The limits of number-crunching: Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World

A few weeks ago, seven political philosophers at my department, who regularly meet to discuss issues related to sustainable futures, met to discuss Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World. That book quickly appeared on the bestseller’s lists. For everyone who read her book, or is perhaps thinking about reading her book, here’s what we thought about it (which, regular readers of this blog will notice, is an example of Team Philosophy which we discussed here a while ago.)

Our review can be found below the fold.

The limits of number-crunching: Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World

Jamie Draper, Jeroen Hopster, Hannah McHugh, Catarina Neves, Jos Philips, Ingrid Robeyns and Naomi van Steenbergen.

Should those who care about climate change worry less about whether food is locally sourced or comes wrapped in plastic? Should they worry less about rising rates of energy consumption, and more about changing their diets? In Not the End of the World, Hannah Ritchie tries to dissolve such quandaries by arguing that many people make decisions like these on the basis of poor information, which makes them ineffective in addressing climate change and ecological crises.

According to Ritchie, data scientist at Oxford University, environmentalists typically worry about the wrong things. There are indeed some things that are more harmful than environmentalists often presume, such as picking fights with people who have slightly different ideas of the best climate-friendly solutions. But when it comes to most of our decisions about climate action, we should be worrying less, not more. And crucially, we should not fall prey to doomism that tells us that humanity cannot be saved. In Not the End of the World, Ritchie sets herself the task of showing that, while the problems of climate change and other ecological crises are serious and urgent, there has been more progress in solving them than we are inclined to think.

For Ritchie, this becomes obvious if one considers the data. Take deforestation: worries about losing the ‘lungs of the earth’ abound, but looking at the data of the last century, forests have actually made a comeback in rich countries, she argues. The data, Ritchie claims, tell us that we can be the first generation that will reach sustainability. The pathway to sustainability is clear if we look at the data on the ecological crises that we face.

Ritchie outlines three key levers for driving environmental change: a demanding citizenry, financial investment, and political will. Ritchie argues that quick, large-scale action is possible when these factors align, drawing on historical successes like combating acid rain and repairing the ozone layer to demonstrate how international cooperation can yield rapid results.

The book stresses that the most urgent priority is to stop burning fossil fuels and highlights that technological and policy solutions already exist. However, Ritchie critiques simplistic narratives like relying solely on recycling or energy-efficient light bulbs, calling for more impactful actions. She emphasises that overlapping environmental issues, such as climate change, air pollution, and deforestation, can be tackled simultaneously due to their interdependencies.

There are, to our minds, two very important contributions that Not the End of the World makes. One is to keep hammering the point home that we need to look at the facts about the effectiveness of different courses of action if we want to know what to focus on in our environmental efforts, whether we are individuals, organizations, or policy makers. The other is to show that there are a large number of technologically feasible pathways towards a more sustainable world. Ritchie tells us that if we consider both, we should be more optimistic, and realize that we might be the first generation to reach sustainability.

The goal of sustainability

However, examining the book from the perspective of philosophy of science, ethics, and normative political philosophy we concluded that it has significant shortcomings.

The first concerns the goals that Ritchie advocates. Ritchie takes the aim of our efforts to tackle climate and ecological crises to be to achieve sustainability. In her understanding of what this entails, however, she takes a rather self-serving interpretation of the Brundtland definition of sustainable development: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Relying on this definition allows her to make the grand claim that we will be the first generation who can be sustainable. But that is misleading, even in its use of the Brundtland report, which is in the first place concerned with the question how development can be sustainable – not development as a goal as such (though the importance of the latter is taken as a given). More appropriate in the present context is to work with a concept of ecological sustainability. This can take different forms, but must at least involve the notion of staying within the carrying capacity of ecosystems; in other words, not depleting resources as we use them. From this perspective, it is evident that human beings have lived in ecologically sustainable ways in the past, but not at high levels of development. More accurately, then, we can say that (1) in contrast to some periods of the past, the human species is currently living in a deeply ecologically unsustainable way, and (2) we have never reached a world in which everyone’s basic human needs were met and which was at the same time ecologically sustainable.

This points us to another question, namely: why restrict ourselves to the two goals of ecological sustainability and development? These are inevitably normative goals – as the huge literature in development ethics and environmental philosophy shows – and cannot themselves be read off the data that Ritchie presents. And these goals can be either in line with, or in tension with, other normative goals. It is conceivable to have a world that is ecologically sustainable, yet does not meet minimal criteria of fairness or democratic equality, just as it is conceivable to have a world that is geared towards reaching all these goals. Ritchie’s book aims to tell us which technological and policy strategies are able to bring us to ecological sustainability without jeopardizing development for all, but she respects the status quo on any other possible societal or political goal. This is one way in which her implicit suggestion that her book does not rely on normative or politically partisan choices cannot stand up to scrutiny.

