Pushkin.
Here are three statements that are all true. Statement number one, the world is awful. This one is pretty self explanatory, no need to dwell. Statement number two, the world is better than it used to be. This one, in my experience, tends to generate pushback that ranges from mild skepticism to outright hostility. And yet along many dimensions, it is clearly true.
You know, just in the past few decades, the infant mortality rate around the world has fallen by a lot, as has the share of people living in extreme poverty. Literacy rates are going up around the world. Lots of things are getting better, so that is statement number two. And then finally statement three, the world can be better. The world can be better than it is now. This one I find when I say it, people will sort of go along with it.
But without conviction.
Right like, maybe theoretically the world can be better, but they don't really believe it. And yet, as list item number two reminds us, the world is better than it used to be in many ways, it's true. The world really can get better. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My guest today is Hannah Ritchie. Hannah is a data scientist and the deputy editor of Our World in Data, which is an amazing online publication home
of many great graphs about the world. And Hannah is also the author of the relatively new book Not the End of the World, How we Can be the First generation to build a sustainable planet. The book uses that three part framework I just talked about. Things are bad, things are better than they used to be, things can be better than they are now, and it presents a fact based, non moralistic set of approaches to solving some
of the world's big problems. In our conversation, Hannah and I wound up focusing on food, focusing on the way we eat, because the way we eat is really tied up with a lot of the big problems that Hannah focuses on in the book, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and of course climate change. But to start, I asked her about part two of her framework, that idea that the world is better than it used to be. In particular, I was curious why she thinks that idea generates so much pushback.
It's interesting because when you say, when I say, in my experience, the world is much better than it used to be, people don't believe me, or they get mad, which is interesting.
Has that been your experience at all?
Yeah, I think, I mean, I think the key thing about this framework is that you really need to be able to hold all feevings in your head at the same time. I think naturally, it's just very difficult for us to do. I think as soon as anyone says
anything positive, our mind automatically goes to the negative. Right, So if I say we've made amazing progress on reducing global hunger, your automatic reaction is to go to, well, yeah, but there's still eight hundred million people that are hungry, which is also absolutely true, right, But there is this pool in us, and it's definitely had that reaction from the book, that there is this gut reaction of wanting to counter it with the kind of almost cynical or
protective kind of blanket of well, we shouldn't be complacent about this because we've still got a massive problem.
Sometimes it goes even farther than that.
I mean, that is certainly true, and that is more easy to understand, right, because as you say, one shouldn't be complace, one shouldn't just live here comfortably in the developed world and say Oh, everything's great, but people don't even want to believe that things are good here relative to one hundred years ago. And that one is a little bit harder to understand, Like why do you think people don't believe that things are better than they were one hundred years ago?
Say, I mean, I think one thing is that we just don't look at data.
Right.
You can only see this through data. Right, You're never going to get this in the news because the news covers what's happened in the last hour in the world. So is an event, right, it's an event that can
make a headline. It's a natural disaster, it's a war, it's a murder, it's a really, really bad event, which is one of the reasons why the news skews negative, whereas a lot of the progress we've made, you know, there's no headline really you can run because it happens gradually, day after day after day after day.
It's not a headline story that globally, infant mortality has fallen a huge amount in the last thirty years, even though in terms of human welfare it's one of the most important things that happened this century so far.
Right, Yeah, and I think that's true for like most of our progress stories that they happen incrementally over time, but when you add that up over decades, you just have this like profound change that's happened in the world. And I think because it's just out of pace with the news cycle, we just don't get it right. We just don't see it. Especially in rich countries in the world.
We often have this patronizing perception that the rest of the world has stagnated or hasn't moved forward, right, So we think, okay, things might be okay where I am, but you know, countries in Africa or countries in Asia, they're just as poor and bad off as they were fifty years ago, when actually they are. Child mortality rates have fallen, more kids are getting vaccinated, hungered down, poverties down.
So I think we have this perception that many countries in the world are stuck where they were fifty years ago, and that's just not true. And it's because we often again don't see these stories. And the news they're either our news in the US or Europe, is very US or Europe orientated, and the stuff we hear from other parts of the world again attend to be these negative stories.
So the book, the book does talk about a lot of stuff that's wrong, right.
The book is certainly not.
