Overcoming climate anxiety: Hannah Ritchie interview

Navigating climate anxiety: insights from Hannah Ritchie

Pictet: Hannah, you call yourself a pragmatic optimist. But that wasn’t always the case, was it?

Ritchie: I think I would have definitely framed myself as a pessimist 10 years ago. Back then, it seemed like everything was getting worse and worse. It was really hard to see any type of progress. But, over the last 10 years or so that has really flipped; I can now call myself a pragmatic optimist. We have the potential to drive change and we are actually seeing change on the ground. It’s just about accelerating it.

Pictet: Yet climate anxiety is a phenomenon that we particularly see in young people as well as the broader population.

Ritchie: Climate anxiety is a growing problem. For me, it’s always been there. I recall experiencing a deep sense of anxiety, worry and concern about the future since I was 12 years old. Over time, these feelings got progressively worse to the point of being quite crippling […] There’s this notion that we’re headed for doom, and there was nothing we can do about it […]. You can see it in surveys of young people across the world. These feelings and the fact that young people don’t feel like they have a future act as key drivers of this climate anxiety.

Pictet: But you write that the world has never been sustainable.

Ritchie: The world has never been sustainable. I think we have this notion that we’ve only become unsustainable very recently, like in the last 50 to 100 years with the rise of fossil fuels. When you go to the basic definition of sustainability, it has two halves. There’s one half which is the need to protect the environment; to protect future generations and not rob them of opportunities, and also protect other species. So that’s the environmental lens.  But there’s another whole dimension, which is also wanting to provide a good life for everyone today, to reduce human suffering, of having everyone in the world deserve a good high standard of living. And for me, sustainability is balancing both of those things at the same time.  I don’t think we’ve actually done that in the past. Our ancestors might have had a very low environmental footprint, but often living standards were very poor. One example I use is that child mortality rates were extremely high, and obviously led to immense human suffering. Now over the last few centuries, that’s moved the other way. So we’ve massively improved human wellbeing, but it came at the cost of the environment. I think we could be the first generation that achieves both of these things at the same time. We’re now at the stage where we have the technologies, we have the political power, we have the economic power, where these things are no longer incompatible.

Pictet: What is going to push us towards sustainability then?

Ritchie: The major issue with sustainability […] is that the true cost of these goods is not completely factored in. So, when you burn fossil fuels, the price you’re paying on the market does not reflect the future environmental and social damages. Now, there are ways that you can start to try and correct that, you can put a price on carbon.  It was really hard to convince countries to buy solar wind when coal or gas were much cheaper, that was just not in their short-term economic interests. What we’ve seen over the last decade is the plummeting cost of these low-carbon technologies. Solar and wind power were the most expensive 10 years ago, now they’re the cheapest. For electric cars, the batteries were so expensive 10 years ago, they’re now getting comparable with petrol and diesel cars […]. Why I’m more optimistic now is that I also see the short-term economic opportunities aligning with sustainability.

Pictet: But we know that part of the biggest challenge is not the rich world, but the poor world. And we know that those developing countries need USD 2.4 trillion every year to deal with climate change.

Ritchie: Low-carbon technologies are falling very quickly in price […]. And the price per unit of energy is now less than coal or gas. But when it comes to finance, it’s really important to reiterate how different the cost structures of renewables are compared to fossil fuels. When you’re building a solar plant or a wind plant, all of the costs are upfront. [But] once they’re in the ground or on the farm, the energy is basically free […] You may have some maintenance costs, but the costs are very front-loaded.  That’s also why these technologies are so vulnerable to high interest rates because all of the cost is front-loaded. With fossil fuels, on the other hand, there’s some cost in building the plant but the majority is actually buying the fuel, buying the gas and coal, and that’s spread over decades, which means that the costs are not so front-loaded.  If people don’t have the capital to build renewable energy infrastructure in the first place, then it won’t get built. So yes, these technologies are cheaper, but there is a really crucial upfront capital cost that we need to take into consideration. And if we don’t have investors, primarily from the rich world, playing some role in financing this, that transition will just slow down.

Pictet: Do we have to choose between mitigation and adaptation?

Ritchie: Regardless of how fast we move on reducing emissions, we are just going to see temperatures rise for a while. And we need to make sure that everyone in the world, but primarily the poorest who have contributed least, are resilient to those disasters. When it comes to disasters over the last century, we’ve actually made incredible progress. One of the reasons I was so pessimistic in the past is because I was getting so many headlines of disasters. My assumption there was just that more and more people were dying from disasters than ever before. However, when you step back to look at the data, you can see this very long-term decline over the last century. And that’s not because disasters are not getting worse, or they’re getting less intense. We have become more resilient to them. We have early warning systems, people are richer, they can live in earthquake-proof buildings and have more resilient agriculture. So that’s a massive gain. And the point is that going into the future, we need to continue to see this progress.

Pictet: Is it up to youth to fix this?

Ritchie: The generational divide is actually a little bit too exaggerated. There’s often this common perception that young people really care about climate change, but no one else does. I’ve just not found that to be true. I think it’s quite unfair. Most people actually care about climate change and want to do something about it. There’s this constant finger pointing. And to me, that’s just not that productive. There are larger inequalities that we need to bridge, but it is a collective exercise. I have this framework in the book and it’s from my colleague Mark Showalter, where he has this Venn diagram. I think the core point is that we have to be able to hold multiple thoughts in our head at the same time. So one of those is that the world is still awful. And you can pick almost any metric in the world and see where we are today. We should be dissatisfied with the current status, we’re not where we want to be on any of the health, hunger, or poverty metrics or any of the environmental problems; the world is still awful. But part of the work that we have done in mapping out where we’ve come over the long term reveals that the world is much better than it was. Many of these metrics are moving in the right direction, so the world is getting better. And humans actually can make progress. And the data shows that. I think you need to use those tools to galvanize action, understanding that the world can be much better. And that’s where I think some of the anxiety alleviation comes from understanding that we face these challenges. So it’s fine to be anxious, it’s fine to be concerned. But you need to understand that we’ve made progress in the past, so we should be able to make progress in the future if we actually have a good go at it.