Our Chance to Build a Sustainable Future ft. Hannah Ritchie

[00:00:07] Hannah

If you look at a petrol car, for example, for every dollar of gasoline that you put in it, only around 20 cents actually goes towards turning the wheels. The other 80 cents is completely wasted as heat. You don’t get any benefit from that whatsoever. When you’re powering an electric car, it’s almost the opposite. So for every dollar of electricity you use, 80 cents go towards turning the wheels and only 20 cents are lost.

Now, what that means is that to travel the same distance in an electric car, you use three to four times less energy than you would in a petrol car. So these efficiency gains from electrification are really, really, really massive and I think is one of the reasons why I think this transition is just at this point inevitable. The timescale is always debatable, but I think inevitable because we are just moving towards a much better system.

[00:01:03] Intro

Imagine spending an hour with the world’s greatest traders. Imagine learning from their experiences, their successes and their failures. Imagine no more. Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged, the place where you can learn from the best hedge fund managers in the world so you can take your manager due diligence or investment career to the next level.

Before we begin today’s conversation, remember to keep two things in mind. All the discussion we will have about investment performance is about the past, and past performance does not guarantee or even infer anything about future performance. Also understand that there’s a significant risk of financial loss with all investment strategies, and you need to request and understand the specific risks from the investment manager about their products before you make investment decisions.

Here’s your host, veteran hedge fund manager, Niels Kaastrup-Larsen.

[00:01:59] Niels

For me, the best part of my podcasting journey has been the opportunity to speak to a huge range of extraordinary people from all around the world. In this series, I have invited one of them, namely, Kevin Coldiron, to host a series of in-depth conversations to help uncover and explain new ideas to make you a better investor.

In this series, Kevin will be speaking to authors of new books and research papers to better understand the global economy and the dynamics that shape it so that we can all successfully navigate the challenges within it. With that, please welcome Kevin Coldiron.

[00:02:35] Kevin

Thanks, Niels. Welcome, everybody. Our guest today is Dr. Hannah Ritchie. She’s a senior researcher in the program on global development at Oxford University, and Deputy Editor and Lead Researcher at Our World in Data, which is a wonderful online resource bringing together data on the world’s largest problems and making them accessible to all of us.

She also publishes an excellent Substack newsletter called Sustainability by Numbers, of which I am an enthusiastic subscriber, and she joins us today to discuss her new book called “Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet”. It’s a book that I think perfectly fits in with the ideas that we’re trying to profile on the show.

It’s data-driven. It gives a clear-eyed picture of the world as it is, and it gives us an optimistic way forward. So I’m really excited to have this conversation. Hannah, thanks so much for joining us and welcome to the show.

[00:03:35] Hannah

It’s lovely to be here.

[00:03:37] Kevin

So you believe that your generation has the opportunity to be the first in human history that meets the needs of everyone alive and leaves the environment in a better place. It’s not a guarantee, you’re clear about that you say, but it’s an opportunity and it’s a pretty exciting prospect. But you didn’t always feel that way.

In fact, it was only I think around a decade ago when you completed your degree where you said you found yourself in a state of profound pessimism, so much so that you actually began looking for jobs in other fields outside of environmental science. I was wondering if maybe you could just share with us the story of how you changed your mind about the prospects for building a sustainable future.

[00:04:24] Hannah

Yeah, of course. My background is environmental science. That’s what I studied at university. I studied environmental geoscience and I studied carbon management, which is basically entirely focused on climate change. And then I also did a PhD on food systems, environmental impacts of food. So, my background is very, very environment-heavy. And I think at the time when I was studying this stuff, everything just seemed to be getting worse and worse and worse, which is true.

When you look at most environmental metrics that we might follow, they have been getting worse and it seemed like turning the cover on that would be really, really impossible. I think what I was also doing at that time was watching the news a lot. I think I had this notion that to be a responsible, informed citizen, I had to be watching the news all the time.

I had to take on every single disaster that hit the headlines. And if I wasn’t doing that, then I wasn’t engaging properly with the problem and taking on other people’s pain. So I think there was this combination of all of the data seemed to be getting worse and all of the headlines were just hitting me over and over and over. So yeah, I kind of got left in this place where I felt completely helpless to turn things around.

I was left with the notion that I probably wouldn’t have a good future ahead of me and most young people wouldn’t really get to have the opportunities that our parents or grandparents had. I think the problem I had at the time is I was looking at these environmental metrics and I was also extrapolating them to more human well-being, human progress metrics.

So stuff like poverty levels or child mortality or life expectancy, hunger, even death from disasters, I was extrapolating that and assuming all of this stuff was getting worse as well, at least that was what appeared to be the case when you were just looking at news headlines. I think my perspective on that was completely turned upside down when I discovered the work of a guy called Hans Rosling.

He was a Swedish physician and then turned statistician. What he’d do was he gave these amazing TED talks and talks on big stages at Google or the World Bank where he would use data to show how the world has changed over the last 200 years or so. What you see when you look at the data is that many of our conceptions about how the world has changed or upside down.

