YouSaid · the spoken record

Hannah Ritchie

lines on the record: 49
first: 2024-01-19
most recent: 2024-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Like plug in hybrids. A few years ago, I would have said underrated, I'm now overrated. I think we can just go fully battery electric.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Overrated palm oil is a problem, but it's potentially less of a problem than the alternatives. So I think the strategy there is not to boycott and get rid of it. I think it's to produce more sustainable supply chains”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Underrated. I think a lot of people have a resistance to being told to eat less meat. From a climate perspective, you can actually do a substitution of meat and have a big impact. So if you substituted beef for chicken, so if you got rid of your beef burger and had a chicken burger instead, it would have a massive reduction in your climate impact.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just a much better messaging strategy for this is look, we can actually tackle both of these things at the same time, and I just don't think that we're going to make any progress if we try to frame it”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some sense, yeah, I think there's many areas where we can reduce energy use. But a core part of moving to a low carbon economy is when we go through the energy transition, that will happen anyway. Our current energy system based on fossil fuels is incredibly inefficient. Two-thirds of the energy we burn is wasted. It doesn't go towards actually our energy services. So moving us around power in our homes and our laptops is wasted as heat. So when you decarbonize the economy, you take away most of that waste. So your final energy demand is going to be much, much lower anyway. So we are actually going to reduce energy demand anyway. We're not going to have to produce this massive stack of energy that we are producing today. And we still get the same welfare benefits that we all want. So to me, I've”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The pushback I would get often from showing that the UK has increased its GDP while reducing emissions. So what we call decoupling of these two metrics. The pushback is that it's not happening fast enough and it's not happening fast enough. But I think my contest towards people arguing that degrowth would be a better way of doing that is what is the timescale for us to get to a place where a politician is willing to stand up, go for that as a core message people to vote for them and then actually put that into practice. That's not going to be a fast process. So the argument seems to me to fall apart if you're trying to argue that decoupling is not going to happen fast enough. Degrowth will also not happen fast enough. Now another key part of the argument of degrowth is that maybe it's less about GDP and we can just reduce energy use.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, is it feasible at all? Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's one of my core points is that I just don't think that messaging is ever going to get through politically. Like I cannot see a politician standing up and wanting an election with that as one of their key slogans. And I think the time component there is really important. Like I think many of the”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, again, I get the intuition there. I think there are really different, I guess, flavors of degrowth. And what I'm quite explicit about in the book is that we can't go for global degrowth, right? The world is too poor for us to start to try to shrink the global economy. Like, if you do that, you leave billions of people in poverty. Now, there's a different question should we deliberately try to reduce consumption and shrink in rich countries, which seems more feasible.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there are a few companies that do a mix now, but I mean, you can immediately see how that would work, right? Like we need to move away from, we need to globally, we need to eat less meat, right? And people are often quite reluctant to do that, and we might see quite a slow change there. But the point is you can still eat your beef burger, but you could like, we could have beef consumption if we just did a half and half burger. And people would probably not really notice the difference. The texture would probably be the same, the taste would pretty much be the same. I mean, it would be a very, very quick way to do it and should really have no impact on kind of people's enjoyment of the food.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rent a flat, so I can't install a heat pump, I couldn't put a solar panel on the roof. But I think these are just these probably make up around 80% of your footprint. And if you want to do the rest, great, but I don't think we should do that on the basis that we assume we're having a massive impact with those small decisions.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be my one recommendation. The other big part of your carbon footprint is road transport. So if you have a car, try to use it less. So walk, public transport cycle. If you really need a car, an electric one is definitely better than a petrol or diesel one. The other big one is another big one is flying. It's obviously a big one primarily for people in the rich world because most of the world do not fly. Home heating. So a big thing there is like one if you can reduce the temperature slightly, but a big thing you can do if you can afford it is to install a heat pump. It's just way better for the environment than a gas boiler. And then another big thing is like home energy. Like if you can install a solar panel, definitely do it. I mean, a lot of these are constrained by finance and living conditions. A lot of them I can't do because I currently”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the fewer the better. I think one of the problems I often have with environmental messaging on individual action is that you have books that are like a hundred ways to save the planet and no one has time to make 100 decisions. I think part of the problem is there's no prioritization there. So if you only make five decisions, my worry is that people are really well intentioned, but they make the five decisions which don't make a difference, like the plastic bag and the plastic straw So the five core things I would say is one, eat less meat, especially beef and lamb.