Hannah Ritchie Quotes

The world is much better; the world is still awful; the world can do much better.’10 All three statements are true.

The classic definition of sustainability came out of a landmark report from the United Nations. In 1987, the UN defined sustainable development as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

There is a massive ‘solutions vacuum’ for our environmental problems.

Economic growth is not incompatible with reducing our environmental impact

Between 2013 and 2020, Beijing’s pollution levels fell by 55%.6 Across China as a whole, they fell by 40%.

The evidence is clear: to save the world’s coral reefs we need to stop climate change.

Air pollution is one of the world’s biggest killers. Researchers estimate that it kills at least 9 million people every year. That’s 450 times more than die in natural disasters in most years.

In 2010 I started my degree in Environmental Geoscience at the University of Edinburgh. I showed up as a fresh-faced 16-year-old, ready to learn how we were going to fix some of the world’s biggest challenges. Four years later, I left with no solutions. Instead, I felt the deadweight of endless unsolvable problems. Each day at Edinburgh was a constant reminder of how humanity was ravaging the planet.

The global population growth rate – the change from one year to the next – peaked a long time ago. In the 1960s it was growing at more than 2% per year.17 Since then, this rate has more than halved, to 0.8% in 2022.

Lastly, making stuff from plastic – especially single-use plastic – is just so efficient that it makes recycling old stuff much less attractive. Compared to other materials it’s often a low-carbon way to make stuff.

The news is designed to tell us, well, something new – an individual story, a rare event, the latest disaster. Because we see them in the news so often, unlikely events seem like probable ones. But they’re often not. That’s why they make the news and why they capture our attention.

Rosling explained what the data really told us about the most important metrics of human well-being: the percentage of people living in extreme poverty, the number of children dying, how many girls did or didn’t get to go to school, and what percentage of children are vaccinated against diseases. We almost never step back to look at the data on these changes in global development.

None of the world’s forests or vegetation give much to our oxygen supply. As the geologist Shanan Peters calculated: ‘if every living thing other than humans burned up, oxygen levels would fall from 20.9% to 20.4%’.8 It would also take millions of years to deplete the globe’s oxygen supply by any notable amount. The oxygen in our atmosphere came from phytoplankton in the oceans, millions of years ago.

The rest goes to livestock or biofuels. The same is true for soy. We could simply repurpose that food, or repurpose that land to grow different crops. This all sounds very simple in principle but getting people to change behaviours is difficult. I don’t think that enough people will make this change based on the ethical pull alone. If we’re to change how people eat across the world we’re going to need some new, tasty, meat-like products

My gratitude goes as well to the other data scientists I pestered and to the institutions that collect and maintain their data: Karlyn Bowman, Daniel Cox (PRRI), Tamar Epner (Social Progress Index), Christopher Fariss, Chelsea Follett (HumanProgress), Andrew Gelman, Yair Ghitza, April Ingram (Science Heroes), Jill Janocha (Bureau of Labor Statistics), Gayle Kelch (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Alaina Kolosh (National Safety Council), Kalev Leetaru (Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone), Monty Marshall (Polity Project), Bruce Meyer, Branko Milanović (World Bank), Robert Muggah (Homicide Monitor), Pippa Norris (World Values Survey), Thomas Olshanski (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Amy Pearce (Science Heroes), Mark Perry, Therese Pettersson (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Stephen Radelet, Auke Rijpma (OECD Clio Infra), Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data), Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Google Trends), James X. Sullivan, Sam Taub (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Kyla Thomas, Jennifer Truman (Bureau of Justice Statistics), Jean Twenge, Bas van Leeuwen (OECD Clio Infra), Carlos Vilalta, Christian Welzel (World Values Survey), Justin Wolfers, and Billy Woodward (Science Heroes). David Deutsch, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Kevin Kelly, John Mueller, Roslyn Pinker, Max Roser, and Bruce Schneier read a draft of the entire manuscript and offered invaluable advice.

I used to think optimists were naive and pessimists were smart. Pessimism seemed like an essential feature of a scientist: the basis of science is to challenge every result, to pick theories apart to see which one stands up. I thought cynicism was one of its founding principals. Maybe there is some truth in that. But science is inherently optimistic too. How else would we describe the willingness to try experiments over and over, often with slim odds of success? Scientific progress can be frustratingly slow: the best minds can dedicate their entire lives to a single question and come away with nothing. They do so with the hope that a breakthrough is around the corner. The odds drop to zero if they give up.

Air pollution is caused by one very simple principle: burning things. When we burn stuff – whether that’s wood, crops, coal or oil – we generate small unwanted particles at the same time. This is the root of the problem, and the key to solving it.

But remember the ‘maximum sustainable yield’ – the point where we can catch as much fish as possible without depleting their populations – for most fish species is about 50% of their pre-fishing levels.

Hunger rates have fallen quickly over the last 50 years, but one in 10 people still don’t get enough food to eat. It’s not because we can’t grow enough food. It’s because we feed it to livestock, put it into cars, or in the bin where it gets wasted.

Let’s imagine we have a buried landfill, around 30 metres underground. This is the depth of many existing landfills – the Puente Hills landfill in Los Angeles reaches a whopping 150 metres below the surface. Our landfill is going to extend 10 metres deep.

I often feel embarassed to admit that I'm an optimist. I imagine it knocks me down a peg or two in people's estimations.But the world desperately needs more optimism. The problem is that people mistake optimism for 'blind optimism', the unfounded faith that things will just get better. Blind optimism really is dumb. And dangerous. If we sit back and do nothing, things will not turn out fine. That's not the kind of optimism I'm talking about. Optimism is seeing challenges as opportunities to make progress; it's having the confidence that there are things we can do to make a difference. We can shape the future, and we can build a great one if we want to. The economist Paul Romer makes this distinction nicely. He separates 'complacent optimism' from 'conditional optimism'.

Plastic or paper bag – your plastic bag actually has a lower carbon footprint, but it doesn’t matter much fn7

Food waste in households, restaurants and shops is a different issue. In principle it should be straightforward: just buy what you need and make sure you eat it. But human behaviour is hard to change. There are some things that can help.

Over the last 10,000 years we’ve cut down one-third of the world’s forest, mostly to grow food on expanding farmland. Half of this was in the last century

Food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions; it uses half of the world’s habitable land, 70% of the world’s freshwater withdrawals, and the leading driver of biodiversity loss.

eating less meat would reduce the amount of land we use for farming, climate change and biodiversity loss.

For most of human history there was no other choice. That is why nearly every society that has become rich since the industrial revolution has seen air pollution build to crisis levels. Human beings choked on smog in London in the nineteenth century and in New York and Los Angeles in the twentieth century. A few years ago, Beijing’s air quality was an international scandal, and now the same is true for Delhi. But notice: the problem passes. Los Angeles got richer and its residents now breathe clean air. The same is true in London, where air pollution in the eighteenth century was worse than Delhi is today.14 “Environmental action is often framed as at odds with the economy,” writes Hannah Ritchie in Not the End of the World. “It’s either climate action or economic growth. Pollution versus the market. This is just wrong.