The World Is Getting Better (Really)
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Variable APP for apple cards from twenty four percent to twenty nine percent based on credit rates as August first twenty twenty four apple card issued by golden sex bank U. S, A solid city branch terms them more apple card dot come. Here are three statements that are all true.

Statement number one, the world is awful. So one is pretty self explanatory, no need to dwell. Statement number two, the world is Better than I used to be. This one, in my experience, tends to generate push back that ranges from mild skepticism to ought hostility. And yet, along many dimensions, IT is clearly true.

You know, just in the past hue decades, the infant mortality rate around the world has fAllen by a lot, as has the share of people living in extreme poverty. Literacy rates are going up around the world. Lots of things are getting Better.

So that is statement number two. And then finally, statement number three, the world can be Better. The world can be Better than IT is now this one I find when I say that people will sort of go along with IT but without conviction, right?

Like maybe theoretically the world can be Better, but they don't really believe IT. And yet, as list item number two reminds us, the world is Better than I used to be. In many ways, it's true. The world really can get Better.

I'm just a gold stein, and this is what's your problem. My guess today is hanna rich. I hano is a data scientist and the deputy editor of our world in data, which is an amazing online publication home of many great graphs about the world.

And he is also the author of the relatively new book, not the end of the world, how we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet. The book uses that three part framework I just talked about. Things are bad.

Things are Better than they used to be. Things can be Better than they are now. And IT presents a fact based, non moralistic set of approaches to solving some of the world's big problems.

In our conversation, hanna and I wound up focusing on food, focusing on the way we eat, because the way we eat is really tied up with a lot of the big problems that hand a focuses on in the book, a deforestation, biodiversity laws and across climate change. But to start, I asked her about part two of her framework, that idea that the world is Better than I used to be. In particular, I was curious why he thinks that idea generates so much push back. It's interesting because when you say, when I say, in my experience, the world is much Better than I used to be, people don't believe me or they get mad, which is interesting. Has that been your experience at all?

Yeah, I think I mean, I think the key thing about these this framework is that you really need to be able to hold all feedings on your head at the same time. And I think naturally, this is very difficult for us to do. I think as soon as anyone says I have been positive or main automatically goes to the negative, right? So I see we've made amazing progress on reducing global hunger.

Your automatic reactions to go to will give up. There's still eight hundred million people that are hungry, which is also absolutely true, right? But there is this pool in us and is definitely had that reaction from from the book that there is this got reaction of wanting to counter IT with the kind of almost cynical or protective, uh, kind of blanket of what we shouldn't be complacent about this, because we still got a massive problem.

Sometimes that goes even farther than that. I mean, that is certainly true and more easy to understand, right? Because, as you say, one shouldn't be complacent. One shouldn't just live here, comfortable ly in the developed world and say, oh, everything's great but people don't even want to believe that things are good here relative to one hundred years ago, like, and that one is a little bit harder to understand. Like why do you think people don't believe that things are Better than they were one hundred years ago.

say i've been? In fact, one thing is that we just don't look at data, right? You can only see this through data, right? You're never gonna this in the news because the news covers what's happened in the last hour in the world.

So is an event, right? Is an event that can make a head? It's a natural disaster, it's a war, it's a murder, is really, really bad event. Which is why the one of the reasons why the news skills negative, where's a law of the progress we've made? You know there's no headline me really you can 嗯 because IT happens gradually day after day after day after day.

but it's not a headline story that globally, infant mortality has fAllen a huge amount in the last thirty years, even though in terms of human welfare. So one of the most important things that happened this century so far.

right yeah and thinking that's too for like most of our progress stories, they happen incremental over time. But when you add that up over decades, you just have less like profound change that happened in the world and I think because it's just out of out of peace with the news cycle, we just don't get IT right. We just don't see IT especially enriched ted in the world.

We often have this paton's zed in perception that the rest of the world has dignity or hasn't moved forward, right? So we think, okay, this things might be OK where I am, but I know countries in africa, countries in asia, they are just as poor and bad off as they were fifty years ago. But actually they are chair.

Mortality rates of fall and more get vicinity hungers down, a poverties down. So I think we have this perception that many counties in the world are stuck where there we are fifty years ago, and that's just not true. And it's because we often, again, don't see these stories and the news there.

