Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Hannah Richie. She's a data scientist, senior researcher at the University of Oxford, and Deputy Editor at Our World in Data. Climate alarmism dominates headlines, painting a grim picture of impending global catastrophe. But what if the actual data reveals a less worrying situation, one where we don't all end up in a fiery inferno? Expect to learn why everyone thinks the world is doomed due to climate change and what we can do about it, why people are more pessimistic about the world than the data suggests, what the actual research shows about climate change, whether concerns about ocean plastics are being over-exaggerated, if we're actually in a mass extinction event, Hannah's thoughts on population degrowth, and much more. If you're looking to make an upgrade to your nutrition, there is one place I would tell you to start, and it is AG1. Ag1 is a daily foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole body health. Since 2010, they've improved the formula 52 times in the pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible through high-quality ingredients and rigorous standards. With just one scoop, you get the nutrients and gut health support that helps your whole body thrive and covers your nutritional basis.

Also, there is a 90-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it every single day for 89 days. If you do not like it, they will give you your money back. If you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1. You can get a free supply of vitamin D3 and five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drinkag1. Com/modernwisdom. That's drinkag1. Com/modernwisdom. This episode is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. Protect your browsing online and get access to the entire world's Netflix library for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. If you are using the Internet without a VPN, you are basically dancing in a muddy field without any shoes on. It is not good for you. If you use public WiFi network like a library or a cafeteria, the Internet admin can see all of the data going back and forth between your computer and the Internet. Plus your Internet service provider is tracking everything that you look at and then selling your information to companies who will target you with ads on what you browse Also, it means that you can't access the entire world's Netflix library and you can't use services like HBO Max or Amazon Prime when you're abroad.

All of this is fixed by Surfshark VPN. It is available across unlimited devices, so it protects and gives you access on your laptop, your iPad, your your phone and even your smart TV. Plus, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee and an 83% discount with three months free. All of that is available if you go to surfshark. Deals/modernwisdom. That's surfshark. Deals/vp Modern Wisdom. This episode is brought to you by Element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning. Your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is, and salt acts on your adrenal system. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no junk, no sugar, no coloring, artificial ingredients, gluten fillers, or any other BS. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue whilst optimizing brain health, regulating appetite, and curbing cravings. It's how I've started my morning every single day for over three years now, and I absolutely love it. That orange flavor in a cold glass of water first thing in the morning is fantastic. It is the best way to start the day.

Also, they have a no BS, no questions asked refund policy. So if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you love it. Head to drinklmnt. Com/modernwisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box. That's drinklmnt. Com/modernwisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Hannah Richie. 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 from my domain, the big 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?

I can't speak on AI or nuclear war, but my background is environment and climate change. I think actually, probably I was in this similar position a decade or so ago, 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 doomed. I think that was a lot of 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's 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. I think 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 misunderstands understandings on climate is that we've set these climate targets that we want to keep temperature rise below 1.5 degrees if we can, and especially below 2 degrees. I think some of the message that's come out of that is that 1.5 degrees is this tipping point where once we're past 1.5 degrees, it's the point of no return and we're doomed. That's definitely not the case. Climate change is more of a spectrum than an immediate tipping point. So 1.5 degrees, the impacts are worse, and at 1.6, they're worse again at 1.7. You can get escalating risks where the change is not necessarily linear with every 0.1% degree. But there's nothing particularly special about 1.5 degrees. I think it's very clear that 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 an eternal tipping point, then I think that breeds a lot of this apocalyptic thinking.

What's the What's the budget and what's bullshit about tipping points and stuff?

There are big tipping points. Where in the climate system there are, we don't know. There are a lot of unknowns about when we might hit a tipping point and what that tipping point would be. There are some potential quite near term tipping points where you're in between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees range. There are a couple of tipping points that could be breached.

What happens? What do people mean when they talk about tipping points from a climate functional perspective?

I think the definition of a tipping point is that you 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 abrupt and immediate, that it's almost like a domino effect, whereas once it's set off, within a year, the whole thing blows up. I think some tipping points can be fast, but often they're quite slow on human time scales. Some of these tipping points will evolve over centuries or thousands of years. It's not just the entire ice sheet just immediately melts in the space of a year. I think that's one of the key differences there. But there are some near-term potential tipping points where you will shift the system into a different state, and that will contribute to more warming, but it won't necessarily set this full chain where it's unstoppable and there's nothing we can do about it.

