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

by Hannah Ritchie

In just a decade, solar photovoltaic and wind energy have gone from the most to the least expensive. The price of electricity from solar has declined by 89%, and the price of onshore wind has declined by 70%. They are now cheaper than coal. Leaders no longer have to make the difficult choice between climate action and providing energy for their people. The low-carbon choice has suddenly become the economic one. It’s staggering how quickly this change has happened.

A switch to these sources, alongside batteries and energy storage, is how we decarbonise our electricity systems. But we also need to decarbonise other uses of energy, such as transport, heating and industry. This is harder to do. There’s no sustainable liquid fuel that can just take the place of petrol or diesel. So the mantra to fix these energy sources is: ‘electrify everything’. If we can electrify our cars, industry and heating then we can just build more and more nuclear and renewable energy to power them.

We’ve looked at how the land efficiency of different sources stacks up. But it’s worth considering whether the land use of energy is a big deal in the first place. Are we talking about 5%, 10%, maybe even 50% of land? I 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%.

Those that say low-carbon energy will use too many materials should take a look at how much we currently mine for fossil fuels. The world extracts around 15 billion tonnes of coal, oil and gas every year. The International Energy Agency projects that the world will need around 28 to 40 million tonnes of minerals for low-carbon technologies in 2040, at the height of the energy transition.28 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.

If we’re going to seriously reduce our emissions from road transport we can’t run them on oil, or food. We need to run them on electricity.

The lower emissions of driving an EV means that an electric car quickly ‘pays back’ its debt. In the UK, this payback time is less than two years.35 So, within two years your EV is already better for the environment. Within ten years it has emitted just one-third of the CO2 of a petrol car.

In 2022, 14% of cars sold globally were electric.36 That might seem small, but the change over time is what’s really staggering. Two years before it was just 4%. In 2019, just over 2%. EV sales are exploding. They now dominate the car market in some countries. In Norway, 88% of car sales in 2022 were electric. In Sweden, 54%. In the UK, it was 23%. The US has been lagging behind, with just 8% of new cars being electric (although Joe Biden’s new climate deal could change this quickly). In China in 2022, nearly two-thirds (29%) of new sales were electric. This is a massive leap from 2020, when it was just 6%.

The rest of my family can’t do this: they live in a small town where the public transport is not great. It’s even harder for my extended family who live in a tiny village in the countryside, where the nearest shop is miles away. People often picture eco-friendly living as rural. Living on your farm in the countryside is the green thing to do. Living in the packed energy-guzzling city is what’s wrecking the planet. In reality, it’s the opposite. There are clear environmental benefits to cities: we can build efficient, connected networks for travel.39 When we look at the travel emissions across towns and cities we find a clear pattern: people in denser cities emit less.40

The big dilemma of the 2000s and 2010s was whether to get a diesel car or a petrol one. The big dilemma of the 2020s and beyond is to get an electric car or no car at all.

Producing 100 grams of protein from beef emits around 50 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents.45

When we look beyond the global average to the distribution of carbon footprints for each food – from the most sustainable producers to the least sustainable – the overall message doesn’t change. The worst plant-based foods still have a lower carbon footprint than the best beef or lamb.

One in 10 people don’t get enough calories. Four in ten get too much and are overweight.

There is an often repeated claim – that China uses more cement in three years than the US did in the entire 20th century. This is true. I know because I recalculated the numbers myself to check.

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.

I was desperate to understand and optimise every tiny detail of my carbon footprint. I wanted to know if I should use the hand dryer or a paper towel. (The answer is paper towel if you’re just using one sheet, but hand dryer if you go for two.)

There is a concept called ‘moral licensing’: it explains the psychological trick we play on ourselves where we justify one behaviour because we’ve made a sacrifice somewhere else.

Preventing one hectare of tropical deforestation in the first place is much better than replanting one hectare of forest.

The more I read, the more humbled I became. I had got this wrong. Palm oil, deforestation and food are complicated problems, and I had been won over by simplistic messages that played on my emotions.

If we were to boycott palm oil and replace it with one of these alternatives, we would need far more farmland. If every company were to follow Ben & Jerry’s lead and use coconut and soybean oil instead of palm, we would need about 5 to 10 times as much land devoted to oil crops. Where is that land going to come from? Coconut is a tropical crop. It’s going to come at the expense of tropical habitats. That doesn’t sound like the sustainability solution to me. It would be a disaster.

