Doomerism won’t fix the planet, but we can

I think many people today feel doomed about the state of the planet

They see climate change and they think these problems are insurmountable and we just won't be able to solve them

Now I've previously been in the same position, I just couldn't see how I'd possibly be able to tackle these problems

But actually by stepping back to look at the data and looking at how the world has changed over centuries

you can actually find examples of really big environmental problems that we've already solved

So it's not like humans aren't capable of solving problems. We are. And you can only see that when you switch off the news

and step back to look at the data. You can see that while we face really, really big and urgent problems

we are developing the solutions, and these challenges are solvable. My name is Hannah Ritchie

I'm a researcher at the University of Oxford, and I'm deputy editor of Our World in Data

The main driver of climate change today are human emissions of greenhouse gases

Now these come from a range of sources. I think there's four key areas that we need to target in order to solve climate change

Energy, transport, food and construction. So what's really key to transforming our energy system is that we need to move away from fossil fuels to low carbon sources of energy

such as solar, wind, hydropower, duothermal and nuclear. But many people are quite rightly concerned about the potential implications for land use by moving to renewables

They picture fields full and full of solar panels and all of our landscapes transformed into wind farms

But actually, when you run the numbers, they tell a slightly different story. When we look at how much solar we would need to meet demand for the world's electricity today

we could actually produce that on less than 1% of the world's land

For wind, you're probably talking 5%. But the direct impact of actually putting a wind turbine in the ground is very, very small

much, much less than 1% of the world's land. And you can actually use the land between wind turbines for uses such as farming

Now, if you wanted to spare as much of the world's land as possible, your best option would be nuclear

You could feasibly power the world on less than 0.1% of the world's land

Now, many people are concerned that we might not have enough lithium and copper

and a range of other minerals to decarbonise our electricity grids. But actually, when you look at the data, it's very clear that we do

I think what's also key to highlight there is that these numbers are never static

Our known reserves tend to increase over time, not decrease. I think the other concern that people have is the sheer environmental impact of all the stuff that we'll have to mine out of the earth

And we will need to mine a lot. We probably need to mine 10 to hundreds of millions of tonnes of different minerals to build all of the infrastructure that we need Now at first glance that sounds really alarming 10 to hundreds of millions of tons of different minerals to build all the infrastructure that we need Now at first glance that sounds really alarming 10 to hundreds of millions of tons

but contrast that with what we're currently doing with fossil fuels, where we're digging

out 15 billion tons every single year. What's really, really key about this transition

to low carbon sources of energy is that the alternatives to fossil fuels need to be cost

competitive. We will not make progress on this problem if solar, wind or nuclear are more expensive

than coal or gas. But there's some good news here. Solar and wind were among the most expensive

energy sources that we had. Over the last decade or so, we've seen really rapid reductions in their

costs, such that they're now cost competitive or even cheaper than coal or gas. That means that

making this transition is not just about economic gains in the long term when we factor in the

impacts of climate change. It's already cost competitive and economic to make this transition

today. So around a fifth of our CO2 emissions come from transport. Now most of that comes from

cars and trucks on the roads and the rest comes from rail, shipping and aviation

I think the most obvious way to reduce our transport emissions is just to drive less

to walk or to cycle or to use public transport. But I think we should also acknowledge that we won't be able to get rid of cars completely

But we can start to decarbonise cars as well. Now the question I always get is

is an electric vehicle actually better than a petrol or diesel car? And the answer is yes

So in the UK, for example, the electric car will initially have higher embedded emissions than a petrol or diesel car

That's because it does take more energy to produce the battery. But once you start driving the car, this very, very quickly pays off

After just two years of driving, the average driver will have paid off the carbon debt of manufacturing the car in the first place

and from then on you just get really rapid reductions in the CO2 emissions compared to a petrol or diesel car

such that over the lifetime of the car you're probably talking about a reduction of around half to two-thirds

compared to a petrol or diesel car. But what's really key about this is that your electric car will get cleaner and cleaner over time

That's because we will also be decarbonising our electricity systems as we move over the next decade

Now many people might think that this transition is impossible because we'll just keep seeing more and more and more petrol cars on the road

But actually the world has already passed the peak of global sales of petrol and diesel cars

They peaked in 2018 and they are now falling All of the growth in the car sector is now coming from electric vehicles

So around a quarter of our global emissions come from food and that comes from various sources One of the key ones is land use change We often imagine that our impact on land use in the world is very much about urban landscapes and roads and infrastructure

But this actually makes up less than 1% of the world's land use

In contrast, our biggest footprint in terms of land use is farming

We use almost half of the world's habitable land for farming. And here some of these key emissions are actually not carbon dioxide

but other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. So there are probably three key ways that we can reduce emissions from food

One is to make our food systems much more productive, to get much higher yields per hectare of land

I think the second key one there is dietary change. When you look at the carbon footprint of different foods

what we tend to see is that meat and dairy has a much higher carbon footprint than plant-based foods

I think the final one is just simply wasting less food. The problem with food waste is not necessarily the emissions when it goes to landfill

It's all of the emissions that's come from producing the food that then isn't going actually into people's mouths at the end of the chain

The final source of emissions is construction and manufacturing. There's a couple of components to where these emissions come from

one is just using energy to produce the stuff. And we know how to decarbonise that

But for some key materials, they're more direct emissions. Take the example of cement

So how we produce cement is that we take limestone, we turn it up at very, very high temperatures

but as a by-product, we also produce CO2. So what we really need to do is get rid of that CO2 by-product from this process

Now, a couple of key ways that we can reduce emissions from cement. One is actually to just use less cement

Now, it doesn't necessarily mean using less building materials, but we can use a lower grade or a lower composition of cement

in our final product that we then use to produce buildings. I think the second key one that we can do

is we can capture that carbon dioxide at the end of the process

We can then either actually put it back into the cement where it can potentially make it stronger

or we can capture it and store it safely underground so it doesn't escape into the atmosphere

The final way, which some companies are innovating on, is not using limestone as the source rock in the first place

They're experimenting with sources such as calcium silicate, which will give you the same cement, the same product that we need

Because there's no carbon in there, you won't get the CO2 at the end of the chain

So we have a couple of key solutions which might come online in the next decade

in order to decarbonize cement. Although we might be able to do this feasibly

from a technical perspective, what's really, really key is that we drive the cost down

such that there's no more expensive than what we already have. So these are four key areas that we need to target in order to solve climate change I like to frame myself as an urgent optimist

Now, this is different from a complacent optimist or a stupid optimist

which is someone that just assumes that the future will be better than it is today

No, it won't. It will only be better if we make it better. If you look at the evolution of human history

human progress was often very much in conflict with environmental impact. The more that humans progressed, the more the environment degraded

I think we're in this really unique position where I think these two things are no longer in conflict

because we have technologies that decouple our human well-being with our environmental impact

We have institutions that can put policies around this to drive this further

and we have more intelligent, educated humans than ever who are really, really serious about working on these problems

It's not inevitable that we do this, but I think it's important that we can see that there's an opportunity there

and it's really up for us to grab it and to make it happen. Hey, big thinkers

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