Is Green Growth Possible?

A decade ago, I was feeling pretty pessimistic about climate change. The politics of mitigating global warming just seemed impossible: asking people to make sacrifices, or countries to slow their development, and delay dreams of better, more prosperous lives. But the world today looks different. The costs of solar and wind power have plummeted. Same for electric batteries. And a new politics is starting to take hold: that maybe we can invest and invent and build our way out of this crisis. But some very hard problems remain. Chief among them? Cows. Hannah Ritchie is the deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data and the author of “Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.” She’s pored over the data on this question and has come away more optimistic than many. “It’s just not true that we’ve had these solutions just sitting there ready to build for decades and decades, and we just haven’t done anything,” she told me. “We’re in a fundamentally different position going forward.” In this conversation, we discuss whether sustainability without sacrifice is truly possible. How much progress have we made so far? What gives her the most hope? And what are the biggest obstacles? Mentioned: “What was the death toll from Chernobyl and Fukushima?” by Hannah Ritchie “Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers” by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek “Future demand for electricity generation materials under different climate mitigation scenarios” by Seaver Wang, Zeke Hausfather et al. Book Recommendations: Factfulness by Hans Rosling Possible by Chris Goodall Range by David Epstein Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  I think one of the questions on which our whole future hinges is whether the lives that we have, the lives that we want, can exist within our environmental limits. Is there a way to live lives as energetically rich, as materially prosperous as Americans do now, without doing irreparable damage to the world? Is there a way for people all over to live lives even better than Americans do, without doing irreparable damage to the world? Can we decouple material prosperity from the environment? If we can't, then what we're left with is a politics of sacrifice. Then we're asking residents of rich countries to give up what they have. We're asking residents of poor and middle-income countries to give up what they want. There is no way around that. I've read the de-growth books.

• 1:08Ezra Klein?

  That is, in any honest rendering, what they are asking. And the politics of sacrifice, they're abysmal. They're really hard, particularly at the speed at which we need to act on climate. You try passing a global carbon tax and enforcing it. You try doing energetic redistribution between rich and poor countries. You try banning, God forbid, hamburgers. But if you can marry prosperity to sustainability, if we can power the lives we want with clean energy, if we can feed the world without wrecking every ecosystem in our sight, then we have the politics of transition. And the politics of transition is hard. Deployment is hard. Change is hard. But it is more imaginable. And maybe you can even promise that things get better, too, that we get cleaner air, healthier food, regenerated forests.

• 1:53Ezra Klein?

  That's a bet a lot of the climate movement is now making. It's a bet most countries are now making. But is it possible, or is it just a fantasy? Do we actually have the critical minerals, the land, the technology? That's a question that Hannah Ritchie, the lead researcher at Our World in Data, set out to answer in her book, Not the End of the World. It's a question that obsesses me, so I asked her to come on the show to talk about it. As always, my email for guest suggestions, for feedback, for reflections, [email protected].

• 2:28Ezra Klein?

  Hannah Ritchie, welcome to the show.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Thanks very much for having me.

• 2:32Ezra Klein?

  I've heard you say something that has stuck in my mind, which is that air pollution is a problem of energy poverty. What do you mean by that?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  So, air pollution is generated when we burn stuff. And I think when people think of burning stuff, they automatically think of burning fossil fuels, which is absolutely correct. But we also generate air pollution when we burn wood, or charcoal, or crop waste, or dung, which many people in the world, especially the poorest people in the world, rely on as their main energy source. So I think if you see images of Lahore, or New Delhi, in the US, we think, oh, my god, the levels of pollution there. But go back, you know, less than a century, and that's what, I mean, I'm in Edinburgh in Scotland, that's what Edinburgh looked like, that's what London looked like, that's probably what New York looked like. It's just that we are now further along the curve of pollution than

• 3:24Speaker 01

  many of these cities. What we tend to find is that air pollution follows what we call the environmental Kuznets curve. So if you imagine a graph, and on the Y-axis, you have air pollution, and on the X-axis, you have GDP, or income, or wealth. What you tend to see is this upside-down U-shape. So, at very, very low incomes, outdoor air pollution, for example, can be relatively low. What happens is that people get access to energy, they get access to industrial production, they get access to cars, and pollution starts to increase. Now, on that part of the curve, people accept that there's a trade-off. Their need for energy trumps their need for clean air. And therefore, they put up with the

• 4:09Speaker 01

  dirty air because they just need it for energy.

• 4:12Ezra Klein?

  Or, actually, to be said, they don't always have a choice.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Or they don't have a choice. Yes, if they don't have alternatives, and fossil fuels is the only option they have, millions of people die simply because they do not even have access to fossil fuels. They're stuck on wood or charcoal.

• 4:26Ezra Klein?

  What's the death toll of air pollution annually?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  So there are a range of estimates. All of the estimates are in the millions. I mean, the WHO, the World Health Organization, has a figure of around seven million every year. And around 57 million people die every year. It was slightly higher during COVID. If you take, you know, 57 million and you say 7 million are dying from air pollution, you're talking about more than 10% of deaths can be attributed in some way to air pollution.

• 4:58Ezra Klein?

  I want to zoom in on something happening, on the part where the curve begins to slope down as the country gets richer. Because one way of thinking about air pollution, but a lot of environmental problems, is that to get less of the bad thing, you need less of the good thing. To get less air pollution, you need less industry. To get less air pollution, you need fewer cars. But to use the example of the United States, we have many more cars today than we had in 1970 or 1975. But the air in 1975 was much more sensitive today. You go to California, you go to Los Angeles where I grew up. I mean, the smog that would settle over LA was legendary. So how is that part happening? How are you getting less air pollution even as you are having an energetically richer

• 5:43Ezra Klein?

  life, even as you're having a rise in the quantity of industrial production?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you've got two options. You can do less stuff, as you say, or you can improve the technologies so you can get the same stuff just with less pollution or less externalities. And there are a couple of key innovations here. I mean, I think that your example of cars is absolutely correct. There just have been massive developments in the reduction in pollution from cars. And that's a combination of one, policy controls, so forcing manufacturers to develop cars that emit less. But it's also about, you know, then the technological innovation that comes from that kind of forced policy setting. And industrial sites, for example, like a big issue across Europe and North America, which has basically gone, was acid rain.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  And there, the problem was sulfur dioxide. So when we burn coal, you produce sulfur dioxide. And that was leaking out into the environment and causing acid rain. Emissions of sulfur dioxide have plummeted. And there again, there were two ways to do that. One, you could just stop burning coal. And to some extent, that transition has happened. But another big innovation there is that, you know, we just developed a technology called a scrubber or a desulfurization technology that you could literally just put in the smokestack of the coal plant and take the sulfur out. That needed some push from government policy to force that innovation. And then it needed some investment to get there. But that was the flip side of the coin of you don't need to just necessarily do less.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  You can develop technologies that can do better.