Pollyanna ish, I would say, but it approaches it with a sort of practical like, let's figure out how to solve this framework, and you step through most of the big things that seem terribly wrong, or many of the big things that seem terribly wrong climate change, over fishing, deforestation, et cetera. I want to talk at some length about one chapter in particular, because, as you say in the book,
it's sort of a nexus. It's a subject that touches on all of these other subjects, really, and that is food in part I mean, you know, obviously climate change is the other one that is sort of this grand thing.
But food is.
Very important and very underdiscussed in the context of climate change. Right, So let's talk about food at some length.
And let's start.
Let's use that framework that you use more generally with the world is much better than it used to be in many ways. The world is still bad in many ways, and the world can be better. Let's apply that to food. So how is food much better than it used to be?
So when you look at it through a human hunger lens. So today around just under ten percent of the world are sto go hungry, which means they just don't get enough calories to eat. So that's around eight hundred million people.
That's the still very bad piece.
This is still very bad piece. But if you were to go back a century, you know, the share of the world that go hungry was way higher than it was.
Is there are there credible estimates for what it was one hundred years ago.
The long term data on this is more shaky, i'd say, but you're definitely talking about in most regions well over a third if not more, people were not getting enough calories.
To eat, well over a third as opposed to ten percent. So that is improvement. I mean, what if you go back, if you go back two hundred years, what is the rough estimate of what percentage of people on earth were not getting enough to eat?
I mean, I'd say probably even higher still, and I'd say most of the improvements in food and agricultural productivity have came really in the last century, but in particular in the last fifty years. So I think if you were to look at hunger rates a century ago or two centuries ago, they'd all be very very high. And again i'd say estimates are fuzzy, but you'd say at least well over a third, if not over half, of people weren't getting.
Enough, yeah, as compared to today where it's something like ninety percent of people are getting enough food to eat. So I mean, obviously there are a few key breakthroughs in like getting more food per acre of land per unit of land, right, nitrogen fertilizer, and then the Haberbosch process, which weirdly we just talked about on the show, for
synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer. And then there's this other moment, a later moment that you talk about in the book, which is basically one guy, one of these amazing one guy changes the world stories, and it's Norman Borlog. So tell me about Norman Borlog.
So, Norman Borlog was a kind of agricultural scientist, and he was basically recruited initially to go to Mexico to work out how Mexicans could grow more food per unit of land, so how to increase agricultural productivity or crop yield in Mexico. And he came at us for a genet reading lens, so trying to work out what combination of crop strains might be able to produce us and it was a very long process. There's a lot of trial and error.
Right, just to be clear, right, what this is like the sixties. This is not like GMO, This is pregmo, right, this is just like old school Mendelian crosses, farmer hybrid like that, like the old school style.
Yeah, old school.
So lots of trial and error, lots of trying a crop not performing well, trying another crop not performing well, and kind of got to the stage where he was kind of sent out on this mission and kind of left there is like, oh, well, he'll be over there trying to do this. We're kind of skeptical at of work, but you know, he's got a job over there. Good luck, And he finally cracks it and it makes a massive difference to crop yields in Mexico, talking about a large,
large increase. Mexico moved from being a net importer of food to a net exporter of food and from there this really kicked off eat what we frame as kind of agricultural revolution. And he went to South Asia in Pakistan and India and did the same Right, so again
their crop yields were extremely low during that period. There was lots of concerns about especially food shortage in that region, but more broadly, there was lots of concerns at the time about a global food shortage, huge famines, huge levels of hunger.
Right.
Well, and you talk about Paul Erlik, the famous biologist who in retrospect looks quite bad, right, who wrote this best selling book essentially saying, we are screwed already. It's baked in. A billion people are going to starve. We just got to figure out who, because there's no way we can grow enough food to feed all the people who.
Have just been born.
Right, So nineteen sixty eight he comes out with this book, The Population Bomb, and yes, that was his thesis. There's just far too many people on the planet. We've got this major global food crisis coming and many men, many people are going to die from this. That didn't happen. One of the reasons it didn't happen was because of Norman Blorog and the Green Revolution. So we we vastly underestimated how much we could increase crop yields across the world.
So staying for a moment on the theme of the world is much better than it.
Used to be. One thing that I.
