Hello, everyone. Can I welcome you to the Oxford Martin School on what is actually a rather nice day for a change.
My name is Charles Guthrie. I'm the director here, and it's my great pleasure to introduce Hannah Richie.
And Hannah Richie is actually local as well.
She works in the wonderful Our World in Data team, and I see a large number of them in the front row here.
And, uh, supports Max Rose as head of research and deputy director of.
I've got the, the deputy, uh, editor.
Um, and Hannah is a data scientist and, um,
with a special interest in the environment who has written a splendid new book, book called Not the End of the world.
Um, and it's a book that has already had some tremendous comments.
I won't read them out, but on the back you have Bill gates, Margaret Atwood, Tim Harford, David, uh, Wallis.
Well, says it's a, uh, book that's already having a major impact and and I can I come straight to you and sort of ask you,
why did you write this book, and what is the main message that you want to get across in, in.
Yeah. I mean, there's two key reasons. The first one actually comes from my own experience.
Come on to the whole. But my background is environmental science.
That's what I studied at university.
Um, and, um, I think by the time I got to the end of my degree, I was feeling very, very pessimistic about the state,
what it was like, just all of these trends were getting worse and worse and worse. And I think if you'd asked me 10 or 15 years ago,
I was so pessimistic about the state of the world and our ability to solve these problems, I think we can go into why.
But like I got a lot more optimistic since then,
but I still kind of get this overall feeling and that the narrative around these problems, that they're unsolvable, we're doomed.
There's nothing we can do about it. And I just don't believe that anymore.
And I think there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about our ability to tackle them.
I actually think this mindset of it's too late, there's nothing we can do is just not productive and moving us forward.
So part of the motivation was to to push back a bit back a bit on that narrative and
try to show that these are solvable problems and there's something we can do about it.
I think the other core reason I wanted to write the book is that, and it's actually came through in the interviews I've had since then.
But the I mean, the book tackles seven big environmental problems, from climate and air pollution to overfishing and biodiversity loss.
I think the issue that I've had, even in the press coverage, is that everyone just focuses on climate change,
and I wanted to open that up and present like a broader view of just the suite of large environmental problems that we face,
and also kind of get it more on people's radar, but also to put it solutions to these problems.
Also more in the debate in the public domain. So we're not just focusing on climate change.
So in the book you also talk about your, um, personal transition.
And so throw yourself back 10 or 12 years to the young student Hannah, and what was making you so depressed and so teaching at the university?
Was it the way that you were being taught? Was it the narrative in the press?
Was it your friends? Your peer groups? What was it that was most depressing?
Yeah. I mean, I think it even started before university.
Like, I feel like I've just kind of always grown up with climate change.
And I've been given as a kid, I was always I was still already pretty worried and anxious about climate change and what the future might look like.
Or even if I did have a future and see that when I went to study environmental sciences at university, that actually just got worse.
Um, because you were then in the nitty gritty of just looking at these trends day after day, getting worse and worse.
I think there was another dimension to that, that at the time, I think I had this impression that to be an informed citizen,
to understand what was going on in the world, you know, it was my duty to always keep up to date for the news.
And I think that was also around the period when the frequency of news reporting was massively increasing,
that you could instantly get the latest report online, which previously you might have got a daily update or every few days or weekly.
So we've seen this rise in the frequency of of media reports, and I was hyper focussed on it.
And, and when you look at the news, all you get is the bad stuff, right?
You just like the news is there to tell you what's the worst thing that's happened in the world today.
So that was combined with do you do disaster after disastrous disaster kind of being thrown at me.
I think that just led me to this situation where I felt like these environmental
problems that we faced were unsolvable and just weren't going to get any better.
I think that was also combined with the fact that I extrapolated the environmental
problems getting worse with human progress metrics also getting worse.
So at the time, I was just assuming, just based on the news that poverty was going up,
that child mortality was going up, that hunger, just every metric imaginable was getting worse and worse and worse.
And actually, that turned out to not be true. So there's the famous, uh, hockey stick diagrams,
which essentially has time along one axis and then carbon dioxide emissions and many other things getting bad as you get towards the present day.
Do you think one needs to sort of the inverse of that, an argument about what actually is getting better?
And does your book part partly provide that? Yeah.
So the I mean, yeah, the hockey stick graph is like a good summary for most environmental problems, not just the carbon dioxide.
I mean, a large part of this has been driven by the Industrial revolution.
So it's kind of flat and then really ramps up very, very quickly.
I mean, you can also see the inverse of that of a flat and then decrease.
And most human progress metrics like child mortality, like extreme poverty,
maternal mortality over the last few centuries, these problems, you know, have got much, much better.
We're not where we want to be, and we still have a lot of progress to make.
But on many of these metrics, the world has has largely got much, much better.
So you how can a.
Have this inverse relationship between human progress and environmental metrics, and kind of the message I wanted to put forward in the book,
because I think historically, these have very much been in conflict with one another.
Right? It has been the human progress that has come at the cost of the environment.
And I actually think we're in a quite a unique position now, and that's why I frame it as the kind of we could be the first sustainable generation,
where sustainable is taking both sides of that equation to account,
where I think we can continue to improve human well-being and human metrics without the environmental damage.
And by reducing our environmental footprint, I think we tend to only look at one or the other through different lenses.
And I think what's really important is you managed to combine them and kind of provide an overall framework of how we move forward.
So a couple of the reviews I've read of your book has sort of linked you with, um, some of the people that have written optimistically,
Steve Pinker, for example, um, and Hans Rosling and like you, I'm a great fan of Hans Rosling.
Might you say a little bit about him and how he influenced you? Yeah.
I mean, I think discovering the work of Hans Rosling was like a really key turning point for me.
I don't know if everyone in the audience was aware of him, but he was just me, just a position previously, like a physician.
