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Renewable Tuesday: Not the End of the World [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-11
A majority of young people worldwide believe that humanity is doomed. You and I, Dear Readers, know that this turns out not to be the case, but it is easy to see why the uninformed and deliberately misinformed would think so. On the other hand, the future certainly is frightening. If you aren’t fearful, you aren’t paying attention.
In Not the end of the world : how we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet Hannah Ritchie takes a comprehensive view of our environmental problems and then lays out an action plan for each of eight components.
Sustainability: A tale of two halves Air Pollution: Breathing clean air Climate Change: Turning down the thermostat Deforestation: Seeing the wood for the trees Food: How not to eat the planet Biodiversity Loss: Protecting the world’s wildlife Ocean Plastics: Drowning in waste Overfishing: Pillaging the oceans
It is going to take us a while to review all of this, while still keeping up with global news about all of it. To begin with we need to see the sources and nature of our errors, which brings us to Hans Rosling, and to Our World in Data.
Why We Were Wrong
It isn’t our fault.
I was supposed get it all wrong. Everyone does.
Ritchie started on her degree in 2010, and was taught no solutions to anything. Everything reported in the news seemed to be getting worse.
I believed I was living through humanity’s most tragic period. As will be seen, all of these assumptions were wrong.
The “If It Bleeds, It Leads” MSM can’t tell us the real story. Yes, it reports many real disasters, but never the big picture. It can tell us about the latest measles outbreak, but not about all of the dread diseases that we have conquered, and the many more that research is closing in on, or the rapid decreases in infant mortality or population growth. It can tell us about storms, droughts, massive fires, and other climate-enhanced catastrophes, but not about the death of coal, oil, and gas. A Tesla blowing up, sure, or insane tariffs on imported EVs, but not the inexorable technical progress in batteries and EV market growth.
One of Rosling’s most important skills was showing us that we were dead wrong about so much without blaming us, without telling us we were idiots.
As in a Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Motie novel, Rosling, and we, can say something like
That is a natural assumption, but it turns out not to be the case. I can see why you would think so, but it turns out not to be the case.
Here are Six Things to Keep in Mind, the heart of Chapter 1.
We face big and important environmental challenges. The fact that our environmental challenges aren’t humanity’s largest existential risk doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work on them. You will have to hold multiple thoughts at the same time. None of this is inevitable, but it is possible. We cannot afford to be complacent. You are not alone in this.
We will be examining each problem in turn, starting high in the atmosphere and ending under the oceans, on successive Tuesdays, while mining Bluesky and other sources on Fridays as usual, and applying those six thoughts throughout.
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