A Closer Look At The Climate Change Statistics - Hannah Ritchie

Why do you think that there's so many people who believe the world's doomed? I think because we're facing a pretty broad range of what are potentially existential or very catastrophic problems. So, like from my domain, the big one is is climate change and that's what I write about most of all, but there's also other ones. There's nuclear war, there's the rise of AI. I think there's now a host of problems that in the past might not have seemed existential, but to many people today seem very existential. If you are knee-deep in the data, why aren't you in agreement? So, I can't speak on AI or or nuclear war, but my background's environment and and climate change. Um and I think actually probably I was in the similar position, you know, a decade or go or so ago, um where I did really feel like in the depths of there's no way that we're going to solve this problem. This is an existential problem. We are all kind of doomed. Um and I think that was a lot of the the message that was coming through. My perspective on that has changed. Not that climate change isn't a big problem. It is, that's why I study it. But there is a really broad spectrum between climate change is not a problem and we're all doomed and there's nothing we can do about it. I think there's a big space in the middle and that big space in the middle is determined by what we do about it. So, I think like my stance on it is it's a big problem and it's an urgent problem, but there actually are things that we can do about it and there are ways that we can adapt to a changing climate. When it comes to climate change in particular, why are more people pessimistic about the world than the data suggests that they maybe should be? I think one of the key under misunderstandings on climate is that, you know, we've kind of set these climate targets that we want to keep temperature rise below 1.5 degrees if we can and especially below 2 degrees. Now, I think some of the message that's come out of that is that, you know, 1.5 degrees is this tipping point where once we're past 1.5 degrees, there's it's kind of the point of no return and we're doomed. And that's that's definitely not the case. Climate change is more of a spectrum than an immediate tipping point. So, 1.5 degrees impacts are worse than at 1.6, they're worse again at 1.7 and you can get escalating risks where they the change is not necessarily linear with every 0.1% degree. But there's nothing particularly special about 1.5 degrees. So, I think I think it's very clear that we probably we are going to pass 1.5 degrees, but if your mindset is that once we're past 1.5 degrees, there's nothing we can do and it's kind of a terminal tipping point, then I think that breeds a lot of this kind of apocalyptic thinking. What is the what's legit and what's about tipping points and stuff? So, there are big tipping points. Uh where in the kind of climate system there are, we don't know. Um there are like a lot of unknowns about when we might hit a tipping point and what that tipping point would be. There are some potential like quite near-term tipping points where you're in the kind of between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees range, there are a couple of tipping points that that could be breached. what happens? What what do people mean when they talk about tipping points from a like functional climate functional perspective? So, I think the the the kind of definition of a tipping point is that you kind of change a system from one state into another and it's very hard, if not impossible, to take it back from that. Now, I think one of the misunderstandings of tipping points is that people think that it's kind of abrupt and immediate. That, you know, it's almost like a a domino effect where as as once it's set off, it's like within a year the whole thing kind of blows up. And I think some tipping points can be fast, but often they're quite slow on kind of human timescales. So, some of these tipping points will evolve over, you know, centuries or or thousands of years. It's not just like the entire ice sheet just immediately melts in the space of a a year. Um so, I think that's one of the the key differences there. Um but there are some near near-term potential tipping points where you will shift the system into a different state and that will contribute to more warming. Um but it won't necessarily set this like this full chain where, you know, it's kind of unstoppable and there's nothing we can do about it. Well, this is one of the common talking points around uh coastal cities. Miami, Miami's going to be underwater uh if we go over this. It I'm going to guess that Miami may be underwater, but in 1,200 years, not like 2030. Yeah, some of the some of I mean, there is the sea levels are rising and they're rising at pretty steady rate. That could accelerate. Yeah, but a lot of the the very extreme sea level rise scenarios tend to be on the order of of centuries, for example. Extreme takes centuries, so we at least there's a little a little bit You have a time to, yeah. Yeah. But I I think I think the the the risk of sea level rise around coastal cities is is very valid. Um and there are there could be some near-term displacements. Um but a lot of them could be on a longer timescale than we imagine. I read an article from you where you said many young people feel like their future is in peril. To make progress on climate change, we must move past doomsday scenarios. Why? Because I think it lulls us into a kind of state of paralysis. Like I speak to a lot of young people a lot of people email me and they're in a very dark place. They're in a place where they don't even know whether they should go to college. They don't know whether they should actually invest in the future cuz they've kind of received the message that there's no point because they're kind of doomed from climate change. And I think one thing that's just like bad for people's mental health. But I think the second is it I think it paralyzes us and and stops people from taking action. Like if we're doomed, then what's the point in actually taking action against it? So, I think in some ways it hinders progress. And uh in terms of taking action. And then I think there's another dimension to it where I think some of these really extreme scenarios have been used by people on the other end. So, kind of more on the climate denial end, when they see the really extreme scenarios, it's just the the perfect ammunition. They just think, "Oh, this is so ridiculous." Um and so often like pushes people away at the other end of the spectrum that might normally engage. Yeah, it seems like in an attempt to try and convince people that this is something we need to pay attention to, something which is important, which needs resources and time and and and energy spending on it, uh that encouragement to try and get people to work harder is done by over exaggerating uh or or creating um more catastrophe where there perhaps isn't quite so much. But the actual reality is it just makes people sad and anxious and believe that their efforts are futile, which is like from a net effect is actually the opposite of what you want. Right. I mean, I think that I mean, there's also like a really broad spectrum in communication. I mean, I think many most climate scientists are very good on the communication. They're very careful about how they communicate. I think that often messages are are weaponized by some people and actually they put in front of it the science says and they say a statement that the science