And he gave me these amazing Ted talks where it show how the world has changed over the last few centuries,
and it is way more charismatic than me, so I can't replicate what he did.
But he would show that many of the conceptions we have about the world are like, often upside down.
Right? So like if you ask people as extreme poverty in the world going up or down, they tend to see it's going up.
And if you look over the last 200 years, it is dramatically reduced.
So it wasn't just showing that, you know, we we tend to like,
not really understand the world, that we actively have the wrong perceptions of the world.
And many of the human progress metrics we assume to be getting worse are getting much, much better.
And that was kind of how I got a bit out of this trap of thinking that everything was getting worse.
When I discovered his work, I realised, okay, the environmental stuff is getting worse, but the human progress stuff has been going much, much better.
So making discovering his work was like a really key turning point for me,
and also getting me into the the kind of mindset of how to understand the world through data.
I think that just wasn't on my radar previously,
that you could get a big picture of how the world is changing through the use of data, and you just can't get that for news headlines.
I think he I probably if I hadn't discovered his work, I don't think I would be working at our own data today.
He really kind of drove that passion in me. I think it's interesting that there's a number of people who sort of made the data an exciting area.
So we have Tim Harford on the radio.
I'm just blanking on the name of his program, more or less. More or less.
Um, and um, yeah, sort of the, uh, the data geeks ruling and things, if that's not a rude way of putting it.
Um, look, I know that the book is not just about climate change, and we're going to talk about some of the other things,
but can we first talk a bit about climate change and your views on that there?
The genuine narrative around climate change is pretty negative at the moment.
Um, people point to the succession of cops where on Cop 28, I think it's, uh, it is now.
And yet the amount of carbon dioxide going into the, uh, atmosphere is not decelerating.
Can you give your argument about why there is reasons to be optimistic around climate change?
Yeah. And I think, I think I think what the line that was very hard to struggle in the book was,
was put in across what I felt as a more optimistic and realistic version of, of where we could go without slipping into complacency.
And I mean, for me, that was actually a very hard line to walk down.
And my argument is not that we are on a good path on climate or that we're on an acceptable path on climate.
If you look at the trajectory we're on, we're on course for two and a half to three degrees, right way above our targets.
I think there are a couple of reasons for for why I think that could still dramatically change, and we can make dramatic progress on that.
I think the first one being that we're talking about two and a half to three degrees,
no, go back ten years and we're talking about three and a half to four degrees.
Right. So we have in some sense reduced the trajectory that we were on.
We're not in a good one, but we're on a better one than we were ten years ago.
And if we can do that over the last ten years, why can we not go from two and a half to somewhere closer to two degrees or slightly below that?
But I think what really makes me much more optimistic than I was a decade ago is that I think year ago we did not have solutions to climate change,
right when I've been kind of given this narrative and given this talk, you know, people push back and say, well, we've had the solutions for decades.
No, we haven't really made any progress. Clearly, we just can't make this work.
Just things are just not going to change. What's really fundamental about the solutions that we need to solve climate change?
They need to be cost competitive with the current technologies that we have.
Right? Ten years ago. Solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles were way, way more expensive than coal or gas or petrol or diesel.
It's very clear why we weren't making any progress ten years ago, because the alternatives to fossil fuels are just way, way, way too expensive.
Over the last ten years, the prices of these technologies have plummeted such that they are no cost,
competitive or lower than the cost of fossil fuels.
So to me, no, we haven't been working on this problem for decades, have not made any progress.
We're basically only just at the starting line where we can actually start to make progress, because these technologies are competitive.
And that's like a really, really fundamental shift. I think people are not quite getting.
I think it's wrong to extrapolate, you know, the progress we've made over the last 10 or 15 years.
I assume that it will continue that way.
It won't continue at that rate because we're in a fundamentally different position than we were ten years ago.
I think will also just makes me really quite optimistic, is that if you look at the current energy system that we have,
the amount of waste in that system is just enormous, right?
If you just take a diagram of flows of energy from the energy we burn to like actually providing energy services for people,
which has heating, waiting, moving in a car, you know, whatever energy service you want,
a really tiny fraction of that is actually going towards energy services when we decarbonise.
So when we move from fossil fuels to to solar and wind or other low carbon technologies,
when we electrify or energy systems moving from petrol or diesel to electric cars or towards Olympic heating,
you take away massive amounts of that, those losses in the energy system.
So when people see the big stock of energy that we use globally,
they assume we'll have to replace all of that with solar or wind or nuclear or other technologies.
We'll actually have to replace a fraction of that, because the total amount of energy that we'll need is much,
much lower, because we'll get these massive efficiency gains by just taking fossil fuels out of the energy mix.
So it's not that I think, you know, this is going to be easy or that, you know, again, we're not on the right path,
but I think there are reasons to be more optimistic about our ability to tackle this than there were ten years ago.
So let me push back a little bit on that. Um, and given that we really do need to get to net zero by the middle of this century,
um, like you, I'm just amazed by what's happened in the energy transition.
Who would have known, for example, the price of to photovoltaics would have come down like it has.
But, um, the energy sector is a relatively easy sector to decarbonise because it's a relatively small number of large actors.
And it's not you and me and everyone else in this room having to make personal,
hard decisions about paying for home insulation, paying for a much more efficient boiler, or changing our diets.
So is there a risk of being overly optimistic because of the energy sector, compared with the challenges that we face in the other sectors?
I think, I think, I think that applies to to energy, and I think it applies to in some sense,
industry industries, because I actually think one industry would further behind me are on fundamental energy.
I think those investments and things yeah, I think will come.
They're just not there yet. I think food for me is I'm actually much more pessimistic on food than I am on energy,
because I think it relies much more on individual behaviour change and individual choices.
