# News - The Guardian - I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis. I was wrong
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/02/hannah-ritchie-not-the-end-of-the-world-extract-climate-crisis
In an extract from her book Not the End of the World, data scientist
Hannah Ritchie explains how her work taught her that there are more
reasons for hope than despair about climate change – and why a truly
sustainable world is in reach
Hannah Ritchie Tue 2 Jan 2024 08.00 CET
"Scientists say temperatures could rise by 6C by 2100 and call for
action ahead of UN meeting in Paris" – Independent, 2015.
A world that was 6C warmer than it is today would be devastating. And
remember, 6C is just the average. Some parts of the world would get
much warmer, especially the poles. Crops would fail. Many people would
be malnourished. Forests would be stripped back into savannahs. Island
nations would be completely submerged. Many cities will have
disappeared due to sea-level rise. Climate refugees will be on the
move. "Normal" temperatures in many parts of the world would be
unbearable. Even the richest, most temperate nations would see
devastating floods most winters and baking summers. We would be at
very high risk of setting off warming feedback loops – the melted ice
would reflect less sunlight, the melted permafrost might unlock
methane from the bottom of the ocean, and dying forests wouldn't be
able to regrow to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. A 6C warmer world
might be short-lived – it could quickly spiral into 8C, 10C or more.
It would be a massive humanitarian disaster.
Only a few years ago, I thought this was where we were headed. Forget
1.5C or 2C – we were destined for 4C, 5C or 6C and there was nothing
we could do about it. Most people still think that this is the path
we're following. Thankfully, it's not.
In 2015, I went to Paris for the big, famous climate conference,
Cop21. Representatives and policymakers from every country came
together to hash out a new climate deal. The previous goal of the
international agreement was to keep the global average temperature
rise below 2C by the end of the century. So I couldn't believe it when
there were rumours that a target of 1.5C was being discussed. Were
they crazy? At that point, I had already given up on the prospects of
2C. It was so far out of our reach. The notion that we could keep the
rise below 1.5C seemed delusional. And yet the target made it into the
final agreement. Mostly as an aspiration, but it was in there
nonetheless. The world pledged to "limit global warming to 'well
below' 2C above pre-industrial levels and also, if possible, 'pursue'
efforts to cap warming at 1.5C".
My perspective on 1.5C hasn't shifted much since then. Without a
major, unexpected technological breakthrough, we will go past this
target. Nearly all the climate scientists I know agree: they obviously
want to cap warming at 1.5C, but very few think it will happen. This
doesn't stop them fighting for it, though; they know that every 0.1C
matters, and is worth working for. But my perspective on 2C has
changed. I'm now cautiously optimistic that we can get close to it.
It's more likely than not that we will pass 2C, but perhaps not by
much. And there is still a reasonable chance – if we really step up to
the challenge – that we can stay below it.
My perspective flipped quickly after studying the data, not newspaper
headlines. I didn't focus on where we are today, but on the pace that
things have moved at in the past few years, and what this means for
the future. One organisation – the Climate Action Tracker – follows
every country's climate policies, and its pledges and targets. It
combines them all to map out what will happen to the global climate.
At Our World in Data, I sketch out these future climate trajectories
and update them every year. Every time, they get closer and closer to
the pathways we would need to follow to stay below 2C.
If we stick with the climate policies that countries currently have in
place, we're heading towards a world of 2.5C to 2.9C warming. Let me
be clear: this is terrible and we have to avoid it. But countries have
pledged to go much further. They've committed to making their policies
much more ambitious. If each country was to follow through on their
climate pledges, we'd come out at 2.1C by 2100.
What's most promising is how these pathways have shifted over time. In
a world without climate policies, we'd be heading towards 4C or 5C, at
least. This is the path that most people still think we're on. That
would be a scary world indeed. Thankfully, over time, countries have
stepped up their commitments. As we saw with the example of the ozone
layer, incremental increases in ambition can make a huge difference.
The other big change is that moving to a low-carbon, sustainable
economy is not seen as the sacrifice it used to be. Fossil fuels were
far cheaper than renewables. Electric vehicles cost a fortune. But now
low-carbon technologies are becoming cost-competitive. It now makes
financial sense to take the climate-friendly path. Leaders have become
more optimistic about how the landscape is changing. We are still some
distance from a 2C pathway. We need to step up our efforts – and
quickly. But as it becomes more and more realistic, I'm confident we
can keep moving closer to it.
________________________________
When I was in my early teens, I thought most of us were going to die
from climate change. I tried to convince my classmates of this, too.
For my English oral exam, I held up a map of all of the cities and
coastlines that were going to sink by the end of the century. I showed
projected satellite images of the wildfires that would ravage the
globe. In trying to light flames of interest, I simply added fire to
my own anxieties.
By the time I reached Edinburgh University, I was being flooded with
images every day. Some from my university lectures, which, given the
fact I'd chosen a degree in earth sciences, was expected. But, more
importantly, my obsession for environmental sciences was growing in
tandem with the uptick in the frequency of reporting. The more
determined I became to stay informed, the quicker the stories came at
me, often accompanied by streams of recorded videos. I didn't have to
imagine the pain of the victims, I could see and hear it, too. As a
responsible citizen, I wanted to stay informed. I had to know what the
latest disaster was. To switch off from them seemed like a betrayal to
the lives that were lost.
With reports of disasters coming at me faster every day, it seemed
that things must be getting worse. Climate change was driving an
intensification of disasters, and more people were dying than ever
before.
Or so I thought. The problem was that I mistook the increase in the
frequency of reporting as an increase in the frequency of disasters. I
mistook an increase in the intensity of my secondhand suffering for an
increase in the intensity of global suffering. In reality, I had no
idea what was happening. Were disasters getting worse? Were there more
this year than last? Were there more people dying than ever before?
Then I discovered the work of Swedish physician, statistician and
public speaker Hans Rosling. Videos of his lectures taught me that
extreme poverty and child mortality were falling and education and
life expectancy were rising. I went looking for other areas where my
preconceptions might be wrong. I started with data on "natural"
disasters. I would have bet a lot of money that more people were dying
from disasters today than a century ago. I was completely wrong. Death
rates from disasters have actually fallen since the first half of the
20th century. And not just by a little bit. They have fallen roughly
tenfold.
It's at this point that I should make one thing clear: none of the
above means that climate change is not happening. The decline in
deaths from disasters does not mean that disasters are getting weaker
or less common. Deniers often misuse this data to downplay the
existence or risks of climate change. But that's not what the data
shows us at all.
In the past, it was common for disasters to claim millions of lives a
year. The 1920s, 30s and 40s were particularly bad. There were a few
large earthquakes that claimed many lives: China, Japan, Pakistan,
Turkey and Italy were all hit by a series of earthquakes that cost
tens of thousands of lives. The most lethal – the 1920 earthquake that
struck the Gansu province in China – is estimated to have killed
180,000 people. But it was drought and floods that were the most
deadly. China endured a number of large floods and droughts through
the 1920s and 30s, which often led to widespread famine and killed
millions at a time.
Today, the annual death toll is much smaller, usually between 10,000
and 20,000. Sometimes, there are particularly devastating years where
the toll is much higher – like 2010, when the annual death toll was
more than 300,000, with most deaths resulting from the Haitian
earthquake.
When I zoomed out and saw these trends, I felt stupid. I also felt
cheated. I had been duped by an education system that was supposed to
teach me about the world. I was a diligent student. I won medals for
coming top for everything, from earth materials to sedimentology,
atmospheric science to oceanography. I could create complex diagrams
of seismic faults, I could recite the chemical formulas of pages of
minerals from memory, but if you'd asked me to draw a graph of what
was happening to deaths from disasters, I'd have sketched it upside
down.
I wasn't alone in my ignorance. In the 2017 Gapminder Misconception
Study, the public, across 14 countries, were asked 12 key questions,
one of which was:
How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change
over the past 100 years?
a) More than doubled
b) Remained more or less the same
c) Decreased to less than half
Just 10% got the right answer: c). The most popular answer, 48% of the
vote, was a).
________________________________
To tackle climate change, we have to accept two things: climate change
is happening and human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible.
We simply don't have time to argue about the existence of climate
change. By "we", I mean all of us, collectively. The time for debating
is over. We need to move past it to the question of what we're going
to do about it.
Let's take a close look at where we are with carbon emissions. They
are still rising, but the world has already passed the peak of per
capita emissions. It happened a decade ago. Most people are unaware of
this.
In 2012, the world topped out at 4.9 tonnes per person. Since then,
per capita emissions have been slowly falling. Nowhere near fast
enough, but falling nonetheless. This is a signal that the peak in our
total (not per capita) CO2 emissions is coming. This is the case with
any metric in a world with an increasing population. Per capita
measures will peak first, then it's a tug-of-war over whether our
impacts per person will fall more quickly than the population is
growing.
We are very close. Emissions increased rapidly in the 1960s and 70s,
then again in the 1990s and early 2000s. But in recent years, this
growth has slowed down a lot. Emissions barely increased at all from
2018 to 2019. And they actually fell in 2020 as a result of the
Covid-19 pandemic. I'm optimistic we can peak global emissions in the
2020s.
One of the simple things that brings me the most joy in life is
getting an email from my grandma. My gran is in her mid-80s and can
almost work an iPad. By "work", I mean do the basics of looking at a
photograph and sending an email. She doesn't have an iPhone, a laptop
or a smartwatch. My grandpa rejects all modern technology, except
television. Their life is very similar to how it was a few decades
ago.
This has created something of a divide between the generations on
climate change. Many see the lifestyles of youngsters as the problem.
We spend all day on energy-guzzling gadgets. We flock to dense cities
with no gardens or green space. We buy lots of stuff and don't bother
to repair it. We never ration food and waste too much of it.
Yet my carbon footprint is less than half that of my grandparents'
when they were my age. When my grandparents were in their 20s, the
average person in the UK emitted 11 tonnes of CO2 per year. We now
emit less than five tonnes. The gap between me and my parents is
equally wide. From the 1950s to the 90s, emissions in the UK changed
very little. It's only since then – in my lifetime – that emissions
have plummeted.
Technology has made that possible. In 1900, nearly all of the UK's
energy came from coal and, by 1950, it was still supplying more than
90%. Now coal supplies less than 2% of our electricity, and the
government has pledged to phase it out completely by 2025. Coal is now
almost dead in its birthplace, where it all began. It has been
replaced with other sources of energy: gas, then nuclear, and now a
transition to wind, solar and other renewable sources.
That means that, for every unit of energy we consume, we emit much
less CO2. But that's not the only change. We also use much less energy
overall. Per capita energy use has fallen by around 25% since the
1960s. Year after year, more efficient gadgets have come into our
lives. First, it was improvements in the energy ratings of white
goods, then it was the trend of replacing inefficient lightbulbs. Then
it was double-glazed windows and home insulation to stop heat leaking
out into the street. When I was a kid, our family television – we
"only" had one – was a massive box that seemed to be two metres deep.
The screen was so small you had to sit really close to see anything.
Our car was a gas guzzler. Not a gas guzzler like we see with SUVs
today. My parents would never have bought one of those. No, our car
was secondhand and it was a "banger". It was inefficient: you could
hear the engine roar and feel it overheating. The miles per gallon
were terrible.
These massive strides in technology mean that we use much less energy
than we did in the past, despite appearing to lead much more
extravagant, energy-intensive lifestyles. The notion that we need to
be frugal to live a low-carbon life is simply wrong. In the UK, we now
emit about the same as someone in the 1850s. I emit the same as my
great-great-great-grandparents. And I have a much, much higher
standard of living.
Yet very few people know that emissions are falling. The climate
scientist Jonathan Foley recently polled his followers on Twitter [now
X]. He asked what had happened to emissions in the US over the past 15
years. Had they:
a) Increased by more than 20%
b) Increased by 10%
c) Stayed the same
d) Fallen by 20%
Thousands of people answered. Two-thirds of people picked a) or b).
Just 19% picked the correct answer d). No wonder people think we're
screwed.
Leaders no longer have to choose between climate action and providing
energy. The low-carbon choice is the economic one
We have a habit of underestimating how quickly things can change. Most
of us have been too pessimistic about renewable energy in the past,
even the experts. Part of the reason I thought that 2C was so far out
of reach was that I couldn't see how low-carbon energy could grow
quickly enough.
In just a decade between 2009 and 2019, solar photovoltaic and wind
energy went from the most to the least expensive source. The price of
electricity from solar has declined by 89%, and the price of onshore
wind has declined by 70%. They are now cheaper than coal. Leaders no
longer have to make the difficult choice between climate action and
providing energy for their people. The low-carbon choice has suddenly
become the economic one. It's staggering how quickly this change has
happened.
Poorer countries do not have to follow the fossil fuel-heavy and
unsustainable trajectories that rich countries did. They can leapfrog
the centuries-long journey that we've taken. And they don't have to
sacrifice human wellbeing or access to energy. In fact, by adopting
these technologies they can ensure that even more people have access
to affordable energy.
The huge progress being made in developing affordable low-carbon
alternatives to fossil fuels is just one counter to the doomsday
thinking of so much of the climate change conversation. It has become
too common to tell kids that they're going to die from climate change.
If a heatwave doesn't get them, then a wildfire will. Or a hurricane,
a flood or mass starvation. There is an intense feeling of anxiety and
dread among young people about what the planet has in store for us.
In my book, I look at realistic ways we can adapt the fields of
energy, transport, food and construction to rein in climate change
while improving human wellbeing at the same time. If we take several
steps back, we can see something truly radical, gamechanging and
life-giving: humanity is in a truly unique position to build a
sustainable world. Another reason some climate scientists are less
pessimistic is that they believe that things can change. The past few
decades have been an uphill battle for them. They've been mostly
ignored. Often they were the ones framed as apocalyptic scaremongers.
But, finally, the world has woken up to the reality of climate change
and people are taking action. The climate scientists know change is
possible because they've seen it happen. Against the odds, they've
driven much of it.
This is an edited extract from Not the End of the World: How We Can Be
the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie,
which will be published by Chatto & Windus on 11 January (£22). To
support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at
guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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In an extract from her book Not the End of the World, data scientist
Hannah Ritchie explains how her work taught her that there are more
reasons for hope than despair about climate change – and why a truly
sustainable world is in reach
Hannah Ritchie Tue 2 Jan 2024 08.00 CET
"Scientists say temperatures could rise by 6C by 2100 and call for
action ahead of UN meeting in Paris" – Independent, 2015.
A world that was 6C warmer than it is today would be devastating. And
remember, 6C is just the average. Some parts of the world would get
much warmer, especially the poles. Crops would fail. Many people would
be malnourished. Forests would be stripped back into savannahs. Island
nations would be completely submerged. Many cities will have
disappeared due to sea-level rise. Climate refugees will be on the
move. "Normal" temperatures in many parts of the world would be
unbearable. Even the richest, most temperate nations would see
devastating floods most winters and baking summers. We would be at
very high risk of setting off warming feedback loops – the melted ice
would reflect less sunlight, the melted permafrost might unlock
methane from the bottom of the ocean, and dying forests wouldn't be
able to regrow to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. A 6C warmer world
might be short-lived – it could quickly spiral into 8C, 10C or more.
It would be a massive humanitarian disaster.
Only a few years ago, I thought this was where we were headed. Forget
1.5C or 2C – we were destined for 4C, 5C or 6C and there was nothing
we could do about it. Most people still think that this is the path
we're following. Thankfully, it's not.
In 2015, I went to Paris for the big, famous climate conference,
Cop21. Representatives and policymakers from every country came
together to hash out a new climate deal. The previous goal of the
international agreement was to keep the global average temperature
rise below 2C by the end of the century. So I couldn't believe it when
there were rumours that a target of 1.5C was being discussed. Were
they crazy? At that point, I had already given up on the prospects of
2C. It was so far out of our reach. The notion that we could keep the
rise below 1.5C seemed delusional. And yet the target made it into the
final agreement. Mostly as an aspiration, but it was in there
nonetheless. The world pledged to "limit global warming to 'well
below' 2C above pre-industrial levels and also, if possible, 'pursue'
efforts to cap warming at 1.5C".
My perspective on 1.5C hasn't shifted much since then. Without a
major, unexpected technological breakthrough, we will go past this
target. Nearly all the climate scientists I know agree: they obviously
want to cap warming at 1.5C, but very few think it will happen. This
doesn't stop them fighting for it, though; they know that every 0.1C
matters, and is worth working for. But my perspective on 2C has
changed. I'm now cautiously optimistic that we can get close to it.
It's more likely than not that we will pass 2C, but perhaps not by
much. And there is still a reasonable chance – if we really step up to
the challenge – that we can stay below it.
My perspective flipped quickly after studying the data, not newspaper
headlines. I didn't focus on where we are today, but on the pace that
things have moved at in the past few years, and what this means for
the future. One organisation – the Climate Action Tracker – follows
every country's climate policies, and its pledges and targets. It
combines them all to map out what will happen to the global climate.
At Our World in Data, I sketch out these future climate trajectories
and update them every year. Every time, they get closer and closer to
the pathways we would need to follow to stay below 2C.
If we stick with the climate policies that countries currently have in
place, we're heading towards a world of 2.5C to 2.9C warming. Let me
be clear: this is terrible and we have to avoid it. But countries have
pledged to go much further. They've committed to making their policies
much more ambitious. If each country was to follow through on their
climate pledges, we'd come out at 2.1C by 2100.
What's most promising is how these pathways have shifted over time. In
a world without climate policies, we'd be heading towards 4C or 5C, at
least. This is the path that most people still think we're on. That
would be a scary world indeed. Thankfully, over time, countries have
stepped up their commitments. As we saw with the example of the ozone
layer, incremental increases in ambition can make a huge difference.
The other big change is that moving to a low-carbon, sustainable
economy is not seen as the sacrifice it used to be. Fossil fuels were
far cheaper than renewables. Electric vehicles cost a fortune. But now
low-carbon technologies are becoming cost-competitive. It now makes
financial sense to take the climate-friendly path. Leaders have become
more optimistic about how the landscape is changing. We are still some
distance from a 2C pathway. We need to step up our efforts – and
quickly. But as it becomes more and more realistic, I'm confident we
can keep moving closer to it.
________________________________
When I was in my early teens, I thought most of us were going to die
from climate change. I tried to convince my classmates of this, too.
For my English oral exam, I held up a map of all of the cities and
coastlines that were going to sink by the end of the century. I showed
projected satellite images of the wildfires that would ravage the
globe. In trying to light flames of interest, I simply added fire to
my own anxieties.
By the time I reached Edinburgh University, I was being flooded with
images every day. Some from my university lectures, which, given the
fact I'd chosen a degree in earth sciences, was expected. But, more
importantly, my obsession for environmental sciences was growing in
tandem with the uptick in the frequency of reporting. The more
determined I became to stay informed, the quicker the stories came at
me, often accompanied by streams of recorded videos. I didn't have to
imagine the pain of the victims, I could see and hear it, too. As a
responsible citizen, I wanted to stay informed. I had to know what the
latest disaster was. To switch off from them seemed like a betrayal to
the lives that were lost.
With reports of disasters coming at me faster every day, it seemed
that things must be getting worse. Climate change was driving an
intensification of disasters, and more people were dying than ever
before.
Or so I thought. The problem was that I mistook the increase in the
frequency of reporting as an increase in the frequency of disasters. I
mistook an increase in the intensity of my secondhand suffering for an
increase in the intensity of global suffering. In reality, I had no
idea what was happening. Were disasters getting worse? Were there more
this year than last? Were there more people dying than ever before?
Then I discovered the work of Swedish physician, statistician and
public speaker Hans Rosling. Videos of his lectures taught me that
extreme poverty and child mortality were falling and education and
life expectancy were rising. I went looking for other areas where my
preconceptions might be wrong. I started with data on "natural"
disasters. I would have bet a lot of money that more people were dying
from disasters today than a century ago. I was completely wrong. Death
rates from disasters have actually fallen since the first half of the
20th century. And not just by a little bit. They have fallen roughly
tenfold.
It's at this point that I should make one thing clear: none of the
above means that climate change is not happening. The decline in
deaths from disasters does not mean that disasters are getting weaker
or less common. Deniers often misuse this data to downplay the
existence or risks of climate change. But that's not what the data
shows us at all.
In the past, it was common for disasters to claim millions of lives a
year. The 1920s, 30s and 40s were particularly bad. There were a few
large earthquakes that claimed many lives: China, Japan, Pakistan,
Turkey and Italy were all hit by a series of earthquakes that cost
tens of thousands of lives. The most lethal – the 1920 earthquake that
struck the Gansu province in China – is estimated to have killed
180,000 people. But it was drought and floods that were the most
deadly. China endured a number of large floods and droughts through
the 1920s and 30s, which often led to widespread famine and killed
millions at a time.
Today, the annual death toll is much smaller, usually between 10,000
and 20,000. Sometimes, there are particularly devastating years where
the toll is much higher – like 2010, when the annual death toll was
more than 300,000, with most deaths resulting from the Haitian
earthquake.
When I zoomed out and saw these trends, I felt stupid. I also felt
cheated. I had been duped by an education system that was supposed to
teach me about the world. I was a diligent student. I won medals for
coming top for everything, from earth materials to sedimentology,
atmospheric science to oceanography. I could create complex diagrams
of seismic faults, I could recite the chemical formulas of pages of
minerals from memory, but if you'd asked me to draw a graph of what
was happening to deaths from disasters, I'd have sketched it upside
down.
I wasn't alone in my ignorance. In the 2017 Gapminder Misconception
Study, the public, across 14 countries, were asked 12 key questions,
one of which was:
How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change
over the past 100 years?
a) More than doubled
b) Remained more or less the same
c) Decreased to less than half
Just 10% got the right answer: c). The most popular answer, 48% of the
vote, was a).
________________________________
To tackle climate change, we have to accept two things: climate change
is happening and human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible.
We simply don't have time to argue about the existence of climate
change. By "we", I mean all of us, collectively. The time for debating
is over. We need to move past it to the question of what we're going
to do about it.
Let's take a close look at where we are with carbon emissions. They
are still rising, but the world has already passed the peak of per
capita emissions. It happened a decade ago. Most people are unaware of
this.
In 2012, the world topped out at 4.9 tonnes per person. Since then,
per capita emissions have been slowly falling. Nowhere near fast
enough, but falling nonetheless. This is a signal that the peak in our
total (not per capita) CO2 emissions is coming. This is the case with
any metric in a world with an increasing population. Per capita
measures will peak first, then it's a tug-of-war over whether our
impacts per person will fall more quickly than the population is
growing.
We are very close. Emissions increased rapidly in the 1960s and 70s,
then again in the 1990s and early 2000s. But in recent years, this
growth has slowed down a lot. Emissions barely increased at all from
2018 to 2019. And they actually fell in 2020 as a result of the
Covid-19 pandemic. I'm optimistic we can peak global emissions in the
2020s.
One of the simple things that brings me the most joy in life is
getting an email from my grandma. My gran is in her mid-80s and can
almost work an iPad. By "work", I mean do the basics of looking at a
photograph and sending an email. She doesn't have an iPhone, a laptop
or a smartwatch. My grandpa rejects all modern technology, except
television. Their life is very similar to how it was a few decades
ago.
This has created something of a divide between the generations on
climate change. Many see the lifestyles of youngsters as the problem.
We spend all day on energy-guzzling gadgets. We flock to dense cities
with no gardens or green space. We buy lots of stuff and don't bother
to repair it. We never ration food and waste too much of it.
Yet my carbon footprint is less than half that of my grandparents'
when they were my age. When my grandparents were in their 20s, the
average person in the UK emitted 11 tonnes of CO2 per year. We now
emit less than five tonnes. The gap between me and my parents is
equally wide. From the 1950s to the 90s, emissions in the UK changed
very little. It's only since then – in my lifetime – that emissions
have plummeted.
Technology has made that possible. In 1900, nearly all of the UK's
energy came from coal and, by 1950, it was still supplying more than
90%. Now coal supplies less than 2% of our electricity, and the
government has pledged to phase it out completely by 2025. Coal is now
almost dead in its birthplace, where it all began. It has been
replaced with other sources of energy: gas, then nuclear, and now a
transition to wind, solar and other renewable sources.
That means that, for every unit of energy we consume, we emit much
less CO2. But that's not the only change. We also use much less energy
overall. Per capita energy use has fallen by around 25% since the
1960s. Year after year, more efficient gadgets have come into our
lives. First, it was improvements in the energy ratings of white
goods, then it was the trend of replacing inefficient lightbulbs. Then
it was double-glazed windows and home insulation to stop heat leaking
out into the street. When I was a kid, our family television – we
"only" had one – was a massive box that seemed to be two metres deep.
The screen was so small you had to sit really close to see anything.
Our car was a gas guzzler. Not a gas guzzler like we see with SUVs
today. My parents would never have bought one of those. No, our car
was secondhand and it was a "banger". It was inefficient: you could
hear the engine roar and feel it overheating. The miles per gallon
were terrible.
These massive strides in technology mean that we use much less energy
than we did in the past, despite appearing to lead much more
extravagant, energy-intensive lifestyles. The notion that we need to
be frugal to live a low-carbon life is simply wrong. In the UK, we now
emit about the same as someone in the 1850s. I emit the same as my
great-great-great-grandparents. And I have a much, much higher
standard of living.
Yet very few people know that emissions are falling. The climate
scientist Jonathan Foley recently polled his followers on Twitter [now
X]. He asked what had happened to emissions in the US over the past 15
years. Had they:
a) Increased by more than 20%
b) Increased by 10%
c) Stayed the same
d) Fallen by 20%
Thousands of people answered. Two-thirds of people picked a) or b).
Just 19% picked the correct answer d). No wonder people think we're
screwed.
Leaders no longer have to choose between climate action and providing
energy. The low-carbon choice is the economic one
We have a habit of underestimating how quickly things can change. Most
of us have been too pessimistic about renewable energy in the past,
even the experts. Part of the reason I thought that 2C was so far out
of reach was that I couldn't see how low-carbon energy could grow
quickly enough.
In just a decade between 2009 and 2019, solar photovoltaic and wind
energy went from the most to the least expensive source. The price of
electricity from solar has declined by 89%, and the price of onshore
wind has declined by 70%. They are now cheaper than coal. Leaders no
longer have to make the difficult choice between climate action and
providing energy for their people. The low-carbon choice has suddenly
become the economic one. It's staggering how quickly this change has
happened.
Poorer countries do not have to follow the fossil fuel-heavy and
unsustainable trajectories that rich countries did. They can leapfrog
the centuries-long journey that we've taken. And they don't have to
sacrifice human wellbeing or access to energy. In fact, by adopting
these technologies they can ensure that even more people have access
to affordable energy.
The huge progress being made in developing affordable low-carbon
alternatives to fossil fuels is just one counter to the doomsday
thinking of so much of the climate change conversation. It has become
too common to tell kids that they're going to die from climate change.
If a heatwave doesn't get them, then a wildfire will. Or a hurricane,
a flood or mass starvation. There is an intense feeling of anxiety and
dread among young people about what the planet has in store for us.
In my book, I look at realistic ways we can adapt the fields of
energy, transport, food and construction to rein in climate change
while improving human wellbeing at the same time. If we take several
steps back, we can see something truly radical, gamechanging and
life-giving: humanity is in a truly unique position to build a
sustainable world. Another reason some climate scientists are less
pessimistic is that they believe that things can change. The past few
decades have been an uphill battle for them. They've been mostly
ignored. Often they were the ones framed as apocalyptic scaremongers.
But, finally, the world has woken up to the reality of climate change
and people are taking action. The climate scientists know change is
possible because they've seen it happen. Against the odds, they've
driven much of it.
This is an edited extract from Not the End of the World: How We Can Be
the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie,
which will be published by Chatto & Windus on 11 January (£22). To
support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at
guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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