Well, this is one of the common talking points around coastal cities, Miami. Miami is going to be underwater if we go over this. I'm going to guess that Miami may be underwater, but in 1,200 years, not like 2030.

Yeah, the sea levels are rising, and they're rising at a pretty steady rate. That could accelerate Yeah, but a lot of the very extreme sea-level rise scenarios tend to be on the order of centuries, for example.

Extreme takes centuries. So at least there's a little bit- You have a time to, yeah.

I think The risk of sea-level rise around coastal cities is very valid. There could be some near-term displacements, but a lot of them could be on a longer time scale 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 state of paralysis. 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 because they've received the message that there's no point because they're doomed from climate change. I think one thing that's just bad for people is mental health. But I think the second is it, I think it paralyzes us and stops people from taking action. If we're doomed, then what's the point in actually taking action against it? I think in some ways it hinders progress in terms of taking action. 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. More on the climate denial end, when they see the really extreme scenarios, it's the perfect ammunition. They just think, Oh, this is so ridiculous. And so often 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 energy spending on it, that encouragement to try and get people to work harder is done by over-exaggerating or creating 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 from a net effect, is actually the opposite of what you want.

Right. I think there's also a really broad spectrum on communication. Most climate scientists are very good on the communication. They're very careful about how they communicate. I think often messages are weaponised 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. I think for some people, probably a small segment of the population that actually does work. That does fear, it does drive them, they do get involved. But I think there's a much larger part of the spectrum that puts them off.

Yeah, I watched a video that you spoke about in that article from Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion. The video was titled Advice to Young People as They Face Annihilation. Hardly in buying stuff.

No. He's a big point of the video. I think he says, it's a big point of the video. I think he says, young people should just have no hope for the future. 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 it's not an all or nothing. There are things that we can do about it. 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, I think in Germany, called The Last Generation. I think the message there can be interpreted in several ways. I think one is very valid, which is we can be the last generation to solve climate change. I think that's true. We're talking about solving climate change. We're talking about the next few decades or 30 or 40 years. Yes, we are the generation that will have to solve this. But I think the other interpretation is this notion that if we don't solve it, then we will literally be the last generation. That's very similar to the Extinction Rebellion activist group, where it is very much geared towards we will be the last generation and we're doomed.

Yeah, and they did a month long hunger strike that resulted in a ton of them going to hospital.

Yeah, there was a hunger strike.

When it comes to climate change, 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 most obvious and most well-documented link between rising temperatures is just exposure to extreme heat waves, as you would expect. I think that will be a significantly growing problem. It will also be a really big problem because 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 have a conditioned house. So 10 will also fall disproportionately 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 as 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 a whole harvest for an entire season. But also crop It varies across the world depending on where you are and what crop you're working with, but increased temperatures could start to reduce yields. Some of the scenarios you could see, for example, a 30% drop in yields.

Now, at a time when we need to increasing food production because we will have a growing population, that could be a significant concern. For me, those are the two biggest direct impacts, I think.

What about the efforts that have been made over the last few years. 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. 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're 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 what's really fundamental to addressing climate change is that humans need energy. They need energy for development. And that has been a massive driver of human progress over the last few centuries. 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, and they're not going to stop doing that. You're not going to stop them doing that. You need a substitute. As 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. You're never going to use solar or wind or batteries or electric vehicles because 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.

They know... Electric cars are growing now and they're getting very cost-competitive with petrol or diesel cars, but they were really far away a decade ago. 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 because 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? Because they were always going to move out of energy poverty? I think we've reached the 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. 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 still growing there. We have this tug of war at the global level, which means that global emissions are now hovering around a peak.

Yeah, I think this is... I don't know, this... 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 push and pull. 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 what's it called? The tragedy of the Commons. There is always going to be some equivalent of a free rider problem or something 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 humans are creatures of relativity. We have anchoring biases. 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 I can't water my garden or whatever.

We anchor off where our lifestyle was previously, not off someone in the Sudan.

