solve some of these problems?

0:08:34.3 HR: So I think when I had definitely been in this kind of rabbit hole of only looking at environmental metrics. So throughout my studies, I was just very laser focused on the environmental stuff that was going on. And I think most of those trends were definitely moving completely the wrong direction, which gave me that feeling. But I think combined with that, many of the human developments I was completely unaware of. I think I just extrapolated the environment's getting worse, therefore all of the human metrics like hunger, deaths from natural disasters, poverty, all of those must be moving very much in the wrong direction at the same time. So I was very, very ignorant to some extent on actually what was happening in the world. And what changed my mind was a guy called Hans Rosling. He's done lots of TED Talks and speeches where he basically uses data to show that on most of the human metrics that we talk about there, the world is getting much, much better. And I've had that completely the wrong way around. I think that opened my mind up to, well, if I'm totally mistaken about that, maybe if I step back to look at a lot of the environmental data, I might see it in a slightly different way.

0:09:47.4 SC: And it's not just you, right? I think in your book, you bring up data from surveys saying that people, I don't know how global these surveys are, but people tend to think that the world is getting worse even in ways that it's not. It is getting worse in some ways, like you say, but they get... A mood catches on and you think everything must be getting worse.

0:10:08.0 HR: Right. I mean, that was kind of Hans Rosling's party trick is that he would ask, which are linked on the surveys seem like very simple questions like, "Is global extreme poverty going up or down? Is child mortality going up or down?" And most people would get that wrong. They would think it was the opposite. And this is just a very, very consistent trend.

0:10:29.5 SC: And so let's think about the trend. The human, like you say, the human measures, child mortality, mothers dying in childbirth, life expectancy, these are generally getting better if I'm correct, right?

0:10:42.8 HR: Yeah. They're generally getting better. There are still, and I should caveat that by saying, and again, in no way am I saying that everything's fine. On many of this measures still completely unacceptable, but we have seen progress on all of these measures. And I think what's important is it's not just the rich countries in the world have got much better on these metrics and the rest of the world has stagnated. Many countries in the world have moved much slower, but if you look at child mortality, it's fallen basically everywhere in the world. So these are trends that are truly global and truly moving in a positive direction.

0:11:17.8 SC: Well, good, 'cause that was going to be my next question. When we get into slightly finer grained details here is, it's always going to be a slight oversimplification, but are things getting better everywhere? And is that a sustainable kind of trajectory?

0:11:31.8 HR: If you look at change over the last century, for example, and in low and middle income countries and particularly the last, say, 50 years, most of the basic metrics of human well-being have got better. They've obviously got better at different rates and there are certain regions where on some metrics things have stagnated. But in general, yes, you'd say that for most human metrics, things have got better everywhere.

0:12:00.0 SC: And meanwhile, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and the global temperature and the amount of pollution, et cetera, is getting worse.

0:12:07.9 HR: Right. So I like to think about history for this, basically like scales and tipping the balance. So for most of human history, we were doing, you would say we were doing reasonably well on the environmental metrics. We had low levels of pollution, CO2 levels were not high, but we often would have very low standards of living. So for most of human history, child mortality was at 50%, for example, where nearly half of all children would die before reaching puberty. And over the last century or so, we've seen those scales tip where all of these human metrics have got better. But there's been this conflict with the environmental metrics. And what I'm trying to put forward in the book is that we could be the first generation that actually achieves both of these things at the same time, you can improve the lives of humans today, whilst also reducing environmental pollution and protecting future generations.

0:13:06.4 SC: So that's good because I guess the worry would be that the cost of making the world richer and decreasing poverty and things like that is dumping a lot of pollution into the environment. And you're saying well, that's not necessarily true?

0:13:22.6 HR: No, that was definitely the case in the past. So you think about the past, if a human population wanted to produce more food, for example, for most of human history, crop or agricultural history, crop yields were incredibly low and there was just no way to increase them. So if you wanted to produce more food, you had to basically expand the amount of farmland that you're using, and there you would have to cut down forest and destroy habitats. So there was just an obvious conflict of if you wanted more food, came environmental destruction. The same is true for energy. You would have to cut down forests and burn wood, or eventually we then burned fossil fuels. And so that was true historically. Where we are at now is with all of these technological innovations, we no longer have this conflict in this trade off. We can increase crop yields so we don't have to cut down forests. We can use alternatives to fossil fuels.

0:14:17.2 SC: And just to be super duper clear, we can do those things. It is not at all obvious that we will actually sum up the willpower to do them.

0:14:25.5 HR: No, we're seeing positive signs already, but we're not moving anywhere close to the rate that we should be moving, but we can do it.

0:14:35.8 SC: So at the end of the day your book is titled Not the End of the World, but it's a call to action to make sure it is not the end of the world.

0:14:43.1 HR: Yeah, I think it needs to... Yeah. There's two ways you can say it, "Hey, it's not the end of the world." That's definitely not what I'm saying. It's just, "No, it's not the end of the world. We can tackle this."

0:14:54.2 SC: Okay. Well so that's the basic big picture. Let me just say one more thing 'cause you said it very nicely in the book that you have a little Venn diagram just to emphasize all these points. The world is awful. It is also much better than it used to be, and it can be much better than it is even now, I suppose.

0:15:14.8 HR: Yeah. And those three statements on almost anything are true at the same time.

0:15:19.4 SC: Right. Okay, good.

0:15:20.3 HR: And it can be hard to sometimes hold those three thoughts together, but I think that's really important.

0:15:26.1 SC: So then let's get onto the details that we can worry about, what are the environmental trends going on that should cause us concern, even if they are potentially addressable? If you just give them like the general list, then we'll go into details one by one.

0:15:41.9 HR: Sure. So I think the key headline environmental problems are one, air pollution, two, climate change, three, deforestation, four, growing enough food for everyone, five, biodiversity loss and the loss of wildlife, six, plastics and plastic pollution. And then finally overfishing and the destruction of our oceans.

0:16:07.7 SC: Yeah. Okay. We're not gonna get to all of them because I want people to buy your book. So we'll hit some highlights and feel free to expand on them. But that's a kind of depressing list I gotta say, these are all real, we face them every day. How would you rank them? What to you is the one that is the most pressing?

