Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie - Review by Mark Cornelius
Hannah Ritchie is a data junkie. She is an academic at the University of Oxford. But she is also a researcher and deputy editor of the publication, “Our World in Data’. She uses data throughout the book to both confirm and confound widely held beliefs about sustainability. The book is subtitled “How we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet”. It is a very positive book.
She helpfully starts by defining her view of what sustainability actually means. She takes the United Nations as her guide. In 1987, the UN defined sustainable development as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations. In her mind, both of these aspects are important. She points out that another definition of sustainability focuses solely on the future: and that is to make sure what we’re doing today does not damage the environment for tomorrow. The book is nearly all about how we can stop doing damage to the environment. But she recognises that we cannot achieve that if we are going to impoverish people who are alive today. Her aim is to achieve a balance between supporting the present without doing too much damage to the future.
The book considers seven environmental problems that need fixing: air pollution; climate change; deforestation; food; biodiversity loss; ocean plastics; and overfishing. Ritchie makes the point that many of these problems are inter-related, if you start to solve one, then often you are also on the way to solving many others.
There is a lot of complexity in the book with many multi-faceted arguments. So I don’t want to trivialise what she says through over-simplification. But one thing keeps coming up throughout the book as a problem that needs to be solved. That relates to farming and what we eat. She does admit that changing what we eat is not going to solve climate change. But fixing our energy systems and ignoring food won’t get there either. If we continue eating as we are, food production would emit around 1,360 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases between 2020 and 2100. To have a good chance of meeting the world’s climate targets we can only emit 500 billion tonnes. And that is not just from food, that is from everything. One of the most effective things we can do, argues Ritchie, is eat less meat – especially beef. Not only does beef farming produce a lot of greenhouse gases, it also leads to the destruction of forests. Brazilian beef production alone is responsible for one quarter of global deforestation. Forests have been cleared either for grazing, or to grow crops to feed the cattle. If we cut out beef and lamb, but kept dairy cows, that would halve our need for global farmland. We would save 2 billion hectares, and could plant more trees to soak up more CO2. That is an area twice the size of the USA. If we were to cut out dairy too, that would save another 1 billion hectares. So substituting dairy with plant-based products would also be a good choice for the environment.
I like the way that Ritchie spends a lot of time in the book challenging the widely held beliefs of people who would consider themselves to be environmentalists or green. Many people believe that eating a diet that is mostly locally produced, including locally produced meat and dairy products, leads to lower greenhouse gas emissions than a vegetarian diet, where some of it has been imported from other countries. But Ritchie shows that it’s what you eat not where it comes from that is important for the environment. So a plant-based product from far away will always typically be better than locally produced meat or dairy. The transport part of the food chain only contributes around 5% of all the greenhouse emissions from food. Most of the emissions come from land-use change and emissions on the farm. According to Ritchie, organic foods may be less environmentally sound. They use more land because they tend to have lower yields. So they need more space to produce the same amount of food, and that is bad for the environment. Plastic packaging of food can be a good thing. It helps to protect food. With no packaging, we would end up with more food waste, which would be worse for the environment. Around one third of the world’s food goes to waste. And food waste in the supply chain is a major contributory factor. The issue is not the emissions that the rotting food produces. It is the impact of producing the wasted food in the first place. By contrast, the carbon footprint of the packaging is relatively tiny.
Many advocates of green policies argue that we should stop economic growth. Growing economies they maintain are not compatible with protecting the environment. This has never been an argument that I have found palatable. Ritchie argues that the ‘stop economic growth’ argument partly hinges on the idea that we can simply redistribute the world’s existing wealth from the rich to the poor to give everybody a good standard of living. To demonstrate why this would not work, she uses Denmark as a helpful benchmark. She says that in order for everybody in the world to have the same standard of living as Denmark, with no inequality anywhere, the world economy would need to be five times larger than it is today. The poverty line in Denmark is $30 a day. Even ensuring that everybody in the world received that amount would currently be beyond the global economy. To achieve that level of income across the world with no inequality would require total global income to be double its current size. The conclusion is that we need economic growth if we are going to end poverty. Moreover, Ritchie thinks we can achieve that, while reducing our environmental impact.
Ritchie is extremely critical of what she calls “Doomers”. They are people who recognise the problems the world faces, but who feel nothing can be done. She feels that they are a counterweight to progress, or perhaps worse, are pulling in the same direction as deniers. I applaud her positivity. But if there was one small criticism of the book, it’s perhaps that there are few concrete suggestions for policies that will lead to a sustainable world. Essentially. she demonstrates how the world has made enormous strides over many years. The technology or the ability to improve the technology further is there to achieve our sustainable ends. This at times feels a little complacent. To take one example, greenhouse gas emissions. She takes comfort from the fact that emissions per person have fallen, while some countries have continued to grow their economies while reducing their emissions. She recognises that emissions are still rising. But she fails to make the point that emissions don’t just have to fall, they have to go to zero, if the world is going to stop heating up. Positive emissions mean that there will be more CO2 in the atmosphere that will trap the sun’s heat. And these emissions have to fall pretty rapidly to limit the average temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius since the nineteenth century. That is going to require much more radical action than governments around the world seem ready to countenance. Ritchie’s book does not really convey that urgency or that lack of action by policymakers.
Nevertheless, it is a very enlightening book that can really help readers to discriminate between arguments and to plan ways to live their lives that are compatible with a sustainable future. I heartily recommend reading it.