So when you ask people whether global extreme poverty has risen or fallen, most people say it’s risen. Actually, when you look at the data, it’s fallen, and it’s fallen a lot. It’s the same with most human well-being metrics. We’ve made amazing progress over the last few centuries. Now, that progress has obviously been very unequal. It’s not like we are done with that. It’s not like we are in a position where we’re happy with where we are. But we have made significant progress.

Now, that left me in a weird position where many of the conceptions I had about the world I realized were completely wrong, especially in the human well-being metrics. Now, all of the environmental metrics are still getting worse. I don’t think Hans Rosling’s work really changed my opinion on that. But it did show me that when we think about sustainability, we have had this step up of the skills. It’s not that just everything has gone in the wrong direction where we’re incapable of solving problems.

So we’ve had this balance where our ancestors might have had a low environmental impact in the past, which is good, but the human well-being metrics were probably pretty poor. What we’ve seen over the last few centuries is that balance stepping in the opposite direction. So we’ve made amazing progress on human well-being, but it came at the cost of the environment.

The proposal I put forward in the book is that we have the opportunity to be the first generation where I think we can do both of these things at the same time.

[00:08:08] Kevin

After you saw his work and you started potentially changing your mind, how did that lead you to where you are now in terms of your current day job?

[00:08:22] Hannah

I think a couple of things changed. I think, one, he fundamentally changed my mindset. Not from I was really pessimistic and I was just thinking everything’s amazing, because that was also not what Hans Rosling was trying to show. But more from a mindset of all of these problems are getting worse and there’s nothing we can do about them more into a problem-solving mindset.

These are massive problems that we’re facing, but we are capable of solving problems. How can I contribute to the solutions? I think he also fundamentally changed my career trajectory or what I thought would be a useful contribution to the world, where I probably saw myself as one, either leaving environmental scientists behind completely, or going down a very narrow academic route.

What I’ve done instead is to join the work Our World in Data where we basically take this approach and look at the big picture through data to understand these problems and how to solve them. So I think he had a profound impact on me on a personal level of just how I view the world and my contribution, but also my mindset around career trajectory and where I can add value.

[00:09:31] Kevin

At Our World in Data, your job is to study what we already know or what we could know if we looked at the data properly. How do you describe yourself? Do you describe yourself as a data scientist or as someone who’s a translator of scientific work to the rest of us? When people ask you at a cocktail party what’s your job title or what you do, what do you say?

[00:10:01] Hannah

I kind of squirm and try to avoid the question. It’s actually quite hard to describe my job. I usually either see an environmental scientist or a data scientist. Actually, I think data scientist is more apt now because I do broader research than just environmental metrics. But yeah, I would fundamentally see myself as a data scientist but in a way that I also translate that data into a language that other people can understand.

At Our World in Data, we’re a very diverse team with different skill sets. Some of us are more on the academic side. So I’m partly based at the University of Oxford. We’re kind of misfits in that environment because we don’t really do original research like most researchers do. We do this translation role where we try to bridge the gap between research and the general public, policymakers, journalists.

So we rely on the amazing work that other researchers do and we basically just try to translate it and make it more accessible so that it can get out there into the world so that people can use it to actually drive change.

[00:11:10] Kevin

Let’s talk about some of those. I don’t know if maybe misperceptions is the right word, or just trends that are different than what we might expect. We had a guy called Larry Siegel on our show about a year and a half ago. He wrote a book called “Fewer, Richer, Greener”.

In that book, he talks about the trend that as countries go richer, they get greener. They get better at managing their environment. Emissions per person begin to fall. Total emissions keep going for a while because population grows, economies grow. But ultimately, even total emissions start falling too.

You talk about that trend in your book as well, but you also provide some data that really was striking to me. It seemed to show that developing countries are becoming greener faster now. I’m not sure if you agree with that or not. But I’m particularly thinking about the graph you had on coal emissions per person in China and India, and it was striking to me how rapidly that’s declining.

I was wondering if you could describe what’s happening there just as an entree into basically how global emissions have developed.

[00:12:30] Hannah

Yeah. If you look over history, the biggest industrial producers have been rich countries. So the UK or the US, for example, if you plot over time our CO2 emissions or even just coal emissions per person over time, 50 or so years ago, they were really, really high. And when you compare them to the emissions that you’d see per person in China or India, today, they’re way, way higher. You’re talking like, double, triple, quadruple, the level that these emissions are today.

Now, in rich countries, we have gone through this whole trajectory where our emissions increased very steeply, we reached this peak, and now we’re on the downward and we’re actually on the downward quite quickly. At lower levels of income, there are varying trends. Some countries are still growing very strongly, but many middle-income countries are kind of reaching this peak.

China is a good example where coal emissions per person could be peaking right now at a much, much lower level than the UK or the US did. Now, that’s good news. Basically, what that means is that we are able to develop economies in a much cleaner and low carbon way than we were in the past. If every country was going to go through the same trajectory that the UK or the US did, tackling climate change would be impossible. We just wouldn’t be able to do it.