doesn't say. Um and I think think for some people, probably a small segment of the the population, that actually does work. That does that fear does drive them. They do get involved. But I think there's like a much larger part of the spectrum that that that that puts them off. Yeah, I watched um a video that you spoke about in that article from Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion. Uh the video was titled Advice to Young People as They Face Annihilation. Hardly inspiring stuff. No. And I mean, and he says he's kind of a big point of the video. I think he says like young people should just have no hope for the future. Um and that's that's not in line with the science. I mean, the science is very clear that the climate change is a big problem. There are really big potential risks, but, you know, it's not a an all or nothing. Like there are things that we can do about it. So, this the notion that we should have no hope because there's nothing we can do is just false. What was that story of the group called the last generation? Yeah, so there's an activist group um I think in Germany called the last generation and I think the the message there can be interpreted in several ways. I mean, one is like very valid, which is we could be the last generation to solve climate change. And I think that's true. Um that, you know, we're talking about solving climate change, we're talking about, you know, the next few decades or 30 or 40 years. So, we kind of yes, we are the the generation that will have to to solve this. But I think the other interpretation is kind of this notion that if we don't solve it, then we will literally be the last generation. And that's very similar to the kind of Extinction Rebellion uh activist group where it is very much geared towards we will be the kind of the last generation and we're kind of doomed. Yeah, and they did a month-long hunger strike that resulted in a ton of them going to hospital. Yeah, it was yeah, there was a hunger strike, yeah. Yeah. Uh so, when it comes to climate change, what are the what are the most salient concerns that you have and what are the ones that you think are most exaggerated or most misrepresented? So, I think for me, there are a few big concerns. One is just exposure to heat. I mean, I think they're just the very the most obvious and and and most well-documented link between rising temperatures is just exposure to extreme heat waves. Um as you would expect. And I think that will be a significantly growing problem. It'll be also be a really big problem cuz many of the people that will be exposed to this will be people closer to the equator typically in lower income countries where they don't you know have an conditioned house. Um so 10 will will also fall disproportionately on on people on lower incomes where they might not have the money and luxuries that we would have to just adapt to that. I think then the other big concern for me is is agriculture where we've got a growing population, climate change there could be a significant problem. One in terms of extreme weather events so floods, droughts. You could lose like a whole harvest um for an entire season. But also crops and it varies across the world depending on where you are and and what crop you're working with. But increased temperatures could start to reduce yields. So some of the kind of scenarios you could see for example a 30% drop in yields. Now at time when we need to be increasing food production because we will have a growing population, that could be a a significant concern. So for me those are the two like biggest direct impacts, I think. What about the efforts that have been made over the last few years? You know, it's not just now that people have started talking about climate change even if maybe the discourse is getting more heated all the time. Um it's not like this is a new thing and there's been many initiatives that have been put in in the UK, in the US trying to counter this. How effective or ineffective have those been? I think we are getting there. We're just not getting there fast enough. I think people have the notion that we're still in the same position on tackling climate change as we were a decade ago. And I think that's not true. I think I think what's what's really fundamental to addressing climate change is that humans need energy, right? They need energy for development and that has been a massive driver of human progress over the last few centuries. So our basis of producing energy has been fossil fuels. Now in order to tackle that there are billions of people still trying to move out of poverty, still trying to increase their energy use quite validly. Um and they're they're not going to stop doing that. Like you're not going to stop them doing that. So you need a substitute. It's a it's a substitution exercise. You need to substitute fossil fuels with a low carbon energy source. Now the problem in the past has been that these energy sources were way too expensive, right? So you're never going to use solar or wind or batteries or electric vehicles cuz they were just way more expensive than fossil fuels. What's been a really dramatic change especially in the last decade is that the prices of these have plummeted. Um so you know, they're not electric cars are growing now and they're getting very cost-competitive with petrol or or diesel cars but they they were really far away a decade ago. Uh same with solar and wind. They were extremely expensive. They're now undercutting the cost of fossil fuels. Now that's completely and fundamentally changed the position that we're in cuz we're no longer asking people to make a trade-off of do you want to escape energy poverty or do you want to keep your CO2 emissions low cuz they were always going to move out of energy poverty. I think we've reached a position now where there's no longer that trade-off such that often people just go for the low carbon energy source because it's the cheapest. I think to me that's fundamentally changed the equation. So the overall story on carbon emissions there is that rich countries over the last few decades have tended to reduce their emissions whereas middle and low income countries are are still growing there. So we kind of this tug-of-war at the global level which means that global emissions are kind of now hovering around a peak. Mm. Yeah, I think this is I don't know this sort of uh uh the fact that we have a shared environment but individual actors acting independently of each other to contribute to it means that there is always going to be this sort of push and pull, right? There is going to be a group of people in developed countries that are going to be told you need to reduce energy emissions and it's very easy to say well they're not. They're not going to do it. And yeah, this what's it called? The the tragedy of the commons. Um yeah, it there is always going to be some equivalent of a free rider problem or or something else. It it's it's always going to be there and I think it's always going to make people feel uncomfortable about making sacrifices. I guess if they were to go and live in a country that didn't have access to reliable energy or was burning wood or dung to be able to do it, they might think maybe I'm not making that much of a sacrifice. But you know, humans are creatures of relativity, right? We have anchoring biases. Like I remember how much my refrigerator energy fee was last year and I've seen it go up this year or I've been told that I can't water my garden or whatever. Like you know, we we anchor off where our lifestyle was previously not off someone in