0:16:30.2 HR: In terms of absolute numbers of people that it's currently affecting, the top of the list for me is air pollution. I think people often are automatically drawn to climate change and it tends to get the most press coverage. But if you're looking at number of deaths today from environmental problems, the number one is air pollution. So the estimates vary but they're in the millions. And the kind of median estimate is around seven million premature deaths per year from air pollution.

0:17:00.7 SC: Sorry, say that again. How many?

0:17:01.9 HR: Seven million.

0:17:03.2 SC: Seven million. Yeah I thought you said that. That's a big number. That's a lot per year. Okay. That's clearly not uniformly spread throughout the world. Are there hotspots where it's just really, really bad?

0:17:15.3 HR: Yeah, there's two kind of key contributors to that. One is what we'd call indoor air pollution. And indoor air pollution is basically just an issue of energy poverty. It's people without access to gas heating, or electricity using solid fuel. So burning wood or crop waste or dung in their house for energy. And that creates pollutants within the household. And actually there, you're talking about millions of people dying every year from that. Then there's what we would, most of us would think of as air pollution, which is the air pollution outdoors from cars and burning fossil fuels, et cetera.

0:17:56.1 HR: And there, there's definitely a divergence of trends. I think one is that people are often unaware of how much progress rich countries in particular have made on reducing air pollution. Air pollution levels are a mere fraction of what they wear in the past. In contrast, you've got many middle income countries which have industrialized very, very quickly, and their air pollution levels are still very high.

0:18:25.0 SC: Well, we were just mentioning before we started recording here, you're sitting there in Edinburgh. I used to live in Los Angeles and now I live in Baltimore, where this morning I got an air quality alert on my phone. But in both Edinburgh and Los Angeles famously, the conditions for the air were really really bad. But we did... We have succeeded in greatly improving them.

0:18:46.4 HR: Yeah, most... Yeah, many kind of industrial cities across the US, across Europe used to be incredibly polluted. I mean, we can't even really envision it today. And when you look at the data, often they are, I think we think of air pollution in Beijing or in New Delhi as kind of unprecedented, but actually you could argue that air pollution in London or Edinburgh in the past was actually higher than it is in those cities today. So I think what I wanna communicate there is that these, because we've solved these problems in some cities, it should give us hope that we can solve it everywhere. It's not that we are tackling this new problem that we've never handled before. We've been there and we've actually succeeded in reducing pollution.

0:19:29.4 SC: Well, one of the effects of going through your book is that it gave me a new thought or insight or feeling about the Sherlock Holmes stories or Charles Dickens stories, when they talk about the gloominess of London. I always thought it was more or less metaphorical, but you made me realize, No, it was really just gloomy just to walk around because of all the air pollution.

0:19:51.9 HR: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean... There's just so many historical accounts of air pollution. I mean, you can find kind of damaged tissue in the lungs of mummies. There's like writings from ancient Rome, ancient Greece. I think we think of air pollution as a very new problem. And it's not a new problem. It's been with us for millennial.

0:20:11.7 SC: But we have success stories. Right. The ozone hole, acid rain. We've already done some good things.

0:20:17.9 HR: Yeah, exactly. And I think what's key about those problems, we've managed to tackle local air pollution. So the UK for example, air pollution levels are much lower than they used to be. I think they are. People might make the argument that, okay, they did that as a kind of nationalistic thing. It was not selfish, but it, it was about protecting the nation. And those solutions just don't scale to international problems. Like countries can't work together. They might do it domestically, but they can't work together. But the two examples you gave there of the ozone layer, which was truly global. I mean, every country in the world signed on to this pact to reduce emissions. And then even acid rain there, it was like continental Europe teamed up to tackle it because emissions from the UK would blow over to Scandinavia. And then there was also like tensions in the US and Canada...

0:21:08.3 SC: Yeah.

0:21:08.8 HR: About who was gonna tackle that. So it's not just that we can only tackle domestic problems. We actually can work together as countries to solve them.

0:21:19.9 SC: So if many of the individual deaths though are from people burning coal or wood in their house worldwide, is that something where we can hope that just making the whole world richer is going to be the right solution here?

0:21:38.4 HR: No, because the problem is that if you look at the trajectory of rich countries to get to where they are today took maybe over a century and we don't want low and middle income countries to follow that same trajectory. The number of deaths that you'd have under that curve if they were to take the same amount of time as rich countries did, would just be, it would just be unbelievable. So what we need to do basically is give them like a short circuit where they can skip the whole trajectory that the US and the UK had to learn from and say, we can actually do this much faster.

0:22:17.9 SC: So give them... Give other countries ways to heat their homes other than burning coal, basically.

[laughter]

0:22:25.9 HR: Yeah. Basically don't, I mean, the key to air pollution is you produce pollution when you burn stuff.

0:22:31.5 SC: Yeah.

0:22:32.4 HR: So we need to not burn stuff [laughter] whether that's wood, whether that's coal, whether that's combustion engine, we basically, we need the technologies we need to make cheap enough that they can basically just skip the whole fossil fuel trajectory.

0:22:46.7 SC: You know, what we're told by certain circles that natural gas is a clean fuel that burn burns much better. That always seemed to be a little bit of marketing to me, less than reality. I don't know what your thoughts are.

0:22:58.7 HR: I mean, it's certainly, so, I mean, we're talking about air pollution here, but when it comes to climate change, the US has managed to reduce its emissions in the last few decades. And actually natural gas has played a key role there. It's basically switched out coal and natural gas for coal. And the amount of CO2 you produce from burning gas is much less than coal. So to some extent natural gas has reduced emissions. I think there's debate there. It was often like proposed as this is a bridge fuel that we needed it for a little while and then we would quickly skip to the alternative technologies. I think it's still to be seen how much of a bridge it is and how much of a, No, a just a bedrock it is of our energy systems.

0:23:44.2 SC: Well, there's a, therefore a geopolitical kind of issue here, right? I mean, the US and Europe and Canada have cleaned up their act somewhat. We put pressure on other countries, right? Like India and China are trying to industrialize and, they're throwing air pollution into the air. And maybe 50 years from now Africa is really just pumping out various pollutants 'cause they're industrializing and how can we claim to have the moral high ground when we've benefited from doing this first?