I think when you're talking about energy, most people, yeah, they might have some small preferences about where it comes from.
Fundamentally, they just want cheap, reliable energy that they can plug when they plug a socket and they want cheap energy out.
I think if you can provide that, most people are happy with that.
I think food is very different, is like very tight identity is very much more politicised.
I think food fundamentally will be much harder.
I think I mean, I've had this comment that like there is like a little bit of a difference in the tone,
maybe from the energy climate chapters to the food chapters.
Actually, what I wanted to do a bit with food chapters is, let's see, here's this like really obvious solution, because I think that will be harder.
But actually just fundamentally to communicate to people, that's a big environmental problem.
I think when you talk about these like climate change or other problems,
people automatically think fossil fuels, like, I don't need to really convince anyone of that.
I think people miss the food stuff, which when you're talking about any of the other environmental problems,
including climate, it's just like not really on people's radar.
So I also wanted to like give food a bit more of a. Profile I've seen this is a big problem as well.
The you talk a little bit about the idea of decoupling and the argument that we need to decouple economic growth from environmental footprint,
essentially. Um, and you're quite optimistic if I've understood you right about that, we're actually making progress in that direction.
And you've had some pushback from that, from people who are advocating for really,
really quite radical decoupling and what that means to the whole economic structure with which we organise our societies.
Um, might you give a little more, um, texture about why you're optimistic in that area?
Yeah. So the, I mean, the, the. The clear argument there is, if you look historically CO2 emissions,
but you could use really any kind of material metric has been very tightly coupled to economic growth.
Right. So there's been very, very strong relationship. As economies grow, people use more energy.
Therefore you get more fossil fuels, more carbon emissions.
And therefore you might then lead to the conclusion, the only way you get emissions and fossil fuel use down is to,
to to to use less energy and to shrink the economy.
I think two clear push backs on that is that that's very fundamentally not a solution for a large part of the world, where their primary concern is,
is lifting people out of poverty, lessening people of energy poverty and economic growth is really central to that.
So then you have the question of can rich countries actually decouple those impacts?
How can you have a still a growing economy, well, shrinking, uh, for CO2 emissions or energy use?
And the data suggests, yes, you can. We are starting to see absolute decoupling between these two metrics across a range of countries.
I think the very valid argument they are and push back is that this is not happening fast enough.
Right? It's not having anywhere near fast enough.
Definitely not for one and a half degrees, but even for two degrees, that decoupling is not happening fast enough.
I make my argument on that. There would be.
Again, this decoupling has largely happened when the alternatives to fossil fuels have been expensive.
Right. So the decoupling has happened in a, in a basically in a world where actually wasn't that economically advantageous to make that transition.
I think that economic argument actually gets stronger and stronger every day.
And I think there are still massive gains through electrification of transport,
through its electrification of heating, where you can really start to push that decoupling much faster.
So I think again, there's a balance there. I think decoupling is happening but not happening fast enough.
To me, I just fundamentally don't see any alternative to decoupling because I think politically
there's the been able to sell a message of of degrowth to me just doesn't seem feasible.
Can I also bring up the issue of tipping points? And I want to ask in two ways.
Um, so is there a possibility that you're, um,
you're quite optimistic about what might happen if we managed to get to a, a, um, trajectory to take us to two degrees?
But is there not a worry about that? The climate system may tip over, switch over into a different domain.
So that's a negative aspect of, uh, tipping points.
Um, can you also see some positive tipping points, something that might happen that when you write the fifth edition of this in 25 years time,
you say, I wasn't as optimistic as I should have been there.
Yeah. I mean, it would start with a positive.
I mean, I think I think many of these technologies are fundamentally like on the brink of what we make framed as positive tipping points.
I mean, these these technologies, they follow the follow what we call learning curves, where the more you deploy them, the more the cost falls.
The more you deploy them, the more the cost falls because reinforcing action.
But in terms of deployment, they tend to follow what we would call s curves, where the growth at the beginning is very slow.
And then you actually reach a kind of tipping point where you start to get very, very fast growth.
And there are a range of, you know, estimates of what we think the tipping point is for like solar or wind or electric cars, for example.
I think in many countries. And what we actually saw are starting to reach that tipping point.
I mean, there's a very clear, uh, an electric vehicle market, for example, the very clear countries in Europe where, you know, started off very slow.
And now most electric car sales are most car sales are now electric.
So, I mean, I think there is room for optimism, more optimism on the fact that, you know,
this stuff could happen much, much faster than we are anticipating if we had these kind of positive.
But I was also thinking about sort of dramatic new technologies.
Fusion is obviously something that's been talked about for a long time, but there's a lot of excitement in fusion that there wasn't a few years back.
So for all of us, we've got a couple of five years under our mattress. What are the sectors that we should be putting our money into?
Yeah, I mean, I think the this is I mean, I have often been framed in interviews and stuff as a techno optimist,
and maybe it's to some extent am I going to push back on that a little bit?
Because, I mean, I think the technologies that I'm optimistic about are the already established ones.
Like I'm just really optimistic where it's a whirlwind of batteries. Um, and actually there's probably much more room for techno optimism,
which is like looking at technologies that we just don't really know we have yet or aren't established.
I mean, some of the key ones on energy, yes, fusion would be a very clear one.
I think there's some one, top ones that we just don't really talk about, like geothermal, like we just.
I think that's in some sense maybe geothermal was where solar and wind was ten years ago.
A decade from now, we might be talking about that technology in a different way.
I think actually that deal with geothermal could actually solve many of the problems we think we might encounter, um, with solar and wind.
So, for example, the key challenge for the UK for solar and wind will be no short term storage because we have batteries for that.
But, you know, seasonal storage and having less variable renewables like geothermal might fill a key gap there.
So I think that's a particular technology that that could be untapped.