the Sudan. Right. And I think yeah, I think that's been a a key stumbling block has been these divisions. I think for me there's there's so much finger-pointing in this. It's kind of young people pointing at old people or old people pointing at young people or left pointing at right and right pointing at left and and rich countries pointing at China or India and I think that's created a lot of divisions. I think in general what's worked better on climate is that the way international climate processes used to work was it was a very like top-down where basically there was kind of global coalition and kind of would set try to set impose targets from the top down. And actually it didn't get us that far and countries didn't really like it. What's actually been more successful has countries been like a bottom-up exercise where countries have decided this is the the pledges or the targets that we're going to put on the table and they nominated themselves. Now you might think well, they're all just not put anything on the table and to some extent there's much room for them increasing these these promises and we hope they do. But you do start to get like a little bit of a competition exercise where it does start to put pressure on different countries. So I think the the bottom-up approach of of people volunteering what they're willing to do has actually counterintuitively worked better than a top-down this is what you have to do. And I think in general that also works at the individual level. I think I think there's a lot of pushback against people trying to tell others what you should and shouldn't do. Often that's like the best way to get someone to do exactly what you don't want them to do is to is to try to force them to do it. Yeah, what uh I mean I'm I'm I'm interested in this stat that you put up about um in the UK carbon emissions per person are half what they were when our grandparents were our age and we haven't just offshored all of these either. That seems like quite a big win. Yeah, so carbon emissions in the UK have fallen a lot. They've fallen by around 50%. Um a big driver of that has been the reduction of coal. So like most of our electricity used to come from coal and we're basically now coal-free. So we've kind of got rid of the kind of the dirtiest fuel in our electricity mix mix which has pushed down emissions a lot. Now the caveat there is that the 50% like exaggerates the total amount of reductions that we've incurred because we've offshored some of them. So um we've kind of got rid of a lot of our manufacturing industries so like we import goods from other countries that re-produce them. And it's very valid to say that you know, the UK's carbon footprint should be what the UK consumers are actually consuming. So the the the total drop on that basis is not as big as 50% but there is still a decline and emissions are still falling and that's a kind of general trend that we see across most high income countries that domestic emissions have reduced um but they've also reduced when we take offshoring into account. Got you. How difficult is it going to be to provide a good quality of life for 8 billion people while still being sustainable? It's a big challenge. Um yeah, it's going to be big. I think it's achievable. I think I think for me what's key is the time scale. I think it's just inevitable that we will just move to clean energy. I think how long we take to do that will be the big question and that will be the big question about what temperature rise we we get to. Can we do it in the next 30 years? Um it will be a big challenge but I would expect that we would do it in the next 50 or 60 years. So the the the emphasis is there on the speed um which is going to be very difficult but to me is not completely unachievable. What do people mean when they talk about degrowth? So I think there's two terms here. I think one is focused on population so it's more like depopulation. So kind of an environmental movement so like especially in the past uh like a big point was that the problem is just there's just too many people. Um and and the the planet cannot possibly provide for so many people. So the solution to this problem is to have less people. And then there's more of a kind of degrowth movement where the argument there is that the driver has been overconsumption and therefore in order to reduce our emissions, we need to basically shrink our economies. Right. And what are your thoughts on degrowth? My thoughts are you cannot do degrowth at a global level because you would leave billions of people in poverty and that's to me just morally unacceptable and you just won't achieve it, right? Like you're not going to stop people in low income countries from from trying to move out of poverty. Now there's a question of should you keep GDP in rich countries the same or should you shrink the the economies of rich countries? I don't think that's going to be a political reality. Like I don't know see any political leader standing up and saying our main policy is that we're going to reduce our economy in order to reduce our CO2 emissions. And it's definitely not going to happen in on the time scales that we're talking about, right? We need to get moving on this in the next decade. Um and to me, I do not see it being politically feasible that that one that a leader would stand up and promote that. I think it would kind of be political suicide. Um but also that they would actually get elected into government. And then you've got the long the long time period where even if you did get that and people voted for it and they went into government, then you've got the time that it takes to actually implement that. And we don't actually know how effective that would be in reducing emissions. Like you know, no one's tried kind of deliberate degrowth. So I think there's like tons of unknowns there and for me it's kind of a political non-starter. Well, I guess over a long enough time horizon, the next 100 years, the people calling for anti-natalist or depopulation, they're going to get the they're going to get the outcome that they want. It's just going to happen due to declining birth rates. I know, you know, you made a really good clarification at the very beginning of this, which is exists the difference between existential risk and just, you know, a big problem. Basically, existential risk permanent unrecoverable collapse, right? It's a very specific category of risk that shouldn't be thrown around incorrectly. And I don't think that declining birth rates are one of those either, but they're definitely going to be the sort of thing that will impact human life front and center very very harshly, very quickly, you know, within what? When are we going to peak? 2100-ish? 2019? I think the I think the the latest UN projections were that was that it would global population would peak around 2080s. Um and they've actually brought that forward like the first project the late the the one projection before that was, you know, still increasing past 2100. And actually because fertility rates, which is just the number of children that a women would have, average women would have, um is falling quicker than than we expected. That's actually what being brought forward to the 2080s. Yeah, so by the end of this century, the degrowth from a population standpoint, I'm aware that we're going to have to gain 2 billion before we start to come back down toward where we are now. Um but how much how concerned are you about that? You know, if we presume that what we're trying to do here, I don't know the basis of your philosophy. I don't know if it's um seeing the Earth as something that needs to be protected, whether it's trying to maximize human flourishing, whether it's trying to, you know, there's a a variety of reasons why people don't want the world to go to Um but if we presume that in amongst that is the flourishing, utility, eudaimonia, happiness of the conscious humans that live on it, reducing that number down precipitously is dangerous. It it it doesn't that doesn't seem to be in alignment either. So, how much time do you spend thinking about birth rates and what's your concern with population collapse? Um I don't spend much time at all thinking about birth rates in a climate context. Um and I don't think it's effective in any way to try to to use climate or environment to to promote lowering birth rates. I mean, I think the the basic story of falling fertility rates and falling birth rates is that um as countries develop, as they get richer, as girls go to school, women go into education, uh women go into uh economic opportunities and jobs, um fertility rates tend to decline. So, you see a very clear relationship that as countries get richer, they decline. Um and the I think I think one of the key part key parts of development is that fertility rates will actually just continue to fall. The countries like low-income countries where birth rates are still quite high, like maybe like four or five or or six, um those will just fall because they will develop. Uh kids girls will get to go to school, women will get going to work and and have economic opportunities. And I think those are all fantastic developments. I actually don't think you need the climate lens as part of that. I mean, if your list of priorities of what would be the driver of declining birth rates, I mean, climate change is very very low on that risk. Like I'm all for promotion of girls going to school just because they should have the opportunity to go to school, not because we should reduce the population in order to address climate change. Right. Okay, that would be that would be like a five-dimensional chess move to try and uh speed up the education of girls in low-income countries in an attempt to reduce down birth rates. That would be that would be an impressive strategy. Uh you said um I saw another quote from you that said we should use data to understand the world and make better decisions. That seems to be like a nice tagline. How effective have you found data being at nudging beliefs and culture and debate? Do you a part of this great website, Our World in Data, you put this stuff forward, but I would guess that the vanguard, like the front lines of trying to convince people by data, might be more difficult than we would think, given that data is like truth, as long as it's right. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I mean, it's very mixed. I mean, I mean, there's some people that are so immune to data that there's nothing there's no data you could throw in front of them that would make them change their mind. And there will always be, you know, an excuse why that data doesn't fit with the narrative or why that data is flawed. Um I think some people are swayed by data and can make good decisions based on it. Um I think I mean, a a range of people use our work like the general population use our work, but also journalists, policy makers use our work. And then I think in those fields, data can actually make a difference to inform decisions. What's happening with air pollution? So, there have been a couple of big air pollution problems. There have been a couple of what we'd call like transboundary problems, which is more again the tragedy of the commons problem where it's not just, you know, pollution in your own country, it kind of crosses across many countries. Um and you kind of need, you know, several countries or the whole world to work together to solve it. And one of the big ones there was the ozone layer. So, kind of before climate change, the big environmental problem was the ozone layer. And uh the growing ozone hole. And at the time it was really politically controversial but like climate change is today. There were kind of pushback against scientists. There was um it was really politically controversial. But we we actually managed to to solve it. Like we we brought in what was called the Montreal Protocol. And we reduced the emissions of the gases that were destroying the ozone layer by like more than 99%. So, we've basically got rid of them. And the ozone hole should just repair itself in the next few decades. Um there was another big problem of acid rain, which when you burn coal, you tend to produce what's called sulfur dioxide and that can dissolve in rainwater and you can get acid rain. Again, that was a big problem and we're we've been pretty successful in solving it, especially across Europe and North America. And then there's the other problem of what we call local air pollution, which is like the pollution you'd find in your city from like cars and burning fossil fuels and home heating and stuff. Now, the the story there is mixed. Rich countries have gone through this process where um as they tended to get richer, air pollution increased. So, if you think about London or Edinburgh, where I am, um go back to the kind of the the beginning to mid-20th century, these cities were so so polluted. Like really unimaginable from what you would assume today. I mean, there's stories of like, you know, the great smog in London where, you know, you couldn't see even see a few feet in front of you. They were kind of shuffling trying to find the curb with their feet. So, there these cities were incredibly polluted. And we've actually been really successful over the last 50 years or so in in dramatically reducing the amount of local air pollution, especially in rich countries. It's a little bit of a different story in low- and middle-income countries. They're still in a kind of going up that curve that um London or Edinburgh went through kind of 50 years to a century ago. Um and air pollution in general is a is a big killer in the world. So, there are a range of estimates, but they're all in the range of kind of millions of premature deaths per year. So, it is a is a a big big problem. In some sense, you know, today in terms of number of lives lost, it's arguably bigger than climate change, although that could change in the future. Wow. What do we do? How do you help air pollution now? You can I mean, the key one is stop burning fossil fuels. Um you can put kind of strict uh air pollution kind of standards on power plants. Like that was the big thing of acid rain. Like it's not that we necessarily just stopped burning coal. We managed to put what called scrubbers on the power plant where it kind of took the sulfur out. So, you didn't get the the the sulfur emissions. Um a big driver in in in rich countries has been just increased air quality standards for cars. So, the amount of um of pollution spewing out the back of a car today is much much less than it was in the past. And actually a move to electric vehicles would would decrease that even further. So, even in rich countries, you know, the the estimated deaths attributed to air pollution in the UK, for example, is still tens of thousands. So, we know that we can still bring down that down further. And that would be by, for example, moving away from petrol and and diesel cars. What about deforestation? Again, it's a bit of a story where countries tend to go through a transition where they would initially cut down forests for wood for energy like before they have fossil fuels. Um, but then the biggest driver of deforestation is just expanding farmland. That's by far the biggest driver of deforestation. You need more land to grow food, therefore you you cut down forests. Now, uh the UK for example, we cut down our forests like a long time ago, like centuries and centuries ago. And actually there was really really very little forest left. Um, but then we stopped doing that and in many forests are regrowing. Now, most of the deforestation that's happening today is happening in the tropics. And it's happening because we're again, we're still expanding agricultural land. Um, so deforestation rates today are still very very high, but we think they've global deforestation rates have fallen since around the 1980s. But we we still have a big challenge on our hands cuz deforestation rates are still high. What's the truth about the cycle between raising or rising CO2 levels with uh like regreening uh and the increase in uh plant growth and tree growth, forest growth based on that increase in carbon? Yeah, there again it's a little bit mixed on terms of like greening uh forests and natural habitat not natural vegetation. It can like CO2 extra CO2 can increase um regrowth to an extent. I mean this is often also discussed in terms of agriculture. Like I was saying earlier that one of the big risks of agriculture is is climate change. And it is true that to a certain extent more CO2 means can mean more um more higher yields and more crop growth, but it's about how much of that is outweighed by the detrimental impacts of drought, of floods, of temperatures. And for many crops, the increased temperatures will just outweigh the increased benefits of CO2. So even if you increase CO2 a bit, you would still see negative effects from uh the temperature effects. It's interesting that everything's so interlinked here that for instance deforestation is intrinsically linked with food and hunger and agriculture. So what progress has been made with with uh food and hunger as well? So um I mean food and hunger again global hunger rates have declined substantially over the last 50 years in particular. We've kind of plateaued on progress there and actually in some regions that has started to regress. So we have around 800 million people in the world when it nearly one in 10 just don't get enough food to eat. And that's the key challenge with with deforestation and these problems is that again there you have this tension between people just need more food uh and we need more agricultural land and there's wild habitat and there's forest in the way. Um, so that's the big challenge. One of the this big solutions to that is just to make agriculture much more productive, right? So if you can increase crop yields by if you can triple crop yields, then you can produce the same amount of food on a third of the land. So one of the big uh necessities there is to just increase crop yields and productivity. And I think in many regions there is still a lot of scope to do that. I mean the the other big link to deforestation there is like animal agriculture. So a lot of the deforestation of the Amazon for example is clearing land for pasture for cattle grazing, for beef production. And by far that's the biggest driver of deforestation. And in general beef is just a really inefficient way of using land to produce food. What What is the you're talking about crop yields there? How much truth is there in topsoil degradation and and the quality of what we're growing our plants out of? Yeah, so the I mean there's been lots of headlines about, you know, soil loss and this this kind of like we've only got the world's only got 60 harvest left headline that kind of went viral and that headline is not true and kind of no sci- soil scientist would back that up. Across the world you have a mixed again a mixed picture like some soils are stable and and they're are are doing fine. Some are actually growing so the they're actually grow topsoil is growing and there are others that actually are degrading over time and is a serious worry but we're not going to get to, you know, this you know, single point where, you know, just the the whole in 60 years the the world's harvest just stop because of topsoil. There's just a really large variation in soils across the world when you could never just put a single figure on when this would happen. Mm, what about biodiversity? That's something else that I've seen talked about an awful lot that the the fifth great extinction or the sixth whichever one we're in. This is the beginning of this sixth whatever that one sixth sixth great extinction we're in the middle of that and we we've lost more uh species in the last x number of years than in the whole bigger number of years before that. Yeah, I mean bio the trends on bio biodiversity loss are not good. I mean they're like the area where I'm most pessimistic. So yeah, there's been five previous mass extinctions on Earth and there's a question of like are we in the sixth mass extinction? Now, in order to to qualify as like a mass extinction, you kind of have this threshold of you need to lose like 75 to 80% of species and you need to do on a it's called a fast time scale but it's like 2 million years. Uh like it's fast on geological time scales but on human time scales it's obviously not. Um, now we're obviously very very far away from losing that percentage of species. But what you can do is you can look at the rate of change and say we know roughly how many species have gone extinct over the last few centuries for example. Um, or or 500 years or 1,000 years. And you can say okay, what's the the rate of extinction there? And then you can compare that to what was the rate of extinctions in the previous five mass extinctions. And actually what you find when you crunch those numbers is that we are actually losing species at a faster rate than we were in the five previous mass extinctions. Now if we just continued to lose species at that rate, then yeah, it would qualify as being in the sixth mass extinction. Um, my optimism there is that we won't just continue to lose species at that rate because we will hopefully address deforestation. We will hopefully curb climate change. We will hopefully be able to restore natural habitats. So this kind of I mean it's reasonably fair to say that, you know, the trends point towards a sixth mass extinction if we just continue as we are, but my hope is that we won't continue as we are. What is driving this loss in biodiversity? Where's it coming from? Mm, I mean it's often referred to as death by a thousand cuts. So there's no like single driver of biodiversity loss. It's it tends to be a mix. I mean the the biggest driver is is food production. So that's either like either over exploitation which is just like direct hunting or direct overfishing or kind of logging of forests um or it's destruction of habitats for farming and agriculture. And that can be either cutting down um forests or or moving into wild grasslands, but it can also be, you know, losing insects uh because of the use of fertilizers or pesticides on agricultural land. Now that's a very to me that's a very very tricky problem to solve because there's a kind of there's kind of two camps on how you produce food in a kind of biodiversity friendly way. Like one you could just use lots of fertilizers, lots of pesticides, get really productive land. You could use less land by doing that. So basically say we're going to accept that we're going to have lots of biodiversity loss on this smaller bit of land. Or you can go for another approach where say we're going to lose less biodiversity but we're going to spread it over a larger area. And I think the kind of jury on that is is still out on how best to manage that. Yeah, that's a difficult a really difficult balance to strike. Have you got any idea what types of animals have contributed most to this biodiversity loss? Has it been segmented out? Has it been the fish they're all falling off but mammals are fine or is it mostly insects and reptiles are fine? Have you got any idea? It's kind of mixed. Um, like the mammals are not doing well in particular. I mean if you look over the course of human history, the big change has been what we call like the downsizing of mammals. So we've tended to just lose the big mammals such that they're getting smaller and smaller over time. That's cuz we predominantly hunt larger animals um and they tend to go extinct and they also take longer to reproduce. So smaller animals can kind of recover cuz they can re- reproduce really quickly. Whereas larger animals take much longer. So we've tended to lose the largest mammals. Birds are not doing particularly well, neither are amphibians. Um, insects like the the general trend there is is not looking good. I mean insects in general were just harder to count. It's very hard to get really long-term data on insects. Like you can kind of count elephants like pretty well and kind of get good historical records, but it's really hard to do for insects. But I think insects are pretty uncertain, but I think they're definitely in decline. There are very very few very few like good good trends here on biodiversity. I was trying to find a a silver lining in the biodiversity loss but it doesn't really seem to be there. I can give you one. Like in some regions like Europe for example, we lost a lot of mammals, but we're actually bringing a lot of them back now. There's been lots of like restoration um uh programs and you know, the European bison is is on its way back. So I think there is stuff that you can do. Um, and it is possible to restore a lot of these populations, but the overall trend is down. I had a conversation a couple of months ago with a guy who is bringing woolly mammoths back to life. Right. Was it Stuart Brand? No. No, it wasn't. I can't remember the I can't remember the name of the place. Colossus Colosseum Colossus, I think, uh, is the name of the company. And yeah, they they've sequenced it from a bunch of frozen uh, bone and I think maybe something else samples and then they're going to use an Asian elephant, maybe, uh, and they're going to implant and then over time they will have this and then maybe they can go up north and they're good at compacting down the earth and compacting down the earth changes the way that heat hits it and then they help with fertilizing and moving. So that's And he also wanted to do he had this really cool idea of wanting to bring back uh, the dodo bird. And the reason that he wanted to do that was as a symbolic gesture to remind people about biodiversity loss. So thinking basically explaining the this huge process that he would have to go through and we'd have to do this and we'd have to do this and we'd have to do this and then finally we would get something that looks like the dodo bird. I think there was one other type of tiger maybe that he was thinking about doing it with. And then to basically use that as the tip of the spear to say, "Do you see all of this work that we've just had to do to try and bring this bird back to life? Like just try not to try not to kill it this time." type thing. Yeah, I mean it's it's like a little bit the same story with with forests where I think we often think about like planting trees and regrowing forests. Whereas like the best thing we can do with forests is just like not to cut them down in the first place. And to some sense it's the same with biodiversity where, you know, it would take a massive effort to be able to bring back a species or even restore a population. So the you know, the obvious best thing is like not to to push it to that sanction in the first place. What about ocean plastics? I'm aware that microplastic like we can Alex Jones our way into phthalates in the water all that we want, but ocean plastics I'd heard this story about this island the same size as Texas that's somewhere and it's swirling round and then there was that guy that made the the ocean scraper thing and and he was doing he was doing really great work, but uh, what's the what's the story there with ocean plastics? Yeah, I mean I don't I can't solve the plastic problem. Like I I mean plastic is a really tricky one. It's like a really amazing and viable material which I think is why it's we produce so much of it and it's so hard to get off of it. Um, but the the simple problem of like plastics flowing into the ocean is a very very like tractable one. Uh, we do have a significant amount of plastics flowing into the ocean. Like the latest estimates are like around 1 to 2 million tons a year. Now for perspective that's about 0.5% of the plastic waste we produce. So I mean the notion that you know, all of our plastics are flowing into the ocean is not correct. Like it's a quite quite a small percentage, but in in absolute terms it's quite big. Um, the key problem with plastic ocean plastics is not necessarily using plastics. It's like how they're managed. So if you can um, store plastics in landfills or they're recycled or they're incinerated then they don't leak leak out into the environment and they don't end up in the ocean rivers or ocean. The problem is often that um, in many countries the waste management infrastructure is not there to to to deal with the amount of plastic that's there such that it's often dumped or it's in an open landfill and and blows into the ocean. Um, Now I mean that is a I mean to to some extent that then is the solution is quite simple like and it's not sexy. It's just like build landfills or build waste management structures. But like that doesn't tend to get a ton of investment cuz it's not flashy. Um, but there is also projects trying to do the opposite. One is as you said there's a guy called Boyan Slat and he created the ocean cleanup project where they are basically trying to scoop plastic out that's already in the ocean and get it out. And I think they're they're they're doing a really good job. I mean they haven't got all the plastic out yet, but they are being quite successful in getting some of it out. And then they've also generated a a kind of separate project which is trying to stop it going into the ocean in the first place. So a lot of this waste tend to come tends to come down through rivers. And what they've done they've like modeled to try to work out like what are the biggest rivers that are contributing to the ocean plastics. Then they have what's called an interceptor where they basically try to like stop the plastics going in uh, at the end of the river before it reaches the ocean. So I think there are I think he's done an amazing job and he's kind of came out of nowhere and decided I mean we know we just watch and see all that's really bad that there's plastics in the ocean and he's like, "No, there doesn't have to be plastics in the ocean." And he's kind of tried to to engineer a solution out of it. Have you got any idea which were the rivers that were contributing heavily? I mean it's changed a lot that our understanding has changed a lot over time. I mean initially they you know, there was estimates that you know, most of it was coming from like 20 rivers. Now actually that's quite good because then you only need 20 interceptors. But I mean more recent studies have shown that actually it's coming from like a thousand different rivers. Which is a much trickier problem to tackle. Uh, from the latest study from the you know, Boyan Slat Slat and his colleagues tend to show that a lot of them tend to be in Asia or South America or Africa. They tend to be in middle income countries where people have got richer they're now using much more plastic, but again the waste management infrastructure hasn't managed to catch up. Rich enough to buy the things that are in the plastic, but not rich enough to be able to work out how to deal with it once you've used it. Right, exactly. What about overfishing? Um, they are um, again there's a little bit of a split where overfishing is a tractable problem. It is a problem that you can manage. Um, the key for that is being able to balance fish populations such that you know how much you can catch without massively reducing the population of the fish, right? You want to be in a state where for fishing you're fishing and the population is not decreasing. Now if you've overfished, so if you fish too much, that population will start to decrease and decrease and decrease. And actually even for from an economic perspective that's only good in the short term, right? Because in the medium to long term the amount of stuff that you can fish will just decline over time. So it's like a really short term benefit for a medium to long term detriment. Now in many regions fish populations are actually doing fine cuz we can do that quite well and we have policies in place and quotas on how much fishermen can catch. In other parts of the world that's just not there and you would expect often that the the fish populations populations there are are declining. So the estimates that are around around a third of the world's fish populations are being overfished. Now the there is a slightly different story to that where in the past you know, our only way of having fish was to like catch wild fish. What we've seen over the last few decades is the rise of what we call aquaculture which is fish farming. Now um, a little bit like on land where we would normally just hunt animals, we then decided no, we'll grow animals. So we'll have livestock and we'll raise our own animals. That's kind of what fish farming is all about where rather than only wild fish, you basically farm your own fish. And actually now fish farming uh, produces more than wild fish. So most of the growth in in global fish production over the last few decades has come from fish farming. It's not come from catching wild fish. Mm. It seems to me like thinking about all of the stuff that we've spoken about today, this tragedy of the commons thing really just comes back to the fore that we are individual nations who are not always even coordinated internally, but definitely not coordinated effectively externally between all of us. And that by trying to improve the quality of the shared environment that requires different actors and agents to behave in different ways. And it can feel to some like they're having the brakes pressed on them while other people are getting away on a free ride. You've got this free rider problem. How do you how like how do you suggest that especially developed countries that are going to have to potentially go to their citizens and say, "Hey, your quality of life is going to stagnate or or perhaps even get more difficult, more expensive, more whatever." Um, have you thought around not necessarily from a public messaging standpoint, but just like culturally how do you deliver this message to people because we're not it's not in our nature to say, "Oh, like sorry the people in Chad or or Zimbabwe or whatever needs to have better access to whatever. Don't don't worry people of Chad. Like I've got you." Like that's just not that's not in our nature and it's very difficult in an age of the internet and sort of quippy sound bites and TikTok length videos, it's way too nuanced and subtle to get across, but the alternative is to kind of use a more doomsday scenario which kind of just blanket coverages everything with fear and terror, and that also is not only not accurate, but doesn't necessarily have the desired outcome. So, have you have you kind of conceived this what a what a like climate culture 3.0 would look like? Yeah, I mean, I think I think part of this has come come down to the fact that I think we've often not been very good on our messaging on this. I think coming from and I'm part of kind of the environmental movement, I think often it's framed as a sacrifice, right? It's like you have to sacrifice this um in order to solve this problem. And I think again again, I think in the past that might have been true. Um I think the only solution in the past would have been you just have to use less energy and you have to have less stuff and you have to have It's all about less less less less. And I think we're moving to a stage with the development of many of these technologies, where you can switch and it's not necessarily less and it's not necessarily a sacrifice, it's just better, right? So, there are technologies where you can actually just reduce energy bills. You could create employment opportunities like and many of the these growing industries like they are creating a job boom and they are creating employment opportunities. You could get lower energy bills. The cost of running your car would be lower on electricity. So, I think there are a range of solutions there where it's not necessarily a massive sacrifice. It actually can just benefit and and enhance life. So, I think we've done quite poorly on the messaging on that because it's all about been about less less less sacrifice sacrifice sacrifice. I think in terms of the role of rich countries and how they contribute to this dilemma on in lower income countries is that I think the responsibility of rich countries is they they need to get their emissions down first and foremost, right? They've had high emissions in the UK we've had high emissions for a real long time. We've managed to get to a stage where we're rich. Um we have really high living standards and in some sense I think it's just a responsibility to get our domestic emissions down. But I think the role that they all rich countries can also play is that they can also be the drivers of innovation and deployment of these low carbon technologies that we need. And these tend to follow what we would call a learning curve where so solar or batteries or wind for example, the more you deploy them, the lower the price gets. So, it's like a self-fulfilling trend where deploy more prices fall deploy more. So, what what that means is that by um pushing these technologies and innovating on these technologies, we basically drive down the cost for the rest of the world. So, we can we can we can invest money, we can deploy them, we can make solar batteries, electric vehicles really cheap, such that people in lower income countries don't need to face that trade-off anymore. They can develop they can follow um a pathway to really high standard of living, but they won't follow the pathway that the UK or the US uh followed cuz they won't have really high coal emissions. They won't necessarily drive a petrol or a diesel car. So, I think that's the the big role that rich countries can play. And again, I don't I don't think it's necessarily this big sacrifice that's often made out to be. What about China? Obviously, it's often brought up in this discussion as a country that is quite developed, but also I have no you will probably know how much truth there is in it. They built more coal