Right. I think that's been a key stumbling block has been these divisions. I think for me, There's so much finger-pointing in this. It's young people pointing at old people or old people pointing at young people or left-pointing at right and right-pointing at left, and rich countries pointing at China or India. 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 top-down, where basically there was a global coalition and they would try to set imposed 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... It's been like a bottom-up exercise where countries have decided this is the pledges or the targets that we're going to put on the table, and they nominate it themselves. Now you might think, well, they all just not put anything on the table. And to some extent, there's much room for them increasing these promises, and we hope they do. But you do start to get a little bit of a competition exercise where it does start to put pressure on different countries.

I think the bottom-up approach 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. I think in general, that also works at the individual level. I think there's a lot of pushback against people trying to tell others what you should and shouldn't do. Often, that's the best way to get someone to do exactly what you don't want them to do is to try to force them to do it.

I'm interested in this stat that you put up about in the UK, carbon emissions per person a 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 %. A big driver of that has been the reduction of coal. So most of our electricity used to come from coal, and we're basically now coal-free. So we've got rid of the dirtiest fuel in our electricity mix, which has pushed down emissions a lot. Now, the caveat there is that the 50 % exaggerates the total amount of reductions that we've incurred because we've offshored some of them. We've got rid of a lot of our manufacturing industries, so we import goods from other countries that produce them. It's very valid to say that the UK's carbon footprint should be what the UK consumers are actually consuming. So the total drop on that basis is not as big as 50 %, but there is still a decline in emissions are still falling. And that's a general trend that we see across most high-income countries that domestic emissions have reduced, 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 eight billion people while still being sustainable?

It's a big It's a big challenge. Yeah, it's going to be big. I think it's achievable. 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 That will be the big question, and that will be the big question about what temperature rise we get to. Can we do it in the next 30 years? It will be a big challenge, but I would expect that we would do it in the next 50 or 60 years. The emphasis is on the speed, which is going to be very difficult, but to me is not completely unachievable.

What do people mean when they talk about degrowth?

I think there's two terms here. I think one is focused on population, so it's more like de-population. An environmental movement, especially in the past, a big point was that the problem is just there's just too many people. 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 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.

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. That's, to me, just morally unacceptable, and you just won't achieve it. You're not going to stop people in low-income countries 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 economies of rich countries? I don't think that's going to be a political reality. I do not 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. It's definitely not going to happen on the timescales that we're talking about. We need to get moving on this in the next decade. To me, I do not see it being politically feasible that One, that a leader would stand up and promote that. I think it would be political suicide, but also that they would actually get elected into government. Then you've got 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.

We don't actually know how effective that would be in reducing emissions. No one's tried deliberate degrowth. I think there's tons of unknowns there. For me, it's a political nonstarter.

I guess over a long enough time horizon, the next 100 years, the people calling for anti-natalist or de-population, they're going to get the outcome that they want. It's just going to happen due to declining birth rates. I know You made a really good clarification at the very beginning of this, which is the difference between existential risk and just a big problem, basically. Existential risk, permanent unrecoverable collapse. 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 thing that will impact human life front and center very harshly, very quickly. Within what? When are we going to peak? 2100-ish?

2019? Something like that? I think the latest UN projections was that global population would peak around 2080s. And they've actually brought that forward. The prediction before that was It's still increasing past 2100. And actually because fertility rates, which is just the number of children that a woman would have, average women would have, is falling quicker 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. But how concerned are you about that? 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 seeing the Earth as something that needs to be protected, whether it's trying to maximize human flourishing, whether it's trying to... There's a variety of reasons why people don't want the world to go to shit. But if we presume that in amongst that is the flourishing utility, eudemonia happiness of the conscious humans that live on it, reducing that number down precipitously is dangerous. That doesn't seem to be in alignment either. So how much time do you spend thinking about both birth rates and what's your concern with population collapse?

I don't spend much time at all thinking about birth rates in a climate context, and I don't think it's effective in any way to try to use climate or environment to promote lowering birth rates. I think the basic story of falling fertility rates and falling birth rates is that as countries develop, as they get richer, as girls go to school, women go into education, women go into economic opportunities and jobs, fertility rates tend to decline. You see a very clear relationship. But as countries get richer, they decline. I think one of the 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, maybe four or five or six, those will just fall because they will develop. Girls will get to go to school. Women will get going to work and have economic opportunities. I think those are all fantastic developments. I actually don't think you need the climate lens as part of that. I think your list of priorities of what would be the driver of declining birth rates. I think climate change is very, very low on that risk.