Didn't know before I read your book that I learned from the book is that the world has passed peak fertilizer use and has passed or almost passed peak land use for agriculture, which was surprising to me and encouraging. Tell me about Tell me about those facts.
So peak fertilizer use, I wouldn't say definitively that we're past the peak. I think we're kind of being on this kind of plateau. We saw really really steep rise in global fertilizer use in the nineteen nineties and especially the early two thousands. If you look over the last day care, so it's kind of been leveling off, which I think goes against people's intuitions. I think they'd think, you know, we're just still going through the roof. We're
using far more fertilizer than ever before. But no, we look like we're kind of stabilizing, and and part of that is due to some cooking hunters are still in the increase, and I actually think it's good at their still in the increase. As you said, like one of the key innovations that have helped to feed the world has been the use of fertilizer, and some countries still don't have enough, but some countries definitely overuse it and overuse it to the point where it's just not even
cost effective for farmers to be using that much. But over the last few decades, some countries have dramatically reduced fertilizer use without sacrificing you old right, So fertilizer use in Europe in particular has gone down, and yields have either stayed the same or have continued to increase, even in China. So China, again it looks like it's now past peak fertilizer use. So fertilizer use and pesticide use in China has now been fallen, and I actually think
that that could fall quite quickly. And part of the way that China has done that has actually been through large scale education programs for farmers on how to use this stuff more effectively. And again it's cost effective for a farmer to learn that.
We're about to get to why the world is still bad in terms of food, But before we do, is there anything else we should do on why the world is much better?
I think what people underestimate and I actually think this is a good and a bad thing. I think people just underestimate how good we've got producing food. I think they don't have a sense of scale in their head about how much food we can actually produce. So if you say that the average person in the world needs around two thousand to two and a half thousand calories per person per day, depending on their size and gender,
et cetera. Because we know that some people don't get enough calories and some people probably over consume a bit, right, we might assume that that just about levels off, right, balances each other out, so we maybe produce just enough calories for everyone in the world, so maybe two and
a half thousand per person per day. The reality is that we probably produce around twice as much as that, right, So you're probably talking about four and a half to five thousand calories per person per day if you were to split it all equally. So we just are capable of producing huge amounts of food.
So we produce enough food if we didn't waste any to feed twice as many people as are on Earth today, which is probably more people than we'll ever live on Earth at once. Right, We're probably not going to get to two x current population.
Right, So if you were to get to zero waste food systems, and again this is not just about I think what people think about as food waste, but if you were to have a really really efficient distribution system, we could Yeah, we could definitely feed ten billion, which is what people are looking at in the future.
Yeah.
So right, So that's happy from the point of view of there's definitely enough food. We have the technology to know how the land to grow as much food as we will need to feed people when we hit peak population. Okay, let's talk about what's bad what's bad with food today? And I think the place to start there is how much of the earth we use for food, and in particular, how much of the habitable land mass of the earth we use for.
Food is a lot. So if you were to take the world habitable land, which is basically land that's not desert or not ice, then we use around half of that for farming.
Half the Earth's land mass we use for growing food. What share of that is for cows, either for growing cows you know, rangeland or for growing food to feed cows.
So for Kaus specifically, it's probably around sixty.
Percent sixty percent of all agricultural land, so more than a quarter of the habitable land mass of the earth goes to growing cows and growing.
Food for cows.
Yeap, Zelli, That's that I think is the central wild fact of your book to me, right, I think as I read this chapter of your book and the book more broadly, because this seems like the central chapter, cows come out as the villain. Uh Is that a fair read?
A fair read?
Yeah?
I mean, villain is a moral word, right, and I would like to use a non moral as my fault. But like, I appreciate that you are not moralistic in your telling. It's one of the things I particularly like about this book. It's not like, here are the evil people and I'm the good person exposing them. It's a much more sort of clinical, what feels to me, more rational approach of just like, look, let's just lay out the facts. But when you lay out the facts, I'm like cows man cows, Like, if we just if it
wasn't for cows. I don't want to say we'd be fine, like we'd still have the energy transition fossil fuel, but it seems like if we could solve beef, we could solve a lot.
