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

by Hannah Ritchie

The reality is that we’re almost certainly going to pass 1.5°C. Most climate scientists expect that. So, if people view it as an end-of-the-world threshold then of course it’s going to feel apocalyptic.

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.’

Before we start our tour of environmental problems, I need to let you in on an unpopular truth: the world has never been sustainable. What we want to achieve has never been done before.

new technologies are allowing us to decouple a good and comfortable life from an environmentally destructive one. This is what makes it possible for us to be the first generation.

Driver of premise

In rich countries carbon emissions, energy use, deforestation, fertiliser use, overfishing, plastic pollution, air pollution and water pollution are all falling, while these countries continue to get richer.vii The idea that these countries were more sustainable when they were poorer is simply not true.

Degrowth argues that we can redistribute the world’s wealth from the rich to the poor, giving everyone a good and high standard of living with the resources already at our disposal. But the maths doesn’t check out.20 The world is far too poor to give everyone a high standard of living today through redistribution alone.

Historically, countries have become rich from fossil fuels and other resources. That means many people now assume that growth equals ‘bad’. But there is no reason for it to stay that way.

Good and practical frame

There is a massive ‘solutions vacuum’ for our environmental problems. The early movers in this space can build a prosperous economy while building solutions to our problems at the same time. Countries can ‘grow’ by leading the way on ‘good’ technologies, not just exploiting polluting ones.

Economic growth is not incompatible with reducing our environmental impact. In this book I’ll show that we can reduce our environmental impact and reverse our past damage while becoming better off. The big question here is whether we can decouple these impacts fast enough. The answer to that depends on what actions we take today.

Crux of argument

It’s now time to explore our seven environmental problems one by one and see what we need to do to solve them.

Supposed structure of book

But the visual imagery of a growing ozone hole was hard to ignore: it finally put pressure on governmental and industrial actors to take action. Forty-three countries signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987, agreeing to phase out ozone-depleting substances from 1989 onwards.

Skips a lot of the important narrative of Montreal Protocol negotiations. Given Ritchie's data-focused background, perhaps it is avoided because it is a story that is difficult to reveal through data trends. But the story of why Montreal worked to generate collective action and subsequent agreements have not done as effectively is entirely relevant to whether or not we are the first/last generation to build a sustainable planet as the subtitle suggests

Tackling climate change and some of the other problems in this book will be more difficult, but there are still important lessons to learn from both the acid rain and the ozone success stories. Humans can solve real global problems. Every country has the opportunity to be involved. And we can take action quickly when we’re up against it. It serves us well to remind ourselves that we are capable of cooperating on such global problems.

Very weak conclusion

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.

Argues that climate action is driven by media salience without providing adequate evidence

Thankfully, over time, countries have stepped up their commitments. As we saw with the example of the ozone layer, incremental increases in ambition can make a huge difference.

Big claim and not really supported. Where in the example of the ozone layer is incremental ambition evident?

The other big change is that moving to a low-carbon, sustainable economy is not seen as the sacrifice it used to be. Fossil fuels were far cheaper than renewables. Electric vehicles cost a fortune. But now low-carbon technologies are becoming cost-competitive.

Yes - supports the case that this is the generation with the opportunity

Climate change gets more attention, and rightly so. But reporting has become more frictionless. Some media outlets even see the frequency of stories as their key performance metric. ‘With a piece of environmental journalism published every three hours, the Guardian is a leading voice in the fight to save the planet’ reads a large banner plastered across the newspaper’s website.5 In other words, the Guardian wants to fire as many crushing stories as possible, as quickly as it can. The faster it does this, the more committed it is to ‘saving the planet’. It’s an anxiety-inducing feed, and one that inevitably leads us to the conclusion that things are getting worse and worse.

Emissions increased rapidly in the 1960s and 70s, then again in the 1990s and early 2000s. But in recent years this growth has slowed down a lot. Emissions barely increased at all from 2018 to 2019. And they actually fell in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. I’m optimistic we can peak global emissions in the 2020s.