I mean, the stuff like food, I mean lab grown meat, if you can produce lab grown meat,
basically just produce meat without the animals, that would just be an actual fundamental game changer.
So I think, yeah, maybe these technologies are coming by.
I've I've undersold where it'll be and it'll be very happy to be under optimistic on that.
So the pessimistic on the.
Yeah on the pessimistic one I think I think there are maybe a couple of misconceptions about I mean boys I mean I think this is two angles.
Some people just don't think about them at all. And then some people maybe have a misinterprets some of the issues on tipping points.
I think fundamentally some people interpret 1.5 degrees or two degrees as like the tipping point.
I mean, I've been asked in interviews, you know, do I not agree with scientists that there's the tipping point, there's not the tipping point?
There are series of tipping points, all different.
But I could be a sort of technical tipping point and sort of examples such as the North Atlantic, uh,
currents switching off so that one gets a radically different, um, climate in this part of the world.
And there's a paper a couple of a couple of weeks back saying that this was more
likely to happen than previous estimates or radical degassing of the permafrost.
So something which really does change over decades rather than a long time.
Yeah. So there's I think those are tipping points, though.
Not like I think people have this impression that, you know, there's just a full planetary scale tipping point that,
you know, we're suddenly at 1.8 degrees and then we end up at five degrees.
And it is a series of tipping points. And those tipping points have very different magnitudes.
So the ones you're talking about, there are much larger impacts than some of the others.
Um, I think what's very clear is that that's very unknown.
It's very unknown where these are in the system and what the potential magnitudes would be.
But if you go or based on our best knowledge today, there are some tipping points that we expect below 1.5 and two degrees, for example.
And that stuff like Arctic, uh, sea ice free uptick in the summer or the Amazon rainforest tipping point, for example.
And these are all very serious. And these are especially have very, very serious localised ecosystem impacts.
If you're looking at global scale, some of these tipping points limit the impact they would have,
like an Arctic sea ice free summer with increased global temperatures.
What we think between point one and .15, the Amazon rainforest, possibly the same.
So what if we were to hit several tipping points on the way to two degrees for your for example,
you might be talking about 0.3 or 0.4 degrees extra warming,
which is obviously very bad and would take us, you know, if we're at 1.8, we'd be at 2.2, which is obviously very, very serious.
But what people assume is that, you know, you go from 1.8 to, you know, five degrees within years or decades.
And that that's not really the story of tipping points. There are also some really massive tipping points, like melting of, um, Greenland ice sheets.
Um, and they're you're talking about, you know, seven plus metres of sea level rise, I think near the the important point is timescale,
where I think people often imagine, you know, the collapse of an ice sheet, the imagined one designed to see collapse.
You know, it's within a year of a couple of years. These tend to occur over centuries or millennia.
So that's not to say that seven metres of sea level rise is fine and 2200,
but it's a fundamentally different problem from if that's happened in the course of years.
So having promised not to talk too much about climate, I've talked a lot about climate,
but I want to switch to food and seeds, a particular interest of mine.
So I thought, right, I'll be able to find lots of things to argue with Hannah on this and and complete failure,
because I sort of violently agree with nearly everything you say.
And, uh, so, like you, I'm not missed on food. So what do we need to do to have a healthy, sustainable and equitable food system?
What are your sort of top three go to policy invention interventions?
I think the really first fundamental one is, is as a real clear focus on agricultural.
Or activity. The the big success story on food over the last 50 years.
And if you go back 50 or so years, you predicted you would have seen massive famines.
Uh, millions and millions of different moments. That hasn't happened.
And that's largely not happened because of increased crop yields and agricultural productivity.
There are still massive opportunities.
We have an agricultural system to do that much further, and in particular, very large,
what we call yield gaps between the yield we have today and the yields we could attain if we were using best practices,
irrigation verses, etc. in some regions, that gap is still really, really large.
And uh, and, and one of the regions in particular, our focus on as is sub-Saharan Africa, where yields have increased over the last few decades.
But there where we below the global average and way, way below what we think the tenable yields could be,
I think actually increasing agricultural productivity there was actually fundamental not just to solving environmental challenges,
but also just fundamental to socio economic development.
Most of the world smallholder farmers are very close to the poverty line, are currently in sub-Saharan Africa,
and without gains in agricultural productivity, there probably will be very, very hard to tackle extreme poverty in that region.
So there's a very fundamental, uh, human development lens that which goes hand in hand with, um,
the environmental issue and the hard core part of increasing agro agricultural productivity as you produce more food from less land.
So less deforestation, less habitat loss.
We could even produce more food using less land than we currently do today if we were to really optimise that.
Are you not a fan of vertical farming as one way of doing that? No.
I'm quite critical of vertical farming in the book.
Not because he couldn't work in practice,
but I think there's just the inherent trade off between vertical farming as you're switching land for energy,
and when you just run the costs on energy, whether it's economic costs or energy costs, the mass just doesn't really work right now.
Maybe that will be like one of the the, the breakthrough is that I'm too pessimistic.
So number one is closing the gap. Yeah. Number two. Number two is globally eating less meat.
Yeah. Um, and filters for so many problems.
And the book, the global meat production and consumption is, is, is too high and has really,
really high, uh, environmental costs and high in the middle and high income countries in particular.
Yeah, there's a very large gap in per capita, um, meat, uh, uh, consumption across countries in the world and tends to again,
there's a very strong relationship between GDP and and meat consumption.
As people get richer, they tend to eat more meat. So when I'm saying eat less, uh, like the world needs to eat less meat, I'm not saying,
you know, the person in charge in two kilograms a year needs to eat less meat.
That's actually probably really key to nutrition in that context,
but especially in high income countries in the West for capital meat consumption is just really, really high.
Um, and I think there are a range of models to do that.