What we are seeing is this development through technological change and through knowledge transfer that countries farther down the income distribution will be able to go through that whole pathway much faster in a much cleaner way than rich countries did.

[00:14:10] Kevin

I was preparing for this interview, and I came across a couple of recent articles in the FT. One said that China’s energy capacity from renewables is now over 50%. In other words, its installed capacity of renewables could produce potentially more than half its power and they’re saying it’s possible they could reach peak emissions before 2030, which was kind of striking to me given what the narrative had been about, well, we don’t really need to do anything or we can’t do anything about climate change because China is just burning a lot of coal and that’s all that matters. That really seems to be changing.

[00:14:52] Hannah

Yeah, and it’s changing very, very quickly. You’re right. I think the narrative often in climate circles as we shouldn’t really do anything because China, it’s all about China and it’s burning so much cool that what we do is completely insignificant. It’s true that China is burning a lot of coal and is the world’s largest emitter, but it is by far moving the quickest on clean energy.

The pace by which it’s installing solar and wind is just staggering. Last year, it installed enough solar and wind to power the entire UK or France, and that’s just one year of installations. Last year, the amount of solar installed was more than the US has built in its entire history. It’s also moving really, really quickly on electric vehicles. Nearly 40% of new cars in China are electric. So it’s moving really, really fast on these sectors.

I think a key reason for that is not just about climate. I think China also just sees that there’s massive other benefits to this transition: economic opportunities, employment opportunities, energy security. All of these are adding up to really shift many countries in that direction. I think in many ways, China is taking the lead on that even though they have a pretty bad reputation in the climate space.

[00:16:15] Kevin

Yeah. It’s fascinating. As I was reading about that and just listening to you now, the thing that popped into my mind is, okay, solar, wind, they’re obviously great in terms of sustainability, but of course, they have this intermittency problem. What is China doing to manage that intermittency? Is it just we’re going to burn coal to provide electricity when solar and wind aren’t generating? Or are they investing in say nuclear power to help with that?

[00:16:53] Hannah

I think a little bit of a mix of all of the above. China is also really one of the few countries that’s still building nuclear at quite a large scale. Nuclear power has fallen out of favor in many countries and we’re not really building at any rate. China still is. It’s still building nuclear power quite quickly. It has other things.

It has quite a lot of hydropower, which is also good for balancing out the variability of solar and wind. It will also be a combination of high-voltage grid systems. That basically allows you to transport electricity quite efficiently from one side of the country to the other. That might be an option in Europe, for example, where you could have this European-wide high voltage grid where you basically transfer electricity at different times in order to balance out some of the intermittency of solar and wind.

One other additional point is that batteries are also really rapidly falling in cost. Actually, China is driving quite a lot of that decline in costs. So that will be another part of the equation on much shorter timescales. You can’t really use batteries over weeks or months, but you can use it over hours.

I think the final thing which is an interesting question on where China will go in terms of coal power is that it’s still true that China is building coal plants. I think when people hear that China is still building coal plants, they automatically think, of course, that must mean that they’re burning lots more coal, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into burning more coal.

What they’re basically doing is using coal power as these peaker plants. So they only really turn on when there’s very, very high demand and they basically want to provide energy security. But there will be very long periods of time where these plants will be running at very low capacity or really not on at all.

China has signed a bunch of purchase agreements with coal plants where they will actually start to be paid to be not turned on. And there are some projections that by the end of the decade, some of these plants will make more money from not running than they actually will from running.

In the UK or other parts of Europe, for example, we’ll often use gas as the peak power. I think China is now going down the route of using coal instead.

[00:19:24] Kevin

Let’s talk about that. I just want to circle back to nuclear power. Where do you see that playing a role in our long-term sustainability future?

[00:19:39] Hannah

Nuclear power always tends to be quite a controversial topic. It seems to be either you’re really obsessed with it or you hate it.

[00:19:46] Kevin

I should let you know that I grew up a few miles from the cooling towers at Three Mile Island. So I have a particular personal experience with that.

[00:19:57] Hannah

Yeah, so it is really controversial. I think the big barrier there for the public is safety concerns. Actually, when you look at the history of deaths from nuclear disasters and compare death rates to other sources of energy, nuclear energy is actually quite safe and has very low death rates.

I think the key comparison there is that you’re looking at from fossil fuels, millions of premature deaths every single year from local air pollution. And obviously, the long-term impacts of climate change will ultimately also cost life. So when you’re comparing nuclear to fossil fuels, it’s kind of a no-brainer even in terms of safety. It’s just that when we’re thinking about fossil fuels and disasters there, we don’t see the visible.

Three Mile Island or Chernobyl or Fukushima, they will have killed far, far fewer than fossil fuels, but it’s much more visible to us. But I think in terms of where nuclear power is going, I think there are a couple of key constraints. I think the big one for many countries is costs. In Asia, for example, so China or South Korea, they can actually build nuclear plants quite quickly without massive overruns, and quite economically.