Either our news and in the U. S. Or europe is very U. S. Or europe oriented. And the stuff we hear from other parts of the world, again, attend to be these negative stories.

So the book, the. Book does talk about a lot of stuff that's wrong, right? The book is certainly not Polly anish, I would say. But IT approaches IT with a sort of practical like let's figure out how to solve this framework and you step through most of the big things that seem terribly wrong, or many of the big things that seem terribly wrong, climate change, over fishing, deforestation.

Um Sarah, I want to talk at some length about one chapter in particular because as you say in the book, it's sort of a nexus a it's a subject that touches on all of these other subjects really and that is food in part I mean, you know obviously climate change is the other one that is sort of this grand thing. But food is very important and very good discussed in the context of climate change, right? So so let's talk about food at some length.

And let's start. Let's use that framework that that you use more generally with a the world is much Better than I used to be in many ways. The world is still bad in many ways, and the world can be Better. Let's apply that to food. So um how is food much Better than I used to be?

So when you look at IT for a human hunger lens, so today around just under ten percent of the world are so hungry, which means they just don't get enough calories to eat. So that's around eight hundred, nine .

people still .

very to go a century. You know, the share of the world that go hungry was very be higher than IT was.

Is there are there credible estimates for what IT was a hundred years ago?

The long term data on this is more shaky, i'd see. But you're you definitely talk him about a more well over a if not more people not .

to eat well, lover, a third as opposed to ten percent. So that is improvement. I mean, what if you go back if you go back two hundred years, what is the rough estimate of what percentage of people on earth are not getting enough to eat?

I mean, i'd see you probably even in higher still. I would see most of the improvements in food and agricultural productivity have came really in the last century, but in particular in the last fifty years. So thank you. You were to look at hunger a century ago or two centuries ago, or they'll be very, very high. And again, I see estimates are fuzzy, but you'd see at least well over a hard, if not over half of people weren't get in of ty as compared .

to today where it's something like ninety percent of people are getting enough food to eat. Ah so so I mean, obviously there are few key pictures in like getting more food per acre of land per unit of land, right uh nitrogen fertilizer and then the harbor bosh process, which weirdly we just talked about on the show for synthesizing nitro gen fertilizer and then there's this other moment, a later moment um that you talk about in the book which is basically one guy one of these amazing one guy changes the word stories at its Norman borrel gue e so tell me about Norman borrel gue.

So Norman borloo gue um was a kind of agriculture scientist. And he was basically recruiting initially to go to mexico to work out how mexicans could grow more food prior of land, so how to increase agriculture productivity or crop OS and mexico. And he came at this very genetic reading land or trying to work what combination of um a crop strings might be able to produce. And there was a very long processor, a lot of trial and error, right?

He just to be clear, right, what this is like, the six, this is not like, G, M, O. This is pregnant, right? This is just like old school indian crosses, farmer hybrid like that. Like the old school style. Yeah.

old school. A lots of trial and error, lots of try trying to crop not performing well, try another crop not performing well. And kind of forgot to the stage where he was kind of sent out on this machine and kind of left there is like, oh, well, we over, they are trying to do this.

What kind of to go to work but you know he's got a job over there. Good luck. Yeah um anything they cracks IT and IT makes a massive difference to crop views.

And mexico, just talking about a large, large increase mexico move from being an importer fit an exporter of. And from there, this really kick started what we frame is kind of agricultural revolution. And he went to sophya in pakistan and india and the right. So again, there crop views were extremely low join period. There was lots of concerns about especially food shortage in that region, but more broadly, there was lots of concerns at the time about a global food shortage, huge farmers, uh, huge levels .

of hunger. You you talk about paul earlier, the famous biologist who in retrospect, CT looks quite bad, right? Who wrote this best selling book, essentially saying we are screw wed already. It's baked in a billion people are gonna starve. We just got to figure out who, because there is no way we can grow enough food to feed all the people who have just been born.

right? So in one thousand nine hundred and sixty, he comes out with this book, the population bomb. And yes, that was his faces.