• 7:18Ezra Klein?

  Sometimes there's an argument, and certainly there's a suspicion that what is happening is the rich countries are pushing their environmental problems out into the poor countries. Right? We used to make the dirty stuff here, burn the coal here. Now we do it in China and we just buy the end product from China. We're going to talk about that in the carbon case a bit later on. But is that the case for air pollution?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  No, I don't think that's really the case with air pollution. Yes, the UK and the US have reduced levels of air pollution, but so has China. So it cannot possibly be the case that we're just offshoring all of the pollution to China if China's pollution is also falling rapidly and it has fallen rapidly. Especially over the last decade, local air pollution in cities like Beijing and other major cities across China, you know, have really plummeted with massive health benefits for those populations.

• 8:07Ezra Klein?

  To just add some numbers to that, because I think they're really striking. In Beijing, air pollution fell by 55% between 2013 and 2020. The number you have in the book for China as a whole is 40%. So how did they do that? What is happening that China could make air pollution fall so much faster than other countries have been able to do it in the past?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  So this was really kickstarted by the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Pre 2008, if you were to ask someone, picture a city with really high levels of air pollution, they'd probably picture Beijing. And the world was descending on Beijing for the Olympics. The top athletes in the world were coming to the city and all eyes were on Beijing. The Chinese government realised, you know, we can't have just horrendously polluted city. We need to clean this up for the athletes that are coming in. And it was still one of the most polluted Olympics ever. But emissions and levels of air pollution were much lower than they were pre Olympics. The problem is that when all the athletes went home and all of the eyes turned away, the pollution levels came back.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  It was a very short term reduction in order to facilitate the Olympics. A couple of years on, and it was actually really a public backlash that said, why would the government do this for people coming in to watch the Olympics, but not do it for us? And we have to live here day after day, year after year with terrible impacts on health. And it was really this public pressure that kickstarted action on concerted reductions in levels of air pollution. The key one has been really strict reduction in coal burning in households, for example, which you would imagine in Edinburgh or London a century ago as well. It's the same in China where people were using coal in cities to heat their homes. And there was a really strict crackdown on that.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  In some sense, too strict, such that some households were temporarily left without energy. A shifting of industry outside of the city. The problem is that often you'll have industrial sites very, very close to dense population centres. So you can move those industrial sites further out where there are less people. And then strict industrial controls. And in China, strict regulation can be put in place very, very quickly. And actually, industries do take action very quickly.

• 10:22Ezra Klein?

  How much is the rapidity of what China was able to do? Because we simply have more ways to generate energy in 2024 than we did in 1904 without burning things. We have nuclear energy, we have solar energy, we have wind energy, we have advanced battery technology. How much is that an enabler of the possibilities here?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  I think for China in the last decade, it hasn't been, that contribution hasn't been massive. Now, to be clear, China is rolling out renewable energies very, very, very quickly. It's rolling out electric cars extremely quickly, but it's still burning more coal than it was a decade ago. But as I say, going forward, and I think for many other countries, this opportunity to skip a lot of the burning stuff phase of energy and moving straight to energy technologies where you don't burn stuff is a massive opportunity to avoid the really high emissions and high polluting pathway that most countries have now been through. I mean, I think people underestimate how unique this current position is that

• 11:26Speaker 01

  we're in. You said a century ago, but literally since the invention of fire, humans have been burning stuff to generate energy. It's only very, very recently that we now have the technologies and the opportunity to generate large amounts of energy, large and cheap energy without burning stuff. And I think people underestimate the scale of that opportunity.

• 11:49Ezra Klein?

  One reason I really like the air pollution chapter in your book is that it sort of operates, I think, as a metaphor, which is, is this thing we did with air pollution, this thing we keep doing with air pollution, where we are able to bring it sharply down, the air in London, as you say, might be cleaner now than it has been in, you know, centuries. Is that possible for other kinds of environmental harm? Because I do think there is this question that sits in people's minds of whether the materially rich lives that we live in, in richer countries today, is possible for the planet without completely cooking it. And one of the ways you look at this is by comparing your carbon footprint to that of your grandparents.

• 12:34Ezra Klein?

  And it's a kind of surprising comparison. So can you walk me through that?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you look at the carbon footprint of the average person in the UK over time, what you see is that over the last few decades, emissions in the UK have fallen really sharply. So since nineteen ninety, they've fallen by around fifty percent. The pushback on that is always, well, we've only achieved that because we've offshored emissions to other countries and that's not a genuine reduction. Now, it's completely true that the UK has offshored some of its emissions. But even when you account for that, and you account for that based on what we call consumption-based emissions, so it tries to adjust for the goods and services that the UK is buying and importing, and allocates those emissions to the UK rather than China,

• 13:23Speaker 01

  for example. What you find is that emissions are still falling, and still falling pretty quickly. And what that means is that my carbon footprint today is less than my grandparents when they were my age. Despite the fact, if you looked at our lifestyles, I think you would think that mine is much more luxurious than theirs was, and I'm sure they would say the same. And this is really the result of just technological change and decarbonisation. And if you look at pre-Passagreement, so Passagreement twenty fifteen, the course that we were talking about the world heading towards then was like four to five degrees. And that was just, you know, completely catastrophic. That's not really the pathway that we think we're on anymore.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  We're kind of on track for between two and a half to three degrees. Now, to be clear, that's not unacceptable. We do not want to be on a path towards two and a half degrees. But it is vastly different from a world of four degrees. It's, you know, we've chopped off a degree of that trajectory, at least a degree of that trajectory that we thought we were on.

