New York Times Podcasts 
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 (https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hannah-ritchie/not-the-end-of-the-world/9780316536752/) .” 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? (https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima) ” by Hannah Ritchie
“Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216) ” by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek
“Future demand for electricity generation materials under different climate mitigation scenarios (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435123000016) ” by Seaver Wang, Zeke Hausfather et al.
Book Recommendations:
Factfulness (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250107817/factfulness) by Hans Rosling
Possible (https://profilebooks.com/work/possible/) by Chris Goodall
Range (https://davidepstein.com/range/) by David Epstein
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast (https://www.nytimes.com/column/ezra-klein-podcast) . Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs (https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html) .
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.
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts (http://nytimes.com/podcasts) or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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China became the best country thanks to President xi !
So glad Ezra has Ritchie on. Her work is amazing and more of my fellow progressives need to read her book before they become paralyzed with fear over climate change
30 years ago we were told not to try to invent the way out of climate change, and to instead rely on political and economic process. That was a fundamental error that has been a global disaster.
An interesting presentation, and I was pleased that the morality question of lives lost and quality of life was briefly pondered.
Do the world a favor, Ezra and NYTimes, and please invite Nate Hagens to present from a wider energy and economic systems lens regarding our many overlapping predicaments. It’s past time for these conversations, and your followers need to hear from a far more diverse collection of experts.
So we're not taking away their hamburgers? Drat. Stalin's dream, deferred yet again.
I don't bother arguing with some people about the science of climate change. Instead I argue we need to get to a 50-50 mix of sustainable and fossil fuels to create more competition in the energy markets and make prices more stable. sticking with fossil fuels just makes a bunch of ceo robber barrons, middle east zealots and russian criminals richer.
They ruin our public lands here in AZ. Happy with my decision to go vegetarian.
cows are carbon neutral you idiots. the grass takes carbon out of the air the cow eats the grass and farts carbon. its a closed loop cycle. fossil fuels are the problem not cows.
Very interesting and good information, especially how our well-intentioned actions may not necessarily result in good outcomes. But I have always wondered why our urban roofs – houses, apartments, offices, warehouses, car parking lots – are not covered with solar cells; in other words mini-power plants everywhere instead of centralized solar power plants with their delivery grids. What do the stats say about this?
Here comes the propaganda on cows, they won't speak about coca cola spreading plastic pollution but an innocent animal is now a problem. How will the people get protein. Fix your shit first and stop targeting the farmers.
If we can't convince people to stop eating red meat, and we can't stop climate change without it…. I just don't understand how we can reconcile this simple fact. I imagine sitting in a room with other people, a pedestal in the middle of the room, a button being held down by a hamburger, that if anyone eats the hamburger we all die…. now lets say you were at a casino, gambling your entire life's wealth, would you bet that no one will eat the hamburger?
nuclear creates toxic waste that lasts forever. as do many chemicals. carbon is nontoxic and good for life. landscapes change and people migrate but we wont be able to avoid these forever toxic solutions.
Soy Boy politics.
Corporate change is required to address Climate issues.
We have the technology on hand to reduce our footprint without impacting our lifestyle: white paint. If your house, your place of work, and your car is white, the surface area gets much more reflective at very little cost. If you ban asphalt or paint it with white epoxy coating or replace it with concrete, the amount of reflection increases.
But steak is SO good…
Enlightening. Thank you.
Cows? Really? If this is really your view, give up cheese,butter,beef,leather now. If you want progress, focus on fazing out fossil fuels, plastics, toxic chemicals, nuclear, and war.
Hannah Ritchie's work looks amazing. I really like her take. Thank you for bringing her on. Watched her Ted Talk and bought her book now. Funny that the NYTimes disasterized the title (Totally misleading title) when one of her main themes is messaging global warming with optimism instead of impending disaster.
Thank you for talking about this!!!!!
I just can't take Hannah Ritchie seriously. Her last book 'Not the End of the World' was terrible and after listening to her interview with Rachel Donald on Mongabay, it's crystal clear that she has absolutely no shame and is happy to use data to push forward her agenda. Let's not forget that she's funded by Bill Gates and I would suggest that it's no coincidence that her views on climate change are aligned to Gates's.
Use less energy. We will be forced to do that soon. It is better to get ahead of the curve.
Nobody ever wants to say NO. 'Can we continue to live with this level of energy usage but with cleaner energy sources?' NO. Do not say YES when the answer is NO.
I have a question: which mammals produce milk? Yes! No … haha … only the females. Cows, btw, are used to produce milk and only milk – they last a long time and produce an important food that even vegetarians consume. Males – castrated males, btw – are the cattle used for meat. So, NYT, check your subconscious sexism and change that title!
Now … what can we do? We can eat less cattle meat and more pork, for instance – we can even eat other sources of protein regularly like fungi, soy bean, fish … and save cattle meat for our barbecues!
Air pollution is caused by energy poverty because to pollute less you neeed to spend energy. Cars, for instance, lost 10% of their horse power after the electrolytic catalizer was installed. Remember when Dan Aykrioid explains to John Belushi why the police car bought on an acution was a great purchase: "and it was manufatured before the electrolytic catalizer!".
Energy richness: you can throw out 10% of your fuel to filter the exhaust pipe gases.
China has serious problems with air pollutions and is being strongly affected by climate change – they took action! Part of their action was also moving manufacturing to other countries and, therefore, giving the carbon emissions a new nationality. I must be clear here: the piece I read is over 10 years old and I don't know how things are now. Also, China has been taking serious actions to reduce both pollution and carbon emission – including building some 20 nuclear power plants. (AFAIK, those nuclear plants aren't readey yet)
She's not well remembered for her work to reduce the UK's carbon footprint but I think we should remember her name: Margareth Thatcher! Some criticize her actions claiming it was even stricter tha Xi's … after all, did she really need to kill almost all of British industry?
15:36 Tipping points.
A couple of city born quasi-intellectuals playing at saving the world and assuaging their conscience at a naive childish level. You couldn't ask for a more harmonious with nature industry than beef cow/calf ranches. The initial energy input is entirely free solar. The base material is green grass that just pops up from the earth. I would guess your methane count is from a feed yard and you projected it to every cow's butt in the pasture. Your numbers are skewed, cattle are not the problem. City dwellers are the ones unnatural and a detriment to the environment.
The conundrum between chicken and beef is strong. Eating chicken hurts chickens. Eating beef hurts future people
More people in the world eat goat than any other meat
Baloney on rhe digging rhings up excuse. We already mine hundreds of billions of earth. Fossil Fuels extraction is many times more damaging, goto Western PA, strip mines out west, mountain top removal in WV, Louisiana's disintegrating delta, many more in US, exponentially more globally. When burned rhe damages extend to the atmosphere we breath, waters we drink, farmland that feeds us. Nuclear yes, unfortunately we're 50 yrs behind due to foolish short sighted decisions made with the very first US commercial reactor. We must act. Weve spikked billions of hours down rhe drain talking.
I'm not saying they're wrong about beef, I'm saying the chemicals needed to grow high yield cereal crops kill soil, and when manure is used naturally (not through slurry) according to War on Want that desertification can be reversed. I wish fertiliser would be included in discussions of the issues with meat based diets, likewise incomes – who would lose their livelihoods through a rewilding push?
the title of this is really offensive to people who actually see cows as beings with lives, like we have lives
Amazing. I will listen to her book.
Peak Ezra Klein. Unquestioning materialism coupled to unquestioning guilt, producing the absurdity of banning cows.
Talking about animal rights is nonsense. There is not one single logical reason to care about the sufferings of animals. There are only emotional reasons. Haven't Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins proved that we should always think logically and never let our emotions get in the way of our decision making?
There HAS BEEN NO DECARBONISATION. ZERO. NADA. LAST YEAR NORTH AMERICA PRODUCED MORE FOSSIL FUEL THAN AT ANY TIME IN HISTORY.WHO IS THIS CLOWN?
Why there are conspiracy theories about environmentalists? The corn to ethanol and bio-diesel is an expensive exercise that makes things far worse and nothing can be done about it. If cows are to blame for all our problems then the well-being of chickens should not matter much. Moreover, free-range chickens are sold at my local supermarket with only 13% premium over regular ones. Why do we have to invent expensive technologies vs adapting to depopulation that happens on its own? If nothing in environmental movement makes sense, then sure there is some conspiracy there (or maybe just a regular "progressive" stupidity).
I always enjoy listening to someone who has a hyper-optimistic perspective.
I dont eat beef. I truly dont eat beef just because of climate. I eat pork and chicken and fish.
She never tells the whole story. Never.
solar panels are not that efficient. the amount of energy needed to build and maintain them offsets their energy yield substantially. they're still a net positive, but not as much as one would expect
Magical thinking is not a solution. Suggesting that we’re going to suddenly improve our recycling practices in the future? What evidence supports that suggestion ? The solution is to change our energy consumption. We cant mine our way out of this. There are no justifications for threatening our clean Water security for all future generations.
Talking about how changing the world's eating habits could reduce emissions depresses the heck out of me. Heavy carnivores who are close to me are not even a tiny bit influenced by my choices. I find it a bit suspicious that just as really palatable vegan products are super available, there's a barrage of scary news about the dangers of eating 'ultra-processed' foods. That includes fake meat and fake dairy. If you leave people with only whole plant-based foods, what are the chances they'll eat diets like people in the developing world who eat simple, mostly plant diets heavily focused on beans and lentils? Not happening.
Our collective madness is an opt out, a pre-checked box. It’s not much but it beats nihilism.
"We have cut one degree"… have we though?! Cause its what politicians (and climate change scientists working with the government) say, but its not what some of the top climate scientists (who are no longer working under the government) are saying!!!