I was stunned that of the plastics in the ocean,
the portion coming from, say North America,
is actually pretty small.
And so that’s another one where
it might not be that expensive
to see a big reduction.
For me, plastic pollution is one key area
where I think the tension is kind of lopsided.
I think we think of plastics,
and we immediately think to stop using them.
And all of the treaties are based on
how we reduce plastic use as much as possible.
But, actually, the problem of plastic pollution,
like plastic going into the ocean,
is not about using plastics,
it’s about how it’s managed.
And when it comes to the oceans,
around 0.5% of our plastic waste
ends up in the ocean.
So it’s actually much more effective
to tackle that 0.5% than to tackle
the 100% way at the top of the chain.
When you look at maps of
plastic use across the world, yes,
plastic use and plastic waste per person
is much higher in richer countries.
We use more of the stuff,
but what’s different is we send it
to landfills where it’s closed and managed,
or we recycle it, or it’s incinerated.
And most of the plastic that is
leaking into the ocean is more in
middle-income countries where they’ve seen
very fast growth and very fast industrialization,
but waste management has not managed to keep up.
But they’re using lots of plastic, but there’s not
the waste management infrastructure there
to gather it and to keep it.
So, yes, it is a very tractable problem.
If you invest a little bit of
money in waste management,
you can actually put a
massive dent in that problem.
When you look at environmental numbers,
have we actually reduced them anywhere?
Are there examples where our
greenhouse gas emissions have gone down?
Yes, so on greenhouse gas emissions, I guess,
across the world, it’s a very mixed picture.
On a global level, we did see a
very rapid rise in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Over the last decade or so
we’ve kind of seen a bit of a plateauing,
emissions are still increasing a little bit,
but they are going up very, very slowly.
So rich countries in particular
have managed to significantly reduce emissions
over the last few decades.
In the U.K., for example, emissions have
approximately halved, and some of that
is because of offshoring,
but not all of it is because of offshoring.
So even when we account for that,
emissions are going down.
Middle-income countries are
a bit of a mixed picture where some
are starting to see a decline.
And then in lower-income countries,
as people are gaining access to energy
you would assume the emissions
are going up, and they are.
Yes, the U.K. number
was quite striking to me because, of course,
the whole energy intensification
with Industrial Age coal starts in the U.K.,
and yet they’re one of the countries in that area
that has made the most progress of all.
Yes, I mean, the story of
carbon emissions in the U.K.
is basically about coal,
like most of our electricity
used to come from coal.
So when I was born,
it was between one-half and two-thirds,
and now we are basically coal-free.
So we’ve just cut coal completely out
of the electricity metrics which just makes
a massive difference to your carbon emissions.
Yes, the challenge is getting people
to understand each of the sectors
and what’s in the pipeline in terms of
innovation that might allow that sector
to get its numbers down without having
the cost be so gigantic.
People know about electric cars,
and they know about wind and solar,
but most of the rest of it
is probably pretty opaque to people
in terms of emissions
and what we might be able to do.
Yes, if you split up the world’s emissions,
there are the power sectors,
so electricity, there’s transport.
Now, those two combined are quite big,
but they’re not everything.
I think the way I see it is
with these sectors we now actually do have
economic solutions there.
Over the last decade or so
we’ve seen plummeting costs of
solar, wind, batteries and electric cars,
and I think for those sectors,
it’s now about deploying these technologies
very, very quickly.
The last decade it was getting the cost down,
and in this decade,
it’s building as much as we can,
and as fast as we can.
But there are other sectors
where we still do need innovation.
We need cement, we need steel.
A big one, for me, that is often overlooked,
is the food sector.
I think decarbonizing food and agriculture
is going to be very, very difficult.
So we have this two-end approach where we
need to go fast on the stuff that we have now,
but we also need to be
putting money and research into innovations
in the other sectors such that by 2040 or 2050,
we have affordable solutions
for those sectors as well.