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not. There's other examples like people often assume that organic food is just automatically better than non-organic food when actually the data would suggest otherwise. And again, I kind of intuitively get it. It feels green. It feels natural. I think that's what our environmental kind of inclinations are built on is like green natural, like no artificial inputs. So I think maybe that part of it comes into it is that we have this kind of gut feeling of I often frame it as like this feeling of like we want to kind of go backwards in time like we think this is the past was really sustainable if we could just get back there where we kind of all had our little farm where we ever find was organic we weren't using all these plastics we weren't using all this energy i think part of it is maybe just this drawback to what we imagined was a very sustainable past”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there's other reasons beyond carbon footprint why someone might want to buy local, and that's fine. But I think it's sad if they do that thinking that it's much better for the environment.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, don't have a good answer to why we get the stuff. I think the plastic straws I don't get why we get that wrong. I mean, it just doesn't make any intuitive sense to me. I think there's some stuff that seems a bit more intuitive to me why people get, like, I kind of get the local food stuff. Like, I do get it. It seems kind of intuitive.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a good reel of fun. When it comes to the transport of the food, the reason that the food, the impact of transport is often not that big is that most of the food that's travels internationally comes by ship, right? They don't fly it because flying is carbon intensive and it's expensive, right? They're not going to do that unless they really have to fly it to you because it's expensive. So most of it's shipped and shipping actually has a very low carbon intensity in terms of travel. So most of the stuff that's coming to you is not flown. It's shipped for that specific reason that it's actually expensive to fly.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's not. And when you look at, I mean, food is a massive contributor to climate change. It's around a quarter to a third of greenhouse gas emissions. But the transport part is only 5% of food emissions globally. Nearly all of the emissions come from land use change, so deforestation and using the land, and emissions on the farm. So when it comes to ruminants, as you say, it's a methane. Those are the big contributors to the carbon footprint of your food. It's not about the distance it's travelled.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think people just, they maybe have one specific area that they work in or lecture in, and then the rest of the stuff they base on intuition. And I think the intuition there seems right. And I get why people make that mistake. They imagine transport, that means flying or shipping or a big truck that obviously emits lots of CO2. Therefore, the further it travels, the worse it is.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, as a fraction, the transport component is a fraction of the impact. So, like, my number one recommendation on food, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint, is to eat less meat.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I told that story, I think, partly to demonstrate that even people that work in this field don't necessarily always get it right and don't necessarily always base their decisions based on the data, which if you look at the data would show that the inference should have been the other way around. But I think it's also...”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reference, you can see that it's actually there's been air pollution there or looking at historical anecdotes where I think I quote Marcus Aurelius as saying he was so glad to get out of Rome because the air was filthy and he could like think clearly again once he left Rome as clearly pointing to air pollution is not just this modern problem, it was also a problem in the past So I think it's a mix of we have really for most of the stuff we have like pretty good solid data and where we don't I try to be very clear that this is a big data gap and we need to fill it and then trying to piece the story together you need to draw on different strands of evidence”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm relieved. Yeah, like the sources I rely on for most of these things, like the data is pretty good, pretty solid. Like we have good data on CO2 emissions, for example. We have reasonable reconstructions of air pollution emissions, where there's not really long-term data, I try to piece together an overview from a range of different sources. So if you take air pollution as the example, we have reasonable reconstructions of emissions of air pollution by looking at the amount of fuel we're burning and where we're burning it, etc. for the last 200 years or so, we don't have a lot of data previous to there. So when it gets to that stage, I try to understand what air pollution might have been like a bit more, a bit further in the past. And we can't use data for that, but we can use archaeological evidence. So in the book,”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I try really hard to make sure I'm only sourcing from reliable sources. I mean, you can find data that would support any argument that you want in the world, probably.