Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

by Hannah Ritchie

Environmental action is often framed as at odds with the economy. It’s either climate action or economic growth. Pollution versus the market. This is just wrong.

Countries have slashed air pollution while growing their economies at the same time. Lower pollution, better health and a stronger economy? That sounds like the perfect sales pitch to me.

It took countries like the UK and the US two centuries to go through the rise and fall of air pollution. With new technologies, countries are going through this transition four times as quickly. Better yet, some of the poorest countries might be able to skip the curve entirely.

In 2020, nine-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah became the first person in the world to have ‘air pollution’ on her death certificate. She died of asthma, and a London Coroner’s Court concluded that air pollution played a large role. This outcome is rare. Air pollution kills a lot of people, but it’s not cited as a cause of death.

To put these numbers into context, this is similar to the death toll from smoking: around 8 million.29 It’s six or seven times higher than the number of people that die in road accidents: 1.3 million. Hundreds of times more than the number that die from terrorism or war each year. Air pollution is the silent killer that doesn’t get enough headlines. It doesn’t shock us like images of a flood or a hurricane, but it kills around 500 times more people a year than all ‘natural’ disasters combined, in most years.v

We might think that spending hundreds of millions of dollars is expensive. But that’s because we ignore the alternative: the costs of not fixing the problem.

There is no single estimate of how much air pollution costs us in monetary terms; it depends on what ‘price’ we put on poor health and early death. But most studies come up with a similar order of magnitude: trillions of dollars are lost globally every year from ill health, sick days, loss of productivity, crop losses and other ‘hidden’ impacts.

Nuclear energy and renewable sources, like solar, hydropower and wind, are all low-carbon. The reason they don’t emit zero CO2 is that we still need energy and materials to build the panels and turbines in the first place. But compared to fossil fuels they emit very little.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that nuclear power is unsafe. In fact, it’s one of the safest sources of energy. Over the last 60 years there have been only two major nuclear accidents: Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. When we think about nuclear power, it is these two terrible incidents that come to mind. When I polled my friends about how many people had died in them, the most popular guess was hundreds of thousands. The numbers are actually much smaller.39 When we combine the direct deaths from the Chernobyl explosion, and the potential deaths from cancer cases caused by the radiation, the accident is likely to have caused up to 400 deaths.40, 41 Every one of those deaths is tragic, but they’re much fewer than most imagine, especially given the fact that this was the worst nuclear disaster in history and is unlikely to be repeated. The Chernobyl reactors were an old and unsafe design, and the secrecy of the Soviet Union at the time meant the response to the disaster was slow.

In 2011, the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan was hit by a tsunami after the country’s largest recorded earthquake. Remarkably, no one died directly from the incident. Several years later, the government announced that one man died from lung cancer which might be linked to the disaster. Overall, that is quite remarkable: a nuclear power plant was hit by a tsunami and there was only one possible death. However, the government does attribute around 2,700 premature deaths to the stress and disruption of evacuation from Fukushima in the years that followed.

Hydropower is also pretty safe, though its one major incident – the 1975 Banqiao Dam Failure in China, which killed 171,000 – pushes its death rate up quite a bit.

Those who squabble about whether nuclear death rates are a little bit higher than solar, or a little bit lower, or whether solar is more deadly than wind are completely missing the point. Separating these is like splitting hairs. The big headline is that all of them kill far, far fewer people than any fossil fuel. Millions die from fossil fuels every year, with estimates ranging from 3.6 to 8.7 million – 1 to 2.5 million come from electricity, and most of it from coal.

Every day I come across motivated and thoughtful people trying to do their best for the environment. They think about the environmental impact of almost every decision they make. Or they home in on some things that they think will make a huge difference. What’s heart-breaking is that this energy and stress is often wasted: what they’re doing makes almost no difference, and, as we’ll see later, occasionally makes things worse.

there are two problems I think people should stress a little more about. Air pollution is one of them (the other is biodiversity loss). We worry a lot about climate change, and the fact that it could kill many people in the future. But air pollution is already killing millions every year and has done so for a long time. Cutting out fossil fuels now would have an immediate impact.

