Not the End of the World: A Book Review
This is the oddest climate book I’ve read, and not in a good way.
What did she just say?
I read a lot of books on climate change. I’m obsessed with the topic, both professionally and personally. Most of those books fill me with horror. So when I saw a recommendation for Not the End of the World, I felt compelled to give it a read. It’s what I’d like to believe, but….
Hannah Ritchie has written a strange book. Much is made of her role at Our World in Data (a source I frequently trust for my own research), but that data fails her when she doesn’t explore the forces behind it. The result is a litany of obscure observations and vague solutions.
“If we’re to stamp out air pollution completely we need to stop burning fossil fuels. The good news is that we need to do this anyway if we’re to tackle climate change. That means we can fix two big problems at the same time.”
Um…. how do you respond to this logic? Yay?
She has a tendency to downplay events on the basis that they are not statistically relevant. Discussing nuclear power and the downside of Chernobyl and Fukushima, she says,
“When we think about nuclear power, it is these two terrible incidents that come to mind. When I polled my friends about how many people had died in them, the most popular guess was hundreds of thousands. The numbers are actually much smaller.”
I’m so… relieved?
It’s weird to use the following word to describe an Oxford scholar, but much of what Ritchie says in this book is wildly - naïve. You sense you’re reading an eight year old’s take on global events. For example, her takeaway on agriculture:
“The technologies and investments that have already worked for so many countries — from fertilisers to improved seed varieties to irrigation — will become even more important with climate change.”
She’s actively saying that the methods that gave us climate change will be ‘important with climate change.’ The monocrop deserts, the monopolized seeds and insecticides, the fossil fueled fertilizers, the agricultural system that uses up the organic nutrient equivalent to, her data, ‘10 earths’.
Is this something that should give us hope?
Agriculture will save us
I started to write down all the weird things she says, but I couldn’t keep up. They’re on every page. Having read as many other books on the same topics she covers (books with actual insight and reflection, deep dives into the mechanics of why) I had a hard time keeping a straight face at her simplistic observations.
For example, she takes solace in seeing that, although agricultural land has peaked, agricultural production has increased. She says that means we can continue feeding ourselves. “It is a strong sign that we can produce more food from less land.”
I look at that and see something else entirely, something very dark. After farming land for centuries, we depend on our technology, not natural systems, to sustain eight billion. We don’t yet know how to change that without half of the globe starving. We expect two billion more by the end of the century.
The reality is that our agricultural soils are not healthy. They’re what the Nature Conservancy calls green deserts — growing a single monocrop with all competing living things expunged. They’re increasingly depleted to desert-like conditions. The only reason we continue to reap harvests is the unnatural amount of fertilizer and water we pump into the dirt. What we have is zombie agriculture. What would have been dead decades ago we keep alive through extensive life support.
Her data doesn’t tell her that. Instead, she draws this conclusion:
“If we take these lessons and apply them everywhere, then we can achieve this everywhere.”
What a horrifying thought.
Ritchie gives us is a childlike assessment of the world, and it’s the data. If you look at individual data points, you can draw your own conclusions. But when you start putting them together, you get something altogether different. You tell me.
What do you see in data that has fertilizer use peaking, available land peaking, population growth peaking? I can’t help but see a planet stretched to its limits.
Ritchie does not see this.
And what happens when we add more people to this mix?
On population growth
She is heartened by predictions that population will top out at 10 billion toward the end of the century, or even decline. By itself, that sounds like a good thing. But in the context of climate change, another 2 billion people is daunting. Here’s what the data doesn’t tell her.
Nigeria, one of the worlds’ fastest growing populations, is expected to triple to 791 million people by 2100. Nigeria ranks tenth in the world for oil production and eighth for natural gas, holding 37 billion barrels of oil in reserve. Not only did Chevron discover more oil in the region, but last year Nigeria’s president decided to double production to 4 million barrels of oil per day.
As Nigeria’s population booms, incomes will also increase. With that comes materialism, consumption, more food and agriculture, more meat consumption, and more fossil fuel use. And we can pretty much assume this will all be fossil-fuel based since they’ll have a steady supply of both domestic oil and export funds.
Incredible population growth in an oil nation in the midst of climate change — that should give her pause.
It does not. We’ll grow our way out of it.
On agriculture
Her chapter on agriculture rehashes the same arguments we’ve heard for the past ten years, but with a weird twist. ‘Stop eating beef’ makes the obligatory appearance (surprise, she’s a vegetarian). But, so does the suggestion to use more plastic crates and plastic wrap to preserve food, thus reducing food waste. That’s odd for a climate action book.
She tries to add novelty by saying chicken and eggs are not that bad if eaten sparingly, or that hybrid burgers (?) made of chicken and beef are an improvement. She says we can’t rely on indoor farming (by which she means vertical farming, not Spain growing her vegetables under thousands of hectares of plastic wrap).
The one thing she does right is point out that buying local or organic can be more carbon intensive than buying vegetables from half a world away. Ships have ridiculously low carbon footprints due to high volume no matter how far it travels. As a statistician, she was bound to get something right.
She should have stopped there.
On Biodiversity Loss
“We need biodiversity to survive. That’s mostly true, but not always…. This is why understanding which species we ‘need’ and which we don’t is not clear cut.”
That’s a weird thing to say. The species we don’t need? She continues with a discussion of two northern white rhinos, both female, who represent the last living specimens of a species on the verge of imminent extinction.
“The northern white rhino is a good example of a ‘non-important’ species. If they disappeared, there would be no ecological collapse. We’d be perfectly fine.”
Right.
Humans were the reason the white rhino died out. We may never know if we ‘needed’ them because it’s too late. Are they important? Who cares. They’re about to die out, so fuck ’em. We’ll be perfectly fine. Right?
Lots of ideas, very few solutions
The reason I feel it’s necessary to be harsh on Hannah Ritchie is that solutions and optimism without solid science to help us move forward is just another way to fail. It’s a signpost in the dark that says “this way”.
Not the End of the World is touted as a book of solutions, a book of hope. It’s big on hope, but as light on solutions as a one-line Ikea assembly manual. There are so many weird examples throughout the book that it’s not even worth posting here. But I can’t help listing a few more.
After a whole chapter on how bad plastics are for the environment: “The occasional plastic carrier bag is fine” and “Landfills are not as bad as they seem,” as long as they are buried deep in the ground, storing carbon.
What does she think we can do?
“It’s not too late… This mass extinction event is unlike any of the others because there is a handbrake. We are the handbrake.”
Never mind that we are also the foot on the accelerator.
“If we make the right decisions today then we can slow — possibly even reverse this damage.”
And what are these ‘right decisions’?
“Eating less meat [again] would reduce the amount of land we use for farming, climate change and biodiversity loss. Stopping deforestation will reduce habitat loss and greenhouse gas emissions.”
Simple, right? Not convinced?
“A wonderful by-product of slowing climate change, fixing our food systems, stopping deforestation, ending plastic pollution and protecting our oceans is that we stop piling pressure on the species around us.”
Is that all we have to do? Why didn’t we think of that?
The entirety of Ritchie’s book could be summed up in one Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert’s pet dinosaur Dawn, immersed in deep thought, came up with, “If people are starving in Africa, they should just move to France.”
Obviously.
“For most of the crisis I’ve explored,” says Ritchie, “there are clear examples of things people should stress less about.”
I’m glad that’s settled.
If you want to know how to fight climate change, listen to the podcast Replace Remove Recover on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts, or listen here on Spotify:
Then read these articles to take climate action. Good luck! The fate of the world is in our hands.