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's lots of different reasons you might or might not want to buy install nuclear, whether it's cost or reconstruction time. So there's lots of decisions about whether you want to build a new one. What I definitely don't think we should do is shut down our existing ones because we're just shooting ourselves in the foot. When we install renewables, we'll start to be replacing the existing nuclear when we should really be replacing the fossil fuels.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're including supply chains and the mining. And the big one, the big one for fossil fuels is air pollution. We're not factoring in climate change. So if you also factored in climate change, fossil fuels would be even worse. So for me, it's this less of a framing of are you going to go for solar and wind or are you going to go for nuclear? How can we move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible? And I'm pretty much pro anything that helps us get there faster”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's like a very contentious subject, but I'm pro-nuclear as much as I'm pro-renewables. My general, from looking at the data, I think there's lots of concerns around safety. And I think when you actually break down the data and the book I look at, number of deaths per unit of electricity produced. And we've had a few big nuclear accidents. I think more people assume more people died in those accidents than actually did. But when you look at the numbers, nuclear, it's just very clear nuclear is much safer than fossil fuels. You have a pretty”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a big challenge, but I think what people don't appreciate is there are a lot of smart people already doing this on the national grid. The fact that you're supply and demand is fluctuating all the time, even on a fossil fuel based system.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A very different electricity system where pricing will often operate and go with when supply is highest. So you'll get really cheap electricity when the sun is shining or the wind's blowing. And I think we'll actually start to adapt. To that, so you'll shift your electric car charging to a time when it's not peak demand, for example.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think that as a big challenge, but I think it's a solvable problem, the intermittency problem is different on different timescales. So for, you know, evening out like peaks throughout the day on the basis of like hours, batteries work well, for longer term storage, you might be looking at other options such as hydrogen or we're now talking about maybe methanol, like storing it as a liquid fuel, which is easier than a battery over longer time period. So I think we will have a range of solutions at different time scales in order to balance that. And then I think that they are, I think on the demand side, we'll actually just change things a lot. I think like a problem you might see is if we all move to electric vehicles, the problem you'll get is in the evening everyone will come home, they'll start cooking, they'll turn on the heating, they'll start charging the electric vehicle. I think what you're going to get is”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so over the last decade, the price of solar has fallen by 90%, the price of wind has fallen by 70%, electric cars are starting to reach price parity with a petrol car. So your solar and wind are now the cheapest technologies we can put in instead of coal or gas. So I think regardless of climate change, many countries will actually just start to do this because it's the cheapest option. So I think we need to stop framing this as a, are you willing to sacrifice the economy in order to solve climate change? Because I think that's a false dichotomy. And that's why I'm a bit more optimistic now than I was a decade ago.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the reason for that, and the reason I'm optimistic, and I think what maybe goes slightly against the quote you gave earlier, is that I think if it was true a decade ago that it was very expensive to tackle climate change, right? If you look at any of the technologies we need to switch to, so solar or wind or electric vehicles, they were all far more expensive than coal or gas or petrol car. So it really was like, are you willing to sacrifice the economy and put your money on the line in order to solve this? And a lot of countries just weren't.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's bad. That's really bad We've set targets of trying to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees and well below 2 degrees if not we won't reach the 1.5 degree target we're going to go past 1.5 degrees so in that regard I'm not this like crazy optimist I think if you'd asked me a decade ago I would have said two degrees was completely unfeasible as well I'm becoming slightly more optimistic that we can get close to that range although we're currently headed for 2.5”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're still very far off track from where we need to be. But what gives me optimism that we have a shot of actually tackling this is we've actually made quite a lot of progress in the last decade. It sounds unbelievable, but we actually have. So we're currently on track for around two and a half degrees. That's kind of the median estimate of where our current policies are taking us. Now, that's very bad.