0:24:18.2 HR: Yeah. And then that's been the political tensions and these climate agreements for decades now. I think they're... I think the argument there is that rich countries need to acknowledge that they've got to where they are from burning fossil fuels. It's not necessarily a, they're really evil because they've done that. It's just the reality that, they've built their economies on fossil fuels. And if we don't want the rest of the world to do that because we're concerned about climate change, then basically there needs to be cheaper alternatives for them to follow the same development pathway. They should not have to choose between alleviating poverty or...

0:25:02.0 SC: Right.

0:25:02.6 HR: Not emitting carbon. That's just like not acceptable. So I think they are, when people ask me, well the UK only emits around 1% of the world's CO2 emissions, like there's actually no point in us even like trying just doesn't make a difference. But there, we're only talking about domestic emissions. What we need to think about is the more like global indirect impacts of what the UK does. The role I see rich countries playing is one, taking the lead and reducing emissions because they need that even and from a geopolitical perspective, China's not gonna reduce emissions if everyone else steps back and says no.

0:25:38.1 HR: But importantly what they need to do is invest in these technologies early. So solar, wind, electric cars, the low carbon technologies. And when we do that, we make these dramatically cheaper. And the point is we want to get to the place where these technologies are cheap enough for the rest of the world that they're not even tempted to burn fossil fuels 'cause they're actually more expensive anyway. So that's to me, where I see rich countries playing a key role.

0:26:06.6 SC: And maybe let's dwell on these technologies that you mentioned here. 'Cause these are all things that we hear about in the context of climate change. And maybe we can just mix up that discussion. But you're saying that there's a whole nother worry about burning fossil fuels, even if the temperature of the globe stayed constant, we're still breathing in a lot of really bad stuff.

0:26:26.9 HR: Right. Exactly. So the, these technologies really the aim there is that they tackle multiple problems at the same time. I think that's a key point to come back to. When I read out the list of all of these scary problems, it seems often overwhelming for people. And often the concern they have is, well, if I make one decision to tackle this, maybe climate change, for example, if I'm making this one decision, what if I'm making all of the other problems worse? [laughter] So they're constantly grappling with these trade-offs that they think exist. But I think the reality is for most of the big solutions to these problems, they basically filter through all of the problems and they link together. So there's maybe only like five to 10 really big solutions, but the point is they tackle all of these environmental problems at the same time.

0:27:16.0 SC: Yeah, good. That does make sense. And therefore, let's just throw climate change into the mix here. I mean, you seem, from my perspective to be pretty realistic in the book saying, look, there's... It's bad and it's getting worse, but you try to make the point that we can make it better. Why don't you just talk about like the thresholds and the targets, 1.5 degrees Celsius, 4 degrees Celsius, whatever people talk about.

0:27:44.4 HR: Right. So there's various targets that we've set. I think the distinction that I like to make is that these are not what we define as thresholds. I think one of the problems that people have is that they do think of them as thresholds and what that leads to, so if you think about, so we've basically said in the Paris agreement, we've said we want to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees, and if possible, 1.5 degrees. Now what many people interpret that as is 1.5 degrees is a threshold. And if we go past that point, it's just a tipping front point from there. And we're just headed for doom.

0:28:25.4 SC: Doom.

0:28:25.8 HR: And my key point is we're going to pass 1.5 degrees that's inevitable.

0:28:30.5 SC: Yeah.

0:28:30.7 HR: So if you're in that frame of mind that's the end, and there's a threshold then that you can obviously see how people get in the position where they do come into this doomsday thinking. So the rally is we're gonna pass 1.5 degrees. Where we're currently headed is that if you look at our current like policies on the table from across the world, we're probably heading for around 2 and a half 2 1/2 degrees. Now, that's unacceptable and we need to bring that down. But if you look at for example what governments have pledged to do, so they've said, we are gonna do this and we're gonna implement these policies, you can actually bring that down significantly where you're actually around the 2 degree mark. So what we're saying is that governments, the commitments that governments have put on the table would bring us to around 2 degrees.

0:29:22.6 SC: Okay.

0:29:23.2 HR: Now you have that gap there between what they're doing and what they're saying they're gonna do. But that's where we have agency because if they said they're gonna do it, then we can actually start to hold them accountable to it.

0:29:34.7 SC: Let's dig into exactly what this means. What 1.5 above what, do we agree on some baseline and what is it that we're measuring? Is it the air temperature average globally water temperature?

0:29:47.1 HR: Yeah. So it's the average temperature rise from pre-industrial.

0:29:52.1 SC: Okay.

0:29:52.1 HR: And it's global average land to sea temperature.

0:30:00.2 SC: Land to sea temperature. I don't even know what that means.

0:30:01.4 HR: Yeah.

0:30:03.0 SC: So just, it includes over the land and the sea.

0:30:03.5 HR: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

0:30:04.1 SC: Okay, good. 'Cause I mean, of course the climate is a messy thing that different parts of the world have different temperatures and so forth, but implicitly in what you're saying, the climatologists and atmospheric scientists know how to take an average and we can measure this quantity?

0:30:19.5 HR: Right, Yeah. I mean the... When we talk about 1.5 degrees, when you talk, when you look at the variation and what that means across the world, it's huge.

0:30:27.4 SC: Yeah.

0:30:27.9 HR: So this is like a global average. And actually a lot of that is if you think for example of the amount of heating you get over land is actually much more than you get over the ocean.

0:30:40.8 SC: Right.

0:30:41.3 HR: So you think about heating over land, it will be more than 1.5.

0:30:43.0 SC: Good. And where are we now? Do you know?

0:30:45.7 HR: We are around 1.2.

0:30:49.5 SC: Around 1.2.

0:30:49.5 HR: So you get kind of ups and downs this year has been a particularly warm year. I think it's, we're gonna probably be around 1.4 this year. But the average is around 1.2 at the moment.

0:31:03.2 SC: And okay, so we're 1.2. You've told us, Don't expect to stay below 1.5. We're gonna bust through 1.5, no problem. You hope that if we do everything right, we can avoid 2.5 keep it to 2. But if we did nothing, my impression is we'd be busting up there at 4 or 5 or 6 degrees warm.

0:31:29.6 HR: Yeah, 4 or 5 degrees would be definitely plausible if we didn't take any action. Now if you look at, even if you look at, I think there's this feeling that we have been trying on climate change for decades and we've made no progress. If you look at the amount of progress we've made over the last decade, for example, so where we thought we were heading a decade ago, we've brought that down by around 1 degree. So we're like heading for 2.5, but we were heading for 3.5.