• 14:28Ezra Klein?

  The point you make that I found somewhat revelatory, even though it makes total sense now that I think about it, is that actually, as you get into higher numbers, right, as we hit one and a half degrees, if we hit two degrees, that every tenth of a point after that becomes more, not less consequential. Can you talk through that idea of sort of the increasing marginal value of reducing climate change?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we know that the impact of climate change, and by that I mean the impact that temperature has on stuff like precipitation patterns, for example, does not scale linearly with warming. So going from 1.5 degrees to 2 degrees is worse than going from 1 degree to 1.5 degree. So as we get into these higher and higher temperature ranges, we expect that the impacts will not be linear and they will scale much more quickly, which means that our emphasis to keep temperatures as low as possible increases the higher the temperatures go. We also risk hitting feedback loops

• 15:34Speaker 01

  or, to some extent, tipping points, which can amplify warming. And the words tipping points are kind of thrown around quite freely and often people don't define them very clearly. Here, I'm not necessarily talking about really large planetary scale tipping points that somehow flip us from one system into another. I'm often talking about more localized tipping points that we know exist in the system but don't know exactly where they are. So if you take an example of Arctic sea ice, it is quite likely that by 2050, we will have some summers where there's no Arctic sea ice. It will recover in the winter,

• 16:17Speaker 01

  but during the summer, we might have no Arctic sea ice. Ice reflects sunlight and therefore you have less being reflected. Now, that's not going to have a massive impact on the global climate system, but it could increase our warming by, I don't know, the estimate's about 0.15 degrees. Now, if you hit several of these feedback loops or tipping points, again, you might not go from 2 degrees to 5 degrees, but you could very easily increase the temperature by 0.2 degrees, 0.3 degrees, 0.4 degrees, which means that if you are at a temperature of 1.8 degrees, you're then shifted into a world of 2.2 degrees. I think the key point here is that we don't know exactly where these tipping points are,

• 17:02Speaker 01

  but some of them are potentially in that 1.5 to 2 degree range. And you'd certainly massively increase the risk of hitting them the higher and closer you are to 2 degrees. So that's why, you know, going from 1.8 to 2 degrees is much more consequential than going from 1.3 to 1.5.

• 17:24Ezra Klein?

  I was struck reading through your book, how much the solutions or the ameliorating policies seem to stretch across problem areas. I mean, it seems to be basically you're talking about really two things over and over and over again, which is don't burn so much stuff and try to reduce the human footprint over land. And if you could get those two things more or less right, we could be in a much better place. Like, that's a question of political will and organization and cooperation. And it is an extraordinarily hard question, as we've talked about and as everybody knows. But it is not a unsolvable problem. It is a set of choices we make or we do not make.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  I think these are tractable problems. They're not easy problems. They're really, really difficult to tackle, but they're tractable. And the solutions that we have to solve them are getting better year after year after year. For me, what's key is that they're linking up with other co-benefits and stuff that people care about in the shorter term. So if you're talking about energy, for example, we're in a vastly different position from where we were a decade ago. Because it's not just about tackling climate change or tackling air pollution. It's also about energy security. It's about, you know, having lower energy bills. It's about having more localized energy systems, which makes me more optimistic that they become viable and accelerate.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  When people think about the vast array of environmental problems that we face, they get really overwhelmed. And they get really overwhelmed because they assume, you know, there are 50 solutions to 10 different problems. And therefore, we need to find a way of implementing 500 different solutions. And as you say, the reality is that, you know, when you bring it down to the basics, we need to stop burning stuff for energy and we need to find a way of feeding people on much less land. And I think we are getting closer and closer to the solutions we need. And the solutions are getting better and better for us to do that every year.

• 19:22Ezra Klein?

  One of the most common questions I just hear at all is whether it is possible for all these different countries to be powered by clean energy sources, renewables, nuclear. And, I mean, we know there's a lot of solar power, right? The sun is big and it keeps shining. We know there's a fair amount of wind. But other things are limiting factors. The number of minerals we have to create solar panels with. You've got to mine all this lithium and mine all this cobalt to get your batteries. As a matter of material, as a matter of how much the earth has to give us, can we do what we need to do? Can we live and have more people living, the kinds of lifestyles we see in the UK,

• 20:05Ezra Klein?

  in the US, built on a clean energy foundation?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  So, there are a large number of researchers and different research organizations that have studied this question. And the answer that comes out is nearly always, yes, we have enough stuff. This has been said by the International Energy Agency. This has been said by Bloomberg, New Energy Finance, by the Paine Institute. There was a recent paper by Sever Wang and Zeke Hausfather and colleagues where they looked at the mineral requirements specifically on low-carbon electricity globally. And the resounding answer was, you know, there are almost no minerals where total amount is a constraint.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  What people also underestimate is that the amount of stuff we know we have or think we can extract tends to go up over time. And that's because we found new deposits, we find new ways of extracting stuff that we couldn't extract before. And actually, just the drive for low-carbon energy will just increase our efforts in order to do that. The other key change there goes in the other direction, where we're becoming much more material efficient about building this stuff. The amount of materials you need to build a solar panel today is not what it was a decade ago. For many of these minerals, you need far, far less. So, our amount of supplies are going to go up and our material requirements are probably going to go down.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  So, if we are looking into the future, I'm just not concerned about total material requirements.

• 21:39Ezra Klein?