There's just far too many people in the planet we've got this, made your global food crisis common. And many, many people are gonna die from this. I didn't happen. And one of the reasons that didn't happen because because of Norman borg on the the Green revolution so we vacate underestimated um how much we can crease crop fields across the world .

so staying for a moment on the theme of the world is much Better than I used to be. One thing that I didn't know before I read your book, that I learned from the book, is that the world has past peak fertilizer use and has passed or almost passed peak land use for agriculture, which was surprising to me and encouraging. Tell me about, tell me about those facts.

So peak feral zer use, I couldn't say definitively that were past the peak. I think we been on this kind of plant to um we saw really, really deep rise and global feroza use in the ninety years and especially the early two thousands.

If you look over the last decade or so, what kind of been level in off which I think goods against people's intuitions, I think they think, no, we're just still going through the river for using far more ferlie er than than ever before ah um but no, we look like we're kind of stabilizing and and part of that is due to some hundred years are still in the increase and I actually think it's good at they're still in the increase. As said, like one of the key innovations that have helped to feed the world has been the the use of fatalism, and some countries still don't have enough, but some countries definitely overuse IT. And overuse IT, to the point worth, is not even cost effective for farmers to be using that much.

But over the last few decades, some countries have dramatically reduced feral iser use without sacrificing youth rights. Will fertilizer use in europe in particular has gone down and you'd have either state the same or have continued to increase um even in china. So china again looks like it's no past peak fertilizer use to fertilizer use on pesticide use in china has now been falling.

Um and I actually think that that could fall quite quickly. And part of part of the the the way that china done that has actually been through large scale education programs for farmers on how to use this stuff more effectively. And and again, it's it's cost effective for a farmer to where .

not we're about to get to why the world is still bad in terms of food. But before we do, is there anything else we should do on why the world is much Better?

I think what people unarrested me and I actually think this is a good anti thing. I think people just understand ate how good we've got up previous in food. I think they don't have a sense of scale in their head about how much food we can actually produce.

So if you say that the average person in the world needs around two thousand to two and half thousand and calories per person party depending on the size and gender sector um because we know that some people don't get enough calories and some people probably over consumer bit, right we might assume that that just about levels, all right, baLance each other. So we maybe just enough calories for everyone in the world so maybe two and a half vocant preperation party. The reality is that we probably produce around twice as much as that, right? So you're probably talking about four and a half to five thousand and calories per person party if you were to split IT all equally. Um so we just are capable of producing huge amounts of food.

So so we produce enough food if we didn't waste any to feed twice many people as our on earth today, which is probably more people than we'll ever live on earth once, right? We're probably not going to get to two extra and .

population they were to get to zero waste food systems. And again, this is not just about, I think, what people think about as food waste, but if you were to have a really, really efficient distribution system, uh, 啊 we could yeah we can definitely see ten million， which is what people are looking at in the future.

So right? So that's happy from the point of view of there is definitely enough food. We have the technology to know how the land to grow as much food as we will need to feed people when we hit peak population. Um okay, let's talk about what's bad uh what's bad with food today and and I think the place to start there is how much of the earth we use for food and in particularly, how much of the habitable line and massive of the earth we use .

for food is a lot. So if you're to take the words habitable land, which is basically land is not desert or nose, then we use arrived half of for farming.

half the earthly and mess we used for going food. What share of that is for cows? Either for growing cows, you know, ranged land, or for growing food to feed cows?

So for cause pacifically is probably around sixty percent.

sixty percent of all agricultural land. So more than a quarter of the habitable land mass of the earth goes to growing cows and growing food for cows.

Yes.

that, I think, is the central wild fact of your book to me, right? I think as I read this chapter of your book and the book more broadly, because this seems like the central chapter, cow's come out as the villain. Is that a fair read?

I think that's a fair read.

yeah. I mean, villain is a moral word, right? And I would like to use a non moral as my fault but like I appreciate that you are not moralistic and you're telling it's one of the things I particularly like about this book.

It's not like here are the evil people and and the good person exposing them. It's a much more sort of clinical what feels to me more rational approach just like, look, let's just lay out the facts. But when you lay out the facts, I like cows men, cows like if we just if we if IT wasn't for cows, I don't want to say we'd be fine like we would still have the energy transition, fossil fuel. But IT seems like if we could solve beef, we can solve a lot.