0:32:00.3 SC: That is pretty good.

0:32:02.0 HR: So it's not that we're making no progress.

0:32:03.1 SC: That's a very important thing to say, because like you say, the political situation as well as the scientific situation can lead one to just despair sometimes. So we already have some progress, not compared to where we used to be, but compared to where we worried we'd be by now.

0:32:20.1 HR: Yeah, exactly.

0:32:21.4 SC: And you talk about the absence of thresholds, like 1.5 is a target and we're not going to make that target. But it's not once you get to 1.5, the whole world just boils over and everyone dies, right? But there are positive feedback loops, right? There's melting of permafrost and things where a little bit of warming can lead to a lot of warming down the way.

0:32:43.6 HR: Yeah, exactly. But I think there, it ultimately comes down to probabilities. And there it's not a 1.5 threshold or a 2 degree threshold. Because it's like every 0.1 degree higher you go, you increase the probability that you reinforce one of these positive feedback loops.

0:33:06.3 SC: Okay.

0:33:06.7 HR: Which I think is an important message to get across that once we pass 1.5, which we will, we fight for 1.6 and we fight for 1.7 and you just continue fighting for that one point, that 0.1 degree. Because with every element of temperature rise, you just increase the probability that you get into one of these positive feedback loops.

0:33:27.9 SC: I like that. So I'm just going to say it again. Every 0.1 degree really matters, no matter if we're at 1.5 or 2 or 2.5, we still should work really hard to prevent the next 0.1 degree.

0:33:40.3 HR: Yeah, exactly.

0:33:42.1 SC: And let me, I know better than this, but let me pretend that I didn't. 1.5 degrees doesn't sound like that much. You know, I could get through the day with 1.5 degrees warmer. What's the big deal about all that?

0:33:54.9 HR: I mean, the key thing there is that, as I said, that's a global average temperature rise. When you look at distribution across the world, the changes there are much larger than that, especially at the poles. So you get the most severe warming at the poles. So yeah, 1.5 amplifies quite a lot.

0:34:15.1 SC: There's a lot of bad things that happen when the globe warms. What are the relative importance of the different things that are happening, you know, sea level rise, you know, crops being destroyed, people moving from their homes? What are the things that we should actually worry about here?

0:34:34.8 HR: I think the key one for me, because I see it as being, having potentially the largest impact on human lives, is food security and crop yields. I think because they are often the most severe events or the ones that are highly seasonal or they come without warning and you're kind of suddenly thrust into a situation where you lose all your crop yield, you can't adapt, et cetera. I think some of the problems, such as sea level rise, are to some extent gradual. It's obviously still devastating, but there are ways to adapt to that because it's a slower, it moves at a slower pace, whereas some of the impacts on crop yields could be very sudden and seasonal.

0:35:26.2 SC: Okay. And we have this weird situation where there is a global average that we track, but there's small disasters, right? And as we're having this conversation, California just suffered through a hurricane, which is just unheard of. California does not have hurricanes. Here in the Northeast US, we had terrible air quality because of wildfires in Canada and so on. How much are these individual disastrous events connected to global climate change? Is it a zero relationship? Is it a probabilistic relationship?

0:36:00.5 HR: It's a probabilistic relationship. It's actually very difficult to attribute a specific event to climate change 'cause there's so many factors involved there. There is actually a specific project called the World Weather Attribution Network, I think it's called.

0:36:17.2 SC: Okay.

0:36:18.6 HR: Where they do these really in-depth analyses where they try to see after an event, what was the probability that this event would have happened in the absence of climate change?

0:36:28.1 SC: Oh, that's great.

0:36:28.2 HR: And there you do get varied results where some, they're pretty confident that yes, there's a very high likelihood this would not have happened. There's other ones where they think the impact of climate change was actually very low.

0:36:41.1 SC: Okay. So what should we do about it? What are we doing about it? You already touched on some of the renewable energy sources, but maybe let's just make that very, very clear. Is it both good and plausible to imagine a wholesale shift from fossil fuels to other energy sources? And if so, which ones?

0:37:00.5 HR: I mean, when it comes to energy. So the way I like to think about it is I basically break emissions up into, it's around 75% energy and industry and around a quarter food.

0:37:12.3 SC: Okay.

0:37:14.1 HR: So when it comes to energy and industry, I mean, just the predominant thing is to rapidly shift away from fossil fuels. And there we've got various, methods to do so. One is renewables. The other one which is less popular, but I think is important is nuclear energy, which is another low carbon source of energy. And actually there is the argument that if more countries had really invested in nuclear energy 1970s, 1980s, nuclear bomb, we might actually be in a much, much better position than we are today. But there is, this mix of nuclear, solar, wind, those... I mean, hydro still plays a significant role. It's just less scalable than solar and wind. I think the mix there is nuclear. You get... You can basically get high output with a very stable... At very stable level. That's the advantage of nuclear. Solar and wind is where you can just get very, very fast growth of these technologies very quickly.

0:38:19.5 SC: So if you were put in charge of either advising or maybe helping, developing countries, what would you tell them to do? Would you tell them to start building some nuclear power plants as well as solar and wind?

0:38:33.5 HR: I mean nuclear is much more regionally specific like some of the issues with nuclear is one, the potential for long construction times with pre planning and one is overrun like costs. There are some countries that are doing this very well and doing it very quickly, mostly in Asia. So, China, South Korea for example. They're doing very well in building new nuclear plants. I think there are some countries where, there just might not be the knowledge and the infrastructure to build these quickly and economically. So there's... I probably wouldn't advise nuclear for every country in the world. My first go-to for lower income countries would be solar.

0:39:19.3 SC: Solar. Okay. I mean, nuclear has an emotional resonance, negative emotional availance, with a lot of people right there. There have been disasters. There have been Chernobyl, there's been Fukushima. There's nuclear waste sitting below the ground for millions of years or whatever it is. What is your feelings about this? Have they been overblown? I know that statistically the number of deaths is much lower per erg or whatever with nuclear than with fossil fuels.