Truth’s political import

Ritchie’s avowedly non-partisan approach leads to an important tension in her book. On the one hand, Ritchie thinks citizens are entitled to the truth about the ecological crises that we face. On the other hand, she is not willing to point fingers, or make any statement regarding who is causally to blame or who bears moral and political responsibility to take the actions that are needed to overcome those crises. The same data that Ritchie draws on to set out a pathway to sustainability also document the gross inequalities of the ecological crises. The scholarly literature in climate and environmental ethics, as well as in the work of systems and transitions scholars, treats these inequalities as crucial obstacles for achieving a fair, not merely technically feasible, ecological transition. Avoiding questions of responsibility is a real shortcoming of the book, for two reasons. First, if citizens are entitled to the truth, they are entitled to the whole truth, and hence also the truth about causal responsibility. Second, the question about what needs to be done is not a question that can be answered in a merely technical way, but also requires an analysis of these questions of fairness.

It may also be that a fair ecological transition, rather than any technologically feasible ecological transition, requires limiting what we can do, both collectively and individually. But Ritchie avoids discussing this: she only wants to frame the necessary changes as opportunities, not as something that might be required of us on grounds of fairness or respect for human rights. There is a growing body of scholarly work arguing that the necessary transitions towards sustainable development can only be achieved if we move the entire human species within a consumption corridor in which they do not have too little to consume, but also not too much (see, for instance, here, here, here, here, here and here). This literature is crucial for the very points she aims to make. Yet Ritchie sets this body of work aside in less than two pages in the first chapter. This doesn’t fit with the claim that readers are entitled to the truth.

Ritchie’s non-partisan approach could be consistent with a world in which the extreme poor have their bare basic needs met only because billionaires, who are disproportionately responsible for ecological destruction, have now been granted a business opportunity to roll out the policies that will make the world ecologically sustainable. That in such a world the middle classes pay, and we move further away from a democracy to a plutocracy, is something that Ritchie’s analysis wouldn’t be concerned with – because her normative goals are limited, and because she is unwilling to attribute blame and thus make some specific agents responsible for the necessary actions, or for the cost of paying for them.

Theory of social change and political economy

What, then, are Ritchie’s recommendations? Her core recommendation is that we, citizens, put pressure on our governments to implement the fiscal changes (such as a carbon tax) and the technological changes that her analysis shows can help us move towards sustainability. There is, however, not a word on how we should do this, nor on the domestic or geopolitical hurdles that have prevented climate action. Ritchie doesn’t talk about the vital role of environmental activists who are doing precisely that kind of work, instead being inclined to paint activists as ‘doomers’ who actually halt positive change. She doesn’t talk about the need for citizens to fight for democracy first, which is important given that most radical right political regimes have a proven track-record of not caring about ecological concerns, let alone people whose lives are threatened by climate change and environmental disasters. Most strikingly, she doesn’t tell us what should be done by – or about – those who are right now massively worsening the ecological crises. For example, the one million dollar question in the climate transition is how we will make Big Oil companies stop selling fossil fuels as quickly as possible – but Ritchie’s book does not have the beginning of an answer to that question.

The book adopts the premise that optimism about the future is not only grounded in the past, but will motivate political action. This is not something to simply presume – such a claim needs to be empirically grounded. It is unclear that optimism will indeed motivate the demanding citizenry, financial investment, and political will that Ritchie argues is needed. Moreover, in seeking to avoid a ‘blame game’, Ritchie misses how blame can be crucial in developing the ability to take action for change. An important concern is that if blame and pessimism are excluded from considerations of responsibility, agents will consider themselves to have something akin to what Martha Nussbaum has referred to as a ‘moral free pass’. For the simple reason that time marches on, it is difficult to maintain the idea that we have responsibilities towards climate change, but can be blameless if they are not taken up. Taking effective action will involve the ability to attribute responsibility for duties together with concern and blame for failures to adopt them.

A best-light interpretation of Ritchie’s push for optimism could be seen as a form of ‘hope grounded in history’, in order to avoid ‘optimism that breeds complacency’. History tells us that democracy and social transformation have come with political battles for the just attribution of responsibility. Recognising that many key actors are failing to act may be reason to worry more, not less. Any motivating force of optimism should be explained. Without this explanation, there is a risk that the rhetorical effect of Ritchie’s book will breed complacency.

It might seem quick or easy to criticise a book for what it leaves out, but this omission is hardly inconsequential. If we want to know what we should be worried about when it comes to ecological crises, the plutocratic tendencies of high-emitting societies and the structural obstacles to breaking the power of those with a vested interest in the fossil fuel economy should come high on our list. If we want to be effective in our ecological actions, then we do not only need to know how to do good, but also how to make those who do evil stop. An account of what is technologically feasible will not get us there: at least as important is a theory of social change and a clear-eyed view of the political economy of the ecological crisis.

The limits of data science

Not the End of the World is a book written by a data scientist who explicitly claims authority based on the data that she provides. Yet it is misleading to pretend that data alone can answer these questions. There simply isn’t any non-partisan position if we talk about transitions. We need to know who is responsible so that we know what will be a fair distribution of climate duties, we need to have a proper analysis of political economy and a theory of social change, and we need to not only focus on changes that can be framed as opportunities, but also on changes that require malign parties to stop doing great harm. If we want readers to know the truth, let’s give them not a misleading slice of it, but instead all of it.