Here’s another thought experiment to drill this point home: let’s consider how much land the world would need to produce all its vegetable oils from any one of these options. We currently use 322 million hectares to grow oil crops. That’s an area the size of India. If we were to get all of it from palm oil we’d need just 77 million hectares – four times less. We’d free up a lot of land. On the other hand, if we got it all from soybean oil, we’d need more land: 490 million hectares. From olive oil we’d need twice as much land as we currently use – around 660 million hectares. Two Indias.

The single biggest driver, by far, is beef.34 Forest clearance to make room for cows to graze on is responsible for more than 40% of global deforestation.35 South America is home to most of this destruction. In fact, Brazilian beef production alone is responsible for one-quarter of global deforestation.

It’s not just rich countries that import foods, but they are responsible for around 40% of traded deforestation. If we then do the sums, rich countries are responsible for 12% of the world’s current deforestation through the products they buy.iv

by eating less meat the world would actually need less cropland than we currently use today. We feed lots of our crops to animals, and by reducing our meat consumption we could use this land to grow crops for humans instead, and we could leave more land to nature.

That brings us to our second solution, which will be unpopular with many: switching to grain-fed rather than grass-fed beef. It needs much less land, which is what we’re concerned about when it comes to deforestation.43 One important conflict that comes up here – and will come up later when we think about other types of meat – is that the goals of animal welfare and environmental impact are not always aligned. Unfortunately, the environmentally friendly or ‘efficient’ choice is often one that is worse for the animal. How you balance these priorities is up to you.

Our cities and urban areas take up just 1% of the world’s habitable land. Agriculture takes up 50%. Our biggest footprint on the world’s land is not the space that we ourselves take up, and build our houses on; it’s the land that’s used to grow our food. This is the biggest driver of deforestation, not the rise of urbanisation.

It’s not that soil loss isn’t a problem. It really is. We need to find ways of farming that rebuild soils rather than depleting them. But the idea that we only have 30, 60 or 100 harvests left is just wrong. These zombie statistics are frustrating but they do have one silver lining: they are a great way of knowing which campaigners and reporters are more interested in a headline than the truth. It’s a red flag for someone to make such a big claim without bothering to check if there is anything to it.

‘If we split the world’s food production equally between everyone we could each have at least 5,000 calories a day. More than twice what we need. Or, to put it another way, we produce enough food for a global population twice the size that it is today.’

The fact that hundreds of millions still go hungry while we produce enough to feed a population twice our size is truly shocking. But knowing that the world is capable of producing so much food should give us all the means and motivation we need to fix the problem. It is solvable. Hunger and famine still exist today, but they’re political and social in nature. The limits to us feeding everyone are entirely self-imposed. This is a unique position in human history: until the last century our ability to feed large numbers of people well was constrained by our ability to hunt down animals, then our ability to grow more food from the limited land we had. Now it is only constrained by our choices of what to do with the food we produce.

Hundreds of millions don’t get enough to eat, but billions get too much. Around four in 10 adults in the world are overweight. For most of human history the biggest battle was to get enough food to eat. Now, the hungry are a minority. The fact that obesity rates have increased so quickly across the world is actually a signal of how new and rare this situation is: evolving in a world of scarcity, we’ve been programmed to make the most of any food we can get our hands on.

Diverting food away from humans is a luxury. Many richer countries take this luxury to the extreme. The amount of maize that the US puts into cars for biofuels is 50% more than the entire African continent produces.iv

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 get just 3 calories of meat back in return; 97 calories are effectively wasted. For lamb, it’s around 4%. Better than cows, but still crushingly bad. Pork is almost 10%. For chicken, it’s 13%.

the vast majority – more than 80% – of calories are wasted. That fact is quite hard to stomach. Can you imagine buying a loaf of bread, cutting a slice, and throwing the rest – more than 90% of it – in the bin? When it comes to calories, that’s pretty much what we’re doing with meat.

One thing that should be obvious by now is that we can’t go backwards. It’s tempting to think we should return to a way of producing food that seems more rooted, more grounded, in how things used to be. These methods can work at a small scale. But they don’t feed billions. The maths just doesn’t check out.

Preaching and shaming are common.

So, once again the biggest thing we can do is to eat less meat and dairy. If we want to really change things at scale we need lots of people to get on board. We would cut emissions, land use and water use by much more if half the population went meat-free two days a week than we would from increasing veganism by a few per cent. Most people aren’t going to change if they’re offered an all-or-nothing alternative. One of the worst ways to get someone to reduce their meat consumption is to tell them to go vegan. It just doesn’t work. We need to make it simple and enjoyable for people to cut back a bit. That might be Meatless Mondays or meat-free lunches. Often people dip their toes into the water of a more plant-based diet and find it’s easier than expected. But it’s not just how much meat and dairy we eat that matters. It’s also what types. We can have a massive impact by simply switching one type of meat for another. If you’re a big beef eater then replacing some of your weekly intake with chicken or fish is the biggest thing you can do. In fact, that change makes much more of a difference than a chicken eater going vegetarian.