Yet if we were to significant regions, global beef consumption IT would have a massive environmental impact on a positive environmental part. 对。 So when you look the range of environmental problems we face, beef can come up really strongly. So it's A A really large driver of climate change, is the leading driver of deforestation, is the a as a result of deforestation, is then one of the leading drivers of biology loss. So yes, Carol, and beef consumption specifically structure a large number of our problems and for many of these problems are really like the leading cause.

And just can you just articulate the link between beef and climate change a little more?

yes. So there's two key with the um beef contributes to climate change. One is about layers, right?

So when we have deforestation and all other land use changes that a driver of seo to emissions, so we that contributes to seal to religious changes. And then the second one is really about kaz barking, right? So cos bark and the bark me in meeting is as a very powerful Greenhouse gas. So that's the second way that the the mostly contribute. There's a hard way, which is that the manual also releases Greenhouse gases.

I want to get to the world can be Better section of of the food conversation, but before we do like so, cows are clearly the biggest food problem IT seems. Are there other, what what else is on the very short list of of big food related problems we need to solve?

I mean, I think one, I think one final dreaming of the world is bonus is now is that we still have a one hundred million people in the world don't get food to eat. And actually, when you look at IT beyond calories, so not just getting enough energy, but getting enough of all of the mice nutrient that we need, you're actually talking about billions of people in the world are defined as being monitrix ed. So even if you can get enough calories and you can usually do that for stable crops like syria, ark tra, you might be able to get enough calories, but you're not getting the full spectrum of nutrient that we need.

After the break, we get to the the world can .

be Better part of the conversation.

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Okay, so let's solve these problems. Let's start with people going hungry and not getting enough nutrition. How do we solve that?

One key way is that, especially for many of the poorest countries in the world, we just need to work again on the agricultural productivity problem. And here, in this specifically ally talking about subhan africa, most farmers in sub saharan n africa got very low crop, is much lower than the global average and much, much, much lower than, say, you get in the U. S.

Are there examples of places you, if you set aside this kind of one of Green revolution, are there examples of places where crop els go up independent of economic growth? Or is the typical story that economic growth sort of causes crop fields to go up when countries are not at .

the economic frontier is very strongly correlated? So as countries get richer, yes, you tend to get increased productivity. Um but I think there are no differences there.

I think I think government policies play a role. Land reforms play a role. Access to markets play all. So I don't think this is pure. They just about stimuli conomo growth.

And that happens like there are things that the governments can do to stimulate that and make that go faster. Providing subsidies for farmers to be able to afford the crucial inputs like Better seeds or more artistic ation really helps a lot. That's one k key v to do IT.

Okay, what are we gonna do about meat and beef in particular? So I think .

if we are to solve these big environmental problems globally, we need to reduce sumption, and I say globally, because I think when I reduction make consumption, people say, should the person that sit in a few kilograms a year and not crucial to the noticias, should they be coming back? And just know right here, i'm really mostly talking about people in middle income to rich countries where make consumption is very high. And what to solve these problems, we would need to reduce global make consumption?

Yes, I mean that that's the, again, almost total logical answer of like the way to solve the problem of too much. Me to stop people eat less meat. But but how do you do that? right? I need you talk in a book about like individual behavior change.

Dos doesn't matter basically in the aggregate, right? IT may be useful for kind of moral reasons or in the abstract, but on the level of like climate changed by a diversity of deforestation, the things we're talking about here, IT seems like individual behaviour change is not gonna a do IT right. So like, what are the moves? What are the acro moves that might drive things in the right direction?

So individual behavior change on its own is not going to change something. I still advocate for that, and i'm vegan myself, so I try to take that on. I think people too often say going .

to have to be right after ready that chapter, you kind have to be sure .

um but I think I think people too often set up this false economy of individual behavior change and waiter systemic change as an individual .

the system no, you're putting me on the hook and that's totally reasonable.