  I get constantly emails from people after we do climate episodes suggesting, "Hey, look, from what I can tell, the amount of mining we are going to need to do here to do this renewable energy transition, this is not a clean transition. This is just hiding the dirtiness somewhere else." Are people right to be suspicious that the mining we're going to need, the intensity of getting the earth to give up what it needs to give up, if we're going to have all these solar panels and batteries and turbines, that that's going to blunt a lot of the efficacy of turning over to these fuels?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  I think what's key to highlight here is that there are no perfect solutions to this. There are no perfect solutions to meeting our energy needs or the energy transition. And I think the tough reality is that if we're looking for a perfect solution that needs no materials, that needs no land, that has zero impacts whatsoever, we'll be waiting forever and we'll just stay on this course of fossil fuels. So what we're looking for are solutions that are much, much, much better than fossil fuels. And the reality is that we have them. Estimates for the amount of material requirements for mining is something like tens of millions of tons per year, an upper limit. Compare that to how much fossil fuels we're currently extracting.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  That's 15 billion tons every single year. We're talking about mining orders of magnitude lower amount of materials compared to fossil fuels. It's vastly, vastly different. And these are very, very vastly different systems. With fossil fuels, you extract them, you burn them, you extract them, you burn them. You get nothing back in return. What's going to happen with the energy transition is that we're going to need this massive ramp up period where we're building stuff, right? So we are extracting a lot of materials out of the earth, but you can reuse that stuff at the end of its life. And I think we will also see massive leaps in terms of recycling, of refurbishing these materials back into the system later. So we will have this big ramp up period,

• 23:41Speaker 01

  but we'll move to a much more circular and sustainable system, which is vastly different from a fossil fuel system where it's just extract, extract, extract.

• 23:50Ezra Klein?

  To hold on to that point about recycling for a minute. If you have a car that burns gasoline... You burn every tank of gasoline until you're done with the car, and there's no gasoline left at the end of that. If you have an electric vehicle, when you want to trade up for a different model or your car has reached the end of its useful life, that battery still has lithium and other things in it that can be reused. I mean, right now, people reuse the minerals in electric vehicle batteries. And so at the very least, there's a possibility. I'm always a little bit skeptical of recycling because there are plenty of things that people think they can recycle that they cannot. But the things that are precious, you often can. And things like car batteries seem to be one of those even now.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I think, again, this comes back to underestimating how rapidly I think some of these technologies could shift, where it might not even be the case that the materials in your current electric car battery, you know, go into another electric car battery at the end of their life. They might be able to power more than one battery. And that's because the material requirements for a battery in 15 years might be much lower than they are today, just because we've had so much innovation and advancement in these technologies.

• 25:07Ezra Klein?

  Let's talk a bit about some of the different sources of energy here and sources of what get called clean energy. So you have renewables, and mainly, I think, what people are thinking of there are solar and wind. And the difficulty of solar and wind right now, particularly politically, is that solar and wind require, or seem to require, a lot more land than coal and gasoline. I've seen a lot of estimates around how much more land they require. You question some of that in the book. So tell me a bit about how you think about the land footprint of an economy that is substantially powered by solar versus the same portion of that economy being powered by coal.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, there are some studies that say if you take account of the mining and the transport and the full lifecycle, actually, sometimes the land footprint of coal is higher than it is for solar. But the fact that you get for some of these estimates is touch and go, which suggests that the land footprint of solar is not massively bigger than it is for coal. The question of land use for these technologies is a perfectly valid one. But I think it's important to highlight that these are choices. And what I often think is a bit suspicious, or people don't take account of, is that there are current land uses that we have that we don't really question. But as soon as solar and wind come along, you know, the guardrails go up and we shouldn't build this stuff. I mean, to give context,

• 26:33Speaker 01

  if you were to put solar panels in the US on all of the land that's currently used to produce biofuels, you could power the US three times over. You would be able to easily decarbonize the US and meet its energy requirements. That land use is a choice and you can make a different choice.

• 26:53Ezra Klein?

  I've never heard that about biofuel production in the US. So we're talking things here like growing corn for ethanol?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's nearly all corn production for ethanol that's used for road transport.

• 27:04Ezra Klein?

  And we are actually using as much of that as we would need for all solar combined?

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you put solar panels on that land, back of the envelope estimates suggest that you could meet the USC's electricity demand around three times over.

• 27:18Ezra Klein?

  So in some theoretical world, if we just paid off every farmer at above market prices for all the land being used for fairly low output ethanol from corn, we could solve a lot of these problems. I feel like that's a version of this I've not really heard before.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not saying this is the solution. I'm not saying we should put solar panels-

• 27:37Ezra Klein?

  No, this is your policy.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  I'm just making the point that we raise our eyebrows at the thought of how much land solar would need. But no one thinks about the land that's been currently being used for biofuels and not particularly productive for US gasoline and cars.

• 27:53Ezra Klein?

  Well, the other version of this is nuclear. So you write in the book that the most land efficient source of electricity is nuclear. Per unit of electricity, it needs 50 times less land than coal and 18 to 27 times less than solar photovoltaics on the ground. So that's striking and nuclear is something that is obviously controversial within the renewable energy debates. Tell me a bit about how you think of nuclear, which on the one hand is very clean and on the other hand, I think people perceive is very dangerous. And on the third hand, if we had a third hand, really has a quality that that wind and solar doesn't, which is that it can kind of be anywhere and does not require very much land to generate a lot of electricity.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think nuclear energy has a lot of merits, one of the primary ones being land use. Like, if you want to conserve land and produce lots of energy, nuclear is ultimately your best option. It's low carbon, it is safe. You know, I give figures in the book looking at death rates from different forms of energy per unit of electricity production. And as we discussed earlier, you know, fossil fuels are off the charts because not even if you take climate change out of the picture, even based on local air pollution, they're just like vastly more dangerous than the nuclear energy.

• 29:11Ezra Klein?

  Well, can you zoom in on that for a minute because people have probably heard of two major disasters here, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Can you talk about the the death rates of both?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Sure. So Fukushima in Japan in 2011, the death toll there, I mean, the direct death toll was zero. No one died in that nuclear disaster. Since then, there has been, one of the workers has subsequently died of cancer. And then there are what they call excess mortality deaths from the stress of evacuation, the stress of the event. And they attribute that to several thousand, which is obviously a lot. There is the Chernobyl disaster and more people died directly from that incident. I think you're looking at 10, I think maybe up to 50 or 100.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  It's very hard to come up with an exact total mortality impact from that disaster. But I looked into a bunch of research on this and my estimate is somewhere in the low hundreds, so maybe 300 to 500 people died in total from Chernobyl. But as I said earlier, we have millions dying from fossil fuels solely from air pollution every single year, even taking out the issue of climate change. So those numbers are just so vastly different that when you crunch the numbers per unit of electricity that we've produced from each of these sources, nuclear energy is just vastly safer than fossil fuels.