A 6°C warmer world might be short-lived – it could quickly spiral into 8°C, 10°C or more. It would be a massive humanitarian disaster.

there is still a reasonable chance – if we really step up to the challenge – that we can stay below it.

Our World in Data

Now we’re going to look at what we can do to tackle climate change. For this to make sense, we have to accept two things: climate change is happening, and human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible.

Total emissions are still rising, but emissions per person have peaked The world has already passed the peak of per capita emissions. It happened a decade ago. Most people are unaware of this. In 2012, the world topped out at 4.9 tonnes per person.10 Since then, per capita emissions have been slowly falling. Nowhere near fast enough, but falling nonetheless.

First, it was improvements in the energy ratings of white goods, then it was the trend of replacing inefficient light bulbs. Then it was double-glazed windows and home insulation to stop heat leaking out into the street.

In other words, new low-carbon technologies will get cheaper and cheaper. Fossil fuels will not.

Climate sceptics love to tell you that our landscapes will become littered with solar panels. They do this to ‘prove’ how land-hungry and unsustainable our so-called green technologies are. But when we crunch the numbers, the results are surprising: a move to renewables (and especially to nuclear) wouldn’t mean using more land. In fact, we might even use less.

The most land-efficient source of electricity was nuclear: per unit of electricity, it needs 50 times less land than coal, and 18 to 27 times less than solar PV on the ground.27 Gas was the second most land-efficient.

But if we use a cadmium panel, it needs less land than coal. Of course, that’s not our only option with solar PV, which we can also put on roofs. Then, the only land use is for mining. In that case, solar PV is almost as good as gas and is much better than coal.

There is evidence that ‘agrivoltaic’ systems could be great examples of shared land.

agrivoltaic

The conclusion is that a move to clean energy technologies will not need much more land than we currently use for fossil fuels. If we use some nuclear, utilise roofs for solar panels and share land we’re already using, we might even need less.

estimate that we currently use around 0.2% of the world’s ice-free land for electricity production – most of it for the mining of fossil fuels. (That’s small, considering we use 50% of the world’s ice-free land for farming.) In a world with low-carbon electricity, we could reduce this number. If the world moved to 100% nuclear, we’d need just 0.01% of the world’s land. If we used solar panels on roofs, it’d be 0.02% to 0.06%.

One final concern is whether we’ll have enough minerals to build the solar panels, wind turbines and batteries we’ll need. These technologies need a range of different materials – lithium, cobalt, copper, silver, nickel – and we’re often told that the amount of mining will be immense, or that these minerals will run out.

That’s 100 to 1,000 times lower than fossil fuels. Of course, rocks are not made of pure minerals; the minerals are often in much lower concentrations, so the total amount of rock we’ll have to move will be higher. But the same is true for fossil fuel mining: to get those 15 billion tonnes of fuel, we dig a lot more stuff out of the earth. Put simply: moving to low-carbon technologies will mean less mining, not more.

We need to make sure we utilise deposits elsewhere, and that they are extracted in fair and safe working conditions.

Changing what we eat is not going to solve climate change. We need to stop burning fossil fuels to do that. But only fixing our energy systems, and ignoring food, will not get us there either.

Eating less beef and lamb is still the most effective way to cut your footprint, but these differences within a given food product do matter.

The key to decarbonising our economy is to make it as pain-free as possible. It needs to be easy and products cheap.

Carbon pricing policies need to include support for poorer households to make up for the increased cost of energy. This could be done by directing the tax revenues towards poorer households. This revenue could be used in other positive ways: to invest in developments in low-carbon technologies, for innovations in clean energy and meat, to build sustainable cities, stop deforestation or restore forests that have been cut down.

Pull people out of poverty This is the most important thing we need to do to adapt to climate change. Being poor makes you incredibly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. In fact, being poor makes you vulnerable to almost any crisis.

This is a controversial statement in environmental discussions because that will require more energy. But I stand by it. We want to build a comfortable future for everyone, and baking in extreme heat cannot be part of it.

The book How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee was the bible I used to carry everywhere with me.

When we ask people what they think are the most effective things they can do to reduce their carbon footprint, they often mention the stuff that has the smallest impact.52 Recycling, using more efficient light bulbs, not leaving their television on standby or hanging their washing out to dry. They often miss the big stuff: eating less meat, switching to an electric car, taking one less flight, insulating their home or investing in low-carbon energy.

In no particular order, here is a list of common things that people think make a big difference, but usually have a small impact on their carbon footprint. Sure, continue doing them if you want to (I do some), but don’t stress and definitely don’t do them instead of the big things that really do matter.

Recycling your plastic bottles (see Chapter 7) Replacing old light bulbs with energy-efficient ones You don’t have to stop watching TV, streaming movies or using the internet How you read: whether it’s Kindle, paper or audiobook, it doesn’t matter Washing your dishes in the dishwasher, it doesn’t matter much Eating local food (see Chapter 5) Eating organic food (this can be worse for your carbon footprint – see Chapter 5) Leaving your television or computer on standby, it doesn’t matter much Leaving your phone charger plugged in, it doesn’t matter much Plastic or paper bag – your plastic bag actually has a lower carbon footprint, but it doesn’t matter muchvii

You can find the latest commitments, which are being followed and documented by the Net Zero Tracker: https://zerotracker.net/.

Now, there are very real concerns about a ‘tipping point’ with the Amazon. But it’s not a concern about oxygen. The Amazon doesn’t provide 20% of the world’s oxygen. On balance, it contributes almost none of it. The Amazon does produce huge amounts of oxygen. During photosynthesis, it sucks up carbon dioxide and emits O2. The estimate of 20% is too high, though: it is closer to 6 to 9%.

Researchers don’t even agree on the simple question of what a ‘forest’ is.

Tropical forests are teeming with unique wildlife; rebuilding those ecosystems will take a long time, if they bounce back at all.

Preventing one hectare of tropical deforestation in the first place is much better than replanting one hectare of forest. It’s not the same as buying an offset for your summer holiday flight.

Rich countries tend to be regrowing their forests. Low- and middle-income countries are losing theirs. This is no coincidence. Forest cover follows the classic U-shaped curve that also tracks a country’s development. In the deforestation sphere, we call this the ‘forest transition’ model.18 –20

This curve has four stages, which are defined by only two variables: how much forest a country has, and how this is changing from year to year. In Stage 1 – the Pre-Transition phase – a country has lots of forest and is not losing much of it over time. Deforestation might not be zero but is at a very low level. In Stage 2 – the Early Transition phase – countries start to lose forests very rapidly. Forest cover falls quickly, and the annual loss of forest is high. In Stage 3 – the Late Transition phase – deforestation starts to slow down again. At this stage, countries are still losing forest but at a lower rate than before. At the end of this stage, countries are approaching the ‘transition point’. In Stage 4 – the Post-Transition phase – countries pass through the transition from losing forest to gaining it. Forests start to regrow naturally, or countries may replant them. At the start of this phase, a country might not have much forest left, but it is making a comeback. Hopefully, by the end of Stage 4, a country will have not only regrown some of its forest, but will be closing in on historical levels of cover. This might even be a whole stage of its own: Stage 5.

Brazil managed to slash deforestation by 80% in just seven years under Lula da Silva’s presidency. In October 2022, he was re-elected as the Brazilian leader.

to tackle our big project on deforestation. The idea was to complete the full global picture: how much forest has been cut down, from where, what’s driving deforestation, and what can we do about it. I knew palm oil was going to be a big deal. I wondered if the modern story of deforestation might even be built around it. I started digging into the research.