Monday Musings – 22 January

The optimist says, “The glass is half full.” The pessimist says, “The glass is half empty.” The rationalist says, “This glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”       Thomas Cathcart

I am a worrier by nature, so I guess that makes me a glass-half-empty kind of guy. And I must be in good company, because according to a recent international survey, more than half of young people think humanity is doomed. But I do love a story that turns me on my head and the January 2024 episode of the TED Radio Hour Facing the world’s problems—without the doom and gloom spiral did just that. One of the presenters, environmental data scientist Hannah Ritchie, actually has a positive message about one of the most pressing issues of our time, climate change.

Ritchie’s seemingly outlandish suggestion is that far from being the “last generation,” as some climate activists call themselves, today’s youth have the opportunity to be the first generation in human history to achieve true sustainability. For Ritchie, this would mean both protecting our environment and providing a good life for everyone alive today.

According to the blurb about her new book, Not the End of the World, it has become fashionable to think we’re all going to die from climate change. But Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. In fact, she suggests, we’ve made so much progress on climate problems that “we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in human history. These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed.”

Finally, some good news about our future. My glass is still half empty, but Hannah Ritchie has made that glass a little bit smaller.