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 to the population in order to address climate change.

Right. Okay. That would be like a five-dimensional chess move to try and speed up the education of girls in low-income countries in an attempt to reduce down birth rates. That would be an impressive strategy. I saw another quote from you that said, We should use data to understand the world and make better decisions. That seems to be a nice tagline. How effective have you found data being at beliefs and culture and debate? You are part of this great website, Our World in Data, and you put this stuff forward. But I would guess that the vanguard, the front lines of trying to convince people by data data might be more difficult than we would think, given that data is truth as long as it's right.

Yeah. I mean, it's very mixed. I mean, there's some people that are so immune to data. There's nothing. There's no data you could throw in front of them that would make them change their mind. There will always be an excuse why that data doesn't fit with the narrative or why that data is flawed. I think some people are swayed by data and can make good decisions based on it. I mean, a range of people use our work, like the general population use our work, but also journalists, policymakers use our work. Then I think in those fields, data can actually make a difference to inform decisions.

What's happening with air pollution?

There have been a couple of big air pollution problems. There have been a couple of what we'd call transboundary problems, which is more, again, the tragedy of the commons problem, where it's not just pollution in your own country, it crosses across many countries, and you need several countries or the whole world to work together to solve it. One of the big ones there was the ozone layer. Before climate change, the big environmental problem was the ozone and the growing ozone hole. At the time, it was really politically controversial, a bit like climate changes today. They were pushed back against scientists. It was really politically controversial. But we actually managed to solve it. We brought in what was called the Montreal Protocol, and we reduced the emissions of the gasses that were destroying the ozone layer by more than 99%. So we've basically got rid of them, and the ozone hole should just repair itself in the next few decades. 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 They've been pretty successful in solving it, especially across Europe and North America.

Then there's the other problem of what we call local air pollution, which is the pollution you'd find in your city from cars and burning fossil fuels and home heating stuff. Now, the story there is mixed. Rich countries have gone through this process where as they tended to get richer, air pollution increased. If you think about London or Edinburgh, where I am, go back to the beginning to mid 20th century, these cities were so polluted, really unimaginable from what you would assume today. There's stories of the great smog in London where you couldn't even see a few feet in in front of you, they were shuffling, trying to find the curve with their feet. So these cities were incredibly polluted. We've actually been really successful over the last 50 years or so and dramatically reducing the amount of local air pollution, especially in rich countries. It's a little bit We have a different story in low and middle income countries. They're going up that curve that London or Edinburgh went through 50 years to a century ago. And air pollution in general is a big killer in the world. There are a range of estimates, but they're all in the range of millions of premature deaths per year.

It is a big, big problem. In some sense, 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?

The key one is stop burning fossil fuels. You can put strict air pollution standards on power plants. That was the big thing of acid rain. It's not that we necessarily just stopped burning coal. We managed to put what we called scrubbers on the power plant where it took the sulph out, so you didn't get the sulph emissions. A big driver in rich countries has been just increased air quality standards for cars. So the amount of pollution spewing out the back of a car today is much, much less than it was in the past. Actually, a move to electric vehicles would decrease that even further. So even in rich countries, the estimated deaths attributed to air pollution in the UK, for example, is still tens of thousands. We know that we can still bring that down further. That would be by, for example, moving away from petrol and diesel cars.

What about deforestation?

Again, it's a bit of a story where countries tend to go through transition where they would initially cut down forests for wood, for energy, before they have fossil fuels. 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 cut down forests. Now, the UK, for example, we cut down our forests a long time ago, centuries and centuries ago. Actually, there was really, really very little forest left. But then we stopped doing that. In many rich countries, these forests are regrowing. Now, most of the deforestation that's happening today is happening in the tropics. It's happening because, again, we're still expanding agricultural land. Deforestation rates today are still very high, but we think global deforestation rates have fallen since around the 1980s. But we still have a big challenge in our hands because deforestation rates are still high.