0:39:51.0 HR: Yeah. I think it depends on what you're comparing it to when you look at, yeah. So if you look at the numbers on deaths per unit of energy that we've generated, nuclear is incredibly low. Very, I mean, no one died in the Fukushima disaster, possibly one person in the aftermath. And there's debatable whether you would attribute deaths in people evacuating to the disaster itself. But in terms of the direct death from the disaster, no one died. Chernobyl was obviously a devastating event and I think what captured the world's attention on nuclear energy. But even there, when you're comparing the deaths to the number of people that die from fossil fuel burning every year, I mean, you just have orders of magnitude of difference.

0:40:44.3 SC: Right.

0:40:44.5 HR: So while there is inevitably a risk with nuclear power as there is with most technologies, the risk is very, very low compared to fossil fuels where it's not even a risk, it's just a constant. You just constantly have millions of people dying every year from fossil fuel burning.

0:41:02.6 SC: Yeah. How do they die from fossil fuel burning? What is the cause?

0:41:06.5 HR: So, when we burn fossil fuels, we basically emit, various gases, but also what we call particulates. So like basically small pieces of matter. Now, the ones that we're really worried about are, or are the worst, are basically the smallest particles. So you've got these particles, we call them PM2.5, so they're like less than 2.5 microns.

0:41:28.5 SC: Okay.

0:41:29.0 HR: And the point about these small particles is they can basically get into your respiratory system because they're so small and through that they increase the risk of respiratory disease, stroke, et cetera. So many of the non-communicable diseases that many people die from, air pollution significantly increases the risk.

0:41:51.5 SC: Okay. So it goes back to the air pollution aspects of the fossil fuels. Okay. So if we imagine replacing fossil fuels with renewables and nuclear and so forth, what those produce is electricity. And so we have to electrify the world rather than burning our fuels directly in our cars, or maybe even in our airplanes and our homes certainly.

0:42:15.7 HR: Yeah. So the... I mean the way I like to think about it is we need to basically electrify everything or as much as we possibly can. We can generate low carbon electricity at scale. We producing other forms of energy in a low carbon way is trickier. So we basically want to shift as much of our energy to electricity as we can. So the key thing there is, well, one, our existing electricity demand, but also shifting as much transport over as we can. And there that's predominantly road transport. I think aviation is gonna be much more difficult, but also in terms of heating, for example, so switching to electric heat pumps, that basically takes off a lot of our, the gas that we burn for heating basically move that to electricity as well. So we basically have this challenge of we need to rapidly scale the amount of electricity that we're produce, low carbon electricity we're producing. 'Cause we're not just trying to meet our current electricity demand. We're probably gonna need to at least double the amount of electricity we're producing and meet that all through low carbon sources.

0:43:22.3 SC: Since you're in the UK is it possible that you avoided the weird culture war discussion about natural gas stoves here in the United States a few months ago? Are you familiar with this?

0:43:34.6 HR: I got like small inklings of it.

[laughter]

0:43:36.6 HR: But it wasn't as big here. No.

0:43:39.0 SC: All it was was, you know, a proposed idea that we should think carefully about the status of burning gas in our stoves and make sure that we didn't have too many people dying of this, et cetera. But then this was instantly seized by a certain political party as evidence that the government wanted to take away your gas stoves. And it's an example of how the political problem is going to be a difficult one. It becomes an identity that you're not gonna let the government take away your gas stove, just like your gas burning car, I guess.

0:44:14.4 HR: Right. I mean we didn't really have the gas burning stove thing here, but certainly in the UK there's lots of backlash against electric vehicles. And there I think it's similar. I think, so the UK government has basically committed to by 2030, they're not going to sell new petrol and diesel cars anymore. So there's a phase out of new petrol and diesel cars. Now I think there's debates about whether they stick with that target, whether they push it back. But I think a lot of the messaging coming from that, which is untrue, is that there's this feeling of the government's gonna take your petrol car away from you, which is just obviously not the case. You just cannot buy a new one on the market after 2030. But there has been this definite backlash where I see there being some bridge between these political divides again, comes down to the technology itself. I think when you just look at the fundamental level of the technologies, electric vehicles are just much, much better than internal combustion engine. The driving experience is better, they waste much less energy. You need to make them cost effective compared to petrol cars. And people will just make the switch anyway. It won't even be about air pollution or climate change, they'll just pick the electric car regardless.

0:45:39.4 SC: 2030 is pretty remarkable. That's not that far away. I know that certain individual car manufacturers like Jaguar in your country as soon as 2025, they're just not gonna build internal combustion engines anymore. It's a remarkable shift from where we were just a little while ago.

0:45:57.2 HR: Yeah, I think this is one of the reasons I feel so optimistic is that it seemed for decades that we're making no progress. And basically within the space of a few years, many of these trends are just really taking off. So electric cars, for example, you've gone from basically nothing a few years ago to nearly one in five electric cars in the world being electric, new car sales. In some countries, I mean China for example, we often think about, it's the US and Europe that are paying for the expensive electric cars. China one in three new cars sold in China, now are electric and they're really going for it. I expect that within the next few years you'll be hitting almost half of new cars in China being electric. So this kind of shift in feeling from petrol to electric cars has been incredibly, incredibly fast.

0:46:54.8 SC: And there is a certain contrarian take that even though you're not burning gas in your car, electric cars are bad for the environment in other ways 'cause they need all sorts of resources we have to dig up in mines in poor countries. Is that... There some truth behind that or is it a little bit exaggerated?

0:47:11.3 HR: I mean, there's various claims that go around. I think the ultimate point there is that none of these solutions are absolutely perfect. It's not that... You're just not going to find a solution that has zero impacts. And I think if we're gonna try and wait for that, we'll just be waiting forever. I think the key point is we need to move. So we need to move with the solutions that are really, really good, but not perfect. So when it comes to example from the CO2 emissions from electric vehicles, the point that's often made or claimed is that you need lots of energy to produce the battery and therefore over the lifecycle of the car, actually you emit just as much as a petrol or diesel anyway. That's just completely not true. You do emit more in the production of the battery compared to just producing a regular gasoline car. But for the average driver, you're paying that back within one to two years. So like after one to two years, you're saving carbon and over the lifecycle of the car, it depends on the electricity mix. But by the way, even if you're producing the electricity from coal, it's still better than a petrol car, but for standard electricity emit, you're talking about reduction of at least half, often two [0:48:32.0] ____ in terms of CO2 reductions. And that will just get cleaner as we decarbonize the electricity grid to the point where you have very, very, very low emissions for electric cars.