Yeah, if we were to significantly regious global beef consumption, it would have a massive environmental impact and a positive environmental impact. So when you look at the range of environmental problems we face, beef and cattle come out really strongly. So it's a really large driver of climate change. It's the leading driver of deforestation, it's the as a result of deforestation. It's then one of the leading drivers of
biodiversity laws. So yes, cattle and beef consumption specifically straddle a large number of our problems. And then for many of these problems are really like the leading cause.
And just can you just articulate the link between beef and climate change a little more.
Yeah, So there's two key ways that beef contributes to climate change. One is about land juice, right, So when we have deforestation or other land juice changes, that's a driver of CO two emissions, So that contributes to CO two through land juice changes. And then the second one is really about cows burping. Right, So cows burp and the bark mephane and mephe is a very powerful greenhouse gas.
So that's the second way that they mostly contribute. There's a hard way, which is that their manure also releases greenhouse gases.
Yeah, I want to get to the world can be better section of the food conversation. But before we do, Like, so, cows are clearly the biggest food problem, it seems, are there other what else is on the very short list of big food related problems we need to solve?
I mean, I think I think one final framing of the world as bad as it is now is that we still have eight hundred million people in the world don't get enough food to eat. And actually, when you look at it, beyond calories, so not just getting enough energy, but getting enough of all of the micronutrients that we need. You're actually talking about billions of people in the world
are defined as being malnourished. So even if you can get enough calories, and you can usually do that through stable crops like cereals or cassava, etc. You might be able to get enough calories, but you're not getting the full spectrum of nutrients that we need.
After the break, we get to the world can be better part of the conversation.
Okay, so let's solve these problems.
Let's start with people going hungry and not getting enough nutrition.
How do we solve that?
One key way is that, especially for many of the poorest countries in the world, we just need to work again on the agricultural productivity problem. And here I'm really specifically talking about Sub Saharan Africa. Most farmers and subs in Africa got very low crop yields, much lower than the global average and much much much lower than say you'd get in the US.
Sure, are there examples of places, you know, if you set aside this kind of one off green revolution, are there examples of places where crop yields go up independent of economic growth? Or is the typical story that economic growth sort of causes crop yields to go up when countries are not at the economic different tier.
It is very strongly correlated. So as countries get richer, yes, you tend to get increased productivity, but I think there are still differences there. I think I think government policies play a role, land reforms play a role, access to markets player role. So I don't think this is purely just about stimulate economic growth and this happens. I think there are things that that governments can do to stimulate
that and make that go faster. Providing subsidies for farmers to be able to afford the crucial inputs like better seeds or more fertilizer or irrigation really helps a lot. That's one key key way to do it.
Okay, Well, what are we going to do about meat and deef in particular?
So I think if we're to solve these big environmental problems globally, we need to reduce make consumption. And I say globally because I think when I see reducing meat consumption, people say, oh, should the person that's in a few kilograms a year and that's crucial to the nutrition, should they be cutting back? And they always askers no. Right here, I'm really mostly talking about people in middle income to
rich countries where meat consumption is very high. Of course, to solve these problems, we would need to reduce global meat consumption.
Yes, I mean that's the again almost tautological answer of like, the way to solve the problem of too much meat it's to have people eat less meat.
But how do you do that?
Right?
I mean you're talking the book about like individual behavior change doesn't matter basically in the aggregate, right, it may be useful for kind of moral reasons. Or in the abstract, but on the level of like climate change by a diversity laws, deforestation, the things we're talking about here, it seems like individual behavior change is not going to do it right. So like, what are the moves, what are the macro moves that might drive things in the right direction.
So individual behavior change on its own is not going to change anything. I still advocate for that, and I'm vegan myself, so I tried to take that on. I think people too often said, I.
Have to be right after writing that chapter, you kind of have to be sure.
But I think I think people too often set up this false dichotomy of individual behavior change and wider systemic change. As an individual, you are part of the system.
Fair, you're putting me on the hook, And that's totally reasonable.
So so yes, even if you were to go vegan tomorrow, the world global make consumption is not going to notice. I would I would say that what you choose to eat actually is one behavior change that actually can have a small direct impact in some way, especially when you look at it in terms of animal welfare. Yeah, so you eat unless meat does actually potentially reduce the number of animals that are probably raised in pretty poor conditions and killed from consumption.
