Many changes that do profoundly shape the world are not rare, exciting or headline-grabbing. They are persistent things that happen day by day and year by year until decades pass and the world has been altered beyond recognition.
doomsday attitudes are often no better than denial.
I used to think optimists were naive and pessimists were smart. Pessimism seemed like an essential feature of a scientist
As my colleague Max Roser puts it: ‘The world is much better; the world is still awful; the world can do much better.’ All three statements are true.
Paul R. Ehrlich is an American biologist. He’s not to be confused with Paul Ehrlich, the German physician who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to immunology. The latter invented the cure for syphilis in the early 20th century, and saved many lives as a result. The same cannot be said for Paul R. Ehrlich.
The prospect that a child would outlive its parents is not a ‘natural’ occurrence at all: it’s something that we’ve had to fight hard for.
it’s not possible to reduce the population quickly enough for that to help address our environmental problems. If anyone argues that it is, they don’t understand how demographic change works.
In rich countries carbon emissions, energy use, deforestation, fertiliser use, overfishing, plastic pollution, air pollution and water pollution are all falling, while these countries continue to get richer. The idea that these countries were more sustainable when they were poorer is simply not true
A world without economic growth would remain a very poor one.
having money gives us options
When I zoomed out and saw these trends, I felt stupid. I also felt cheated. I had been duped by an education system that was supposed to teach me about the world.
Some media outlets even see the frequency of stories as their key performance metric. ‘With a piece of environmental journalism published every three hours, the Guardian is a leading voice in the fight to save the planet’ reads a large banner plastered across the newspaper’s website. In other words, the Guardian wants to fire as many crushing stories as possible, as quickly as it can. The faster it does this, the more committed it is to ‘saving the planet’. It’s an anxiety-inducing feed, and one that inevitably leads us to the conclusion that things are getting worse and worse.
But not everyone is richer, and this is the biggest risk of climate change.
China and India are seen as big emitters today, but per capita emissions are just a fraction of emissions in the UK and US in the past.
The world has already passed the peak of per capita emissions. It happened a decade ago. Most people are unaware of this.
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. In the UK we now emit about the same as someone in the 1850s. I emit the same as my great-great-great-grandparents. And I have a much, much higher standard of living.
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.
One concern I have – and many others do too – is that putting a price on carbon would hit the poorest people the hardest. If you were to double the price of petrol tomorrow, the rich guy with five Lamborghinis might feel a bit of a pinch. But he’ll be all right. He might have to sell one of his five cars or fly first class rather than by private jet. He’ll get over it.
But the parents living on the breadline might already struggle to heat their home and drive their kids to school. They cannot afford to buy an electric car. Carbon pricing policies need to include support for poorer households to make up for the increased cost of energy.
Note: Taxing externalities to get to the social optimum assumes the marginal value of each dollar to society is the same when economics tells you this isn't true. Marginal value of a dollar to millionaire <<< family on the breadline. Social optimum must consider this. -Dr. EKG
This could be done by directing the tax revenues towards poorer households. This revenue could be used in other positive ways: to invest in developments in low-carbon technologies, for innovations in clean energy and meat, to build sustainable cities, stop deforestation or restore forests that have been cut down.
In the 21st century, everyone should have access to air conditioning when they need it.
Tackling climate change feels like a massive sacrifice that has taken over our lives. That would be okay if all of these actions were really making a difference, but they’re not. It’s misplaced effort and stress, sometimes even at the cost of the few actions that really will matter.
One action – having one less child – has been excluded from the chart shown here. This is because the underlying data didn’t take account of changes in the carbon footprint of people over time. It’s fair to say that my child will not have the same footprint as me: in the coming decades as we rapidly decarbonise, the emissions of a ‘person’ will hopefully decline significantly and eventually reach close to zero.
I read countless scientific papers and policy documents. I thought the message from the experts would be clear: palm oil is a leading driver of deforestation, and we have to stop it in its tracks. I expected recommendations of a boycott. There were none. In fact, the advice was that boycotting palm oil was a terrible idea. Do that, and we’ll make tropical deforestation worse not better. The more I read, the more humbled I became. I had got this wrong. Palm oil, deforestation and food are complicated problems, and I had been won over by simplistic messages that played on my emotions.