What's the truth about the cycle between rising or rising CO₂ levels with regreening and the increase in 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 greening forests and natural habitat, not natural vegetation, extra CO₂ can increase regrowth to an extent. I think this is often also discussed in terms of agriculture. Like I was saying earlier, that one of the big risks of agriculture is climate change. It is true that to a certain extent, more CO₂ can mean 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. For many crops, the increased temperatures will just outweigh the increased benefits of CO₂. Even if you increase CO₂ a bit, you would still see negative effects from 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. What progress has been made with food and hunger as well?

I mean, food and hunger, again, global hunger rates have declined substantially over the last 50 years in particular. We've plateaued in progress there, and actually in some regions that has started to regress. So we have around 800 million people in the world, nearly one in 10, just don't get enough food to eat. And that's the key challenge with deforestation and these problems is that, again, there you have this tension between people just need more food and we need more agricultural land, and there's wild habitat, and there's forest in the way. That's the big challenge. One of this big solutions to that is just to make agriculture much more productive. If you can increase crop If you could triple crop yields, then you can produce the same amount of food on a third of the land. So one of the big 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 think the other big link to deforestation there is 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 is the... You're talking about crop yields there. How much truth is there in topsoil degradation and the quality of what we're growing our plants out of?

Yeah, so there's been lots of headlines about soil loss, and there's this... The world's only got 60 harvest left. Headline that went viral, and that headline is not true. No soil scientist would back that up. Across the world, you have, again, a mixed picture. Some soils are stable and are doing fine. Some are actually growing, so they're actually topsoil is growing. And there are others that actually are degrading over time and as a serious worry. But we're not going to get to this single point where just the whole in 60 years, the world's harvest just stopped because of topsoil. There's just a really large variation in soils across the world where you could never just put a single figure on when this would happen.

What about biodiversity? That's something else that I've seen talked about an awful lot, that the fifth great extinction or the seventh, whichever one we're in, this is the beginning of the- Six. Whatever, that one. Sixth-grade extinction. We're in the middle of that. And we've lost more species in the last X number of years than in the whole bigger number of years before that.

Yeah, I mean, the trends on biodiversity loss are not good. I think they're the area where I'm most pessimistic. So yeah, there's been five previous mass extinctions on Earth, and It's a question of, are we in the sixth mass extinction? Now, in order to qualify as a mass extinction, you have this threshold of you need to lose 75 to 80% of species, and you need to do it on a It's called a fast time scale, but it's like 2 million years. It's fast on geological time scales, but on human time scales, it's obviously not. 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, or 500 years or a thousand years. You can say, Okay, what's the rate of extinction there? And then you can compare that to what was the rate of extinctions in the previous five mass extinctions. 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 six mass extinction. 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. I think it's reasonably fair to say that 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?

It's often referred to as death by a thousand cuts. So there's no single driver of biodiversity loss. It tends to be a mix. The The biggest driver is food production. So it's either over exploitation, which is just direct hunting or direct overfishing or logging of forests, or it's destruction of habitats for farming and agriculture. That can be either cutting down forests or moving into wild grasslands, but it can also be losing insects because of the use of fertilizers or pesticides on agriculture land. That's a To me, that's a very, very tricky problem to solve because there's two camps on how you produce food in a biodiversity friendly way. 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. We say, we're going to lose less biodiversity, but we're going to spread it over a larger area. And I think the jury on that is still out on how best to manage that.

Yeah, that's a really difficult balance to strike. Have you got any idea what types of animals have contributed most to this biodiversity loss? Is it being segmented out? Is it being 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 mixed. 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 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 because we predominantly hunt larger animals, and they tend to go extinct. And they also take longer to reproduce. So smaller animals can recover because they can reproduce really quickly, whereas larger animals take much longer. So we've tended to lose the largest just mammals. Birds are not doing particularly well, neither are amphibians. Insects, the general trend there is not looking good. I think insects in general are just harder to count. It's very hard to get really long term data on insects. You can count elephants pretty well and get good historical records, but it's really hard to do for insects. I think insects are pretty uncertain, but I think they're definitely in decline. There are very few good trends here on biodiversity.

I was trying to find a silver lining in the biodiversity loss, but it doesn't really seem to be there.

No, I can give you one. 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 restoration programs, and the European bison is on its way back. I think there is stuff that you can do, 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 wooly mammoths back to life.

