Swedish public health doctor Hans Rosling liked to survey attendees at international conferences on their basic understanding of health, development and poverty: How many children lived in absolute poverty? What percentage of girls in developing nations went to school? What percentage of the world’s one-year-olds were vaccinated against measles? And how have these numbers changed in recent decades?
He found their responses were less accurate than random guesses – “Beaten by the chimps,” as he put it – and they were always wrong in a pessimistic direction. They thought the world was a worse place than it was. Their perceptions were often subject to a host of cognitive biases and/or based on old statistics, outdated theories and obsolete predictions. They hadn’t refreshed their models of reality, Rosling complained, and if they didn’t know the world was moving in the right directions, they might support misguided policies that stopped or reversed those positive trends.
Rosling died in 2017 but he has many disciples – including Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at Oxford University and deputy editor of Our World in Data (a website you were probably addicted to during the early stages of the Covid pandemic when its cheerful visualisations depicting viral transmission numbers and per capita death rates swept through social media).
Ritchie began her academic career teaching sustainability. She was an environmentalist in the Greta Thunberg mode: tortured by the hopelessness of climate change and the inevitability of apocalypse. One day, she inadvertently watched a Hans Rosling presentation online and was deradicalised. In many ways, the world – including our environmental challenges – was getting better. But most people didn’t know this, and in the absence of good data, some were turning to radical solutions – depopulation, degrowth – that Ritchie felt were doomed to fail, or would make things worse.
Her book walks a mostly untravelled path between climate scepticism – the notion that global warming from industrial gas emissions is a scientific hoax, an argument heavily promoted over the decades by fossil-fuel companies and their public relations advisers – and the climate doomerism advanced by environmental groups prophesying that in the near future, our planet will become uninhabitable: the seas will turn to acid, the air to poison and the forests will burn. Everything will die.
Ritchie believes there are three discrete thoughts we have to hold in our minds simultaneously to understand the climate challenge: 1. The world is in an awful position. 2. The world is much better than it used to be. 3. It can be much better than it currently is. None of them contradict each other but they’re a rare combination.
Most of us are either optimists who discount bad news or pessimists who revel in it, and the pessimists might justly ask what Ritchie considers good news. The world has probably passed the 1.5° global average temperature increase target adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement as a critical threshold to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change: heatwaves, floods, droughts, massive loss of biodiversity. Last year saw record high levels of carbon emissions. How can anyone say things are getting better?
Ritchie’s answer is that the curve is flattening. Global emissions rose rapidly in the 20th and early 21st century, but they’ve plateaued over the past 10 years, even as population and energy use increase. In OECD nations, they’ve been declining since 2006. The green tech revolution of the 2010s has turned wind, solar and rechargeable batteries into electricity generation and delivery systems par excellence. They’re cheaper than any other form of energy infrastructure. Only natural gas comes close.
Texas is rapidly switching to a solar energy grid, not because Texans love the environment, but because the economic logic is overwhelming. The transition to electric vehicles is taking place very rapidly – they were 14% of new cars sold in 2022, up from near zero in 2015.
None of this means there won’t be catastrophic climate change; remember that Ritchie still accepts the world is awful. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates predict that by 2050, there will be 250,000 excess deaths attributable to climate change a year. Horrific. And yet she also argues that air pollution currently causes about nine million preventable deaths a year: about one in 10 deaths globally. And it’s reducing as poor and middle-income countries switch to cleaner energy sources, such as gas and renewables. Things are getting better.
Ritchie has returned to her early specialist topic of sustainability, but with a different emphasis. When many people think about sustainable economies, they think of pre-modern cultures: indigenous peoples in harmony with the land. Ritchie believes we’ve romanticised these societies in which half of all children died before adulthood and deadly famines were routine events. They were sustainable because disease and starvation kept the population level in check.
A truly sustainable society is one that provides for the existing generation without passing the cost on to future generations via the destruction and consumption of the environment they’ll be living in. New Zealand is terrible at this: our entire economy is structured around borrowing from the future to pay for the present. But at least the rest of the world is figuring it out.
