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.
I don’t think Bibi van der Zee‘a claim that 2023 was an example of tipping points becoming manifest is obviously true. There is A LOT of year to year variation in weather events especially when you have an El Niño year appear. A true tipping point would mean a new climatic regime that endures. I guarantee you that weather time series that put 2023 in context will not show this. Or at least we won’t know until we are able to look at that data retrospectively.
I greatly appreciate this review. I subscribe to sustainability by the numbers and am buying this book so I’m happy to have some nuance going into it. This stuff is really tough to balance, optimism and hope vs. realism and the potential for things to go really wrong. I still don’t quite know how to balance them myself.
My goodness. We can't build a better world for 8 billion people, and I don't know how anyone can be optimistic on biodiversity with the extinction rate at least 10 times (possibly 1000 times) the background rate, with 70% of wild mammals gone since 1970, and humans with their livestock now over 95% of mammalian mass.
No, there is nothing to be optimistic about if one is keen to keep an unsustainable lifestyle going for much longer. The only optimism, for some, is that the widely damaging civilisation will likely hit its downslope in the lifetime of many people living today.
On the energy constraints I think he's right, and he's spent long enough looking at it. Julian Allwood at Cambridge and many others are more or less in the same ballpark. On human nature, Murphy takes a big leap into buying into the Myers-Briggs test. From Wikipedia: "In personality typology, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. It enjoys popularity despite being widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community.[1][2][3][4] "
This is an excellent book about people, our interactions, and behavior:
Ah, OK. Well, as you say, the energy constraints are real, as are resource constraints generally. Add to that the biosphere deterioration, and modernity is definitely unsustainable so must end. Every decade it goes on seems to be another decade of kicking the can down the road. As Tom Murphy mentions, he's prepared to be surprised at modernity's longevity but it gets harder and harder to see it lasting through the following decade, except for a dwindling number of people.
"...modernity is definitely unsustainable so must end."
So to which century would you have us digress? And how much of modern life are YOU willing to give up? And how will you force others, that may disagree with you, to knuckle under to your ideas?
I keep hearing people "degrowth...regress...REs only...no flying...only local foods...only 3 new clothing articles per year...everyone MUST live in a 15 minute city...". And the best of all is WEF's "You will own nothing but be happy".
So what is your mechanism for getting rid of "modernity"?
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.
thank you for the thoughtful comment, I will listen to the interview!
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.
I don’t think Bibi van der Zee‘a claim that 2023 was an example of tipping points becoming manifest is obviously true. There is A LOT of year to year variation in weather events especially when you have an El Niño year appear. A true tipping point would mean a new climatic regime that endures. I guarantee you that weather time series that put 2023 in context will not show this. Or at least we won’t know until we are able to look at that data retrospectively.
You are probably right. We will look back at Hunga Tonga volcano as the basis for the weird higher temperatures and rainfall.
I greatly appreciate this review. I subscribe to sustainability by the numbers and am buying this book so I’m happy to have some nuance going into it. This stuff is really tough to balance, optimism and hope vs. realism and the potential for things to go really wrong. I still don’t quite know how to balance them myself.
My goodness. We can't build a better world for 8 billion people, and I don't know how anyone can be optimistic on biodiversity with the extinction rate at least 10 times (possibly 1000 times) the background rate, with 70% of wild mammals gone since 1970, and humans with their livestock now over 95% of mammalian mass.
No, there is nothing to be optimistic about if one is keen to keep an unsustainable lifestyle going for much longer. The only optimism, for some, is that the widely damaging civilisation will likely hit its downslope in the lifetime of many people living today.
The jolt in the other direction from this blistering interview of Tom Murphy, physicist at UCSD:
https://overcast.fm/+zkMP3fEIo
* I have more faith in people than Murphy does.
** When it comes to energy, he's the one with the Ph.D., and his free book for his UCSD class is a keeper:
https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions
It's not about having faith in humanity, for Tom Murphy, its about doing the math(s). Modernity must end. It's just a matter of when.
On the energy constraints I think he's right, and he's spent long enough looking at it. Julian Allwood at Cambridge and many others are more or less in the same ballpark. On human nature, Murphy takes a big leap into buying into the Myers-Briggs test. From Wikipedia: "In personality typology, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. It enjoys popularity despite being widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community.[1][2][3][4] "
This is an excellent book about people, our interactions, and behavior:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674237827
And this paper, from Hauser et al, shows a pathway that would help:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5738d97f555986b60e6f16d0/t/5c787af424a694f2fb7bde9f/1551399673488/Hauser+et+al.+%282014%29+Cooperating+with+the+future+%2B+SI.pdf
I don't think he uses the MBTI to deduce the failure of modernity. None of his posts in recent years mentions it.
It's part of the 'Human Factors' chapter of his book:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#page=323
The energy constraints are real, what's less solid are his conclusions about people.
Ah, OK. Well, as you say, the energy constraints are real, as are resource constraints generally. Add to that the biosphere deterioration, and modernity is definitely unsustainable so must end. Every decade it goes on seems to be another decade of kicking the can down the road. As Tom Murphy mentions, he's prepared to be surprised at modernity's longevity but it gets harder and harder to see it lasting through the following decade, except for a dwindling number of people.
"...modernity is definitely unsustainable so must end."
So to which century would you have us digress? And how much of modern life are YOU willing to give up? And how will you force others, that may disagree with you, to knuckle under to your ideas?
I keep hearing people "degrowth...regress...REs only...no flying...only local foods...only 3 new clothing articles per year...everyone MUST live in a 15 minute city...". And the best of all is WEF's "You will own nothing but be happy".
So what is your mechanism for getting rid of "modernity"?