0:48:42.7 SC: Do you drive an electric car yourself or are you just because you're lucky enough to live in a country with good public transportation, do you not need to?

[chuckle]

0:48:50.7 HR: No, I don't have one. I mean, that's the key point I always make. I think I often come across as a electric car, like advocate or fanatic 'cause I do a lot of writing on it, but I actually just don't own one because cycling or walking is better. It's just that an electric car is better than a petrol car.

0:49:08.7 SC: Even better, yeah. Cycling or walking is even better than the electric car, right?

0:49:11.8 HR: Yeah.

0:49:12.0 SC: We have two cars and one we keep in the garage for road trips, which goes on gas and the other is the little BMW i3, which is electric and it's so much fun to drive. I love it and I think it's gonna be an easy transition myself one.

0:49:23.6 HR: Yeah.

0:49:24.1 SC: But of course the countries need the infrastructure, right? The charging stations and everything, so it will take a while.

0:49:29.8 HR: Yeah. I think that... I mean, it will take a while. And it's a big infrastructure challenge, like both in terms of one scaling electric vehicles, but even decarbonizing the electricity grids there, it's just a massive infrastructural challenge. We're just completely rebuilding our energy systems and we shouldn't underplay like the size of that challenge. But I think when it comes to electric cars and infrastructure, I think for a long time there was this kind of range anxiety where people were worried that the range of electric cars were too low. I just, I don't really see the case for that anymore. I think what's more valid is what we'd think of is like charger anxiety, where there you are actually relying on there being reliable working chargers, a reasonable cadence across networks.

0:50:22.8 SC: But it is coming. And I guess one of the lessons here, since you're trying to be overly... I should say overtly not overly, optimistic in the book, is that we've already seen that there's no direct coupling between CO2 emissions and economic growth, right? That is something that we've demonstrated. The economies can grow without polluting the atmosphere.

0:50:47.6 HR: It's definitely true for rich countries in recent years. I mean for most, like most of the last century it was true that these were tightly coupled and it still is tightly coupled in low and middle income countries. As economies grow, CO2 emissions do rise. What we've seen over the last few decades in rich countries is yes this decoupling where economies have grown while they've reduced emissions at the same time. Now the question that always comes up is that just because they're just offshoring all of their emissions elsewhere, so like they just get rid of all the industry and just the rest of the world produces stuff for them. We can adjust for that. And when we adjust for that emissions in the US so the UK are higher so we are net importers of emissions. But even when you take account of that emissions have fallen. So emissions have fallen while GDP has increased. So that's certainly true in rich countries. We're still to see this decoupling further down the income spectrum.

0:51:49.1 SC: And I guess one other thing on the climate change issue how much interest do you have in active technologies to change the atmosphere, to remove CO2 or to otherwise engineer a return to what the temperature was a century ago?

0:52:09.8 HR: Definitely a lot less than just simply reducing emissions.

0:52:14.6 SC: Okay. [laughter]

0:52:15.9 HR: I think, I mean I think the, I don't know how much it's overplayed. It's often discussed as doing one comes at the cost of reducing emissions at the same time. What I wanna be clear is that the primary focus is to reduce emissions as much and as quickly as we can. There are certain sectors where we might struggle to basically get rid of emissions. And there you would, we might need to rely on negative emissions technologies to get us over that final hurdle to get to net zero. But there's, so yeah, first and foremost reduce emissions. I think the question is if we want these technologies to be ready in 2050 when we might need them, do we need to be investing early and now and the answer's maybe probably yes.

[laughter]

0:53:14.3 HR: So we think about technologies. I mean the point of these technologies is they're variant energy. So if you take direct air capture so that's basically directly sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere. They're energy intensive and they're very expensive. So we could not deploy them at any scale at the moment but you would have made that argument about solar or wind or batteries several decades ago as well. They were really expensive and didn't look like they could be scalable. So the question is do we need to be investing in them now to have any sort of viability in 30 or 40 years from now? And the answer's probably yes. So I think these should be still some small amount of budget going into these technologies but the primary focus should be reducing emissions.

0:53:56.7 SC: Way back when years ago I had Ramez Naam on the podcast and he made the point that solar power costs have plummeted of course but it's not because we had any great scientific technological breakthrough was just because we built a lot of them and got better at it. And so you know the cost went down as we learned how to do it. And I'm not sure if that's an analogous situation for what you just called negative emission technologies.

0:54:24.0 HR: No, I think it's exactly the same. I mean it's just what we'd call a learning curve. And you've seen the same for batteries. You've seen the same for wind energy whereas you deploy more you basically have this continual learning throughout. And yet we've seen like talking about like 98% declines in costs over a few decades. So it's been this very, very dramatic change. But it has been this gradual reducing by I think the learning curve for solar was something like reducing costs fell by 90% every time you doubled capacity. So it's just been this constant. I think this comes back to what I was talking about earlier of the responsibility of rich countries. This has only happened because someone was investing in these technologies when they were very, very expensive. And the point there is it was rich countries quite rightly. But what's happened there is the costs have fallen and they've fallen because we've had this gradual learning over time.

0:55:22.2 SC: And I feel, okay just to switch gears. That I've been a little unfair 'cause talking about pollution and emissions and climate change is just inevitable and fascinating. We had to do it but I don't want the audience to get away without realizing that a major theme of your book is food. How we produce it, how we eat it. And that is something you hear a lot less about I think in the popular discourse. So what's up with food? Why don't you like hamburgers, Hannah? [laughter]

0:55:52.0 HR: So I think food kind of sits at the heart of sustainability for me, because it basically touches on almost all of our environmental problems. So we use half of the world's habitable land for farming. So we've basically turned the world into a massive farm. It's around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. Around 78% of fresh water withdrawals are for agriculture and farming. It's the leading driver of deforestation. It's the leading driver of biodiversity loss. So basically we... Most of the issues that I'm talking about, we cannot tackle unless we tackle food. And when it's, so obviously there's the environmental lens to that. There's obviously also the human lens where we're trying to feed people 8, 9, 10 billion people a nutritious diet at the same time. So that's the challenge that we have. Like can we feed 10 billion people while also tackling these problems at the same time?

0:56:53.9 SC: So it's inevitably coupled to the population question. So maybe we should get that on the plate as well. Our population is growing. We already have a lot of people in the world. It's growing more slowly than it used to, to the extent that some people are worried it's gonna start shrinking. Do you have a way that we should be thinking about that?