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the problem with ozone is that we were using these specific gases, CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons, in refrigerators, deodorants, a small subset of stuff that we used. And we got to the point where there was just basically a basic substitute. You could just take the CFCs out and put something else in in its place. And initially it was maybe a little bit more expensive, but it was kind of a one-for-one substitution within a really small number of goods. So once we did that, the problem was largely solved. The problem with climate change is like we literally need to change everything. We need to change the way we produce energy, the way we move around, the food we eat, the way we build stuff. Like it's a full economy-wide problem. So I think that's part of the reason why it's so much harder. What gives me”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I don't think it's going to be easy, and I don't think it's a perfect ozone problem or the acid drain problem is a perfect parallel. I think climate change is just much harder to solve. So I largely agree with his analysis there.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the ozone hole, the gases, the CFCs that depleted the ozone layer, we've basically reduced them by more than 99% now. So we've kind of done the job of stopping those emissions. The ozone hole is still there and it will take decades to close, but really there's nothing more we can do about it. We've stopped emitting the gases. We just need to wait for it to heal. And the same with acid drain across Europe and North America, like our emissions of sulfur dioxide, which is what causes acid rain, our in many countries have reduced emissions by more than 90%. So we really emit very little of these gases now. So you could essentially say, yes, these two problems we've solved and we just don't really hear about them anymore.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the difference there is I think you can use the local air pollution example to show that it's possible to make progress. I think some people would push back and say, well, okay, like countries can do that at a local level because they care about their own people. But the struggle is when you try to work together on international collaboration. But the o's only are an acid drain problem or like perfect examples of where countries really did work together, often not really in their personal interests, but realized that there was a collective problem. And the ozone hole, I don't remember it. It was before my time.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That applies to local air pollutants, but it also applies to CO2 emissions. So cars have also just become increasingly efficient over time, such that you can also drive declines in CO2 emissions through these technologies. Now, it's not to say that air pollution in our cities are perfect. In the UK, we still have at least the estimates are like tens of thousands of premature deaths every year. It was more in the past. And the point is you can look at these trends and say, oh, it's possible to make progress here. How can we squeeze out that last bit so we don't have tens of thousands still dying?”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, what some of the success stories there is one is just moving away from coal, that the UK has made amazing progress on moving away from coal. We basically don't burn any coal anymore, which has happened actually very quickly in the space of a few decades. We've put in really strict pollution controls on power plants, so that's government policy. Another big source of air pollution has been cars on the road. And we often look outside now and think our streets must be the most polluted they've ever been, look at the number of cars spewing, toxic fumes out the back. But car manufacturers actually have had increasingly strict regulations on how much of these pollutants they can emit. And if you look at the data, you just see that pollution has significantly decreased.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's maybe other air pollution related problems we can come onto, but the local air pollution in London, yeah, I think we have, we kind of forget that many of our cities in the rich world today go back a century and they were extremely polluted. Like London is one example. I'm in Edinburgh, so we're called the Aldrique, so really polluted city. London was the big smoke, and it was the big smoke because smoke was filled there. And there are stories of the big London smog where, I mean, you literally, people were walking down the street, they couldn't see in front of them. They were shuffling along trying to feel for the curve because the air was so polluted. And a big driver of that was coal burning. So one like now we think of coal burning as just producing electricity in a power plant. But historically, we would often just burn coal in our houses and it would go out the chimney and into the streets. So you had this really thick blanket.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think I see us at the moment at a bit of a crossroads where we've, as you've said, all of these trends are largely getting better for most people in the world. And we're at a kind of fork in the road where we can go down a path where these continue to improve and we manage to fix our environmental problems at the same time or we don't fix our environmental problems. And actually you have the assure that some of these measures could start to regress, hunger could start to regress, deaths from natural disasters could go upwards. There are a range of human metrics which could be impacted by our continued environmental damage. And yet, as you say, like when you step back to look at the data, there are obviously really, really worrying signs in a lot of the data, but there are also stories of success. And I think it's important to bring those stories of success out so that we get this understanding that, yes, these are big challenges, but we have solved many of them in the past and we can continue to do that.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are great as long as this is in some way sustainable, or at least as long as it can become sustainable before we degrade the environment irreparably. And then I guess then what's radical about what you're saying is actually we can make this sustainable. We have got some big problems, but they're fixable, and we've had big problems in”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Measures, so child mortality, poverty, maternal mortality, and the really first chapter of the book. And the reason I do that is because I think as environmentalists, we often just don't get that picture of what's actually happening to human well-being. So I think it's important to get that across. But in the rest of the book, it's completely focused on our environmental problems, which I think Hans Roslin and Stephen Pinker did much less of. Yeah. So you've looking at the same data and you reach the same conclusion, which is”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Book reminded me in some ways of a couple of other books that I'm sure you know. One was Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now, and Stephen Pinker's book refers a lot to the data from the Our World and Data website which you're one of the main moving forces behind that website. And the other book it reminds me of is Hans Rosling's Factfulness. And I know a lot of people have read those books. Tell me a little bit about how you would compare your book to them, what different about what you're saying and what are the commonalities. I think the commonalities is that a core argument is if you step back to look at the data, you often get a very different picture from what you would build just by looking at nose headlines and having a rather narrow view of the world. I think where it's really different is that I only really focus on these huge”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I've been, and I've done my background in environmental science, I did that all through university. And at the end of my degree there, I really did feel this kind of level of doom of I've done all the science, I've done all the work behind the scenes, but now I feel kind of incapable to change things because I really felt like nothing could change and these problems weren't solvable. And I think since then I've just seen that feeling grow over time. Like I know from the emails I get from people that they really feel like these are big problems, but there's just nothing we can do about it. I see it often in headlines. I'm seeing increasing levels of doom around me. And I think that's not particularly constructive to us moving forward. If we step back and say we give up, there's nothing we can do about it, then that's a surefire way of making sure that we don't fix these problems. So my core argument in the book is we need to push back and we need to say, yes, these problems are solvable. Let's get going.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we make the right decisions and get moving, that we can achieve both of these things at the same time. We can provide a good life for everyone without degrading the environment. So you phrase it there in a very practical way and you come across in the book as a very practical person. These are things that we can do. These are the steps that we need to take. There is a much more optimistic framing in your book than in most of the books I read about the environment though. I mean maybe the clues of the title not the end of the world. One of the first things you say is, look, we are not actually doomed and it's not helpful to think that we are doomed. So why was that one of the first points that you wanted to make, that the doomsday thinking isn't helpful?”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The opportunity to be the first generation to be sustainable. Now, when you first think of that, that sounds quite controversial because I'm implying that no generation before has been sustainable. But the reason I make that argument is historically societies might have been environmentally sustainable, so they weren't degrading the environment for future generations. But in order to do that, they often had very low living standards. So as an example I give is that for most of human history, about half of children died before reaching puberty. So living standards were often low. Now what's happened over the last few centuries is that human living conditions have really massively improved across the world on many, many metrics, but that has come at the cost of the environment. We've burned fossil fuels for energy. We've cut down forests to grow more food. And so we've been balanced one way and we've tipped the other way. And the core argument of the book is I think we have the opportunity.”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sound rather strange. It took me back to my early days of courting because my wife was an environmentalist and when I met her, she studied this environmental master's degree and all her friends had studied this environmental master's degree. And so they're all environmentalists and they're all talking about food miles on organic food. And quite a lot of what you were talking about in the book basically just reminded me of me going, well, yes, that sounds very plausible. Is that actually what the data show? So we're going to get geeky. We're going to talk about saving the world. We're going to talk about the data. And I will try not to talk any more about how I met my wife because that's of no interest to anybody. So just tell us, first of all, what's the big picture? What is this book about? So I think to start with, I think the concept seems quite bold, but hopefully it all makes sense. My core argument in the book is that I think we have”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello, Hannah. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. Hi, thanks very much for having me. It was my pleasure. I am delighted we're going to be able to get to talk about this book, Not the End of the World. I don't know whether I should hold it on this side or it's probably going to be mirrored in the final version. Yeah, you can go for it. So I love reading the book. Margaret Atwood also loved reading the books. That's probably more important than the fact that I love reading it. But I did love reading it. It actually took me back to...”
2024-01-19 · Intelligence Squared · The Mend is Nigh: Hannah Ritchie on How to Build a Sustainable Planet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT