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January 18 - January 29, 2025
It’s tempting to dismiss these views as empty words. But a recent study, not looking at surveys but actual data on people’s reproductive decisions, suggests non-environmentalists are 60% more likely to have children than committed ones.5 Of course, this may not be the only reason environmentalists are less likely to have children, but it gives us some concrete evidence that when people say they’re anxious about having kids, they’re not bluffing. If people aren’t bluffing about their hesitation to have kids, they’re probably not bluffing about their feelings of doom and anxiety either.
Many changes that do profoundly shape the world are not rare, exciting or headline-grabbing. They are persistent things that happen day by day and year by year until decades pass and the world has been altered beyond recognition.
we want clarity we have to take in the full picture, and that means giving ourselves some distance. If we take several steps back, we can see something truly radical, game-changing and life-giving: humanity is in a truly unique position to build a sustainable world.
There are several reasons why I think these doomsday messages do more harm than good. First, the doom narratives are often untrue.
Second, it makes scientists look like idiots. Every doomsday activist that makes a big, bold claim invariably turns out to be wrong.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, our impending doom leaves us feeling paralysed. If we’re already screwed, then what’s the point in trying? Far from making us more effective in driving change, it robs us of any motivation to do so. I recognise this from my own dark period when I nearly walked away from the field entirely. I can assure you that after reframing how I saw the world, I have had a much, much bigger impact on changing things. When it comes down to it, doomsday attitudes are often no better than denial.
This option of ‘giving up’ is only possible from a place of privilege. Let’s say we stop trying and temperatures climb by another degree or two, taking us well past our climate targets. If you live in a wealthy country, you’ll probably be okay. It won’t be plain sailing, but you can buy your way out of serious danger. That’s not true for many less fortunate people, though. Those in poorer countries cannot afford to protect themselves.
Accepting defeat on climate change is an indefensibly selfis...
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Optimism is seeing challenges as opportunities to make progress; it’s having the confidence that there are things we can do to make a difference.
Complacent optimism is the feeling of a child waiting for presents. Conditional optimism is the feeling of a child who is thinking about building a treehouse. ‘If I get some wood and nails and persuade some other kids to help do the work, we can end up with something really cool.’
Don’t mistake criticism for pessimism. Criticism is essential for an effective optimist. We need to work through ideas to find the most promising ones.
we want to get serious about tackling the world’s environmental problems, we need to be more optimistic. We need to believe that it is possible to tackle them.
don’t think we’re going to be the last generation. The evidence points to the opposite. I think we could be the first generation. We have the opportunity to be the first generation that leaves the environment in a better state than we found it.
Our environmental problems overlap. What we eat matters for climate change, deforestation and the health of other species on our planet.
As my colleague Max Roser puts it: ‘The world is much better; the world is still awful; the world can do much better.’10 All three statements are true.
By denying the first – that we have made progress – we lose out on important lessons about how we keep moving forward. Denying this fact also robs us of the inspiration that change is possible.
I wish I could reach back to my younger self and hug her. For a long time, I felt alone in trying to grapple with these problems. The headwind got stronger and stronger. If you currently feel this way, this book is me reaching out to you. To show you that you are not alone in this journey: there are many people who are working to build a better future. Some of them you see in the limelight. But most of them you don’t: they are fighting in boardrooms to change company strategies; they are in governments trying to shape policies; they are engineering solar panels, turbines and batteries in labs;
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Look around and you will find people at all levels – from individuals in their local community to world leaders making consequential decisions – pushing into the headwind. Many are concerned but determined. Optimistic that what they do today will make a difference tomorrow.
the world has never been sustainable. What we want to achieve has never been done before.
In 1987, the UN defined sustainable development as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.
‘Treat the Earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.’
recently as 1800, about 43% of the world’s children died before reaching their fifth birthday.9 Today that figure is 4% – still woefully high, but more than 10-fold lower.
Air pollution is one of the world’s biggest killers. Researchers estimate that it kills at least 9 million people every year.
In The Population Bomb, Paul R. Ehrlich argued that the optimal global population was around 1 billion people. He still argues for this today. Here’s the thing: if we were to accept for a moment that this was the optimal number of people (which I don’t), it’s not possible to reduce the population quickly enough for that to help address our environmental problems. If anyone argues that it is, they don’t understand how demographic change works.
Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel. Not only does it create the most pollution when we burn it, but it’s also the worst for driving climate change. But moving from wood to coal was a big step-up. Per kilogram, coal gives us about twice as much energy as wood. And you don’t have to cut down forests to supply it.
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
For this to make sense, we have to accept two things: climate change is happening, and human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible.
Historically, the richer you were, the more CO2 you would emit, and it was mostly rich countries that were responsible for the world’s carbon emissions.
At the same time, many richer countries have started to reduce their emissions, while getting even richer at the same time. With low- and middle-income countries coming up, and rich countries coming down, the world’s carbon emissions per capita have started to converge.