Yes, that is plainly directly true. I mean, the moral dimension of eating meat is real and significant, and we have not been discussing that piece of it to this point. But clearly the individual choice about eating meat, that moral dimension is obviously significant, but it is notable in your book. And let's just talk about this for a second. It's a little digressive, but let's just do it here. Like you know, you talk about like which behavior changes people
make are meaningful at what magnitude? Right, And clearly eating meat and even more so eating beef relative to other individual choices is quite significant, and I think it kind of punches above its weight in terms of what people think about. Right, So, like, just for a minute talk about that, Like, in terms of individual choices, what are things that are kind of underrated that people don't think
about enough that make a big difference? And then what are things are overrated that people talk about or care about but actually don't really matter that much.
Right, So the things that people overrate And this is basically when you ask people what are you doing for the environment, this is what they see. They see the recycle, they get light, they get energy efficient light bulbs, and they try to avoid single use plastics like that. Those are the key things that people see when you ask what they're doing for the environment, and the reality is that the impart that they have is tiny, right, any tiny fraction of your footprint.
Yeah, recycling wildly overrated. Right, good for cans, but for everything else it doesn't matter really, But so okay, so what does matter?
Eating meat? What else?
What are other actual meaningful changes, at least relative to the scale of one person.
So if you were to look at what except probably eighty percent of your footprint, it's what you eat. And the biggest thing you can do there is eat less meat and dairy. In your house, it's heating or cooling, so right, so like heating or air con. So if you have a gas boiler, switching to an electric heat pump and make a massive difference to your footprint. And
then the other two big things are travel. So like if you have a car, your car is a massive part of your footprint, so either obviously walking and cycling is best. Going to an electric car is way better than a petrol car. And then the final thing, if you fly, is flying. And if you add up those things, you're getting to the majority of your environmental footprint.
Good.
Okay, back to meat. What do we do about meat on a.
Non individual level? Right? What are the macro ways we can reduce meat consumption?
So I'll go to the macro and then I'll say why, having individuals play a role in that. So when you look at the macro trends in meat consumption globally, they're going up. And even when you look at a country level, there are very very few examples where meat consumption is going down. Right, So we're just really not making much progress on this problem.
We're making regress. And what about beef in particular, I mean, presumably a shift from beef to chicken. Obviously it's not as good for the world as a shift from beef to SOI, but it's pretty good, right, And I feel like anecdotally in the US, chicken has risen and beef has fallen, not for environmental reasons but for health reasons basically, Right, people grew more wary of red meat.
Is that true empirically?
Like what has happened with beef consumption in America in the last whatever fifty years or something?
Yeah, that's true. If you look at America, or you look at Europe, red meat consumption specifically, beef consumption has gone down a bit and in its place, chicken consumption has gone up. As you say, that's witch is probably very underrated as a climate solution, right, It actually makes a big difference to your footprint switching from beef to chicken. So environmentally that's a very very good swap. I'd argue that the animal welfare cost of that or the opposite, right.
If you value the life of a chicken at the same as you value the life of a cow, it's clearly much worse for and more.
But yeah, I think this meat switchain has been a key transition in many countries and environmentally positive.
But globally, beef consumption is rising, presumably because as very poor people get richer, they eat more meat.
Understandably.
Yeah, okay, so still bad. We're not yet to how do we make it better?
Let's get there? What do we got to do? Or you know, how do we go in the right direction? Right?
So we've made little progress, and one of the reasons we've made a little progress is because people are not willing to switch to the previous alternatives we had as a protein right. People were not switching from a beef burger to lentils or tofu or beans. Right. People just didn't want to make that switch. That seemed like a step backwards.
Right.
The way we solve this, and the only way I see with that, we solve this, is to make a like for like switch so that people can still have the beef burger or something really close to a beef
burger without the cow. Right. That's the only way I see a route out of this, or a way to reduce global meat consumption is to basically produce meat substitutes that provide the same texture, the same nutrition, the same experience, just without the cow or the chicken, and with much lower environmental footprint.
It's basically lab grown meat.
Some of the plant based meat substitutes I think are getting pretty good, although I'm probably biased.