Researchers at Harvard University have loudly pushed against this backlash. A meta-analysis covering 30 studies found that omega-6s lowered the risk of heart disease: those with more in their bloodstream were 7% less likely to develop
Another study followed around 2,500 men for an average of 22 years, and found that those with the highest blood levels of omega-6s had a much lower risk of dying from any disease. Studies show that they lower cholesterol and blood sugar. And the American Heart Foundation found that getting 5% to 10% of your calories from omega-6s reduces your risk of heart disease.
‘If we split the world’s food production equally between everyone we could each have at least 5,000 calories a day. More than twice what we need. Or, to put it another way, we produce enough food for a global population twice the size that it is today.’
When I was talking to one of my previous bosses – Mike Berners-Lee – about food losses, he remarked that it was ‘just a Tupperware problem’. That’s stuck with me ever since. He’s right. If the world had more Tupperware it would lose a lot less food.
My lecturer had ordered the lamb. ‘I know meat isn’t great for the environment, so I don’t eat chicken and pork. I eat lamb though, because it’s locally sourced and so it has a low-carbon footprint.’ I thought she must be joking. She wasn’t. I couldn’t believe it: how could a lecturer on environmental topics really believe this – that meats have a low-carbon footprint simply because they’re locally sourced?
what we eat matters much more for our carbon footprint than how far it has traveled to reach us.
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
A better rule is to eat foods that are grown where the conditions are optimal. That means you should buy tropical foods from tropical countries, cereals from countries that get very high yields
years ago I was interviewed on US National Public Radio about some of the world’s most important statistics. I wanted to highlight the worrying decline in wildlife, so I picked the headline numbers from the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Index (LPI). I can’t remember exactly what I said – and it’s too painful for me to go back and listen – but I panicked. I said something along the lines of ‘the world’s animal populations have declined by 68% since 1970’. This isn’t true – that’s not what that metric shows. It’s embarrassing – given that part of my job is trying to correct public miscommunications of data – that I stumbled so badly.
Why are so many people dedicated to saving this single species? It doesn’t really make sense. It’s expensive to protect only two individuals, money and time that could be used in a range of other ways.
This touches on the bigger question of why we care about biodiversity at all.
In his book Do We Need Pandas? The uncomfortable truth about biodiversity, the ecologist Ken Thompson argues – as is probably obvious from the title – that we give disproportionate attention to the species that provide the least functional value (the pandas) and we ignore the species that really do matter for our survival (the worms and bacteria). For a long time I tried to push back against this disconnect, but finally accepted that it’s okay to be motivated by either or both at the same time. If something, anything, drives us to take positive action we should harness it.
Disagree. See previous points about actions wasting effort or even making things worse.
Sometimes we fight hardest to protect things because they move us, not because of objective valuation of their functional importance… Bacteria keep us alive more than bears do, but the bears help us to have lives worth living.
Disagree.
Over the last century the world has made unprecedented progress in improving living standards across the world. In some places progress has been slower, but every country has improved in health, education, nutrition and other important indicators of well-being. Of course, we’re not done. The world is still terrible in many ways: children and mothers die from preventable diseases, nearly one in ten go hungry, and not every child gets the opportunity to go to school. We’ve got serious work to do.
Technologies are changing the way we make food. We can produce products just like meat, without the environmental impact or the animal slaughter. That would save an incredible amount of resources and help alleviate global malnutrition at the same time. We just need to make these products nutritious, tasty and cheap enough for the global stage. In 50 years, we won’t be using half of the world’s land to grow food, or raising and slaughtering billions of animals every year to feed ourselves. Everyone in the world can be well fed on a planet that isn’t eating itself alive.
Being an effective environmentalist might make you feel like a ‘bad’ one
e.g., not getting hung up on charismatic macrofauna
Microwaves are the most efficient way to cook, local food is often no better than food shipped from continents away, organic food often has a higher carbon footprint, and packaging is a tiny fraction of a food’s environmental footprint while often lengthening its shelf life.
we will not fix our environmental problems through individual behaviour change alone.
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%. That’s a hard pill to swallow.
Pulling people out of poverty has to be central to our goal.
While we fight among ourselves, the ... fossil fuel companies, the meat lobbies and those that oppose environmental action get a free ride.
Doomsayers are not interested in solutions. They have already given up. They often try to stand in the way of [solutions]. At best, they are just counterweight to progress. At worst, they’re actively pulling the other way; just as damaging as deniers.
What makes me most optimistic is the number of people I meet who are all pushing for this. Surround yourself with those people. Be inspired by them. Ignore those who say that we are doomed. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let’s turn that opportunity into reality.
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