Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Less Doom, More Data: Debunking the Biggest Climate Myths | Ep223: Dr. Hannah Ritchie

Episode Notes

Is the future of clean energy and climate solutions brighter than we think? In this episode of Cleaning Up, Michael Liebreich welcomes back Hannah Ritchie — Deputy Editor at Our World in Data, researcher at the Oxford Martin School, and author of her new book, Clearing the Air.

In Clearing the Air, Hannah tackles 50 of the most common myths and misconceptions about climate solutions, from “Isn’t climate action too polarised and politically divisive to fix?” to “What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?” and “Won’t the world run out of minerals?” Hannah dives into the data behind renewables, electric cars, nuclear power, grids, and even lab-grown meat — cutting through the noise with clarity.

Michael quizzes Hannah on why she wrote the book and what she hopes to achieve with it, and whether it has the potential to change the minds of climate skeptics. This conversation offers a grounded, accessible look at what really works, what doesn’t, and why we should feel more hopeful than the doom-filled narratives suggest.

Leadership Circle:

Cleaning Up is supported by the Leadership Circle, and its founding members: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Arup, Cygnum Capital, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP of Portugal, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit https://www.cleaningup.live.

Links & more:

Clearing The Air: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/462676/clearing-the-air-by-ritchie-hannah/9781784745745
Ep147: Dr Hannah Ritchie: https://youtu.be/fMLmeWc7NFo
Ep178: Dr Andy Palmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzDWFFRDK8o
Decarbonising the Last Few Percent: https://mliebreich.substack.com/p/decarbonizing-the-last-few-percent

Episode Transcription

Hannah Ritchie

So when you rely on a country for fossil fuels, you are basically tied into them forever. You need a continuous supply of fuel year after year, month after month, day after day, in order to get power. So there's a very, very clear energy security risk there. If you're building a low-carbon system, once you've built the stuff or bought the stuff, you're no longer beholden to whoever supplied you with those minerals or those goods. Once you have a solar panel, the fuel is free. You are no longer dependent on those particular countries for those minerals.

Michael Liebreich

At the first order, what you say is absolutely true — that if we don't have fossil fuels, we have no heating pretty quickly, and we have no transportation pretty quickly. But if you have no supply chain, then you can no longer repair things. You can no longer build out. You can't expand, but also you can't replace anything that gets damaged. So it might be a slower process, but it's just as crippling, ultimately, for your economy.

I'm not saying that there are zero risks there, or even that we should lean in and get ourselves stuck in a high level of dependency. The point here is that this dependency is not a reason for us not to proceed. The point is that we need to do the other stuff at the same time.

Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich, and this is Cleaning Up. For those of us who do this sort of thing for a living, one of the most surprising aspects of the public discussion, whether it's about climate change or clean energy or clean transportation, industry, agriculture, you name it, is the extent to which it is based on misinformation. It might be inadvertent or it might be deliberately spread, and it might come from opponents of climate action, but it's just as likely to come from those people who are deeply committed to it. My guest today has played a key role in trying to address some of that misinformation. Hannah Ritchie is deputy editor and lead on science outreach for Our World In Data, which we've all used. She's also a researcher at the Oxford Martin School of Global Development. She's been on the show before, at the end of 2023, when she wrote her first book called It's Not the End of the World, in which she dispelled the myths about seven very substantial environmental challenges, one of which was, of course, climate change. She's now written another book called Clearing The Air, in which she dispels 50 misconceptions about climate solutions. Please welcome Hannah Ritchie to Cleaning Up. Hannah, welcome back to Cleaning Up.

Thanks very much for having me.

It has been nearly two years since your first appearance, which was in December 2023. You had written your first book at the time, which was called, It's Not The End Of The World. And now you're just releasing your second book, which is, I'm holding it up — I hope I'm holding it the right way around — there we go. For those on the podcast, you can't see it, but it's called Clearing The Air, and it's got a very nice kid’s wind turbine, whatever they're called, on the front. So Hannah, why a second book?