I think I've maybe in the past been too optimistic about Theory of Change for doing that.
I think in my head I thought if we have to me, I think we just already have like pretty good meat substitutes on the market.
And I think they're tasty. And I think, I mean, like for me, I really like them.
I think I had this notion that they just got cheap enough, and if they just got good enough, people would just make that switch.
I don't think we're really seeing that switch, and nowhere near the scale or speed that we would need.
Um, I think there I, I'm actually kind of hinging on this kind of technological breakthrough of,
of global meat because I think for some people, the only alternative to meat is me just without the animal.
Um, so I think that, yeah, moving away from, from meat consumption is a really fundamental pillar.
So what would you say to people whose livelihoods depend on raising cattle, this country in, uh, middle and high income countries?
What is the what is the narrative that can persuade people that that they're part of the solution and not just going to be thrown out of a job?
I mean, I think the the, the clear point there is that this is not going to happen overnight.
Yeah, right. Like this is going to be a transition over decades.
And it's not we're going to, you know, flip immediately to this completely plant based world.
And I actually think if we are to do this smartly acknowledging the fact that we're
not going to just stop eating meat overnight as we go on that pathway towards,
uh, a more plant based world. We also want to do that in a more sustainable way.
We can, which means optimising the meat production,
the meat that we are producing and trying to optimise for less damaging and more sustainable practices.
So I think fundamentally we also need to create this reward system.
We are on that pathway that we are producing and consuming as as environmentally friendly as we can possibly be.
So I think it's not one or the other. It's not like a silly me or no me.
I think there will be this transition period where we also need to optimise the meat that we are producing.
So closing your gap, uh, research to actually, uh, come up with new technologies, um, diet change you're talking about.
Look at that food waste at all. So tongue in cheek. Let me add the other one.
Clearly we need to get out of palm oil. That's surely right, Hannah.
Uh, it's a little bit more complex. Go ahead. Yeah.
So, like, I, um, I remember when I came to work on deforestation, our own data show just the broad, like, what's going on with deforestation.
I think I also had on my head, you know, the evil villain here is palm oil, and just.
We just need to boycott palm oil and get that out of the system, and we'll, we'll we'll talk about a big part of, of global deforestation.
I think it's when I started to read reports on this and what were the experts saying?
And that wasn't really the clear story that was coming through.
I mean, one, fundamentally, we need to acknowledge palm oil has been environmentally destructive,
like it has led to significant amounts of tropical deforestation, in particular in Indonesia and Malaysia, where most palm oil was produced.
I think if you were to think about this is a yeah, we should just boycott palm oil.
You also need to take into account what the counterfactual would be.
And one of the maybe the benefits and also a weakness of palm oil was that such a productive crop.
If you look at the amount of oil you can produce per hectare,
if you compare it to some other vegetable crops, you're talking about like 5 to 10 times as much.
So if you're global demand for vegetable oil is fixed and you can argue it should be less or.
But let's just imagine that it's fixed.
If you're not producing that from palm oil and you switch that to another crop, you will probably need more land.
Now, if you're switching to other tropical crops, which many companies have done right,
they've boycotted palm oil but went for soybean oil or coconut oil.
You could actually result in higher tropical deforestation because you might need 5 to 10 times as much land.
So I think the story there is not this simple. We need to boycott palm oil.
I think it's fundamentally we need to acknowledge that it has led to environmental deforestation.
Uh, but the focus needs to be on.
Can we produce palm oil without deforestation?
Can't we produce palm oil in a more sustainable way? So we get the benefits of the high yields?
Um, but we do it without leading to to more environmental damage.
That's more leading towards, you know, there's the pure wood, the responsible palm oil,
um, association more leaning towards that than just this, like blanket boycott.
And you made a good point that the that the repairs around table for sustainable palm oil,
which has done a good job but could do a better job with it. Yes. I think, um, I'm going to come to the audience in a moment.
There are two final questions. Well, two final things I'd like to ask you to do.
Uh, you talk about fisheries and again, a theme throughout the book that if you look at the data, it gives you a different perspective.
Might you just I think there's a lovely story about how what was initially, um, an argument, uh, came together to, uh, help resolve an issue.
So worms versus Hilborn. Yeah, yeah.
So there was two, um, scientists, one versus Hilborn.
So one was very much, uh, kind of ecologists, like, very much focussed on, um, marine ecology.
And the other was like a fisheries specialist.
So, so I, you might assume that they would have like a very unified understanding of what's going on the oceans,
but actually their desired outcome was actually quite different there.
Right.
If you're a fisheries scientist, your aim is like, how do I catch an as much fish as I possibly can without reducing fish stocks and fish populations?
Right. You're looking for that like optimisation of fisheries, whereas I mean a marine ecologist might be you know,
we want to restore the oceans back to what it was before humans came along.
So actually like maybe quite fundamental differences in how they see the kind of sustainable fishery equation.
But yeah, there was this kind of war.
Was this a conflict because worms had pushed, uh, published a paper, um, on the state of fisheries across the world.
And actually there was like a final just a kind of almost like a throwaway line in the conclusion, which they blew up into the headline.
You might have heard The fish in the ocean will be, um, empty by 2048.
And that claim has been repeated over and over, but actually came from the International paper,
where he was looking at what he thought was, um, decline of fish stocks over time.
And he said, if you just extrapolate this line, which is, you know, it's very debateable if you just extrapolate this line, it will be on 2% by 2040.
So that's how it led to this. Headline.
Now, Ray Hogan was a fisheries, uh, scientist, and that the data one was using just didn't tally with what he was seeing in the real world.
He thought, you know, fundamentally, he was monitoring lots of fish stocks that were not declining.
And therefore, you know, we couldn't really see how that was matching up with the real world.