So so yes, even if you are to go vegan tomorrow, the worlds global make consumptions not gonna is yeah I would I would say the what you choose to eat actually is one behaviour change actually can have a small direct impact in some way, especially when you look at IT in terms of animal welfare. Yeah so you unless me does actually potentially reduce the number of animals that are probably reason, pretty poor conditions and killed for me consumption yes.

that is plainly directly true. I mean, the moral dimension of eating meat is real and significant and we have not been discussing that piece of IT to this point but clearly the individual choice about eating meat, uh that moral dimension is obviously significant um but IT IT is notable in your book and and let's just talk about this for a set.

It's a little digression but let's just do IT here like, you know you talk about like which behavior changes people make our meaningful at what magnitude, right? And clearly eating meat and even more so, eating beef relative to other individual choices is quite significant. And I think that is kind of punches above its weight in terms of what people think about, right? So like just for a minute, talk about that. Like in terms of individual choices, what are things that are kind of underwater that people don't think about enough, that make a big difference? And then what are things are overrated that people talk about or care about, but actually don't really matter that much.

right? So the things that people over, right? And this is basically when you ask people what reading for the environment, this is what they see.

They see the recycle, they get lh, they get energy efficient light bos ah um and they try to avoid single use. Plastics like that are the key things that people say when you ask what they are doing for the vironment. And the reality is that the impact that they have is tiny, right? Tiny, tiny fraction of your your footprint.

recycling wildly overrated, right? Yes, good for cans, but very, the girls. What doesn't matter, really.

But so, okay, so what doesn't matter? Eating meat, what else? What are other actual meaningful changes, at least relative to the scale of one person?

So if you were to look at what makes up probably eighty percent of your fit, print is what you eat. And the biggest thing you can do there, as he let me in daily in your house, is heating or cooling. So right?

So like heating or air corn. So if you have a gas boiler switching to an electric heat pump and make a massive difference to your food. And then the other two big wings are travel.

So like if you have a car, your car is a massive part of your faint. So either obviously walkin and I an is best going to an electric car is way back other than a petrol car. And then the final thing, if you fly is flying. And if you add up those things, you're get into the majority of your environmental thing.

Um good. Okay, back to meet. What do we do about meat on a non individual level, right? What are the mro ways we can reduce me consumption?

So I i'll go to the macro o and then i'll see why having the individuals play a role in that. So when you look at the micro trends and weak consumption globally, they are going up. And even when you look at a country level, there are very, very few examples where make consumptions going down, right? So we're just really not make .

for making. And what about beef in particular? I mean, presumably a shift from beef to chicken. Obviously, it's not as good for the world as a shift from beef to soy.

But but it's pretty good, right? And I feel like anodos ally in the us, chicken has risen and beef has fAllen, not for environmental reasons, but for health reasons. Basically, right? People grew more wary of renney. Is that true empirically? Like what what has happened with beef consumption in amErica in the last, whatever, fifty years or something?

Yeah, that's true. If you look at amErica or you look at europe consumption and the beef consumption has one in its place. Chicken consumption has gone up as you see that which is probably very undertake as a climate solution, right, actually makes a big difference to your fir inch, but chain from beef to check in. So environmentally that's a very, very good swap. I D argue that the animal welfare cost of that, or the right.

if you value the life of a chicken at the same as you value the life of a cw, it's clearly much worse for any more of.

but yet that I think this this, this meat switching has been a key transition in in many countries and an an environmentally positive.

But globally, beef consumption is rising reasonably because as very poor people get richer, they eat more meat, understandably, okay. So still bad. We're not yet to how do we make a Better let's get there, what we got to do or know how do we go in the right direction.

So we made little progress. And one of the reasons we made progress is because people are not willing to switch to the previous alternatives we had as a protein source, right? People were not chain from a beef burgers to leos or tou or beans, right? People just didn't want to make that switch.

That seemed like a step backwards. The way we solve this, and the only way I see but that we solve this, is to make a lake for lake switch, so that people can still have the beef burger, or something really close to a beef burger without the cow, right? That's the only way I see A O out of this are a way to reduce global meat consumption is to basically produce meat substitutes that provide the same texture, the same nutrition, the same experience, just without the cow or the chicken and a much lower environmental experience.

It's basically lab grown meat.

some of the plant based meat substitutes. I think we're getting pretty good, although i'm probably bias.

No, I mean I I eat a lot of impossible beef A A certainly way more than beef beef um but it's clearly not uh, good enough, right?