Was it a strict brand?

No, it wasn't. I can't remember the name of the place. Colossus, Colossum Colossus, I think, is the name of the company. They've sequenced it from a bunch of frozen bone and I think maybe something else samples. And then they're going to use an Asian elephant, maybe, 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. And he also wanted to do... He had this really cool idea of wanting to bring back the dodo bird. And the reason he wanted to do that was as a symbolic gesture to to remind people about biodiversity loss. So basically explaining this huge process that you 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?

Just try not to kill it this time type Yeah.

I mean, it's a little bit the same story with forests, where we often think about planting trees and regrowing forests, whereas the best thing we can do with forests is just not to cut them down in the first place. And in some sense, it's the same with biodiversity, where it would take a massive effort to be able to bring back a species or even restore a population. So the best thing is not to push it to extinction in the first place.

What about ocean plastics? I'm aware that microplastic 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 swelling around. And then there was that guy that made the ocean scrape a thing, and he was doing really great work. But what's the story there with ocean plastics?

Yeah, I can't solve the plastic problem. I think plastic is a really tricky one. It's like a really amazing, environmental material, which I think is why we produce so much of it and it's so hard to get off of it. But the simple problem of plastics flowing into the ocean is a very tractable one. We do have a significant amount of plastics flowing into the ocean. The latest estimates are around one to two million tons a year. Now, for perspective, that's about 0.5% of the plastic waste we produce. So I think the notion that all of our plastics are flowing into the ocean is not correct. It's quite a small percentage, but in absolute terms, it's quite big. The key problem with ocean plastics is not necessarily using plastics. It's how they're managed. If you can store plastics in landfills or they're recycled or they're incinerated, then they don't leak out into the environment and they don't end up in the rivers or ocean. The problem is often that in many countries, the waste management infrastructure is not there to deal with the amount of plastic that's there, such that it's often dumped or it's in an open landfill and blows into the ocean.

Now, I think it is a I mean, to some extent, that then is... Socialization is quite simple, and it's not sexy. It's just build landfills or build waste management structures. But that doesn't tend to get a ton of investment because it's not flashy. But there There's also projects trying to do the opposite. One is, as you said, there's a guy called Brian Slatt, 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. I think 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. Then they've also generated a separate project, which is trying to stop it going into the ocean in the first place. A lot of this waste tends to come down through rivers. What they've done, they've modeled to try to work out 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 stop the plastics going in at the end of the river before it reaches the ocean.

I think he's done an amazing job and he came out of nowhere and decided... I mean, we all just watch and say, Oh, 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 And it's trying 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. Our understanding has changed a lot over time. I think initially, there was estimates that most of it was coming from 20 rivers. Now, actually, that's quite good because then you only need 20 interceptors. But I think more recent studies have shown that actually it's coming from a thousand different rivers, which is a much trickier problem to tackle. Most of these rivers, from the latest study from a boy in 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?

They are... Again, there's a little bit of a split where overfishing is a tractable problem. It is a problem that you can manage. The key for that is being able to balance fish populations such that you know how much you catch without massively reducing the population of the fish. 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. Actually, even from an economic perspective, that's only good in the short term, 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, many regions, fish populations are actually doing fine because 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. You would expect often that the fish populations there are declining. So the estimates that are around a third of the world's fish populations are being overfished.

Now, there is a slightly different story to that, where in the past, our only way of having fish was to catch wild fish. What we've seen over the last few decades is the rise of what we call agriculture, which is fish farming. Now, 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 what fish farming is all about, where rather than only catching wild fish, you basically farm your own fish. And actually now, fish farming produces more than wild fish. So most of the growth in global fish production over the last few decades has come from fish farming, has not come from catching wild fish.

It seems to me Actually, 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 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 perhaps even get more difficult, more expensive, more whatever. Have you thought around, not necessarily from a public messaging standpoint, but just culturally, how do you deliver this message to people? Because it's not in our nature to say, Oh, sorry, the people in Chad or or Zimbabwe or whatever need to have better access to whatever. Don't worry, people of Chad. I've got you.

That's not in our nature. And it's very difficult in an age of the Internet and quippy sound bites and TikTok length videos, it's way too nuanced and subtle to get across. But the alternative is to use a more doomsday scenario, which 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 conceived this? What a climate culture 3.0 would look like?

Yeah. I think part of this has 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 the environmental movement, I think often it's framed as a sacrifice, right? It's like you have to sacrifice this in order to solve this problem. And I think, again, in the past, that might It have been true. 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. It's all about less, less, less, less. 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. There are technologies where you could actually just reduce energy bills, you could create employment opportunities. In many of these growing industries, 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. I think there are a range of solutions there where it's not necessarily a massive sacrifice.

It actually can just benefit and enhance life. I think we've done quite poorly on the messaging on that because it's all 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 in lower income countries is that... I think the responsibility of rich countries is they need to get their emissions down first and foremost. They've had high emissions. In the UK, we've had high emissions for a really long time. We've managed to get to a stage where we're rich. We have really high living standards, and in some sense, I think it's just our 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 these low carbon technologies that we need. And these tend to follow what we would call a learning curve, where 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 that means is that by pushing these technologies and innovating on these technologies, we basically drive down the cost for the rest of the world.

So 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 a pathway to a really high standard of living, but they won't follow the pathway that the UK or the US followed because 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 big role that rich countries can play. And again, 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, 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 so on and so forth. The point being that the free rider of free riders would be China. What's the truth about that?

I don't think China is a free rider. I think it's true that they are, and They're the highest emitter and they produce a lot of coal, and they are still building coal plants. But I think the paradox there is that they are actually just leading completely on low-carbon technologies. They're building solar and wind so fast. They are pushing really hard on electric vehicles. So the biggest electric car company now is not Tesla, but BYD, which is a Chinese company. They are dominating the supply for these minerals. 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 sleeping. And I think that's the general trend of where that's going. So China is deploying these technologies really quickly. As an example, last year, China installed enough solar and wind to power the UK or France. And they're adding that in one year. They are building this stuff really, really quickly. To the extent we are, and we're really bad at predicting peak, 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.

That's the paradox of China. 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 They're doing it for the economic opportunities. They're doing it for employment. There's an opportunity there, which to me, in some sense is a positive, 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 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.

I mean, this seems to be the... I don't know, one of the laws of physics of climate change or of impacting it in an effective way, which is, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. 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 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. 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 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 They had to retrofit gas. And then obviously they became super dependent on an area of the world that was dominated by a war for two years.

And then that meant that their prices were going up and all the Germans are going to freeze in the winter and all this stuff. 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. If you ever make yourself into one of those quotes, if you've memed yourself into an 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's literally the best. If the people that we I don't know, I've been super critical of China, but I do sometimes find myself leaning into the... They're almost like immoral. It's like an immoral country somehow because they're antagonistic or adversarial with the West, that they're doing things to try and... They're completely disregarding the environment. That's not necessarily the case. So I need to fact-check my thought-check myself when 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're okay.

If we can encourage them to do it, then countries that are part the G20 or whatever other organization, it should be pretty easy.

Yeah. I mean, there's a range of examples. In the book, I have an example of on a personal level, my brother. Now, my brother bought a Tesla. And he didn't buy a Tesla because he really, really cared about climate change. He just bought a Tesla because a Tesla was cool and it was a really nice car to drive. He sat on one and was like, this is the best thing ever. I'm going to get a Tesla. And obviously, he massively cut his carbon footprint, but it wasn't necessarily because of climate. I mean, another clear example there is that in the US, there's obviously there is a very quite strong partisan divide on climate where left are really pro-climate policies and a lot of people on the right are less so. But then you look at which states in the US are producing the most renewable power. The top five states with the largest amount of wind in their energy sector are all Republican. Again, they're not doing that for climate. They're doing it just because landowners can make money, there's an economic opportunity, the community starts to get behind it. Actually, when you look at messaging around climate in this context, The language you use is so important.

So if you just talk about clean energy, many more people are behind it. On the left and the right, everyone loves clean energy. What they don't like necessarily is talking about climate. 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 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 a bit skeptical but 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?

I have a newsletter called Sustainability by Numbers, and I try to break down all this stuff by numbers. 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 Road in Data, where you can find all of this data and research on how all of this stuff is changing.

Hell, yeah. Thank you, Hannah.

Thank you.