Not The End of The World: A Book Summary — Part 1
Introduction
As part of my New Year’s resolution, I wanted to read more, particularly non-fiction books. Since December, I’ve gone through James Clears’s Atomic Habits, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
Seven Rules for Life and Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. These were all excellent books that I would recommend to anyone. I have also read David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth. This was less impressive, and I honestly had no idea what the book was trying to achieve. It painted a dark picture of the future caused by climate change and offered no real solutions to this. It left me feeling somewhat depleted and uninspired to tackle these issues.
Hannah Ritchie describes this viewpoint in her new book Not the End of the World as a doomsday viewpoint. As I have seen, those preaching doomsday views about the state of the climate do nothing to help out. They cause more worry and panic and, in my case, could have led to inaction on the account that the planet is doomed regardless of what I do. Thankfully, I found her book in enough time.
This book was initially recommended on an internal Slack channel at work. Overwhelmed with my growing pile of unread books, I decided to give it a listen on Audible instead. I’m thrilled I did. It is an excellent book, an easy read that describes the current climate challenges we face and, more importantly, how we can solve and overcome them. Since listening to this book, I have already bought it again twice, first as a present and again for me to read and analyse in more detail. By the end of my second read, my copy looked like this:
Being so inspired by this body of work, I decided to write a blog to summarise the key findings in this book. Upon reading for the second time, it turned out that there is just too much good content for just one blog, and I will dedicate a few new blogs to this book.
Chapter 1 — Introduction
Our planet has never been sustainable. This is a point made very early on in the chapter. This is particularly interesting and encouraging. Sustainability, in this case, is defined as ensuring that each person on earth can live a healthy, high-quality life and that we are using the earth in a way that will not destroy it for future generations. Throughout history, we have either not had a high quality of life or lived sustainability. We have cut down trees, hunted for food and burnt coal to provide energy.
Now, we are in this situation for the first time in history. We can be the first generation to create a sustainable future. Infant mortality rates are dropping, Mothers dying from childbirth are declining, the living age is increasing, and more are getting access to water and electricity for the first time.
We are also poised to use the earth’s resources responsibly. We can solve climate change and reduce deforestation, ocean plastics, and overfishing. We can tackle biodiversity loss, and we can use our food production in a smarter way to eliminate world hunger. We are in a once-in-a-lifetime situation, and we need to grasp this opportunity with both hands.
Chapter 2 — Air pollution
Chapter 2 tackles the issue of air pollution. Unfortunately, air pollution is much worse than we think. We don’t think about it often, perhaps due to how normalised it is, but the air we breathe is awful. It kills as many people as smoking per year (around 8 million), more than road accidents, and about 500 times more than natural disasters combined.
Where does our air pollution come from? Simply put, it comes from burning stuff (wood, coal, crops, fossil fuels, etc.). When these materials are burnt, particles are released into the atmosphere. We breathe these in, which can cause many health problems.
Luckily, we are breathing the cleanest air ever in history at the moment. This is a very good sign and shows us that improvements are and can be made. However, it should be a priority to tackle. It is still very deadly and affects all of us daily, killing millions per year.
How can we tackle air pollution?
Simply put, we tackle air pollution by burning less stuff. Transport, surprisingly, is not the leading cause of air pollution; it ranks at the bottom of the list. Therefore, we need to move away from burning wood, charcoal and crops for energy. These three sources are the worst for air pollution and are typically used in lower-income countries. We need to move these countries off these sources and give access to clean fuels for all.
We then need to move away from coal and fossil fuels. Switching to lower-carbon options is much cheaper than we think, as we will see later. We must move to nuclear power and low-carbon sources such as solar, wind, and hydropower. Nuclear power is much safer than we think. The death toll from nuclear disasters stands at about a few thousand people, whereas millions die from the use of fossil fuels each year due to air pollution.
We should also reduce the use of cars. Whilst transport ranks low on the air pollution list, driving cars still emits CO2 and causes air pollution. Some of us are in a fortunate state where driving is a choice; we can easily walk, bike, or take public transport. Of course, this is not the case for those in rural villages without good public transport links. I have been blessed to live in Cambridge for the past 2.5 years, and whilst the public transport system is awful, the cycling infrastructure is fantastic. I rarely drive to work now, choosing to cycle in instead. However, we still need to improve as a nation on this front. Often, cycle lanes are combined with roads, causing a battle between cyclists and drivers. We need to ensure that new developments provide adequate infrastructure for cyclists and provide reliable subsidised public transport. We need to make the choice of purchasing a car a difficult one, not the default.
One encouraging fact in all of this is the success story of acid rain. Emissions of sulphur and nitrogen oxides cause acid rain. We stopped acid rain by installing scrubbers on our power plants to remove sulphur dioxide from the air. This is encouraging, showing we can build the technologies needed to solve our problems. We need to band together and recognise the problem. Air pollution is deadly, and it needs to be solved.
Conclusions
This blog has examined the first two chapters of Not the End of the World. These chapters set the scene for where we currently are regarding creating a sustainable planet and explored air pollution in detail. In the next blog, I will examine the following two chapters of the book.