I mean, you know people are trying sort of sell cell culture like sort of meat as a biotech problem is fundamentally what you're talking about on summer level, right? And and IT IT does seem like fundamentally that's appealing because IT doesn't require people to change their behavior ultimately, right? Ultimately, we want a solution based on people just acting indifferently or in their own self interest like that's the kind of solution I can believe in.

And right. And you know i've heard counter arguments that like, oh, people won't trust IT or people are attached to, you know, beef that comes from an animal. But I feel like that's going to be the minority of people, right? I feel like most people don't care about any particular thing in the world.

And they just want something like with energy. They just want something that's reliable and cheap. And so if somebody couldn't make lab grown meat that was the same as beef and one penny cheaper, IT would win.

I think initially, people might be hesitant and skeptical, but that's the case with most new technologies. And like if you look at electric cars, for example, ah I think initially many, many people were skeptical because they didn't know anyone that had an electric car, right? Yeah, they didn't know how run, whether you broke down on the highway, like was IT easy to charge, was expensive to charge, like no one really knew that, apart from a really small minority.

And I think revilement of vehicles were now get to the stage where most of us know someone that has one and they get by fine and actually really like IT. And I feel like with new technologies to like lab grown meat, for example, and may be the same. Like uptake rates at the very start may be slow.

I think that would very, very slowly start to become Normalize. And as you say, I people at some point but just switch and the'd be very happy to just have something that is like a burger as a picture of a burger as gender is a burglar. I think cost will be key. They will not pay more for IT than they for a beef burger. So that's really, really key, is that we need to scale these technologies, but we also need to make sure that they are undercutting the a cost of me.

Well, you know, I talked to the guy who started impossible foods and he makes the point that from first principles, uh, meta name without animals should be cheaper, right? For the same reason that animals are such a problem for the world, which is they're wildly inefficient like, yes, industrial agriculture has become very efficient at growing cows and at growing the court to feed cows. But from first principle is still crazy, right?

Like the fact that you only get uh one calorie of beef for every whatever, ninety five calories of corn you put in and you have to raise a whole cow. Like theoretically, there should be a much more efficient way to get beef that going through all that work of making a cow right. And so that makes me optimistic in an abstract way, if not in a practical way. Yeah, I think so.

I think I think this is also a time thing like I think we will get there. I think it's really about how long IT takes us. I think what's keep about agriculture is we've been refining and optimizing these processes over a really, really long period of time, whether these new technologies are very much and the empanel y yeah.

well, that makes me less hopeful when you put in that way. I mean, I guess I am somewhat less hopeful about me, right? Like the energy transition seems to be going Better than almost anyone would have expected ten years ago, right? 嗯， we're not having a meat transition is just not happening yet. Can you help me feel .

Better about IT? sure. Because I mean, I think the theme that also comes from my book again is that I think, again, i'm optimistic on the energy story and I making pretty rapid progress. There are more progressive people imagine, yes, I think the way people discuss the food chapter on my book, kind of like the pessimistic side of the story, is that hard.

So if we managed to solve the food problem, if we fundamentally managed to come up with like good, cheap, fake, neat, right, that's actually the answer. Um how will the world change? Like what is the what is the happy outcome there?

So I think if we were to somehow magically and beef production tomorrow, one is that we were dramatically registered of land that we're using for agriculture, which means that we could really start to restore all deco systems in our habitat acks that we be basically took over over with agriculture trial and rate.

So that has bred a verity benefits and IT also has benefits for climate change because you can start to restore and the quest or carbon that we previously lost by the four net land or taking away the world grass land, also a huge, huge positive because beef is also the leading cause of deforestation. I think globally, you will also see a significant ant drop and rates of deforestation. I want to go to zero because there are other causes, but that was at least significantly reduce those rights. And then the final one is, I think we have us never get impact on our our our best house missions and climate change. So if you are to get rid of that meeting in so for uh, context, livestock can in most of this as coal contributes around fifteen percent .

of global Greenhouse .

s burps cobbs. And some of the land just changed again that a lot of that would go away. Ah so I think you would at least caught global. I has got missions by five to .

ten percent. So if we zoom out even more, you at at the end of your book, you sort of tell the happy story right like if things go well, if we make good on the things can be Better piece of of your framework um if if things go well, not just with food but more generally with the big global problems you talk about in the book, what will the world look like well, you say in fifty years in the book.

right? I think there's two sides to this, and I think there's really important that we consider both sides as an environmental list. I mean, again, we always focus on just the environmental metrics, so would be very easy for the meters, I hear.