So they went on the radio and what their radio presenter would be like, very fierce head to head.
They actually quite liked each other and in the end resulted in a collaboration where the two of them came together to say,
can we actually just build a database where we try to understand what's happening to fish stocks across the world?
And they did that and it was very successful and it got republished.
Um, and actually what you see there was again,
this kind of mixed trend like overall fish stocks and the stocks that they'd studied was up, not actually going up or down.
It was increasing in some areas and it was decreasing others. But on net you actually didn't see a net decline over time.
Um, so I think that was the cookie story where the opposing scientists ended up coming together,
collaborating and actually developing a really key data set that's still used today.
And we use it on our own data. It's really improved our understanding of.
And it's a great example of how concentrating on the data can help sort of resolve some issues.
Of course, when you go into policy and there's a lot that's above it, but we should be arguing about the values and things going into policy.
We shouldn't be arguing about the data that that should be something that could be, uh, resolved.
Okay. The final thing I want to ask is, so, like you, I'm generally an ultimate optimist.
I hate what is sometimes called the pornography of doom. When you get up and you get either a lecture, right, or a, um,
television program that is just hitting you around the, uh, hitting you around the cheeks.
And I guess the times that I find my optimism slipping is when I look at, uh, for example, the, uh, political polarisation.
That's one thing in the States, which really has climate change in much of the environment part of that.
Thank you. Thankfully, and fingers crossed, we've been spared the worst of it here, but maybe not.
Um, and as a token London recently where really smart man, a man called Youngkin Vogler,
who is vice president for sustainability at the world Bank and coined the term climate change, climate smart agriculture.
And he said, well, we have so many of the solutions, but we have the narrative wrong.
And if you look at what's happening in continental Europe at the moment, the farmers protesting all over the place.
So kind of cheer me up on that political side.
Do you see? Are we going through a spasm at the moment of a sort of backlash?
Do you see hope in the political narrative, the political economy that will have a better approach to climate change going ahead?
I think, uh, there are some particular issues,
and I think food is like a really fundamental one where there's quite strong political pushback to a specific policy proposal.
Well, I think is much less polarised.
And people assume it's just overall belief in climate change or belief that climate change is a problem or that people should do something about it.
Right. If you look at surveys across the world, you're talking about 75 plus percent of people.
And every country is saying, I think climate change is a problem.
I want my government to do something about it.
And I actually think that the political divide from you can see this as the go left right issue is much narrower than people assume it to be.
And the data shows us very clearly.
And I think the media is actually doing us all a detriment by trying to reinforce that this is a really, really debated issue.
It's not a debated issue. I think if we keep telling ourselves a story that somebody does to,
then actually we we talk ourselves out of these solutions that just most people and most countries one.
I think what's also really clear from the data is that even in areas where the climate problem is politicised,
some of the solutions are really, really not precise.
So if you take the U.S. as an example, as the one country where the partisan gap on climate is as big, right?
Democrats really care about climate change. Republicans you're talking about maybe half, right.
There's a really broad gap. That gap almost completely disappears if you talk about clean energy, right.
Everyone wants clean energy. And actually it doesn't fundamentally,
fundamentally matter whether they believe in climate change or not of the outcome that they really want clean energy, then the outcome is the same.
That's reduced carbon emissions, and that's more and more air pollution is and air pollution is fundamental.
What's really key and the differences in that data in the US is that the reasons for wanting clean energy.
Different across the aisle, right? Democrats to tackle climate change.
For Republicans, it tends to be energy security.
Um, incomes for landowners like for one cites, for example.
So it's an economic argument and it's a local pollution argument, and that's what they care about.
I think that also really matters to how we message this. Right.
I'm not going to get anywhere if I go into the middle of Texas with my climate crisis placard or actually fundamentally my book,
but if I just go on and talk about the other cool benefits of clean energy,
I'm much more likely to be successful in in, in driving action and actually getting people on board.
So, I mean, I think, I think we are overselling how politicise climate change in these problems are.
And I think it's to our detriment. Thank you. Right.
I'm going to go to the audience for, uh, questions. Um, we are broadcasting this.
So do bear that in mind when you when you ask a question and also request to have the questions as brief as possible.
So we hear from Hannah, uh, the lady of the green jersey.
And then behind her in the white Hannah.
And Charles as well. I put it to you both that you're thinking inside the box.
Hannah said early on. She cannot imagine any solution other than decoupling.
She dismissed economic growth just like that.
No mention of maximising mitigation from the dangers ahead.
No mention of minimising consumption per capita or even thinking about minimising our population growth.
Uh, I will argue about answer and population growth.
Do you want to go first? So so so on on on degrowth.
And we're just in the economy. I mean, the fundamental challenge there is, is political feasibility, right?
And actually what's really key is the timescales that we're talking about solving this problem on.
If we had 40 years to fundamentally change a whole economic system, then maybe I could agree with that.
I think was really fundamental is like, we need to get moving on this now.
And if you're looking at the political systems we currently have,
I cannot see a way by which a UK or even a US or any politician stands up and like advocates as this is their core policy choice,
or that actually people vote for them.
I mean, at the next election, like neither Ashish Tendulkar, Keir Starmer are going to promote this as a key policy choice.
So then you're talking about, okay, then who's wasting 4 or 5 years?
Um, again, I mean, given them 4 or 5 years I think is very, very unlikely that politician will stand up and advocate for that.
And then also to get votes for that and voted into to politics.
You would need to see this shift in like every country in the world.
And I think when the timescales that we're talking about, I cannot fundamentally see that shift.
I think there are other ways by which you can tackle what you might think of as excess consumption,
but I think framing it around degrowth, I just don't think will get political support, I'm afraid.
And just hijacking the question because my background is in population biology, the news about human populations is just extraordinarily good news.