We seem to be quite incapable of doing that now across Europe and North America. So where I see nuclear going in these environments is probably quite a low share of the power grid. But I think it could play a crucial role, even as quite a small part of it. I think it could play quite a crucial role as this stabilizer and base load to balance out some of the variable renewables that I think will dominate our energy systems over the next few decades.

If you were to run models of like a lowest cost model of by 2050, what’s the lowest cost grid we can build, often there will be some nuclear in there. It may not be massive, but there is some nuclear in there as a kind of balancing out to get that final 10% or 15% of stability that you might lack with just solar or wind.

[00:22:08] Kevin

Given that we’ve still got that resistance to nuclear power, and as you say, we don’t seem to be able to build it in as a cost-effective way as China or other Asian countries, where does natural gas fit into the sustainability framework in your mind? It’s far cleaner than coal and oil. Do you see it as a good bridge to get us from, I don’t know, dirtier fossil fuels toward where we ultimately want to be?

[00:22:39] Hannah

I think in rich countries, that has already been playing a role as this bridge. If you look at the UK, for example, the transition we’ve had is that most of our power used to be run on coal. We then switched largely to gas, and then we’re now switching from gas to renewables. So it has already played that bridge role. I think from a climate perspective, that has probably been positive.

The idea would be you just go straight from coal to renewables. But I think if you went back 10 or 15 years, renewables were really expensive. So I think it has been a relatively effective bridge there. I think the key point there is that time as a bridge is now up, and we need to shift much faster away from it. The risk always with gas as a bridge is that it basically remains in the system for far too long and it kind of becomes a crux.

So it becomes a permanent feature rather than a bridge where we quickly move to more low-carbon sources of energy. But yeah, generally, if you’re moving from coal to gas, the climate impacts and the local air pollution impacts are generally positive.

[00:23:48] Kevin

I think it’s fair to characterize your general prescription as electrify everything if you can, cars, industry, heating, and then build as much nuclear and renewable power as you can to power them. If that’s right, what’s your take on the prospect for electric vehicles to solve that problem? You talk about emissions from transport. Just less than half comes from cars, motorcycles, and buses, and then another 30% from trucks. So we’re sort of looking at 75-80% of transport emissions coming from those sources.

Can we get to a point where that’s pretty much all coming from electric vehicles in your mind?

[00:24:40] Hannah

Yeah, I think this electrification process is really crucial. I think your summary of my position is correct. Basically, it’s electrify as much as we can and then find alternatives to the remaining factor. I think there are two key reasons for that. One is that we know how to decarbonize electricity. So if you electrify transport, we have a solution by which we can decarbonize our electricity systems. So that’s one key one.

And then the other massive benefit to electrification is that you get these massive efficiency gains such that when you switch from a petrol or diesel car, for example, to an electric car, or a gas boiler to an electric heat pump, you get massive efficiency gains. Basically, what that means is that to travel the same distance in your car or to get the same heat from a heat pump, you need much, much less energy.

So overall, we’re going to actually reduce our energy demand rather than increase it. When it comes to electrification of transport, yeah, I think the move to electric cars is at this point almost inevitable. I think the cost of these technologies is falling quite quickly and I think will continue to fall largely because of just massive improvements in battery technologies, both in terms of cost, but also range and functionality. That’s improved massively.

As you say, the gains there in efficiency are really pretty massive. If you look at a petrol car, for example, for every dollar of gasoline that you put in it, only around 20 cents actually goes towards turning the wheels. The other 80 cents is completely wasted as heat. You don’t get any benefit from that whatsoever. When you’re powering an electric car is almost the opposite. So for every dollar of electricity you use, 80 cents go towards turning the wheels and only 20 cents are lost.

Now, what that means is that to travel the same distance in an electric car, you use three to four times less energy than you would in a petrol car. So these efficiency gains from electrification are really, really, really massive and I think is one of the reasons why I think this transition is just at this point inevitable. The timescale is always debatable, but I think inevitable because we are just moving towards a much better system.

[00:27:09] Kevin

How do you respond to some of the criticism of electric vehicles? If you look at the full emissions generated in mining the materials for batteries, putting the batteries together, shipping in the cars because they’re heavier, even the extra damage to roads because electric vehicles are heavier, these are all- what I liked about your book is that it takes a very broad perspective on a lot of problems. How do you think about that?

[00:27:39] Hannah

I often get the question of the carbon footprint of an electric vehicle versus a gasoline car because people know quite rightly that producing the electric car, producing the battery and producing the body of the electric car actually, at this point, emits more than it does to produce a gasoline car. So if you were to produce an electric car versus a gasoline car and not drive it at all, then yes, your electric car would be worse.

But what’s key then is that once you start driving the car, it really doesn’t take that long before your carbon benefits pay off. Basically, the electric car pays off its carbon debts pretty quickly. It partly depends on how often and how far you drive. But for the average in the UK, for example, it’s less than two years. So after two years, you will then be massively reducing carbon emissions compared to the gasoline car.

