Sorry, Doomers: Hannah Ritchie says it's Not the End of the World
All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds
Oscar Hammerstein wrote the lyrics for South Pacific, set in the Second World War, and has Mitzi Gaynor sing:
“I have heard people rant and rave and bellow
That we're done, and we might as well be dead,
But I'm only a cockeyed optimist
And I can't get it into my head.”
As the world crashes around us today, there are still a few cockeyed optimists around, including data scientist Hannah Ritchie. I have long been devoted to her website Our World in Data and I have been looking forward to the publication of her book, Not the End of the World. The title says it all: Ritchie believes that the major problems we face are solvable, and things are looking up. She writes:
“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. We can shape the future, and we can build a great one if we want to.”
Ritchie notes that her carbon footprint is less than half of her grandparents, primarily because the UK has moved from coal. Technology got better, too, with more efficient gadgets, double-glazing, and thinner TVs.
“These massive strides in technology mean that we use much less energy than we did in the past, despite appearing to lead much more extravagant energy-intensive lifestyles. The notion that we need to be frugal to live a low-carbon life is simply wrong.”
I am also an optimist, and my book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle is full of Ritchie’s data and charts, but it is also full of frugality and a different view of her data.
For example, the British numbers on decarbonization look terrific on a per capita basis, but the problem with Ritchie’s argument is that since her grandparents’ time, Britain has deindustrialized, with its manufacturing sector shrinking by two-thirds. Digging coal and burning it to make stuff is what her grandparents’ generation did; no wonder the average per capita British footprint is smaller. And look at the mess Britain is in once you get outside of London; it is no model to emulate.
I am not a data scientist, but I suspect that if you look at the lifestyle emissions from food, transport, or housing, they are way up compared to our grandparents. I also suspect that we will have to make some sacrifices to fight climate change. I sometimes wonder what Ritchie thinks about the challenges ahead:
“This is no small feat. It will force us to redesign and reshape our energy systems. To change how and what we eat. How we live, how we move, and how we build. But this change must go forward. It can’t be a step backwards. Solutions that involve cutting energy use to very low levels are no good. People need energy to live a good and healthy life. They need it for health care, for education, to power washing machines and kitchen appliances so they have time to work, play and learn.”
As I said, I’m an optimist, but I think cutting energy use to very low levels is very good; that’s why I like Passivhaus for buildings. A few steps backwards to walkable communities and bikes instead of cars are very good. A few pages on, Richie describes exactly that- rethinking our living spaces, putting in cycle lanes and good transit. “The big dilemma of the 2020s and beyond is to get an electric car or no car at all.”
It seems that Ritchie sometimes can’t decide which way is backwards or forwards, or at least tries to have it both ways. She says no to frugality, cutting energy use, or stepping backward. Yet when she complains about people being obsessed with little things, she writes, “They often miss the big stuff: eating less meat, switching to an electric car, taking one less flight, insulating their home or investing in low-carbon energy.”
Ritchie devotes a separate chapter each to climate change and air pollution, but for the most part, they both come from the same source and have the same solution: stop burning stuff. I liked her explanation that particulates have been killing us ever since we started burning wood for fire a million and a half years ago; researchers are finding them in the lung tissues of Egyptian mummies. But while our ancestors didn’t have a choice for heat, light and cooking, we do. She resists the charm of the open fire or the gas stove (she microwaves everything).
Ritchie also has separate chapters for deforestation and food, but they are also closely related, with agriculture being the main cause of deforestation, mostly driven by beef, and followed by oil crops, mostly soybeans and palm oil, which I have been complaining about for years. Apparently, I was wrong; you get around ten times as much oil per hectare from palm oil than you do from other oil crops.
I was shocked to find out how much of our food is fed to cows and cars; 35% of American cereal crops are used as biofuels, more than is grown in all of Africa. And now they want to feed corn to airplanes.
I do have a few beefs with her food chapter and one paragraph in particular:
“One of my favourite websites is called Science Heroes: it ranks the giants of the scientific world according to estimates of how many lives they’ve saved. We might imagine that someone in the medical sciences tops the list. But no: it’s the agricultural scientists, Carl Bosch, Fritz Haber and Norman Borlaug. Many of us owe the fact that we are alive to them.”
I cannot see how anyone can call Fritz Haber a hero. In my book, I wrote: “Fritz Haber was a monster. He invented explosives that are said to have lengthened the First World War by three years, and poison gas that killed thousands in that war and, after he was dead, millions of his fellow Jews in the Second World War.” It gets worse; his wife thought he was so evil that she grabbed his revolver and killed herself. He died a pariah, considered a war criminal, certainly not a hero. Others have not very nice things to say about Norman Borlaug, but this is different.