You bring people out of poverty, you educate their children, you provide access to reproductive healthcare, and natural fecundity drops.
We've already gone through peak children. At the moment, the only reason to populate the global well, not the only reason.
The major reason global populations are increasing at the moment that people are living longer, which is a good thing.
So all the things we have to worry about then, um, population growth is, number one, the demographic transition in rich countries.
As more people get old, there's some real challenges there, but that is a temporary one.
Uh, hi. Uh, so I guess so. I guess my question is, what do you do when data isn't enough?
So you kind of speak, I guess, like, you know, we just need to show people this information and they'll make the right decisions.
But I don't think that's always the case. So, like, for people who make models or scientists or whatever, and they show it to,
you know, policymakers, and that's just not enough to convince them. What would what would you say is the solution there?
No, I agree, I agree. I think, um, I often get the question, uh, or the pushback that, you know, we'll just never make decisions based on data.
I don't I don't think that's true. I mean, we all make decisions based on data every day, but I agree that often the data, uh,
you know, just just presenting the data to people is just often not enough to change our mind.
I think narrative is important.
I think having having a narrative shaped around data is fundamental to like, get more of a personal connection of like,
what does that what does that showing that data actually mean for someone in their life?
Like just saying energy costs. Oh, okay. What does that actually mean for consumer electricity?
So making that link between the data and what it fundamentally means for, for people in their lives, I think is, is really crucial.
Um, I think the, I think I think as this links to narrative over time, I think the data then starts to, to reinforce.
I think once you see the data start to play out in actual real life metrics,
I think actually makes it much, much easier to continue to communicate through data.
So one energy cost, for example, was easy to just say, yeah,
the energy costs have fallen until it actually translates into what people can see on like macroeconomic data.
I think that's harder. Running does start to get easier over time as it filters for it.
Thank you. Question. They're halfway done. I thank you for the conversation, Hannah.
I completely agree with you that these problems are solvable and that there's lots we can and need to do.
At the same time, I check that I will take data and carbon emissions this morning.
In the most recent year you've got 2022 is the highest carbon emissions in history.
In the last few years have plateaued a little bit. So given your books could not the end of the world, what kind of year time frame?
If you had to take the fibre from under the mattress, do you think we will have halved emissions?
And when do you think we'll have reached net zero? Yeah.
Um, so yeah. So like, we, um, I think where we are on carbon emissions is that I think we are approaching a peak.
So if you look at carbon emissions over time, they grew really strongly in the 1990s, really strongly in 2000.
Um, over the last five or so years or maybe five, ten years, they've kind of they're going up a little bit, mostly plateaued.
And I think fundamentally, if you look at any of the projections from IEA or other similar organisations,
the expectation that the peak will come in the next few years. I think the the big question mark is how fast the decline is.
I mean, peaking is not what we're going for. We need to go for a very, very fast decline.
Um, I can't give a specific date on when I think we'll have some emissions.
I mean, what we will not have emissions to be, you know, in line with 1.5.
I mean, I think for me, fundamentally, 1.5 degrees will be off the table.
I think two degrees is still in play. I think two degrees for me is like the ambitious like this will be really ambitious, but is as possible, um,
I think on on net zero, I think the, the question mark will be over the net, but, um, we won't be zero emissions in 2050.
Um, we could be a net zero emissions around that 2015 to 2060 mark.
I think what we need to think about on that very clearly is,
is how net zero globally translates into net zero across different countries and different responsibilities.
And we're going for net zero globally. Uh, rich countries should get net zero well before 2050.
And the current plans are not in line with that.
So I think that would be my fundamental criticism of rich countries, is that net zero globally 2015 needs to be net zero rich countries 2040 2045.
And Mitchell, could we go for all a question from online.
Yep. So a few different people online asking about climate justice.
Um and how we can help the country's most directly affected by climate change and amplify their voices and their possible solutions.
Yeah. I think that's, uh, like, really key is like one to highlight the large inequality in the problem,
not just on who is responsible for it and who has the the most leverage to tackle it,
but also how the, the inequalities in the the impacts of climate change.
I mean, I get this question. A lot of um, the UK only, um, that's 1% of the world's emissions.
Like, why should we really care like what we do? It doesn't make a difference.
I think one does fundamentally make a difference.
But I think this is, uh, an argument that extends to most rich countries in the world.
So I know for me, the rule is not just to get their domestic emissions low or as close to zero as possible.
I think what's really fundamental is that if they want middle and low income countries to also move to clean energy and do that in a much faster way,
their role is to massively bring down the cost of these energy technologies.
So middle and lower income countries are not faced with the dilemma.
Do I left people out of energy poverty or do I keep my CO2 emissions low?
What they what should be fundamental there is that the low carbon option is just the most cheap, the cheapest option anyway.
Therefore they go for that and there's no one here on trade off.
So I think that's a big part of the climate justice story is is primarily also through rich
countries drive in innovation in these technologies such that other countries can benefit.
And then there's the very obvious, you know, more direct transfer of how do you support, um, lower income countries who are facing these impacts?
I think one is a kind of reactionary approach, more like loss and damage of providing funding when disaster does strike.
But I think there's even stuff that's this less seen as is this kind of option,
but is more related to agricultural productivity, like a key role that the richer countries can play,
as in the development of more resilient agricultural systems, but doesn't just benefit, you know,
in a world of a changing climate, is just fundamentally good and beneficial to do anyway, right?
Oh, we're running out of time. So I'm going to take three questions.
Could they be very short please. And if you take one from the back, one from the middle and one from the front, the very short please.
Yeah. You've been talking about electrification as, uh, your reason for being optimistic,
but I applaud all the countries that rely heavily on coal to produce electricity.
So coal as an issue, if you come to the middle, Hanna hands up.
Who wants to ask a question from the middle? Um, so I don't know.