• 31:02Ezra Klein?

  I want to talk about land here because we've been talking about that in terms of energy production, but I also want to talk about it in terms of use because how we use land is relevant to climate, it's relevant to deforestation, which your book talks about, relevant to biodiversity loss, which your book talks about. And I read this statistic every couple of months because of the kind of work I do. And every time, I'm just stopped cold by it, which is that roughly 50% of ice-free land on Earth is used for agriculture.

• 31:36Ezra Klein?

  It's a lot.

• 31:38Ezra Klein?

  Walk me through that.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you you take the world's, what we call, well, we call it habitable land, so it's basically taking away the ice and the kind of barren land that you you literally couldn't use for anything else and other species couldn't really use for anything else, farming uses 50% of that. I mean, we produce around 5,000 kilocalories per person per day. Now, that's around double what the average person in the world actually needs. Obviously, that does not end up on people's plates. So there's a massive loss in the chain there. One, just, you know, losses in the supply chain or consumer waste. But there are two other big ones. One is that we feed a lot of those calories and crops to animals and they convert that

• 32:25Speaker 01

  to meat, but they do it very, very inefficiently. And we also allocate like a good chunk to biofuels. And what you find is that around 75%, or three quarters of our agricultural land is this grazing land and then the other 25% is for growing crops.

• 32:42Ezra Klein?

  So how does that grazing land break down by animal?

• 32:45Speaker 01

  So wild grazing land is basically just cattle and sheep and maybe some goats. But stuff like chicken and pork and fish, et cetera. I mean, I mean, fish where we actually feed them not out in the ocean. They are not raised on grazing land. They're they're raised on land where we we grow the crops and then feed them to the animal.

• 33:06Ezra Klein?

  So when you do that calculation, sort of virtually everything, because goat and sheep are not major sources of of human calories. I mean, they exist, but they're not a huge part of of the diet. All of the other meat, aside from cattle, is actually included in the the crop raising calculation.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Yeah.

• 33:25Ezra Klein?

  So functionally, we are using a huge portion of usable human land to raise cows.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're using a huge amount of land to raise cows. I mean, I mean, sheep are not totally insignificant. They are like, especially on more marginal lands, they are actually like quite large land users in some countries. But yes, it's primarily cattle. And cattle ranching is also the leading driver of deforestation globally. So again, it's not just that they're we're using a lot of land for this. We're actively cutting down forests and more land to raise more cattle.

• 34:03Ezra Klein?

  So can you talk a bit about where we are on on that curve?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yes, if you look at the history of global deforestation, it increased very rapidly in the 20th century. But various estimates point towards a peak in global deforestation around the 1980s. We have targets of getting to zero deforestation by 2030. And we're really not on target for that. So we still have large amounts of forests being lost, but less than we were cutting down in the 1980s. What's been really key there is a shift in where deforestation is happening. In the UK, we cut down our forests centuries ago, and we then had all of this agricultural land to use. In temperate countries, deforestation has definitely peaked, and now many forests are

• 34:52Speaker 01

  coming back, like we're regrowing forests on on these old lands. The center of deforestation today is in the tropics. So nearly all of our our global deforestation is tropical deforestation today.

• 35:05Ezra Klein?

  Beyond agriculture, to the extent there is a beyond agriculture, what are the drivers of deforestation? If we wanted to take what is happening in the tropics seriously, if we wanted to blunt it, what is the equivalent of shifting the energy system to renewables?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  I mean, when it comes to deforestation, it's nearly all about farming. Cattle ranching is the biggest driver by far, followed by oil crop production, so soy and palm oil. And then there are a couple of other major drivers or crops. Rubber, for example, is a growing one. There's some deforestation for cereal production in some regions. The primary way to increase food production in the absence of increases in crop yields is to just cut down forest and use more land.

• 35:54Ezra Klein?

  And what's the role of this in climate?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  So I think people underestimate the contribution of foods to climate change. So if you look at the breakdown of emissions, around a quarter to a third of emissions come from food systems. I think if you take emissions from livestock alone, it's somewhere in the region between 14% to 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. Without any change in this trajectory in food that we're on, emissions from food alone would take us past 1.5 degrees. This was research that came out from colleagues at Oxford, where they looked at just the cumulative emissions from agriculture out to the end of the century. Energy emissions would have to go to zero.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  And even then, emissions from agriculture alone would take us past 1.5 degrees. So I mean, it's just very clear from the data that we just cannot continue on a business as usual in food systems.

• 36:52Ezra Klein?

  And tell me about the role here in biodiversity. I think people know that there's a huge, genuinely historic level of species extinction happening right now. And I think in their minds, in many of our minds, people assume It's probably climate, right? Or making the world hot and messing with weather and that's destroying species. And in some cases, that's true. But talk me through the research on the relationship between that and how big of a driver function our food system is.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the first thing that jumps out when you look at the research is how little we know about the world's biodiversity. Quantifying carbon emissions is easy. Quantifying what's happening to the world's biodiversity is really, really difficult. And the researchers in this area do amazing work, but biodiversity is just so vast that they've hardly even touched the sides. But what's clear from the data that emerges is that most of the trends are downward and downward very steeply. I always get this question, you know, are we in the middle of the sixth mass extinction? And a couple of ways to look at this is the world has been through five big mass extinctions previously.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  And the definition of a mass extinction is losing around 75% of the world's species in a geologically short period of time. And by short here, we mean within two million years. Not short to us, but on geological periods, a relatively short period of time. We're nowhere near losing 75% of our species, but we're also very, very far away from this timeline of two million years. So another way to compare this is to say, what is the rate by which species are going extinct? And what rate were they going extinct in the previous five mass extinctions? And I think what's quite alarming is that when you look at this data, the rates by which

• 38:41Speaker 01

  species are going extinct today are higher than any of the five previous mass extinctions. The key difference there is that in the previous mass extinctions, there were these sustained very high rates for very, very long periods of time. My optimism on this is that even though extinction rates are very, very high, they can be stopped and they can be stopped because we are literally the handbrake. We are the ones driving this and we can be the ones to stop this or certainly slow it down vastly. Climate change is one driver and I think will be a growing driver of biodiversity loss in the future, but it's not top of the list. The biggest drivers of biodiversity loss are basically what we call, you know, direct

• 39:26Speaker 01

  exploitation or food production. So that's stuff like overfishing, that's stuff like deforestation or logging for wood. That is driving deforestation for food production. That's conflicts with livestock. So it's really food production that is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss by far. And again, climate change, I think, will grow in the future, but it's currently not the biggest threat.

• 39:52Ezra Klein?

  So this is one of these areas that really bothers me and that I struggle with how to talk about almost at all. The reason I think that the climate movement doesn't emphasize the role of beef and the role of dairy is because it is just insanely unfathomably lethally unpopular to do so. There's a reason the right is always accusing the left of wanting to ban hamburgers. And the left does not want to ban hamburgers. And in fact, most people I know who worry about climate eat hamburgers and eat steak and all the rest of it. But at the same time, of the things you could do that would, one, have a pretty significant

• 40:31Ezra Klein?

  effect on emissions, on deforestation, on biodiversity, and I think not totally incidentally from my perspective, animal cruelty. So there's something here where this is really, really, really, really big, linked across a bunch of our problems and yet totally politically untouchable.

• 40:53Ezra Klein?

  I'm just gonna put a question mark here and just ask you how you think about this.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  So on this, I'm just way more optimistic about the energy transition than I am about the food transition. Overall, you know, people might have, you know, some biases towards, you know, what energy source they like. Ultimately, they just want cheap energy coming out of the plug. And if you can give them that, they're not that bothered. That's not the same for food, right? People are actively making decisions about what they eat three or four times a day, and they really care about what they eat. And they will push back if you try to tell them what to eat. So even on my work and messaging on this, I do a lot on highlighting, you know, this is the environmental footprint of different foods. In the book, I write, you know, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint from your diet, this is the best way to do it.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  And cutting back on beef is ultimately the number one thing you can do. But I'm also super careful not to say, you should do this, or you have to eat less meat, because I just know that as a communication strategy, it won't be effective and people will push back in the other direction. The easiest way to get someone to increase their consumption of something is to tell them not to do it. So I don't have a good answer to how we actually achieve this, just to say that I think this will be much more challenging than, for example, the energy transition.

• 42:09Ezra Klein?

  It's so interesting, though, because it's so technologically simple compared to the energy transition. I mean, on the energy transition, we're having to figure out how to get all of these electrons we generate in other ways and replace them with these like space age, you know, we're gonna do what they do in stars and create nuclear fusion, right? We're gonna, you know, harness the power of the sun. We're going to use a nuclear reaction. And here it's like, you could eat something different. You could shop in just like literally any other part of the grocery store. But it gets at this truth, I think, across this whole transition, which is that the problems are not nearly as technological as they are political and cultural.

• 42:53Ezra Klein?

  And maybe to add one other complication here from the animal suffering side, I think a lot of people in the animal suffering and animal rights movement worry about this. Because I've known many people who see this data and decide to give up red meat, right? They decide to give up beef. But from the animal suffering perspective, that's very, very, very bad if you substitute with chicken, or fish, or other smaller animals. Cows are known for living better lives, even in industrial agriculture than, say, chickens. And a family can eat a chicken in a night, it takes them, you know, a year to eat a cow. So in terms of the total numbers of animals that you are killing or raising in very difficult conditions, cows mean fewer of them.

• 43:34Ezra Klein?

  So there is also this other difficult tension of, well, you don't want everybody to substitute into these other animals, but then people don't want to be told to become vegetarians. It's a genuinely very hard political problem.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  No, and I think the trade-off between animal welfare and environmental impact is a really underrated one. I mean, I wrote about this previously in our column Wired, where I think the title was something like, "Should we kill trillions of animals to save the planet?" or something. And it was getting at the heart of this, where the amount of chickens you would need to kill to produce the same amount of beef is just, you know, orders of magnitude lower, despite the fact that, you know, it would have a lower carbon footprint and a lower environmental impact. And that's just a naughty and hard-to-grapple-with tension between these two outcomes. I actually wish I had said more about this in the book. I think my dietary habits have actually changed in the last few years because of

• 44:31Speaker 01

  this tension, where I had very much motivations that were just about environment and climate. So I cut out red meat, I mostly cut out dairy, and I'd sometimes eat some chicken and fish, because they have a relatively low carbon footprint compared to other meats. But in the end, I just couldn't handle the tension with the animal welfare question, which is one, the number of animals that you have to kill to produce the same amount of beef. But also, to me, just the welfare standards of many of these animals is worse, right? Like, for me, just a chicken packed into a cage... Or a barn, you know, just seems to have a lower standard of living than a cow in a field, even if it has a much, much lower environmental impact. So I couldn't handle

• 45:15Speaker 01

  that trade off in that dilemma. So I opted out and went completely vegan. But it is really hard to communicate this to people. And my approach to this is to give people good information and then hope that they then make the right decision for them. But I'm not going to pretend that this is going to move very quickly because I don't think it will.

• 45:34Ezra Klein?

  If you just did imagine a world where everybody listened to Hannah Ritchie, just like, eh, we're not going to do beef. There's too much of an impact. How much land would suddenly be available for rewilding or the other kinds of things we might, you know, we might imagine that land doing?

• 45:50Speaker 01

  So if the world shifted to a fully plant-based diet, which to be clear, we're very, very far away from. But if we did that, we could reduce global agricultural use by 75%. So we basically shrink global agricultural land to a quarter of what it is today. And you could feasibly feed everyone on that land.

• 46:14Ezra Klein?

  I always just find this astonishing. I think people imagine human land use and what they think of is humans. We think of where we live. We think of where we build buildings. But actually, just a huge amount of that land is just raising cows for humans. That's what we're talking about here, actually, in terms of like the human land footprint, raising cows for us to eat or drink their milk or consume their cheese.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're really, really set on the cows. I mean, I just say in general food production, but you're right that by far the biggest land user there is cows. But you're right, the land footprint of humans is really not about where we live or where we build stuff. You know, urban land area is about 1% of global land, maybe a few percent if you add in stuff like roads and other infrastructure. But you're talking about a few percent for, you know, where we live and, you know, nearly, you know, half of habitable land for the food that we eat. You know, ultimately, the land footprint of humans is very much what we eat.

• 47:37Ezra Klein?

  One thing you talk about at the end of your book is the way in which being a good environmentalist by the numbers sometimes makes you feel like you're being a bad environmentalist in your actions. And you talk about this as the natural fallacy, that there is this tendency to believe that things that feel natural, cooking on a wood burning fireplace, or getting all your food from within 10 miles, often do not actually align with what the data tells us is environmentally sustainable. Do you want to talk through that feeling a bit and sort of how you've resolved it in your own life?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yes, I think many of the things that we assume to be green or feel are green, when you actually break down the data, the alternatives are often better. And I think the conflict there is that we see natural as good and synthetic as bad. So if you take the example of food, you know, what seems good to us or natural to us is a nice picture of a cow in a grass field. And especially if it's from a local farm, right? That seems like, you know, just the lowest way possible to produce that food, right? You're not growing crops on croplands, you're not transporting the food very far. And compare that to, for

• 48:55Speaker 01

  example, a meat substitute that's grown in a lab or produced in a factory, where, you know, you're using loads of energy for the processing, you know, it's coming in packaging, you're putting in lots of ingredients and chemicals, as people would say. That seems really bad, and the beef in a field, or cow in a field, seems really, really good. And of course, when you break down the data, the emissions from the meat substitute burger are just vastly, vastly lower than the beef. So many of our kind of gut instincts on this are often very, very off. And as I say in the book, you know, this often makes you feel quite bad as an environmentalist. And you will get pushback. You'll get pushback on, for example, the local food story, where people just assume that the best way to reduce

• 49:40Speaker 01

  the carbon footprint of your diet is to buy locally, even if that is beef. And if you're buying a product that's been shipped in from the other side of the world, they assume that that has a very high carbon footprint and therefore that's a very bad thing environmentally to do. When you break down the emissions of those two things, you know, the vegetarian product that's shipped in probably has a vastly lower footprint. Even if you think about, you know, your living conditions, you know, the picturesque, you know, someone living in a rural area, they've got their own little farm, seems much more green than, you know, being packed into a dense city with lots of cement and concrete and noise. But when you compare the carbon footprints, the dense city living

• 50:24Speaker 01

  will just give you a much lower carbon footprint. You may not even need a car. If you do, your driving distances will be much less. It's much more efficient to build infrastructure and to get goods to you if you're in a densely populated setting. It's way more efficient to set up heating networks or power networks. So there are a bunch of environmental benefits to city living, but it seems very out of sync with, you know, what we'd imagine, you know, green living would be in the past.

• 50:54Ezra Klein?

  So I've done most of the things that would reduce my personal carbon footprint. I live in a building in a dense urban area. I'm a vegan, or mostly vegan. I slip up here and there. But I travel by air. And, you know, either I don't go see my family in California, or I am emitting that carbon. My view on everything we're talking about with cattle, and with sheep, and with goats. And so I do think there is this question between the places where the only answer is abstention, which is a very, very hard form of politics, the places where the answer is substitution, which is a much easier form of politics, particularly when the substitutes are good, right? Moving to electric vehicles is much

• 51:37Ezra Klein?

  more possible now because the electric vehicles are very good. And the issue where we believe we might be able to invent a substitute, but we haven't done it yet. My view on the issues of meat is that until we figure out the whole cell-based meat thing people are trying to work through, which is going slowly, it's not like we're going to have affordable meat replacements tomorrow, where people can eat the meat they want to eat without the animals being nearly so involved, we're not going to solve that.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, on the beef question, I'm with you. I'm very pessimistic that most people make that switch to existing products that we have. And I think my pessimism around that behavioral change, you know, pushes me towards a technological vex where we can literally produce a like-for-like substitution for beef. And I think ultimately, in the end, we will to do that, just not, you know, in a very, very short timescale. My concern with some of this is that we have some fantastic technologies to address some part of our emissions pie, so primarily electricity and road transport. We now have very, very good solutions for those. We have them, we need to build them really, really quickly, right? We just need to build, build, build, build, build.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  And my concern often, when people talk about aviation, cement, steel, et cetera, is that there's almost this pullback of, you know, we need to wait until we have all of the solutions to all of the sectors before we can get going. And I think a key point for me is that we need to do both at the same time, right? We need to build the stuff that we have and is already very, very good. And we need to invest in innovations in sectors that we don't have. And in some of those, I'm actually quite optimistic that in the next decade, some of these solutions come online. But the key thing is not to get discouraged that we don't have all of the solutions now and let that hold us back from deploying the technologies that we have and we urgently need to roll out.

• 53:27Ezra Klein?

  This is, to me, something that has actually changed. And it is required to change in our politics. It is happening right now, but it's very messy, which is, you know, for a lot of the history of the environmental movement, we didn't have good substitutes. And to get some of these problems to a point where they were being ameliorated, we had to get people to stop doing things, or we had to sort of add new technologies to things we're already doing, like, you know, the scrubbers for sulfur dioxide. And now we have this capacity to substitute, right, with solar panels and wind and electric vehicles and heat pumps. And it requires a huge amount of construction, you know, transmission lines. And so you have this movement and this politics that for, you know, a lot of its life...

• 54:11Ezra Klein?

  Was about trying to get human beings to do fewer destructive things. And now needs them very rapidly to do far more constructive things. And that's actually new. That actually is a change from the dominant answer we had to environmental problems in the seventies. And the fact that it's messy and difficult is a little bit to be expected. I mean, moving from an environmentalism of stopping things to environmentalism of building things is almost reversing the polarity of an entire political sentiment.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  No, it's not simple, but I think it's also also makes me more optimistic. Mostly because I think individual behavior changes really hard. And there are a bunch of studies that would support that shifting people's behaviors on stuff like climate. It's just really, really difficult to do. If we were relying on that to get out of this climate crisis, you know, I would have very little optimism about our ability to do so. People always frame me as a kind of techno optimist, but I think I lean that way because I'm just more optimistic about the substitution effect rather than a stop doing this effect. But I think you're right that it is a massive change. A point I make regularly now is that many of the big solutions we need, we have.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  And we have like solar, wind, electric cars, et cetera. You know, they're good solutions. They're now really, really cheap and it's just about building them. And often they get the pushback of, well, yeah, we've had, but we've had the solutions for decades now. And we just haven't done anything. To me, that's just like really, really not true. We haven't had cheap replacements for fossil fuels for decades. This is really a change in the last five years. It's only in the last five years that low carbon technologies have now become competitive or undercutting the cost of fossil fuels. You know, this this transition was just not feasible 20 years ago. Like, I mean, of course, you can argue that, you know, countries should have been investing more

• 56:12Speaker 01

  in these technologies 20 to 30 years ago, so we'd get to the position faster. And I agree with that. But to me, it's just not true that we've had these solutions just sitting there, ready to build for decades and decades, and we just haven't done anything. You know, we're in a just a fundamentally different position going forward.

• 56:30Ezra Klein?

  When I get called a techno-optimist, my answer is always that I'm not a techno-optimist, I'm a political realist. And the desire for material prosperity is the strongest driver in politics, particularly for anybody under a certain level of material prosperity. And I just don't believe that there is a political tendency strong enough to overcome the desire for a better life now to avert consequences in the future. And so, in my writing about climate change 10 years ago, I was extremely pessimistic. And it was only the shatteringly fast drop in solar, wind, and battery cost that has made me relatively more optimistic.

• 57:14Ezra Klein?

  But that's only to say that if you begin from the perspective, and I do begin from it, or at least I have concluded it, that there isn't a politics here that is going to work, that is a politics of sharpened near-term sacrifice. The politics here somehow has to align with people's desire for a better life, a more prosperous life than the one they currently lead. And that as that becomes more technologically possible, the politics become more possible in lockstep. And to the extent that is technologically not possible, as in the case of, say, meat, or as in the case currently of cement, the politics are not possible. We're not going to get people to stop eating beef. We're not going to get people to stop using cement.

• 57:56Ezra Klein?

  So, I don't really want to have all my chips in on inventing solution after solution to the problems that human beings create, but I don't really think there's a choice.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  No, I think I've ended up in a similar position. It's often framed as this kind of iron law, where if you put up climate mitigation against either energy security or energy cost, energy security and energy cost will win every single time. And that's just the harsh reality of this. And therefore, if we want to make progress on climate change, then what's really key is that we line up this long-term incentive of climate change with short-term incentives. And short-term incentives are primarily about cost and quality of living. And if we can't manage to offer people a better vision of future of what that would look like... Then I just don't think you will get the political backing, especially on both sides

• 58:49Speaker 01

  of the aisle, right? You want this across the entire political spectrum. If you don't get that, then you won't get the support that you need for climate action. But I think the key thing is that they are now lining up. They weren't lining up 15 years ago, but they are lining up now. And I think going into the future, they will get closer and closer together.

• 59:07Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a good place to end. So then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  So my first book is called Factfulness, and it's by Hans Roslin. And anyone that knows my work or knows our own data will know that, you know, we were massive fans of Hans Roslin, and he was a big inspiration to me. And he was really the first person that got me into, you know, looking at the world through data and really zooming out to understand what was going on. And his book in Factfulness, you know, looks at the long history of many measures of human well-being and global change, but more importantly, kind of gives, you know, 10 key rules or pitfalls that kind of guide you into how to understand the world, how to understand data, how to understand the information ecosystem,

• 59:57Speaker 01

  and how that shapes your thinking in the world. So it had a profound impact on me, and I hope it does on you as well. My second pick is a book called Possible by Chris Goodall. Now, he is a UK energy analyst. And what he does in this book is looks at the solutions that we need in so-called hard-to-abate sectors on climate. And I think when people hear hard-to-abate, they think impossible-to-abate. And really, the key point of Chris's book is that, you know, it will be hard, but it's possible. And he breaks down cement, and steel, and aviation, and plastics, a long list of these, you know, troubling sectors, and just looks at the

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  hard data on, you know, what solutions do we potentially have? You know, how much electricity or energy would we need? How much might it cost? What companies are working in this space? So for me, it just gives a very, very clear-eyed vision of the set of sectors that we need to tackle, and what our options in this space might be. It's not prescriptive. It doesn't say we have to do this, or we have to do this. It just lays out very, very clearly, these are the options that we have. And for me, it made me more optimistic that we will get there. And then the final book for me is Cold Range and it's by David Epstein. And it's really a book looking at this contrast between specialists and generalists.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  And a key point of the book is that really the world needs more generalists. I think we have a lot of specialists and we absolutely need specialists. You know, we won't get anywhere on any of these engineering problems or climate problems without specialists, but we also need generalists that can, you know, somehow sit in the middle, pull these different pieces of, you know, complex problems together, sit in the middle of different disciplines. So whether that's, you know, research and communication or research and policy, and be able to incorporate, you know, a wide range of disciplines and and inputs and then, you know, somehow drive that to change in the world. So I think my takeaway from that is that we need a bit of a better ratio of specialists in the world to to generalists.

• 1:02:06Ezra Klein?

  I can see why you like that book, given that I think that's something you do very well and you do very well in this book. And it's the connections you're able to draw here between different domains of environmental disaster that ends up being so powerful. Hannah Ritchie, thank you very much.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Ezra.

• 1:02:31Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Yelld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Kristin Lynn and Aman Sahota. We've original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rose Strasser and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.