No, I mean, I had a lot of impossible beef, certainly way more than beef beef, but it's clearly not
good enough, right. I Mean, you know, people are trying sort of sell culture like sort of meat as a biotech problem is fundamentally what you're talking about on some level, right, And it does seem like fundamentally that's appealing because it doesn't require people to change their behavior ultimately, right, Ultimately we want a solution based on people just acting indifferently or in their own self interest.
Like, that's the kind of solution I can believe in, right.
And and you know, I've heard counter arguments that like, oh, people won't trust it, or people are attached to you know, beef that comes from an animal. But I feel like that's going to be the minority of people, right. I feel like most people don't care about any particular thing in the world and they just want something like with energy, they just want something that's reliable and cheap.
And so if somebody could make.
Lab ground meat that was the same as beef and one penny cheaper, it would win.
I think initially people might be hesitant and skeptical, but I think that's the case with most new technologies. Like if you look at electric cars, for example, I think initially many many people were skeptical because they didn't know anyone that had an electric car, right, They didn't know how it ran, whether you broke down on the highway, like was it easy to charge, was it expensive to charge? Like, no one really knew that apart from a really small minority.
I think with electric vehicles, we're now getting to the stage where most of us know someone that has won and they get by fine and actually really like it. And I feel like with new technologies like lab grown meat, for example, it might be the same. Like uptake rates at the very start might be slow, but I think
it would very very slowly start to become normalized. And as you say, I think people at some point would just switch and they'd be very happy to just have something that tastes like a burger, has a texture of a burger, asious as a burger. I think cost will be key. They will not pay more for it than they be for a beef burger. So that's really really key, is that we need to scale these technologies, but we also need to make sure that they are undercut in the current cost of meat.
Well, you know the I talked to the guy who started Impossible Foods and he makes the point that from first principles, meat made without animals should be cheaper. Right for the same reason that animals are such a problem for the world, which is they're wildly inefficient. Like, yes, industrial agriculture has become very efficient at growing cows and
at growing the corn to feed cows. But from first principles it's still crazy, right, like the fact that you only get one calorie of beef for every whatever ninety five calories of corn you put in, and you have to raise a whole caw. Like, theoretically there should be a much more efficient way to get beef than going through all that work of making a cow, right, And so that makes me optimistic in an abstract way, if not in a practical way.
Yeah, I think so. I think this is also a time thing, Like I think we'll get there. I think it's really about how long it takes us. I think what's key about agriculture is we've been refining and optimizing these processes over a really, really long period of time, whereas these new technologies are very much in their infancy.
Yeah, well, that makes me less hopeful when you put it that way. I mean, I guess I am somewhat less hopeful about meat, right, Like the energy transition seems to be going better than almost anyone would have expected ten years ago. Right, We're not having a meat transition. It's just not happening yet.
Can you help me feel better about it?
I'm not sure, because I mean, I think the theme that also comes from my book again is that I think, again I'm optimistic on the energy story, and I think we're making pretty rapid progress they are, and more progress than people imagine. I think the way people discuss the food chapter in my book is kind of that, it's like the pessimistic side of the story. It's hard.
So if we managed to solve the food problem, if we fundamentally managed to come up with like good cheap fake meat, right, that's actually the answer.
How will the world change? Like? What is the what is the happy outcome there?
So I think if we were to somehow magically and beef production tomorrow. One is that we were dramatically reduced the amount of land that we're using for agriculture, which means that we could really start to restore all ecosystems and our habitats that we basically took over with agricultural land. Right, So that has biodiversity benefits, and it also has benefits for climate change because you can start to restore and sequest or carbon that we previously lost by deforcing that
land or taking away the well grassland. So that's a huge huge positive because beef is also the leading cause of deforestation. I think globally you would also see a significant drop in rates of deforestation. It wouldn't go to zero because there are other causes, but it was at least significantly reduce those rates. And then the final one is I think it would have a significant impact on our greenhouse cast missions and climate change. So we were
to get rid of that mefing. So for context, livestock and most of this is cattle contributes around fifteen percent of global greenhouse cassome missions.
That's basically cow burps.
Cowburps and some of this land just change. But again that a lot of that would go away. So I think you would at least global greenhouse gas emissions by five to ten percent.