Um, you put a lot of emphasis on kind of having, um, improved crop yields, um, which is a large result of genetic modification and plants.
Um, but many countries, such as sub-Saharan African countries, have bans against GM crops.
So how do you believe that we get around that? Um, rich countries can't really contribute to that as much.
Uh, so GM, although all the gains so far have largely not been GM.
So GM has something in the future. I'm very much like your perspective on virtually everything in your opinion.
One thing I liked was when you talked about the human health effects, the air pollution here today.
You didn't give any numbers to it.
But in your book you do, and you cite the numbers, you know, from Global Burden of Disease and various other sources.
I think these numbers may be wrong, the wrong order of magnitude, really massively wrong and massively exaggerated.
The human health effects of air pollution may be much less than you say numerically in your book.
And of course, this is completely relevant to the question of climate change.
Is is talking about does the human health okay, so add pollution have to you those numbers come from and could could can be considered in please.
So coal GM and air pollution data.
So on air pollution I mean I there know like a really broad range of estimates for for what we would classify as premature deaths from,
from air pollution. I don't just rely on the global burden of disease.
I know a range of studies and the old tend to be in the millions.
Right. So the the median estimate from the W.H.O. is 7 million.
I can range from a few million to to name list these things of the.
Okay. I think this is a discussion for over a a soft drink outside GM cool.
Yeah. On on on on on uh gems as as Charles said like a lot of the, the the new gap we currently have,
if you look at some scenario for example, is not actually based on GM, that's just based on on traditional crops.
You can argue that GM would increase that and you couldn't push that yield even higher.
Um, I think there's still massive gains even if you don't take GM into account.
Um, and then on the the coal and electricity. Yeah.
I think countries will just move away from coal, from electricity. I think if you're even if you compare.
So if you're thinking about electric related transport moving from electric car, uh,
petrol diesel car to an electric car, even if it's running on coal, it's still better on carbon.
It's obviously much less beneficial than if you're using solar or wind.
But even just fundamentally using coal, uh, as carbon beneficial.
And I think the differential there will just increase over time because countries will then start to decarbonise electricity as well.
But obviously the fundamental is like you don't just do electrification and leave a carbon, uh, rich and just mix.
You do both both at the same time. Okay. That's pretty. I think we can do a final round of three.
So sorry. Thank you. So we'll do one from the I'll let you pick one from the back, one from the middle, one from the problem.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Uh, how do you define like how do you define rich countries and other countries,
like where do you draw the line between, uh, different sets of countries?
Okay, nice. Uh, chat with a beard there.
That's not a wrong thing to accuse you having.
Okay, so you talked about, uh, behaviour change in adaptation to, for example,
substitutes to meat, but when you were talking about agricultural productivity,
do the farmers also need to change behaviour because people talk about, uh,
sustainable ways of doing agriculture as opposed to the kind of intensification that you talk about, uh, especially coming from the Green Revolution.
And, Hannah, this one right in the front here. Hi.
Thank you. That's a fair amount of criticism of the manufacturing of electric vehicles, such as local environmental degradation from lithium mining.
How do you think this can be improved, both in terms of the solutions to the lithium mining and other problems,
and also in terms of the innovators regarding this. Thank you. Brilliant.
Three very concise question. So on the on the um, minerals electric mining story.
Yeah, there's lots of challenges there. There's lots of pushback there.
One is you know, do we have enough minerals is we do have enough minerals overall.
Um, there's issues of, uh, social issues like social justice issues and supply chains, environmental issues and supply chains.
Those are all really valid criticisms, but they're not unsolvable problems, right?
They're just problems. I think some of the kind of social justice issues, actually, I think we will, uh,
we are actually already tackling there's always this link between being cobalt and batteries and electric cars,
which cobalt was primarily mined in the DRC with really poor, uh, poor, uh, human, uh, working standards.
I think in the future, bosses will probably just not use cobalt.
We're already moving away from cobalt and batteries, and I think you actually will start to see the same story for lithium.
There are actually probably is a viable pathway for which we also no longer use lithium ion batteries.
But I think the question of how do we do this in a socially environmentally, um, no.
And segregating no non degrading way is really fundamental.
One of these questions, which I always think is really important for us to highlight,
is that if we are looking for an absolute perfect solution, there are none, right?
If you're looking for the solution that needs no minerals, that needs no land,
it has zero impacts whatsoever where we will just maintain the fossil fuel system that we currently have.
We're looking for solutions that are orders of magnitude better than fossil fuels.
And we have some. And there's still issues that we need to work out.
But I think we need to to pause before we, you know, take our solution completely off the table because it has some impact.
We just need to work on reducing that impact.
Farmer behaviour, farmer behaviour I mean I think fundamentally I think that's easier than individual consumer behaviour change.
But I think it's because I think often there must be incentives for all line operators and enough farmers interests to have high productivity,
to not use more fertiliser or more pesticides. And they need to know over apply water, but be able to access irrigation when they need it.
So I think fundamentally there, I think if you provide farmers with good information on how they can make the best decisions,
I actually think that that's much more compatible than consumer behaviour, where there's an incentives are not as strongly aligned.
And the last one I think was an easy one. The metrics, uh, how you define different countries in different income brackets.
Yeah. There are I'm just like typically using like world Bank income categories.
I mean there's obviously like a line there and or we some countries just below it and just above it.
So like a fundamental line doesn't make sense. But yeah, I'm just mainly talking about world Bank income groups okay.
We've run out of time. Um, next door we have some books to buy if you're interested, and also some soft drinks.
So do join us next door. Um, Hannah, this has been tremendous.
Thank you so much. Um, the the one thing I'll say about the book is, is intellectually really stimulating.
Uh, it's wonderfully written. You write like an angel. So, uh, it's an easy book to read.