The rationale for eating local makes sense; transporting food emits greenhouse gases, so the further it has to travel, the more gases are emitted. Seems right, and it’s true. But we have to put the amount of CO2 emitted during food transport into perspective. The transport part of the food chain only contributes around 5% to all of the greenhouse gas emissions from food. Most of our food’s emissions come from land-use change and emissions on the farm: the methane-burping cows; the emissions from fertilisers and manure; the release of carbon from the soils.

That then introduces a trade-off and creates a divide in opinion of how best to preserve biodiversity: should we farm intensively over a smaller area, or should we farm organically, impacting biodiversity over a much larger area.42 The jury is still out.

If something, anything, drives us to take positive action we should harness it.

But there is another way to trace the journey of humans across the planet: looking at when mammals went extinct. Wherever we see large mammals dying out, we find our ancestors’ footsteps not far ahead. Not long after humans reached Australia, species of giant kangaroo were killed off. When we reached North America, the American mastodon went extinct. Our arrival in South America was the end of the ground sloths. This wave of mammal extinctions stretched across the globe from around 52,000 to 9,000 BC in an event called the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction.

In the Levantine – the Eastern Mediterranean – researchers have reconstructed the mass of mammals going back more than a million years and found that the mean mass of hunted mammals decreased by more than 98%.8 One and a half million years ago, our Homo erectus ancestors were roaming the Earth with mammals that weighed several tonnes. There were the ‘straight-tusked elephants’ (which weighed between 11 and 15 tonnes), the southern mammoth, and incredibly large hippos. Species by species, these majestic animals began to disappear. Nearly all the mammals that went extinct were big. If the climate alone was to blame, it wouldn’t make much sense that it was only the biggest mammals that suffered. Big mammals do have lower reproductive rates which make them more vulnerable, but we’d expect smaller mammals to be partly affected too. The climate doesn’t discriminate, but humans do.

By 1900, wild mammals made up just 17% of total mammal biomass. Humans made up 23%, and our livestock, a whopping 60%. This imbalance is even more dramatic today. Wild mammals make up a tiny 2%, humans 35%, and our livestock 63%.

Humans make up a tiny fraction of all life on Earth: just 0.01% of it.ii But we have been the ones that have reshaped it beyond recognition. As the environmentalist, Stewart Brand, put it: ‘We are as gods, we might as well get good at it.’

The idea that animals across the world are going extinct and we are powerless to change it is just not true.

Overhunting and agriculture have been responsible for 75% of all plant, amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal extinctions since 1500. In fact, as we’ve seen, this goes back even further – our direct competition with mammals drove hundreds of the largest ones to extinction. Not much has changed.

Many species face more than one threat. The good news is that the solutions are cross-cutting: eating less meat would reduce the amount of land we use for farming, climate change and biodiversity loss. Stopping deforestation will reduce habitat loss and greenhouse gas emissions.

I don’t think we’ll put as much direct effort into solving biodiversity loss as our other environmental problems. But what makes me optimistic is that we will reduce it indirectly by tackling all of the other problems. A wonderful by-product of slowing climate change, fixing our food systems, stopping deforestation, ending plastic pollution and protecting our oceans is that we stop piling pressure on the species around us.

the things that they should really stress more about. You will recognise this list: they are the solutions in every other chapter of this book. We need to: Increase crop yields to reduce farming land Bring deforestation to an end Eat less meat, and reduce our need for livestock Improve our efficiency of, but don’t eliminate, chemical inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides Slow global climate change Stop plastic leaking into our oceans If we do all of these things, the world’s ecosystems can thrive again. Not instead of us, but alongside. Our long-drawn battle with nature will finally come to an end. Just as with every other problem, time is of the essence. Every time we delay, we risk losing another species forever.

Living standards have increased quickly. People have moved to cities where they use many more consumables. They can now afford to use lots of plastic. That’s a good thing; it’s a sign that people are getting richer and can enjoy a better life. But waste management has remained low on the priority list.

I don’t mean to be too down on recycling. I still tell my friends to do it. I still do it. But I don’t delude myself that this is what’s going to save the planet. My advice to you, then, is to recycle. It’s a good thing to do. But if it’s the only thing you do or one of the biggest things you do for the environment, then you need to up your game.