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

by Hannah Ritchie

Just as Hans Rosling showed that news headlines don’t teach us much about global poverty, education or health, I’ve found that trying to build an environmental world view based on the latest wildfire or hurricane is no good. Trying to understand the world’s energy system and how to fix it from the latest breaking story won’t get us anywhere.

there has been a miscommunication about what our climate targets – of 1.5°C and 2°C – actually mean. It is wrong to think of these as thresholds – that as soon as we pass 1.5°C, we’re toast. That’s not true. There is nothing special about the number 1.5°C;

I don’t think climate change – or any other environmental problem – is going to wipe us out as a species. Risks that are much more likely to be existential are nuclear war, a global pandemic or artificial intelligence.

For most of human history, your odds of living to adulthood were 50–50. Around a quarter of children would die before their first birthday, and another quarter died before they reached puberty.

Every day, 300,000 people get access to electricity and a similar number get clean water, for the first time. This has been the case every day for a decade.

Air pollution is one of the world’s biggest killers. Researchers estimate that it kills at least 9 million people every year. That’s 450 times more than die in natural disasters in most years.

Between 2013 and 2020, Beijing’s pollution levels fell by 55%.6 Across China as a whole, they fell by 40%. The health benefits of these changes are huge: it’s estimated that the life expectancy of the average person in Beijing has increased by 4.6 years.

The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution kills 7 million people every year: 4.2 million from outdoor air pollution, and 3.8 million from indoor air pollution from burning wood and charcoal.

Not everything we burn creates the same amount of pollution. Wood is worse than coal; coal is worse than kerosene; kerosene is worse than gas. This process of moving from one form of energy to another is called climbing the ‘energy ladder’.

Now coal supplies less than 2% of our electricity, and the government has pledged to phase it out completely by 2025. Coal is now almost dead in its birthplace, where it all began.

In the UK we now emit about the same as someone in the 1850s.

The ‘learning curve’ for solar panels has been 20%: this means that every time the installed capacity of solar PV doubles, the price falls by around 20%.

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.)

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.

Some suggest that we use biofuels instead. Again, this is not going to cut it. Studies have shown that biofuels can often emit more CO2 than petrol, especially when we take into account land use.

The world produces enough food to feed everyone, twice over.

Eating locally produced food doesn’t make a big difference. Nor does eating organic food. In fact, in both cases, those choices could actually increase our emissions if we’re growing foods that are better suited for other climates or conditions. The plastic packaging of our food also doesn’t matter much for our carbon footprint.

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.

I’ve asked many economists what we need to do to tackle climate change. Every single one has given me the same answer: put a price on carbon. It is, perhaps, the only thing that economists agree on.

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 every living thing other than humans burned up, oxygen levels would fall from 20.9% to 20.4%’.

Just across the English Channel, the same was happening in Britain. A thousand years ago 20% of Scotland was forested, and 15% of England.10, 11 By the 19th century, this had been slashed to less than 5% in both regions.

Pre-1970, the Brazilian Amazon spanned 4.1 million km2; today, that stands at 3.3 million km2. This means we’ve lost around 20% of the Brazilian Amazon.

Palm oil is an insanely productive plant. It’s why it has been so successful. It gets incredibly high yields – much higher than any of the other options. One hectare of palm currently gives us 2.8 tonnes of oil in return. Olives give us 0.3 tonnes. Coconuts give us 0.26 tonnes – that’s 10 times less. Groundnuts, just 0.18 tonnes.

Overall, just under one-third (29%) of deforestation happens for the production of goods that are then traded. I was taken aback by this finding: I had thought global trade would contribute more.

To be clear: Germany imports palm oil from an area at high risk of tropical deforestation to put it into cars. What’s even more insulting is that it then counts this towards its ‘renewable energy’ target. In reality, biodiesel from palm oil results in more carbon emissions than petrol or diesel.

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.

But fertiliser use has plateaued or is falling in many rich countries. In the US, fertiliser use hasn’t increased since the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, food production has increased by 75%.

Remember: the amount of habitable land on Earth – that’s all our ice- and desert-free land – is around 100 million km2, and we currently use half of it – 50 million km2 – for farming.

The average cereal yield across Africa is half that of India and one-fifth of the yields in the US.

Strangely, many environmentalists are strongly opposed to cross-breeding and genetic modification of crops even though they have been incredibly important for protecting ecosystems and habitats across the world. We need to overcome this opposition. If we want to feed 10 billion people without cutting down more forest, the environmental movement needs to cautiously embrace rather than shun the advances that will help us grow more from less.

There are many reasons why people might choose to eat locally; maybe they want to support farmers in their community or see where their food is made. Those are totally valid reasons. What’s not a valid reason is eating locally to have a low-carbon footprint. This is especially true if you’re selectively choosing high-carbon foods over low-carbon ones, just because they’re closer to home.

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.

Transporting food by boat emits more than 50 times less CO2 than transporting it by plane.

Ten thousand years ago, all the world’s terrestrial mammals – including us and our livestock – weighed in at an estimated 20 million tonnes. This is now around nine times larger.

In 2008, from studies using this satellite imagery, the researcher Simon Jennings estimated there were 899 million tonnes of fish in the ocean.

While it has its environmental flaws, it also has some green credentials. As we’ve seen, if we were to get rid of plastic tomorrow, the world would waste more food. That food waste has a massive environmental cost: all of the farmland used to make it, the water used to irrigate the soil, the greenhouse gases emitted for food that would not even reach our mouths.

In 1907, the Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland created the world’s first fully synthetic plastic, Bakelite (named after himself).8 He subsequently would become the ‘Father of the plastics industry’. Baekeland was different from many of the pioneers covered in this book. Crutzen, Molina and Rowland wanted to heal the ozone layer. Haber, Bosch and Borlaug wanted to feed the world. Baekeland was honest and clear: he worked on synthetic materials because he wanted to make money. As he put it, he wanted to work on problems that had ‘the best chance for the quickest possible results’.

The world produces around 460 million tonnes of plastic each year, and 350 million tonnes of it becomes waste. For this waste to enter the ocean, it needs to be dumped in a way that means it’s not contained. When plastic is put into sealed landfills, it’s unlikely to escape. It also needs to be fairly close to the coast to get carried out to the ocean from rivers. Our best estimate is that 1 million tonnes enters the ocean each year. That’s 0.3% of our plastic waste.

Looking at the other continents, around 8% of plastics come from African rivers, 5% from South America, 5% from North America. Europe and Oceania combined contribute less than 1%. It’s hard to accept these figures. It tells a story that we don’t really want to hear. As a European, I want to think that we can play a big role in fixing this problem by cutting back on our plastic wrappers, ditching our single-use shopping bags, and recycling our used milk cartons. Sadly, this isn’t true. If everyone in Europe stopped using plastics tomorrow the world’s oceans would hardly notice the difference.

By the early 2000s, around one-quarter of the world’s fish stocks were overexploited. By 2008, this had climbed to one-third. But the increase has slowed. Since then, the share of stocks that are exploited has stayed at around one-third. That means two-thirds of global fish stocks are managed sustainably.ii

Around 11% of the 90 million tonnes of wild fish that we catch each year is used as feed for aquaculture.

The world spent most of 2020 at home, at a huge cost to the quality of life for millions of people. Our lives were stripped back to the bare minimum. There were hardly any cars on the roads or planes in the sky. Shopping malls and entertainment venues were shut. Economies across the world tanked. There was a dramatic and almost-universal change in how all of us lived. What happened to global CO2 emissions? They fell by around 5%.