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. Researchers have looked at how much greenhouse gas emissions our food systems will emit over the next few decades if we keep eating as we are. The news is not good. We would blow right past our 1.5°C and 2°C targets.
What do we mean by putting a price on carbon? It means implementing a carbon tax on everything we buy based on how much greenhouse gases were emitted to produce it. Using carbon-intensive fuels like coal, oil and gas would result in higher tax. Using low-carbon fuels such as nuclear, solar or wind would attract very little tax, and would be much cheaper in comparison.
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. When you live close to the poverty line, you are just one shock away from being pushed below it. If you already live under the poverty line, you live with the constant stress that the smallest shock could be the last straw. It’s a truly terrible position to be in, but it is the reality for billions.
The book How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee
the Amazon produces a lot of oxygen, but it consumes a lot too. During the night, when there’s no sun around for photosynthesis, trees convert sugars into energy, using oxygen to power the process. Bacteria on the forest floor also consume oxygen when they’re decomposing organic matter that has landed there from the canopies above. The amount of oxygen the Amazon consumes is almost exactly the same as the amount it produces.
This shouldn’t stop us from taking action. The Amazon – and other tropical rainforests – is home to some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. They are under threat. Deforestation is also terrible for the climate, because when we cut trees down, we can release the carbon that was locked up for hundreds or thousands of years.
Palm oil, deforestation and food are complicated problems, and I had been won over by simplistic messages that played on my emotions. When faced with such a problem, it’s tempting to look for a villain: ‘You’re the problem, so once we get rid of you, everything will be fixed.’ Palm oil fitted the role perfectly.
Palm oil was the biggest driver of deforestation in Indonesia in the first decade of the twenty-first century, responsible for one-quarter of it.27 But its contribution has been shrinking, and in the last few years it has actually been one of the smallest drivers.
In fact, the migration of people from rural areas to cities has mostly been good for protecting our forests. There are still indigenous populations that play a vital role in protecting local forests and ecosystems. They live and maintain a balance in these environments. But this only works at a very small scale. For large populations, the migration to cities and intensification of farming has freed up land for forests to return. Billions of us taking up rural living would be a disaster for the world’s forests.
Humans have always competed with other animals, first hunting them directly, impacting landscapes with fire, and later fighting them for space to grow crops.
This simple relationship is useful: smaller animals are more calorie-efficient. Fish and chickens tend to be the most efficient, then pigs, then sheep, then cows.vi Unfortunately this means the opposite for animal welfare: you’d need to kill more of them to get the same amount of meat. How you balance that moral quandry is up to you. Measuring ‘calorie efficiency’ tells us what percentage of the calories we feed an animal is converted into ‘eatable’ products for humans. These figures are quite shocking. For beef, it’s just 3%.16, 17, vii This means that for every 100 calories we feed a cow, we
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Again, food production is the biggest pressure on the world’s wildlife.20 It always has been. From overhunting animals for food and claiming their habitats for farmland, to killing off ecosystems with pesticides and fertilisers, the largest threat to the world’s animals is human demand for food. Worried about water pollution? You guessed it: farming comes out on top. When we put nutrients in our soils and crops, most of them run off the land and into rivers, lakes and the ocean. These nutrients throw ecosystems into havoc: species such as algae take advantage and bloom everywhere. Fish and
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The climate doesn’t discriminate, but humans do.
The world really got talking in 2017 when a study in Germany reported that flying insect biomass had declined by more than 75% in just 27 years.15 These results were shocking. If 75% had gone in less than 30 years, they might vanish completely within a decade. And if all insects were disappearing at this rate, perhaps the world would soon be insect-less.
As Edward O. Wilson put it: ‘Insects are “the little things that run the world”.’16 We know that insects form one of the bedrocks of healthy ecosystems. Some of them – such as bees and butterflies – are important for food production.
Taking all this into account, studies suggest that crop production would decline by around 5% in higher income countries and 8% in low to middle incomes if pollinator insects vanished. I don’t say that to undermine the importance of insects. They are crucial. They decompose organic matter to make nutrients available to plants. They keep our soils healthy. They lie near the base of the food chain, allowing the ecosystems that are built on top of them to thrive. They play a key role in the diversity of our crops, and they are essential to some foods: Brazil nuts, fruits including kiwis and
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Turning a thriving ecosystem into a farm is one of the worst things you could do for insect biodiversity.
Biodiversity is not quite the same. Again, I am not arguing that humans do not depend on healthy ecosystems to survive. We do. From the food we eat and the fresh water we drink to the regulation of the climate: we are dependent on the balance of species around us. The obvious problem is that we often don’t know what these species are (remember Hardin’s ‘you can never merely do one thing’).
Recycling doesn’t eliminate waste, it just delays the process a little. A good thing, but not the panacea we might think.
The GPGP sits in a part of the Pacific with lots of industrial fishing activity, so it sucks up a disproportionate amount of ghost fishing materials.
Although the uses of whale oil later diversified, Americans mainly used it for lighting.