Fails to acknowledge economic slowdown that lead to decreased activity/transport/production that would otherwise emit, which would thus contradict earlier perspectives on degrowth

Richer people emit more, but that’s not the whole story

Graphs/data indicate more that rich COUNTRIES emit more, not necessarily "people"

The expansion of paper and pulp industries is another key driver of tropical deforestation. Tree plantations have expanded rapidly, particularly in Asia and South America. In the UK we plant lots of trees to then cut down to harvest wood or make paper. These trees are often planted on non-forested land – or, rather, land that was forest centuries ago but hasn’t been for some time. These plantations are sustainable in some sense. They suck carbon out of the atmosphere when they grow, lose some when they are cut down, but suck it out again when they are replanted. This isn’t the same in Indonesia, where old, primary rainforests are cut down to make space for plantations, releasing a lot more carbon and destroying ecosystems that had built up over centuries or more.

So....UK>Indonesia....?

We want to tackle air pollution because it affects our health; we want to tackle climate change so our cities don’t drown; we got our act together on ozone because we were worried about skin cancer. There is a selfishness to our drive to fix these things. By that, I mean at a species level – as humans. Collectively, there is a selfish reason to improve the environment around us. Our flourishing depends on it.

Again, too simplistic a view on the realities that global political economies actually allow us collectively to afford. Discounts much of the mechanisms that enabled the Montreal Protocol to succeed in abolishing CFCs (which were missing in subsequent agreements such as Kyoto) when attributing the success to the human "selfishness" to avoid skin cancer.

Fish farming is an innovation that has saved many fish populations across the world. But it’s not the only thing we’ve got right.

Naively assumes fish farming is an infallible solution without acknowledging the known and studied risks of expanding aquaculture

Farmed fish, a solution that seems icky

Ok she addresses some nuance for aquaculture

So, as a consumer, I wouldn’t stress. As an innovator, policymaker or funder, you could help us get there even faster.

Indicator of intended audience

Sustainability is humanity’s North Star.

Personally, don't feel like she has made enough of a case in this book to make this claim, especially since Ritchie contends that sustainability is novel, how can it be the guidance?

And I hope I’ve shown over the course of the book why it’s one I believe we can achieve in our lifetimes.

Barely. And also still does not acknowledge who "we" are in this context. Who exactly is responsible for absorbing the recommendations that Ritchie imposes? Is the information in this book relevant for policymakers or is this more targeted for the average (uninformed - based on the somewhat patronizing way she explains certain concepts) consumer (in my view, it is the latter)?

The other commonality between our environmental problems is that their historical arc is the same. We’ve told ourselves that all of our environmental problems are recent. We believe they’ve been created in the last few decades through an exploding population and greed. In reality, nearly all of them have a long history. Humanity’s environmental impacts date back hundreds of thousands of years. This damage was not deliberate – our ancestors often had no other option. But their actions had consequences for the environment and the species we shared it with.

Sustainable solutions are becoming the cheapest option.

Techno-optimist view (only looking at technological costs rather than including other costs such as the impact to workers in a clean energy transition)

This probably comes back to the good old ‘natural fallacy’: things that seem more grounded in ‘natural’ properties must be better for us, where natural equals good, and unnatural equals bad. We’re sceptical of synthetic stuff that comes out of a factory. It’s easy to mock this ‘natural is best’ type of thinking. In the past I’d brand it as ‘unscientific’ because it is unscientific. But ridicule has never been an effective way to drive change, and it’d make me a hypocrite because I haven’t totally rid myself of these feelings either. I still get the instinctual pull towards ‘natural’ solutions. Working against it takes repeated, and sometimes uncomfortable, effort.

It’s only then – when the image of ‘environmentally friendly’ behaviours line up with the effective ones – that being a good environmentalist might stop feeling so bad.

What’s odd and counterproductive is that people assume that solutions need to be all or nothing. One against the other. You must pick a ‘team’, and you must berate the other side. But this isn’t going to move us forward. As far as I’m concerned, most of us are on the same team.

Doomsayers are not interested in solutions. They have already given up.