My guest is Dr. Hannah Ritchie,
a Data Scientist and Researcher
at the University of Oxford,
also Head of Research at Our World in Data.
She’s just coming out with a fantastic new book
called “Not the End of the World”.
Welcome, Hannah.
It’s a pleasure to be here.
Hannah, when you did your TED talk,
was the book written by then?
The book was written by then, yes.
Oh, okay.
The TED talk is a little bit of a
squished down version of the book.
Yes, that went very well.
Did they give you 15 minutes for that?
It seems like a long, long time ago,
and it went by in a complete blur.
I actually don’t remember what I said
when I was up there, but I watched it back
and I said most of what I wanted to say.
Tell me a little bit about
how you came to write the book.
Yes, thanks.
So my background is environmental science.
I did a bachelor’s, a master’s, a Ph.D.,
all in environmental sciences.
And I think by the end of my degree,
despite having studied environment
for a long, long time,
I felt, to some extent, quite helpless.
I felt like the number of problems
we were facing were huge.
The problems were massive.
And, to me at the time,
it seemed like we weren’t making
any progress on these problems.
So despite having done all of this work,
I felt kind of helpless on
how do we tackle these issues.
And then I started working at Our World in Data.
And my work led to a much more
data-driven approach where rather than
focusing on news headlines,
which are coming at us all the time,
it’s stepping back to look at the data to
understand these problems and how we solve them.
So what I’ve done at Our World in Data
for the last six or seven years is to study
these environmental problems amongst
health, poverty, other problems that we face,
and try to understand where we are
on these problems and how we tackle them.
So what I do in the book is I take
seven different environmental problems,
so air pollution, climate, food, biodiversity,
and try to paint a picture of where we’ve come from,
where we are today, and what that tells us
about what we need to do next.
There’s a large group of people,
I’d guess you could call them doomers,
who are feeling a sense of despair about,
“There’s nothing we can do, should we have kids?”
that type of thing.
How do you think that got to be
such a common way of looking at
the environmental issues?
Yes, I think it’s a growing problem.
And I should say that a decade ago
I was probably in that very same position.
I was studying all these environmental trends
and they all just seemed to be
getting worse and worse and worse.
And I think what I was also doing at the time
is that I had no understanding of
how human wellbeing trends were changing,
so what was happening to
poverty, to health, to education.
And what I did is I just simply extrapolated and said,
"Well, I’m seeing all these news headlines
saying look at the number of people in hunger,
the number of kids dying," all of these trends,
and I just assumed all of these
were getting worse at the same time.
So to me it seemed like we were
incapable of solving any problems.
And I think then a big turning point, for me,
was discovering the work of Hans Rosling,
who really brought to the front how the world
has changed on these human wellbeing metrics.
But I think one of the reasons why
so many people feel a sense of doom now
is that we fail to also recognize
the amount of human progress
that we’ve made over the last few centuries.
One great thing about your book is that,
although climate is probably the problem
that gets the most attention, you talk about
other environmental challenges we face.
Talk about a few of those.
Yes, the first chapter is on air pollution,
which I think, for me, is just an underrated problem.
If you look at the number of
premature deaths from air pollution,
it’s actually much higher than climate change today.
Now, that might change in the future,
but, for me, air pollution is one of the
biggest health challenges we face.
The WHO estimates that it’s around
7 million premature deaths every year.
You have outdoor air pollution,
which is what we see as the emissions
from cars and power stations, et cetera,
which is a big problem.
But there is also a vastly underrated problem,
which is indoor air pollution,
which is basically people,
mostly in energy poverty,
where the only fuels they have
are wood or charcoal or crop waste.
And they’re basically using this to
heat and cook in their homes.
And the amount of air pollution that you get
from this is really, really damaging to health.
Now, on air pollution we have achieved a lot there.
One is the ozone layer,
which I just learned about from history books,
because I kind of missed
the whole ozone layer period, but at the time,
that was a massive problem.
Countries came together
and we reduced emissions of these
ozone depleting gases by more than 99%.
Acid rain is another one,
especially in Europe and North America,
acid rain was a massive problem
and we’ve basically solved that.
And now you’re starting to see it
in middle-income countries.
So China, for example, has seen
really stark declines in local air pollution.
But when you take rich countries,
so London or Edinburgh where I’m from,
you’ve seen really dramatic
reductions in local air pollution,
which has saved a lot of lives.
So there are a range of problems
that we have solved.
Which I guess pushes back
against this narrative that we’re incapable
of solving environmental problems.
One nice thing about that is that
going from coal to solar or wind,
you can clean up local pollution from coal.
And so there is a little intersection
with climate there, where for the local pollution
people and the greenhouse gas people,
coal is the primary enemy.
Yes, I mean, on air pollution,
you tend to see what is called
the Environmental Kuznets Curve,
which doesn’t apply to
every environmental problem.
But you definitely see it with air pollution
where it’s almost like an upside down ‘u’.
So air pollution tends to be lower
at very, very low incomes,
and as countries industrialize,
it goes up and reaches a peak at middle-incomes.
And then rich countries, once the countries get rich,
they start to decline,
and so it’s like an upside down ‘u’.
Now that is in itself promising.
That just means once everyone gets rich
then the problem is solved.
But I think the challenge we face,
and what we need to push for,
is how do we accelerate that trend
much, much faster.
Because if we wait, the number of deaths
under that curve is really, really big.
So the question is, can India
or other middle- and low-income countries
go through that trend much faster
than the U.K. or the U.S. did,
because doing so will save a lot of lives.
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