I think the really crucial factor there is that this equation will only improve over time. The emissions of your electric car after it’s been built depend on the emissions of your electricity grid. The UK or the US or most countries are going to move towards much lower carbon electricity.

So, actually, if you buy an electric car today, 5 or 10 years from now, it will actually be much cleaner than it is today because your country will reduce the carbon intensity of its electricity grid.

[00:29:09] Kevin

I appreciate that perspective. I’m a driver of electric cars and I have been for a long time. It’s interesting how as soon as someone brings up a criticism, you can kind of think of the counter-example we always hear about range anxiety. There is some, but I remember when I drove petrol cars, I had a lot of petrol station anxiety. Like when do I have to go in?

I get up in the morning, I’m driving to work and I find my daughter had the car the night before and drove it right down to empty. There’s a lot of things. Also, I don’t spend any time at petrol stations now. I get that part of my life back.

[00:29:49] Hannah

I think there’s lots of very valid questions and criticisms on many of these technologies and the transition overall. The key point there is there’s always a bit of truth to them. It is true that producing the battery in an electric car does use more energy and emit more carbon.

It is true that there will be fringe cases where range anxiety is a thing, but I think the role of data and what I try to do in my work is to put that into context so people can see that compared to what is an important question to ask. So when you’re looking at the carbon footprint of an electric car, okay, it’s not zero. But compared to a gasoline car, it’s much, much, much lower.

So I think that framing of the context within data is really, really important.

[00:30:44] Kevin

Let’s pick up on that theme and talk about another big area, which is the food system. You’ve got a really fascinating table I think toward the end of your chapter on climate change where you say, here’s the actual climate impact of various actions we could take, giving up SUVs or avoiding flights, recycling, things like that. Here’s the actual climate impact and then here’s the perceived climate impact from surveys.

To me, it seemed like the biggest gap between actual and perceived came in the impact of adopting a plant-based diet. It was, according to your data, the third most effective climate impact, yet it was perceived as being not that important by most people. So maybe you could explain a little bit more about why a plant-based diet is so climate-friendly. Why does it have such a big impact?

[00:31:46] Hannah

Yeah, I think that’s correct. I think when people think about climate and their carbon footprint, they automatically just think of energy. So they think of my car, my plane, they think of plastics like recycling, and they forget about food because it’s quite hard to link back how does food contribute to climate change. But actually, food systems emit around between a quarter and a third of our greenhouse gas emissions. So they do play quite a significant role.

We actually won’t tackle climate change unless we also tackle our food systems. Obviously, we need to move away from fossil fuels. But if we maintain the food system we have today, we actually wouldn’t be able to tackle climate change.

In terms of the carbon footprint of different food products, yeah, if you look at a graph of the carbon emissions, and you can do it by any metric, per kilogram, per gram of protein, per calorie, what you tend to find is that animal-based products or meat or dairy are really near the top. They have much higher emissions. And plant-based products tend to be much lower to the bottom. There are a couple of reasons for that.

One key one is that meat products in particular, like cattle raising, so for beef or dairy, tend to need a lot of land. That often means deforestation or habitat loss or creeping into other grasslands, which obviously has a climate cost if you’re cutting down forests, that emits carbon. The other big one there, especially for cattle, is that cattle have this process which we call enteric fermentation. So they basically burp out methane, and methane is a really powerful greenhouse gas. So that’s a big contributor to its carbon footprint.

I think the final point is that producing meat is just a really inefficient process. When you think about the amount of crops you need to feed animals to get a small amount of meat in return, it’s really, really big. And when you’re thinking about the carbon footprint of these products, you need to take into account all of the carbon footprint of the crops that they’re eating or other grains that they’re eating, and that’s a massive contributor to their total carbon footprint.

So yes, when you look at a ranking of foods by carbon footprint, meats tend to be at the top and plant-based products tend to be at the bottom.

[00:34:18] Kevin

Yeah. I really enjoyed that section. There were some, I don’t know what the right phrasing is here, maybe inconvenient truths in there in that you say hey, actually, when you look at the emissions say from beef, organic processes are actually much worse or worse. The reason is they take up a lot more land. A grass-fed cattle ranch is going to require more grazing area. How do people react when you tell them that?

You tell a nice story about going back to your old university when your old professor was talking about how she only ate locally raised lamb because that was more sustainable, and you kind of bit your tongue a little. I don’t think he said anything at the time. But that’s also not typically the case. Maybe just elaborate a little bit on why organic farming methods and locally raised meat isn’t really as sustainable as we might think.

[00:35:30] Hannah

On your question of how people react, the answer is not very well. A lot of people just don’t like this message, but it’s what the data tells us. On the local food point, I think, yeah, when you ask people what’s the best way to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet, they tend to say eat local, which I understand the rationale for.

We know that transporting stuff emits CO2. Transporting stuff by truck or plane or ship obviously emits CO2. Therefore, you’d assume the stuff that travels furthest to reach me obviously has the highest carbon footprint. I think what people get wrong there is that when we look at the breakdown of emissions from food systems, globally, transport only makes up around 5%.