And the just the best outcome would be that there is no deforestation and we stopped climate change, right? And again, I think those will be huge Victories. But the same time, we also need to make sure that we're providing a good life for the name or ten million people that there will be on the planet.

So in what i'm an old lady, what no success would look like is that we have nine or ten boy people that don't live in extreme poverty, that are not hungry, have access to energy for a good life. They have access to to to health care. And we ve addicted diseases, and they have clean war orange annotation.

And we've done that. So we've driven that huge amount of global human development while also reducing our environmental. So we've managed to stop climate change, and there will still be climate damages.

There are, to be clear, we're not going to just solve this and there will be no impacts, whatever hope we can manage to deal with those negative impacts. And we've really just freed up a huge amount of the planet to be restored for biodiverse in nature. So we've stop cutting down forest and forest we grow when. And we've taken out a law of the farmland that we currently use and that snow being restored um for for well eco systems. So we have nine attempting people live in really, really good uh, high welfare lives, and we're using a much smaller ment of the planet in order to do that.

We'll be back in a minute with the lightning run.

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At the moment, the renewable energy is that I think the the this is the biggest transition is making me more optimistic about the future is the rapid growth and renewable and the plummet in costs of those energy of sources.

It's amazing cuts like even I don't know, I did a story seven years ago or something about, oh my god, solar got so cheap and people are getting solar power who don't even care about the enviro just because it's cheaper and then since then, it's gotten equally .

optimistic kers know the falling custom .

batteries. Um what's the data set that you wish existed that doesn't exist?

Um is a really, really good global day asset on university. And by that I mean for every species and really far away from that because are so many species and and that was one of the struggles for the bar of H. H.

pr. As I I tried to base all of my my thinking on data and then the data was scared is hard to get really clear picture of what's going on. Yes, I think that's one day I said I would love this is what one else going on with global, by diversity.

What's one thing I should do if I go to foul kirk?

Um we're famous for this massive wheel, so we have a wheel like a wheel. It's got the full coc wheel right.

And you say famous.

I mean, that's the only thing we have. And the queen opened up. So he was there, the open of IT. So in free vocal, we have these canal systems, boats, and we have this magical, we are basically IT takes the boat from like ground level up to like a massive.

massive height. So you can get .

on the new what exactly? But the exact inference that turning this massive wheel with this boat on IT, yeah, takes less energy than boiling a kew.

wow.

Utilize brand for you, yes. So utilizes potential energy and cover antigenic tics, which is really energy efficient.

Will wow. okay. Um you have any graph related pet peeves.

Oh, a lot. Um one key one is that people just make them far too complicated. I think people try to crime as much information and as they can. Or they think that IT makes them look smart to make a more complicated world and that a lying char is just too simple. And but actually the simple line chart, or the simple bochart that people can understand .

as this way more of IT yeah line with time on the x access and the variable you care .

about on the y access.

I I look for those all the time. I'm always googling like time series, whatever, and it's weird how hard IT is to find a time series. Um your book is full of fact. One of things I appreciate about the book what's just like one fact if you want to take one fact from the book and tell everybody what is IT.

That the Price of solar power has fAllen by ninety percent in the last decade.

That is an amazing fact.

And their life changing that I mean, think this is this is just gonna define the energy transaction that we are so crucially need to solve climate change without this change. I'd be super professions .

tic about this .

and with this cautiously optimistic .

london versus amburgh.

Edinburgh, because people can understand what i'm saying.

Because you speak the language .

because you speak the language. yeah.

Hanna riche is the author of not the end of the world and the deputy editor of our world in data. Today's was produced by Gabriel hundred chain. IT was edited by litigant caught and engineered by saba gear.

You can email us at problem at push in dot FM. I'm jack. Go seen and we'll be back next week with another episode of what's your problem.

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