My other beef is Ritchie’s stance on local food. She claims that transport is only 5% of food emissions and that “what you eat is far more important than where it has come from.” I concur with this; giving up red meat is far more significant. But I have looked at her sources, and even their sources, and how they measure transportation emissions. As I noted in my book, they ignore the carbon cost of the cold chain, and in particular, the loss of refrigerants, with a leakage rate estimated between 15 and 50% per year. I wrote about this on Treehugger and in my book, where I quoted Italian communalist Lanza del Vasto: “Find the shortest, simplest way between the earth, the hands, and the mouth.”
Ritchie has further optimistic chapters on biodiversity, plastics, and overfishing, all of which I could say “yes, but….” and complain that her views are a bit too sunny. I kept wanting to say no, we can’t have it all. Sometimes, I do feel she is a bit Panglossian, saying as the world is crashing around us, “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
But it’s such a nice change to read a book chock full of hope and possibility. I want a tattoo with her conclusion: “Ignore those who say that we are doomed. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone.”
And here’s Mitzi, singing much the same thing:
Here are some other reviews; Bill Gates loves it (of course!). My editor when I was contributing to the Guardian, Bibi van der Zee, has some reservations.
I found Hannah's case for optimism from our dire predicament quite strenuous and unconvincing, and she constructed a lot of straw men in the book in order to make her points. Her use of data in her book was selective to say the least. I also noted a number of inaccuracies (or at least significant divergencies from my own understanding of our predicament).
She has also struggled to justify a lot of the positions she adopted in her own book. The section on de-growth was particularly ill informed, and the idea that renewables can replace fossil fuels, simply fanciful. I also struggled with her 'war' metaphor in the book, which I found bizarre. Her claim to absolute apolitical objectivity also, clearly indefensible.
I don't concur with Hannah's definition of a 'doomer'. I regard myself as a doomer in that I think I have a realistic understanding of our predicament and tend not to seek solace in cognitive dissonance or denial. I try to be a grown up and face the grim reality of our predicament. That doesn't mean that I will ever give up hope in our ability to address some of the worst impacts of climate change - far from it - but I do push back against baseless optimism, which I regard as dangerous. Panic is an important human emotion as it can help us to conjure up the motivation and will to act on our worst fears. Buffering people from panic is unhelpful. In respect of the climate crisis, too much panic is not our problem, not enough panic is our problem.
It's a shame, because I so want to encounter a positive narrative on the climate crisis in which I can believe. Hope is so difficult to come by, that I really willed Hannah to provide a convincing space for hope, but alas, I struggled to find it in her book. In order to make her somewhat plaintive case for optimism, Hannah found herself contorting and making use of accounting tricks and statistical sleight of hand. These strategies needed to be exposed. They are the same strategies used by climate deniers to such great effect.
Ritchie states in the book, as cause for optimism, that the EU and USA have significantly reduced their greenhouse gas emissions. Which is, of course true, but not the cause for optimism that she suggests.
Since the rise of China as the world's manufacturing powerhouse, countries like the USA, those in the EU and other developed nations have essentially delegated all of their manufacturing to China which has resulted in their own emissions reducing and China's growing. Overall, global emissions are still rising - it's just that the manufacturing component of those emissions have shifted from other G20 nations to China. This makes China look like the bad guys, when actually all they are doing is producing all of our stuff for us.
Against that backdrop, you can understand why it is disingenuous for Ritchie to pick out EU and US emissions to support her case for optimism when these wealthy countries are contributing to record global emissions by buying more stuff than ever from China. At no point in her book does she caveat her positive message with these ugly truths. She's set out to write a positive book and has evidently cherry picked her data to support that thesis.
This is why Greta Thunberg urges people to keep their eye on the global emissions data and nothing else. This clarity of focus makes one immune to the positive spin that the likes of Ritchie churns out.
I think Bill Gates, and perhaps Elon Musk, had much more influence on this book than Hannah would ever admit. The book is a techno-optimist, neoliberal manifesto and highly ideological and, despite Hannah's assertions to the contrary, very political. She seems to be suggesting that there is a 'business as usual' route to addressing climate change and the book repeats the myth that 'we have the technology in place to solve this' - an assertion that, for me, has never stood up to scrutiny. I found it a troubling book.
I recommend listening to her interview with Rachel Donald on Mongabay. Ritchie is utterly exposed. It's excruciating.
The problem with efficiency is the Jevons Paradox; when something becomes more efficient, you use more of it and the increase cancels out the reduction. The classic example is LED lighting, but there are many more. We need to use less, that is the simplest solution and the hardest to accept. We have known this (or should have) since Limits to Growth was published in 1970. I recommend listening to Nate Hagens' "The Great Simplification". His interviews with numerous knowledgeable doers and scholars provide a broad critique and a way forward, but it always involves living simply, consuming less energy, and allowing/promoting more ecological diversity.