Most of the emissions from our food come from land use change or using land or emissions on the farm. So that stuff like fertilizers, manure, the cows burping, tractors. Actually, the transport component for most products is actually pretty small. Now, what that means is that when you break down the emissions of say local lamb, they still have a higher carbon footprint than, I don’t know, your soy or avocados shipped in from South America.

So this just doesn’t stack up when you look at the data that local food is necessarily the best to reduce your carbon footprint. What I always say is that what you eat and how it’s produced matters much, much more than how far it’s traveled to reach you. The caveat to that is that that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat local food.

There are a bunch of reasons why someone would want to eat local, whether it’s supporting local farmers or they want to see the animal welfare standards that they’re buying meat from. But it’s just to say if you’re doing it entirely on the basis of carbon footprint, it’s not necessarily the case that you’re doing the most optimal thing to achieve that.

On organic farming, again, it’s a little bit of a mixed picture where if you look at the environmental impact of organic versus more conventional agriculture, there’s often no clear winner, or sometimes organic comes out worse. So on land use, for example, organic tends to come out worse because you tend to get lower yields, which means you need to use more land to produce the same amount of food. That’s bad for carbon, that’s bad for world habitats, that’s bad for deforestation.

So the notion that organic is necessarily best for the environment just doesn’t stack up again when you look at the data.

[00:38:11] Kevin

There was another inconvenient truth that I sort of learned reading your book which had to do with indoor farming. Indoor farming, sometimes called vertical farming, that’s basically growing food indoors often in urban warehouses using LED lights. You basically add nutrients to the water instead of soil. That sounds exceptionally promising.

The yields, as far as I understand, can be quite a bit higher, require less land, and the food is grown close to where it’s consumed. So it seems, on the face of it, to be something that could contribute to sustainability, but you’re pretty skeptical of that. Why is that?

[00:38:53] Hannah

Yeah, I’m pretty skeptical. There are massive benefits potentially if you could get this to work. You would massively reduce fertilizer use. You would obviously massively reduce land use. You would also develop a food system which is much, much less vulnerable to climate impacts and weather shocks.

Producing food outdoors is just really bad in a changing climate, which is what we’re going to face. So it may also make our food system just much, much more resilient. The reason I’m skeptical about this especially on shorter timescales is, one, the variety of the crops that you can produce. This has only really proven to be effective say for leafy greens or vegetables.

The reason for that is that you can get a reasonable premium for those products on the market. So you can just about get the economics of those products to work. Although I should say that a number of companies have gone bust recently trying to do this. The reason for that was that there was basically a spike in energy costs.

With indoor farming, you’re basically substituting land for energy. That means that your indoor farming system is really vulnerable to the cost of energy. If the energy cost spikes, then a lot of products are just not feasible. The economics currently just really, really don’t work for the crops where we get most of our calories from, so cereals, pulses, grains. The economics of those products just really don’t work at the moment.

So I’m pretty skeptical about indoor farming over the timescale of the next 10, 20 years. If we can get to a stage where we can produce really abundant energy, really low carbon and really, really cheaply, then yeah, vertical farming could be a really promising solution. But I don’t see it being a big part of our food system in the next decade, for example.

[00:40:50] Kevin

Got it. Yeah, I guess if we’re in a situation where we can produce low-carbon energy in abundance at low cost, not that we wouldn’t need indoor farming, but we’ve already gone a long way just solving the issues anyway. Let’s talk about one more area that I think people stress a lot about, that you address in a really interesting way, which is plastic and plastic waste.

You make the point that there are actually some significant environmental upsides to plastic. So I’m wondering if maybe you could just outline those first just so we’re all aware that there are benefits there.

[00:41:31] Hannah

The world produces so much plastic, which many people see as a negative, and sometimes it is a negative. I think it’s important to acknowledge the reason we produce so much plastic is because it’s actually just a really amazing material. It’s really versatile, it’s really sanitary, it’s really cheap, it’s really flexible.

That’s exactly why we use so much of it, because it’s just so beneficial in so many different environments. Even if you look at the medical industry, how would you be able to run a sterile medical environment without plastic? How would we have dealt with the COVID pandemic without plastic for our vaccines or plastic masks?

So I think plastic does play a really pivotal role in most industries today. I think it does have various environmental benefits. We always see the plastic packaging around our foods. Although in many senses that’s overdone, and I’m sure we could massively cut down the amount of plastic that we use, it is there for a reason. It tends to preserve shelf life. It protects your food from diseases or pests and makes it more safe.

If you didn’t have that plastic there, you could argue that we actually would have higher levels of food waste than we currently do, and that would obviously have a much bigger environmental cost than just the plastic itself. So I think there’s a balance there. I think we can cut back on plastics. I think we do overuse them. But I think we also fail to acknowledge that sometimes the plastic is useful and it’s actually there for a reason.

[00:43:11] Kevin

Yeah, you talk about that, reducing food waste and then that cuts back on CO2 emissions because less food has to be produced. You also talk about usage and transport. It’s a very light material. If we didn’t have it, then we’d be transporting things in heavier containers, which also uses more CO2. So from your perspective, I think the real issue is how we handle plastic waste, in particular, how we stop it from getting in the ocean, getting in the water systems.

You talk about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch not too far off the coast from where I live in California. That’s basically an area three times the size of France where discarded plastic has just accumulated in this giant patch in the ocean. But you’re actually I think fairly optimistic that we can deal with the problem of plastic waste getting into our water systems. Why is that, if I’ve characterized it correctly?

[00:44:15] Hannah

Yeah, that’s correct. To me, there are two problems with plastic. There’s the overarching question of microplastics and what are the impacts of microplastics on human health. We’ve all seen so many stories now about how many particles are in our water bottles. We know that microplastics are just everywhere. I think the really open question is, what if any impact does that have on human health?

I think that’s a really important but totally wide-open question. If we’re looking for solutions on how we stop plastic completely, so we don’t have microplastics, I don’t have the answer to that. I don’t know how to do that. But the question of plastics leaking into the rivers and leaking into the ocean is a much more tractable problem. I actually think this is a problem we could solve with a global scale, relatively minor investment of money into waste management.

When you look at the breakdown of where plastics and rivers and the ocean come from, it’s not necessarily about how much plastic we use. It’s about how it’s managed at the end of the chain. If your plastic is going into a sealed landfill or going to recycling or going to incineration, it’s not ending up in the ocean.

The issue is that many countries don’t have sufficient waste management infrastructure to handle all of the waste that’s being generated. So plastic waste leaking into rivers and the ocean tends to be highest in middle to low-income countries where people are rich enough to use more and more plastic but the waste management infrastructure is not there to tackle it. Now, that’s a very tractable problem.

We know that if we just built landfills there or built recycling systems or incineration systems, that problem would essentially be solved. It’s just the issue is that it’s not high enough on the priority list for countries to want to do that or want to do that in the very, very short term. There are a couple of flashier or more exciting projects than just building a landfill which show some promise.

There’s the Ocean Cleanup project, which was founded by Boyan Slat. Basically, they have to try to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We always talk about the plastics flowing into the ocean, but what they’re actually trying to do is take out the plastic that’s already there. I think they are making some progress on that. It’s not like a solved problem, but they are making some progress on that.

What they’re also doing is this other project which is more focused on stopping plastic going into the ocean in the first place. Now, the idea was that we would build really effective waste management systems and sealed landfills and recycling centers. But since that’s not very, very high on the agenda, basically, this team are building what they call interceptors.

So they basically build these technologies, machinery, at the mouth of rivers so they catch the plastic before it goes into the ocean. They’re specifically targeting these really high-density rivers where most of the plastics are flowing in, and they’re basically trying to catch it before it leaks into the ocean and it’s much harder to get out. So I think to me, this is a very, very tractable problem. It’s just really about our willingness to invest some money into solving it.

[00:47:41] Kevin

That’s really fascinating. One idea that I had is that we often hear that rich countries ship their plastic waste to developing countries, and now of course there’s been a big pushback from developing countries on that. But given what you’ve said of the richer countries have much more well-established and more efficient waste management systems, why not do the reverse?

Why not import plastic waste from poor countries into Western countries where the waste management system is better and can be handled? Couldn’t be like an economic business? I guess it wouldn’t be politically very popular, but is that possible?

[00:48:25] Hannah

I think the challenge there would be that from the country that the plastic waste is coming from, you would still need infrastructure there to gather the waste. So you would still need infrastructure there to gather the waste, transport it to a dock or wherever it’s going to come from, and then to transport it. So the incentives on the other side might not necessarily be there.

I think for me, from a rich country government perspective, in the UK, I criticize in the book, we make a massive deal out of policies like banning plastic straws which seem very visible and it looks like we’re doing a lot to tackle this problem, but it’s so insignificant and it’s doing almost nothing to solve this problem.

For me, the biggest thing there for rich countries would be, one, to stop the tiny amounts of plastic that we still have leaking into the ocean, to stop that. But first and foremost, one, don’t transport and export our waste to countries that don’t have waste management infrastructure, or just invest in waste management infrastructure in these countries. That would be much, much more impactful than these visible but meaningless programs to ban plastic straws.

[00:49:44] Kevin

Yeah, that’s a theme that comes through very clearly in your book of what matters and what doesn’t. I wanted maybe just in the last 10 minutes to ask a couple of personal questions if I could. I guess we all filter data through our own political or personal lens, right? I want certain things to happen, I want other things not to happen. So when I get data that confirms what I want, I kind of remember it. It’s salient to me. And then stuff that is uncomfortable, I downplay it.

I feel like that’s a challenge that we all face. But I imagine that’s particularly difficult for you because your job literally is to interpret data. I guess number one, do you do you feel that? And number two, if you do, how do you deal with it? I’m asking in part because a lot of our listeners are investors or come from the investment world, and I think the best investors see the world as it is not how they want it to be.

It seems like that’s what you have to do every day. So I’m kind of curious how you tackle that problem.

[00:50:59] Hannah

Yeah. I think it’s a difficult problem. As you say, we do go looking for stuff that confirms our biases and stuff that pushes us in a direction that we want to go. I wouldn’t say that I’m immune from that in any way. I obviously struggle with that. I think there are a couple of things that I try to do to keep me in check.

One thing that I think is a benefit in this role is just simply curiosity. Many of the big questions that I tackle in my work, or I tackle in the book, I think it’s less motivated by I want this outcome, let me go and find some papers that back my idea and back this up. I think it’s more driven by, there’s this really annoying question that’s bothering me because I don’t know the answer to it. Let me go out and find the answer.

And I’m going to accept the answer that I find. I’m not going to go looking specifically for the answer that I want to find. So I think this curiosity and being open to just finding whatever answer is out there rather than finding a specific outcome that you want is really important.

What’s also really important is just having good people around you, good, honest people that will give you constructive feedback. I think that’s really valuable about our team at Our World in Data. We all come from slightly different backgrounds. I think we’re unified around a mission. We want to understand the world’s largest problems and we want to inform people on how we can best tackle them. So we share that vision.

But I think we come from different backgrounds, and we have pretty different perspectives. There’s not really anyone else in the team necessarily that’s strictly from an environmental background. On the research team, for example, I work with economists and people in the health space. And they don’t necessarily come to this with the same biases from an environmental perspective that I do.

So getting really clear and honest feedback from them on where I might be pushing too far one way or I might not be completely honest with myself is really, really valuable. But I think in that scenario, you really need to trust those people’s opinions and perspectives and take them very, very seriously.

But no, I totally agree. It is just an issue and you do need to constantly try to keep yourself in check. A good idea is always to try and steel man your ideas. What would be the strongest criticism that anyone could come up with that would push against this article that I’m writing or this data that I’m presenting? I think that’s just essential to do that process over and over and over.

[00:53:39] Kevin

What are the annoying questions or what is the main annoying question that you’re trying to find the answer to right now?

[00:53:48] Hannah

I think one fundamental question that I’m thinking about a lot, and I think is really crucial for us in the energy transition, and I want it to be true but I’m just not sure if it is true, is you often hear (we discussed that a little bit earlier), it’s about the speed of the transition and the pathways of middle and lower-income countries compared to rich countries. You often hear this referred to as leapfrogging.

So there’s this concept that poorer countries, they can just skip all the bad stuff that rich countries had to go through and just leapfrog to this amazing new technology on the other side. People talk about the leapfrogging concept a lot, and I think we often imagine that it’s easy and it’s true. But there’s actually very few examples from history that you can look at where there’s just this really, really clear leapfrogging effect.

The only one when we have looked at the data that’s just super clear is landline phones. So low-income countries basically never really had a landline phone, they just skipped straight to mobile phones. Now, in the energy transition, I would love it to be true that lower-income countries just wouldn’t need fossil fuels. They could just jump straight from burning wood or charcoal straight to solar and wind, and there would just be absolutely no need for any fossil fuels.

I don’t know if that’s true. I think it will take some time for the data to play out for us to really understand what that transition looks like. I’m pretty convinced they will move through a development pathway in a much cleaner way than rich countries did, but I’m still a little bit skeptical of this complete, clean leapfrog that I would like to be true, but we just don’t really have any data to support.

[00:55:35] Kevin

Yeah, that’s fascinating. I kind of agree with you. I think it’s more likely that you just have an acceleration of the typical path, which seems like what we talked about earlier with China and India moving much quicker through the fossil fuel stage to renewable stage.

Well, listen, Hannah, thanks so much for joining us. It’s really been a fascinating conversation. I highly recommend the book. It’s called “Not the End of the World”. If you want to follow Hannah’s regular publication, her Substack is Sustainability by Numbers. So, Hannah, thanks again for joining us and we wish you all the best.

[00:56:19] Hannah

Thanks so much. I really enjoyed the chat.

[00:56:21] Kevin

Great. With that, I’m going to pass it back over to Niels.

[00:56:25] Niels

Thank you so much, Hannah and Kevin, for an absolutely fascinating look into how we may be able to achieve a more sustainable future, which is a nice and optimistic outlook to have.

What I love about the conversation is that Hannah started out with a completely opposite view of the future having a profound pessimistic outlook, but through data-driven work, has changed her mindset and view of the future of our planet.

I think the most surprising thing I got from the conversation was Hannah’s view on how much China is doing when it comes to the green technology despite still burning a lot of coal, which admittedly took me by surprise. So if this really is the case, then the title of her book “Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet” really is very fitting and should give us all hope despite all the negative news we get from mainstream media. Of course, only time will tell.

Make sure you go and follow Hannah’s and Kevin’s work as well as getting a copy of their books because as you can tell from today’s conversation, some of these ideas and topics may not be discussed enough on mainstream media. From Kevin and me, thank you so much for listening. We look forward to being back with you on the next episode. In the meantime, take care of yourself and take care of each other.

[00:57:51] Ending

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