Huh So if we zoom out even more. You know, at the end of your book you sort of tell the happy story, right like, if things go well, if we make good on the things can be better piece of your framework if things go well, not just with food, but more generally with the big global problems you talk about in the book, what will the world look like?
Well, you say in fifty years in the book, right, I.
Think there's two sayes to this, and I think it's really important that we consider both sides. As an environmentalist, I mean, again, we always focus on just the environmental metrics. So it'd be very easy for me to sit here and say, you know, just the best outcome would be that there's no deforestation and we stop climate change, right,
and again I think those will be huge victories. But at the same time, we also need to make sure that we're providing a good life for the nine or ten billion people that there will be on the planet.
So when I'm an old lady, what you know success would look like is that we have nine or ten billion people that don't live in extreme poverty, that are not hungry, have access to energy for a good life, they have access to healthcare, and we've eradicated diseases, and they have clean water and sanitation, and we've done that, so we've driven that huge amount of global human development
will also reducing our environmental impacts. So we've managed to stop climate change, and there will still be climate damages. There to be clear, like, we're not going to just solve this and there'll be no impacts whatsoever, but we can manage to deal with those negative impacts, and we've really just freed up a huge amount of the planet to be restored for biodiversity in nature. So we've stopped
cutting in forests, and forests are we growing. And we've taken out a lot of the farmland that we currently use and that's now being restored for weld ecosystems. So we have nine or ten point people living really really good, high welfare lives and we're using a much smaller amount of the planet in order.
To do that. We'll be back in a minute with the Lightning round. Let's finish with the Lightning round. What's your favorite data set.
At the moment? The renewable energy day is it? I think the biggest transition that's making me most optimistic about the future is the rapid growth in renewables and the plumbting costs of those energy sources.
It's amazing because like even I don't know, I did a story seven years ago or something about oh my god, solar got so cheap and people are getting solar power who don't even care about the environment just because it's cheaper.
And then since then it's gotten so much cheaper.
Like just not stopping, it's not stopping yeah, but I think combined with that, I think the next stage, which is making me equally optimistic, is now the falling costs of batteries.
What's a data set that you wish existed that doesn't exist.
Just a really really good global data set on bio diversity, and by that I mean for every species in the world, but just really far away from that because there's so many species. And that was one of the struggles for the biodiversity chapter is that I tried to base all of my thinking on data. I mean, the data are scarce. It's hard to get a really clear picture of what's going on. So I think that's one day I would love is just what on Earth's going on with global bio diversity.
What's one thing I should do if I go to Falkirk.
We're famous for this massive wheel, so we have a wheel like a wheel. It's called the Fallkirk wheel, right, And when you say famous, I mean that's the only thing we have. And the Queen opened it, so she was there the opening of it. So in through full Kirk we have these canal systems with boats and we have this magical wheel where basically it takes the boat from like ground level up to like a massive, massive height so you can get on the new canal.
Wow. But like a ferris wheel?
Should I picture like at exactly?
But the exciting thing is that turning this massive wheel with his boat on it takes less energy than boiling a kettle.
Wow?
Brand you Yeah, so it utilizes potential energy and converts it into kinetics. It's this really energy efficient wheel.
Wow. Okay.
Do you have any graph related pet peeves? Oh?
A lot. One key one is that people just make them far too complicated. I think people try to cram as much information in as they can, or they think that it makes them look smarter to make a more complicated graph, and that a line chart is just too simple and yeah, but actually the simple line chart or the simple bar chart that people can understand is just way more of it.
Yeah.
A line chart with time on the x axis and the variable you care about on the y axis, you need to I look for those all the time. I'm always googling, like time series whatever. And it's weird how hard it is to find a time series. Your book is full of facts. One of the things I appreciate about the book, what just like one fact if you want to take one fact from the book and tell everybody.
What is it.
That the price of solar power has fallen by around ninety percent in the last decade.
That is an amazing fact and life.
Change in fact. I mean, I think this is just this is just going to define the energy transition that we just so crucially need to solve climate change. Without this change, I'd be super severer pessimistic about this, And with this change, I'm cautiously optimistic.
London versus Edinburgh, Edinburgh because people can understand what.
I'm saying because you speak the language, because I speak the language. Yeah.
Hannah Ritchie is the author of Not the End of the World and the deputy editor of Our World in Data. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lyddy Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.