plants or whatever plants in the last however many years than and so on and so forth. The point being that the the the free rider of free riders would be China. What What's the truth about that? I don't think China's a free rider. I think it's true that they are and they they produce they're the highest emitter and they produce a lot of coal um and they are still building coal plants, but I think the the kind of paradox there is that they are actually just leading completely on low carbon technologies. Like they're building solar and wind so fast. They are uh pushing really hard on electric vehicles. So, the biggest uh car uh electric car company now is not Tesla, but BYD, which is a a Chinese company. Um they are dominating the supply chains for these minerals. They are they are seeing this as an economic opportunity. And in some sense, they're going to start pushing a lot of western manufacturers out of the market because they've been slipping. Um and I think that's the kind of general trend of where that's going. So, China is deploying these technologies really quickly. As an example, last year China produced or or uh installed enough solar and wind to power the UK or France. And they're adding that in one year. Um so, they are building this stuff really quickly. And to the extent where and we're really bad at predicting peaks, so I'm not going to put a definitive peak on it, but some people have been talking about well if China's emissions could peak this year or next year. Just because they're building low carbon technology so quickly. So, that's the paradox of China or like they are still producing lots of coal, but they're also really leading the way on low carbon technologies. Again, not necessarily because they really really care about climate change. They're doing it for the economic opportunities, they're doing it for employment, there's an opportunity there. Um which to me in some sense is a positive, right? Because it's really hard. I would love everyone to be really passionate about climate change, but that's just not the reality. So, you need to create other incentives for people to act. And the the key point there is that people will just act because it's economic to do so, and you get the side benefit of yes, we reduce carbon emissions and we also reduce air pollution. So, for me in some sense that's also a positive. Yeah. I mean, this seems to be the kind of like one of the I don't know, one of the the laws of physics of of climate change or of of impacting it in an effective way, which is show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. You know, before Tesla came along at least in the West, driving an electric car wasn't a status symbol. So, the incentive of I want to buy a vehicle that I look cool in and it gives me prestige and people think that I'm like trendy or whatever for driving it, wasn't happening so much with a Prius. It was like a political statement. To drive a Prius was a political statement. Um whereas if you can make the thing that you want people to do also the thing that they want to do, then you're swimming downstream. And yeah, totally. If if this is the way that it is and if getting reliable energy from solar, from wind, from other stuff. I've heard a lot of criticism around the reliability of it, Germany's problem that they've had where they've had to like retrofit gas and then obviously they became super dependent on an area of the world that was dominated by a war for 2 years and then that meant that their prices were going up and are all the Germans going to freeze in the winter and all this stuff. Um but presumably all of these are just I would imagine teething problems that are only going to be made by one country. And moving forward it's like don't do a Germany. Like if you ever make yourself into, you know, like one of those quotes that's if you meme'd yourself into an energy uh energy strategy, that's probably a bad idea. But yeah, if we can get it to the stage where it's both more economically viable and also impacts the environment in a positive way that like that's literally the best if if the people that we and I don't know, I've been super critical of China, but I do sometimes find myself like leaning into the they're almost like immoral. It's like an immoral country somehow and they they you know that they um they would because they're antagonistic or adversarial with the West that they're doing things to try and you know they're completely disregarding the environment. Like that's not necessarily the case. Like so, I need to kind of fact check my thought check myself and I do do that. But the point being that we presume China has more priorities than simply the climate. And yet if they've managed to build sufficient renewable energy to power the UK or France in the last year, you go okay, that if if we can encourage them to do it, then countries that are part of the G20 or whatever other organization, it should be pretty easy. Yeah. I mean, there I mean, there's I mean, range of examples that like I I in the book I give the example of like on a personal level like my brother. Now, my brother bought a Tesla and he didn't buy a Tesla cuz like he really really cared about climate change. He just bought a Tesla cuz a Tesla was cool and it was a really nice car to drive. Like he sat on one and was like this is the best thing ever. I'm going to get a Tesla. And obviously massively cut his carbon footprint, but it wasn't necessarily because of climate. I think another like clear example there is that like in the US there's obviously there is a very quite strong partisan divide on climate where like left are really pro climate policies and a lot of people on the right are are less so. But then you look at what which states in the US are producing the most renewable power and the top five five states with the largest amount of wind in their energy sector are all Republican. Um and again, they're not doing that for climate. They're doing it just because land owners can make money, there's an economic opportunity, the community starts to get behind it. And actually, when you look at kind of messaging around climate in these kind of contexts, um the language you use is so important. So, if you just talk about clean energy, many more people are behind it. Like on the left and the right, everyone loves clean energy. Um what they don't like necessarily all like is talking about climate. And actually, you ruin the chances of the clean energy being deployed if you try to push the climate message too far. So, I think really gearing the climate message to like whoever you're talking to is so important. If you're talking to someone that's really into climate change, of course talk about climate. But if you're talking to someone that's got a bit skeptical, but they they're pretty in favor of clean energy, then you actually can actively push them away from it if you try to force the climate message too hard. Yeah, use the right language with the right audience. Very interesting. Let's bring this one home, Hannah. I really appreciate you for today. Where should people go they want to keep up to date with all the stuff that you do? Where should you send them? Um, I have a newsletter called Sustainability by Numbers and I try to break down all this stuff by numbers. Um, I have a new book out called Not the End of the World where I discuss all of this. And then I work at Our World in Data where you can find like all of this data and research on how all of this stuff is changing. Hell yeah. Thank you, Hannah. Thank you. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe.