Hannah Ritchie on replacing eco-anxiety with 'cautious optimism' and how to build a more sustainable world
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy
Channel 4 News
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2024
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The past year has been a time of climate firsts, mainly for the wrong reasons. 2023 was the hottest year on record - with devastating wildfires, catastrophic flooding, ongoing loss of biodiversity and carbon emissions continuing to rise. But is there any hope for the possibility for a better future?
Well, there is in fact room for ‘cautious optimism’ says environmental scientist, Dr Hannah Ritchie, whose book Not the End of the World offers a data-based analysis of environmental problems and their solutions. Her view stems from the significant strides made in human progress across the world, and the advancements of technology, especially within renewable energies.
Today on Ways to Change the World, she tells Krishnan Guru-Murthy how her work taught her that there are more reasons for hope than despair about the climate and the planet we live on - and why a truly sustainable world can still be within reach.
Produced by Silvia Maresca.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and this is the |
| 0:03.9 | welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Gerei Murphy and this is the |
| 0:07.2 | podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their |
| 0:10.9 | lives in the events that have helped shape them. |
| 0:13.4 | My guess this week is a data scientist. |
| 0:15.5 | Hannah Ritchie has written a book called Not The End of the World and that might give you |
| 0:19.9 | a clue as to what her arguments are about. She's basically telling us that we don't need to think |
| 0:25.8 | that we can't have children that the world is about to end, that climate change means we may not |
| 0:31.1 | have a future ourselves. Because if you look at the data over a long |
| 0:34.8 | period of time it tends to tell a different story and she's laid it out very clearly |
| 0:39.2 | over a number of topics in this book and is also now quite a common fixture on various TV and radio |
| 0:46.0 | programs articulating the same things. So Hannah, thank you very much for coming |
| 0:49.3 | in. How did this come about? Have you been sort of watching the arguments of |
| 0:55.6 | Extinction Rebellion and Gretchen and Gretchen and saying you are |
| 1:01.2 | unnecessarily worrying people? |
| 1:03.7 | No, not necessarily. |
| 1:05.0 | So my background is environmental science. |
| 1:07.6 | I feel like I've been a kid that grew up always with climate change. |
| 1:10.8 | Like I don't really remember a time when it wasn't really on my radar. |
| 1:14.8 | I think I've always been really anxious about climate change and then I went on to study environmental |
| 1:19.8 | science at university. I think I found myself in a place after my degree program |
| 1:25.0 | where I felt more helpless than ever. It felt like these problems were getting |
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