0:57:12.6 HR: I think it's common in environmentalism to pin all of our problems on population, and if we just have less people, then the problems would go away. Often when environmentalists talk about this, they're not talking about slightly slowing down the rate of population growth, or slightly reducing the number of people. They're saying, we can only have sustainability on the planet with 1 billion people. And obviously that's just not realistic. And it's not even, it's not even what I would claim we should be going for. I think, to me, the question of population is overhyped in this, and I think the key reason is that people overestimate how quickly demographics can change. Like we're talking about tackling these problems within the next few decades, the world's population is not gonna shift enough for that to make a discernible difference on what we need to do.

0:58:10.5 SC: Right.

0:58:10.8 HR: If we can feed 8 billion people and produce low carbon energy for 8 billion people, we can do it for 9 billion people or 10 billion people versus here we're talking about providing scalable solutions in the billions. And when we get to that point, these small changes in population that you might get from some of the solutions that people would propose, they just don't make a difference.

0:58:34.8 SC: And the expectation now is that the... Well, let me phrase it as a question, which I should do. Is the expectation that the world's population is going to equilibrate at some number in the foreseeable future, or that it will peak and start going down? Or do we not really know?

0:58:53.2 HR: So the current UN, the latest UN projections are that the world population will peak around the 2080s and then decline from there. These predictions are obviously very sensitive to what they expect fertility rates and stuff hold in the future.

0:59:10.8 SC: Sure.

0:59:12.3 HR: Not just in terms of declining fertility rates in lower income countries, but also just sensitive to what happens to fertility rates in rich countries. Do they go up a bit? Do they stay the same? Do they go down? So I think there is some sensitivity there, but there is the expectation that towards the end of the century, world population will peak.

0:59:33.0 SC: Okay. And is that just because people are getting richer and rich people have less kids? Or is it education or is it even sensible to talk about causation there?

0:59:45.2 HR: So, I don't know about causation, but there's very strong links that as countries develop, so first as child mortality falls, so rates of child mortality tend to fall, that they tend to fall before fertility rates fall, which is why you can get pretty fast population growth 'cause child mortality falls before your fertility rates fall. But then eventually fertility rates do fall and that tends to be accompanied by economic growth, having access to contraception, getting women into education and careers. So there's a range of social development context there that tends to lead to reductions in fertility rates.

1:00:29.8 SC: Okay. So it's not that the population of the earth is gonna double or triple in the years to come and we won't have enough room to feed them, as we might've thought in the '70s or whatever, we have enough food, in some sense. Is that, did I get that impression correctly from your book? If we just figure out how many calories we produce, if we spread them a little bit more evenly, we would have enough food to feed the world right now?

1:00:54.5 HR: Yeah, definitely. So I think when you think about nearly one in 10 people in the world don't get enough food to eat in terms of calories every day. So I think there, when you think about that, you might think, we're maybe like really close to just like, just getting by on producing enough food for everyone. And so maybe some people overeat a little bit and some people just don't get enough. I think that that's just far from reality. The reality is that we produce more than 5000 calories per person per day. That's how much we're producing. Now what we get at the end of the supply chain is much less than that. But this is not a... The way I like to think about it is this is not like a biophysical problem that we just cannot get enough food out of the ground. If we were in that position, I'd be really, really worried. The point is we can grow more than enough food that we need to feed a population of 10 billion, is what we choose to do after... With it afterwards that's really the key thing. And that comes down to the human agency. Like we have the decisions on how we want to use that food.

1:02:01.0 SC: And in particular, we've chosen to hand over a lot of our land to cattle grazing. And I'll give you the opportunity to explain to us how harmful that is to the planet.

1:02:15.8 HR: Yeah. So the, one of the key reasons that we start with 5000 calories per day and end up with, I don't know, 2500, 3000 per day, is that we feed a lot of that food to livestock and animals. And the point there is that they then convert that into meat very, very inefficiently. So you basically, when you feed crops to an animal, you lose most of the calories. You're basically just throwing it away. Now you can argue that you're converting that into good proteins and stuff, but the reality is you're wasting a lot of food. So when it comes down to cereals, for example, only around half of the world's cereals actually go directly into humans. The rest of it either goes to animal feed or goes to biofuels. So that's one factor is the amount of like crops that we're feeding to animals, very inefficiently. But then beyond that we've got cattle grazing, which is using large, large pasture lands. So if we think about it, half of the world's habitable land is used for farming. Around three quarters of that is used for livestock. So either grazing land, or land for growing crops for livestock. And the issue there is that a lot of that land has come from deforestation and cutting down forests and going into to wild habitats. So it's been, by far, cattle grazing has been the largest driver of deforestation.

1:03:49.1 SC: So in terms of solutions to this, it does seem that it's a slightly different issue than what we were talking about before. One of the happy things about electric cars, for example, is that electric cars turn out to be good. There, it's an easy sell. Like you said, they're going to take over 'cause people want to buy them. Are we going to have to rely on personal choices and responsibility to get people to eat less beef and lamb and more plant-based foods? Or is there a more societal way to tackle the problem?

1:04:22.3 HR: I think I'm a lot less optimistic on how rapidly things can change there. I think, as you say, you can find a very good alternative to a petrol car in an electric one. I think the challenge with food is that, one, there's a very strong health component to it, so it's very personal to people. And again, I think food is just, there's just a very strong identity element to what you eat. And we don't like people telling us what we should eat. And in fact, we often try and push back and go in the opposite direction if people try to do so. So I think there, I'm less optimistic about the scale of change. You could argue that what you do with electric vehicles and petrol cars, you can basically do the same for meat. You can almost recreate the same experience, the same texture, the same nutrition, for the use of either plant-based substitutes, which are actually getting very, very good. Or you could go high tech with lab-grown meat or cultured meat. There, there's, I think there'll still be a little bit more of a barrier to change because it's about putting stuff in your body. There's this strong identity element. So there I could see that transition happening and I think you could almost recreate the experience. I'm just a little bit less optimistic that you can do it quickly.