I think the rich countries
have a few responsibilities.
One, they need to get domestic emissions down,
but I think the other role that they play
is that they need to drive down
the cost of these technologies
for middle- and low-income countries.
Middle- and low-income countries
cannot face the dilemma of,
“Do I lift people out of energy poverty?”
Or “Do I keep my carbon emissions low?”
But the role that rich countries can play
is to drive down the cost of these technologies
such that there’s no trade off.
The cheapest technologies
are also the low-carbon ones.
I mean, that’s one additional way by which
rich countries contribute beyond
just the climate finance mechanism.
Yes, I totally agree with that.
In fact, I talk about the cost as
the so-called green premium.
That obligation not only to get to zero,
but to drive those costs down
so the trade-offs for say, in India,
allow them to say,
"Okay, we’re going to build basic shelter,"
while not dramatically
increasing their emissions.
The solution that helps with
basically every environmental issue
is as you get richer,
your population growth tends to go down,
and then your ability to detect forest fires,
or build buildings that,
when there are natural disasters,
the death toll goes down.
And you had that incredible graph of how,
particularly in rich countries,
the deaths from natural disasters
comes down so dramatically,
which is actually not about
reducing the tornadoes, floods, earthquakes,
but rather, it’s about having
some warning systems and
resilience to those negative effects.
The declining trend in disaster deaths
was really surprising to me.
I thought that to be an informed citizen,
I had to be watching the news all the time.
That’s how I kept up with the world.
But when you watch the news,
all you see is disaster, disaster, disaster.
And if you had asked me to draw the trend of
what was happening to disaster deaths in the world,
I would have said that they were at the highest level ever.
Actually, when you step back
to look at the data it is the opposite.
Because of increased resilience,
we’ve seen a really, really dramatic decline.
If you look out at 2100
a lot of the models look pretty hopeful
because during that timeframe
you have a lot of economic growth.
Yes, I mean, the way I see it is
we do have the capacity to adapt.
We have the capacity to make our buildings,
our infrastructure, more resilient.
I think the key there is that
we need to make sure that
this is inclusive globally.
It’s going to be the poorest
who are going to be hardest hit by this
because they don’t have
the resilience to build back.
Yes, so to be clear,
your message is although being a doomer
is not the right way to look at this,
the sense of urgency about
all the different areas that you
talk about in the book is still super-high.
You would love to see us
making even faster progress.
Yes, I mean, the whole point of the book
is that these are big and urgent problems,
and we need to really get moving on them.
What I’m trying to push back against
is more the message of,
“It’s too late, we can’t do anything about it.”
I think, for me, we’ve seemed to have flipped
very quickly from this area of fringe denial,
where the denial sphere
was actually quite loud and quite big,
and we’ve suddenly seemed to flip straight into,
“It’s too late and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
And the key message of my book is that
these are hard problems to solve,
but I think we are capable of solving them.
And it’s just not the case
that it’s too late to tackle this.
Well, I’m certainly going to be sending it
to lots and lots of people.
Just like in global health
we need to tell the stories
of how great progress has been
because there are lessons out of that,
and we keep people engaged,
even though the pandemic was a big setback.
It’s easy in any of these areas,
including global health, to feel really like,
“Oh, we’re not making that much progress.”
And so to have the positive data points be in there
and have it be kind of comprehensive
I think is fantastic.
I’m looking forward to all the debates
that it will generate.
I wouldn’t have an impactful book
if everyone just loved it
and just loved everything about it.
It’s meant to generate discussion.
If we’re having discussions
based around the data,
which I’ve tried to present in the book,
then I think I’ll have achieved something.
A cool part of the book is not just saying,
“Hey guys, everything’s fine, we can just sit back.”
It’s a call to action.
It’s about trying to show where we are,
building on the momentum that we’ve gained
through tackling some of these problems,
but also trying to show what we need to do next.
Well, I hope that it will inspire more action
rather than reduce the pace of it.
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