Review: Not the End of the World

 Not the End of the World is subtitled How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. It is a data-driven approach to the problems of sustainability and environmentalism by Hannah Richie, a disciple of Hans Rosing. I love it. The book starts off by defining sustainability as providing the best environment for the current generation without making things worse for the next generation. She points out that being a pessimist about our crisis doesn't help, and that one major driver of solving our environmental problems is wealth:

In rich countries carbon emissions, energy use, deforestation, fertiliser use, overfishing, plastic pollution, air pollution and water pollution are all falling, while these countries continue to get richer.vii The idea that these countries were more sustainable when they were poorer is simply not true. (kindle loc 640)

Yes, she addresses the claims that the rich countries have less pollution because they outsource the pollution to poorer countries.  She points out that the USA is an outlier in terms of per capita carbon emissions:

Living standards in Sweden are just as good as they are in the US, if not higher. Yet the average Swede emits just one-quarter of the emissions of the average American, and half as much as the average German. And some middle-income countries – such as China and South Africa – have now overtaken many richer countries across Europe in per capita emissions. And this is not just because rich countries have exported their emissions elsewhere. Sweden and France, with lots of nuclear power and hydropower, have very low-carbon electricity grids. They don’t have the massive transport emissions of the US. Living well does not need to come at a high cost for the climate. (kindle loc 1328)

 One of the things I like about the book is that she doesn't take an all or nothing approach to environmentalism. For instance, she points out that switching from an SUV to a regular car gives you much more emissions savings than going from a regular car to no car.  Similarly, switching from Beef to Chicken also gives you a green emissions savings without having to go completely vegetarian.

The book is full of such examples, pointing out how close we are to a truly sustainable future, despite it looking like we have a long way to go. She also points out that being an effective environmentalist doesn't mean you have to do everything the "natural" way:

For years I’ve battled with this personal dilemma: being an effective environmentalist has often made me feel like a fraud. My take on ‘cooking’ looks like an environmental disaster. I always use the microwave. I try to cook as quickly as possible. It nearly always comes from a packet. My avocados are shipped over from Mexico, and my bananas are from Angola. My food is rarely produced locally. If it is, I don’t check the label enough to notice. Ask people what a ‘sustainable meal’ looks like, and they’d describe the opposite of my eating habits. An ‘environmentally friendly meal’ is one that’s sourced from the local market, produced on an organic farm without nasty chemicals, and brought home in a paper bag, not a plastic wrapper. Forget the processed junk: it’s meat and vegetables, as fresh as they come. We should set aside time to cook them properly, in the oven. But I know that my way of eating is low-carbon. Microwaves are the most efficient way to cook, local food is often no better than food shipped from continents away, organic food often has a higher carbon footprint, and packaging is a tiny fraction of a food’s environmental footprint while often lengthening its shelf life. (kindle loc 4637)

 She acknowledges that our intuition on what sustainability is means we have a severe PR problem in the environmental crisis.  It's also quite clear that limiting warming to 2 degrees C is a stretch, but that just means each 0.1 C matters more and we really need to do what we can. One thing that she and I agree vehemently is that individual action is insufficient to bring about lasting change:

The reality is that we will not fix our environmental problems through individual behaviour change alone. This became obvious during the coronavirus pandemic. The world spent most of 2020 at home, at a huge cost to the quality of life for millions of people. Our lives were stripped back to the bare minimum. There were hardly any cars on the roads or planes in the sky. Shopping malls and entertainment venues were shut. Economies across the world tanked. There was a dramatic and almost-universal change in how all of us lived. What happened to global CO2 emissions? They fell by around 5%. That’s a hard pill to swallow. We want to believe in ‘people power’ – that if we all just pull together and act a bit more responsibly then we’ll get there. Unfortunately, to make real and lasting progress we need large-scale systemic and technological change. We need to change political and economic incentives. (kindle loc 4663)

If you are tired of doom and gloom environmentalism and the degrowth movement, this book is for you. It's definitely well worth your time to read it.