1:05:47.3 SC: Well, good. Let's dig into this just a little bit more, because I'm all in favor of plant-based meat substitutes and synthetic meats and things like that. If you have a population, let's imagine a hypothetical situation where the population had no identity connection to killing cows and eating meat, but really loved the taste of beef or lamb or whatever. Is it much better for the environment if we can do that? Or does it also just... I don't know how much energy it costs to make a synthetic steak or hamburger or whatever.

1:06:24.5 HR: Yeah, so the... I think there's various substitutes there. So the plant-based substitutes are just undeniably better for the environment on any metric. They're just much, much better than meat. I think the lab-grown meat is not quite there there in terms of scalability and it's definitely not there in terms of cost. From the lifecycle analysis, we've seen where it basically tries to quantify the footprint across the whole cycle, so the energy and the ingredient stuff that go into it. From the results that we have so far, the emissions and energy are much, much lower than meat proteins. But there is some uncertainty there because we haven't done the scalability that would be required. But my expectation would be that the emissions of these technologies would just be much, much lower, and like electric vehicles, they would continue to get lower as we decarbonize our energy. I think the key things with fossil fuels or meat for example is, to some extent we've improved efficiency and stuff of these technologies over time, but we're hitting the limits. There's only so far you can go with these technologies.

1:07:43.1 SC: Yeah.

1:07:43.9 HR: With renewables or electric cars or these new technologies, again, there's the learning curve. We're, to some extent, only at the beginning of the journey and these can continue to get much better over time.

1:07:57.2 SC: So the optimistic take here would be that, just as with solar power, we went from a situation just a couple decades ago where it was prohibitively expensive to now it's quite viable, maybe the same thing will happen with meat substitutes in various forms.

1:08:13.2 HR: Yeah. I think the, one of the problems at the moment is they're not that cost effective compared to the alternatives.

1:08:19.4 SC: Yeah.

1:08:19.4 HR: So if you have a real burger and a plant-based burger next to each other, and they're the same price, or even if the plant-based burger is more expensive, your general consumer is just not going to buy it. And that's especially the case of, again, thinking about the trajectory of lower income countries, basically there we want to produce really low cost protein, such again that they skip the really high meat pathway that rich countries have gone through, but hopefully they are, if you could even undercut the cost of meat in those countries, it wouldn't just be that, okay, they avoid the meat, you could actually just improve nutrition at a much, much lower cost.

1:09:00.5 SC: And good. So maybe the take home wrap-up message here is, the subtitle of your book where you propose that we can try to be the first generation to live sustainably on the planet. So you've been a good sport for a whole hour of the podcast, let's see, give your utopian take now. What is the lovely utopian future that we can achieve?

1:09:27.3 HR: So again, it comes back to the two halfs of what I think about as the scales of sustainability. We need to tackle what I think of as the first half of the equation. So the human suffering or the flip side of that, since we're talking about a utopia, human flourishing dimension to that which is, many of the metrics are unacceptable as they are at the moment. So, of widespread poverty, 5 million children die from preventable causes every year. There are just still massive, massive global inequalities. And the aim needs to be that everyone in the world can live a comfortable life where they have good health, they have a good income, they have access to electricity, they have access to clean cooking fuels. All of these basic metrics that we might take for granted now need to be scaled up across the world. At the same time, we need to reduce all of the environmental problems that we've discussed. But I think, as I mentioned, I think these can go hand in hand. If you can make clean abundant energy really cheap, then you can, again, solve the first half of the equation. People can get access to electricity at a much cheaper cost. The same with nutrition and food. You can potentially massively increase nutritional standards at a much lower cost.

1:10:55.4 HR: So it's these, bringing these together as these two realities where everyone lives a comfortable life, but they do so with a very low environmental impact.

1:11:03.0 SC: And how, for the individuals listening to the podcast, can we balance our individual choices to try to make the world a better place? I mean, you point out, for example, in the book, don't worry about the plastic straws, everybody. The plastic straws are not really a driver of anything major in the world. But it makes, maybe I never actually worried about plastic straws, but maybe it makes you feel better if you use paper straws and feeling better is good. But do those local individual choices matter much or does it really depend on us pushing political willpower forward?

1:11:39.0 HR: It's, as you mentioned, it's a mix of both. I think the key point when it comes to stuff like the plastic straws and the plastic bags, it's not necessarily that I'm saying don't do the small things. I think my key point there is that we get thrown at us every day, we need to do these 100 things to save the planet. And for most people, it's completely overwhelming. And we probably only have some brain space to do a couple of things. My key point is if you're only going to do a couple of things, do the stuff that actually matters. Don't waste your efforts on the plastic straws. So it's about being smart with your attention and your money and your energy so that you actually do stuff that matters rather than wasting it on marginal stuff.

1:12:25.1 SC: What is your list of a few things that do matter that we should focus on?

1:12:32.3 HR: Eat less meat, is the first thing. If you drive, switch to an electric vehicle. Heating in your home, switch to a heat pump or to some extent move away from gas if you can. Reduce food waste. If you can, put a solar panel on your roof or somehow increase renewable energy within your household. For many people that's just not feasible. But those are really the really big buckets of your carbon footprint, and actually across the different environmental problems. If you do that stuff, you're already making a massive impact. The other big one is fly less. From an individual there, there's, I'm less optimistic that we find technological solutions to that very soon. On the flip side of that, I also don't see very rapid moves away from that from a social political perspective. I just don't see, if anything, I see global flying increasing, not decreasing in the coming decades.

1:13:43.2 SC: But also presumably vote for leaders who express awareness and care about these issues.

1:13:52.2 HR: Yeah. So the things I mentioned are basically your direct footprint impact. When it comes to your indirect impact, there are a few. One of the big ones is political. So one is vote for a leader that actually takes these issues seriously. But also there's another element to that where leaders campaign based on what they think their voters care about. So it's not just about what you put on the ballot, it's about trying to raise your voice to make sure that politicians know that we actually care about these issues. So they put them near the top of the list. So there's the political lens. There's also, as we've talked about, the economic lens where when you're buying an electric car, when you're buying the meat substitutes, when you're buying the solar panels, you are shifting the economic curve of these technologies for other people, and the rest of the world. So basically by investing, they might still be quite expensive at the moment, but by investing in them early, you're basically shoving that cost curve down for the rest of the world.

1:14:57.8 SC: Well, and you know, read and write books that encourage people to act in these good ways. So we appreciate you contributing to that part of it. Hannah Ritchie, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:15:08.4 HR: Thank you very much.

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