So I wrote the first book, as you say, a couple of years ago. And in that book, I looked at seven of our big environmental problems and where we are and what we need to do to solve them. And climate was just one of those seven chapters, and it's very hard to condense all of clean energy and climate into a single chapter, but I did my best. But what I noticed when I was doing interviews and book events and people were getting in touch on social media and email was that a lot of people had a lot more questions on climate, specifically on solutions, about whether they work, and what do we do about the mining and what do we do when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? And I couldn't go fully into detail on all of these questions in that one chapter. So it felt like I needed to try to put out a book that answered the 50 big questions that I get over and over and over again on climate and energy. So that's how this book came about. It is 50 questions, so I take on 50 of the big questions about solutions and try to give an accessible, but data driven answer.

Now we're not going to be able to go into all 50 questions. We will dive into a few of them, but before we do, there's a bit of a subtext here, because just as your first book was really about how we ought to be optimistic. It's not the end of the world, there's a clue in the title. There's a lot of doom mongering out there. And so at that time, you were trying to not be overly optimistic, pollyanna-ish about it. But to say, actually, let's get some numbers, and work out how bad things are or aren't, and you came down on the side of them not being as bad as the media portrayal. But this time, the subtext is, there's a lot of misinformation out there. Is it not?

Yeah, so I think that there is a lot of misinformation, specifically on climate solutions. And actually a lot of climate solutions we know work, and are effective and cheap and we could be going much harder on them. But there is a lot of misinformation out there, and I think it's very understandable why people that are not immersed in this would be confused and in some sense a little bit cynical, right? Like the way I phrase it in the book, is that we're kind of doomed as we are, but also doomed as we don't. So we're stuck. We're kind of stuck in this climate problem. But then, if you would look towards a lot of the media, the way we get out of this is also taking us to an even worse, or just as bad, world, because the solutions don't work. And as I put forward in the book, I think this kind of misinformation or conflicting information comes from everywhere, right? I think this challenge would actually just be easier if you would just point and say, well, the fossil fuel companies are obviously doing this because it's not in their interest for us to transition away. That would be a much easier challenge, because you could point and say, Look, they've obviously got an incentive to downplay the potential solutions. But you do also just see this kind of conflicting information coming from everywhere. You see it from right wing media. You see it from left wing media, less, maybe less than right wing media, but it still is there. And I think for many people kind of sitting in the middle, they don't have any sense of how to understand or how they should think about these solutions.

So it's quite an interesting structure of the book that you've chosen because just to summarize that, it's not just, ‘oh, this is really interesting, let's dive a bit deeper.’ It is a response to misinformation. But you don't sort of start each section by saying, you know, here are all the stupid things that people say, and here's who's saying them, and here are their motivations, and aren't they stupid or bad or evil, or whatever. You sort of gloss over that. You do talk about it a bit in the introduction and so on, but generally you focus on the stuff and the numbers behind the content, the answers to the questions. But there is this ghost in the room throughout the book, which is people who are spreading this misinformation, right?

So the way I frame it is around questions, and it was purposeful that I framed it around questions rather than, here's this thing that someone said and here's why it's wrong. Because, one, I don't think that's actually an effective, necessarily, communication strategy. And two, I think the point is that for some of these questions, the answers are not obvious. And actually what makes it quite difficult sometimes to debunk them or debunk them effectively, or what makes them so convincing to people, is that there's always some seed or element of half truth there, and often it's just that the numbers haven't been put in context, or it's kind of been extrapolated in an unhelpful way, which is why people maybe think that a particular aspect is a bigger problem than it actually is. But it was deliberate to frame it as questions. And I think, for the general public, what I want to make clear is these are very legitimate concerns and questions that people have. It's not that people are stupid or ignorant or evil for questioning how much mining we’ll need for low carbon energy. It's a very legitimate question. But my point is that we actually have very good evidence and a pretty sound answer to that question. And what I'm trying to do is equip people with the information they need to understand the media context and conflicting information they get, but importantly, so that we can kind of stop going round and round and round in circles on these questions that we've kind of already answered, so we can actually get on and take action.

I was struck, reading the book, by the sophistication of the strategy, as you say, to frame it as a question, rather than to say, you're being fed misinformation, to say, well, there's a question, and we'll get into it. We'll start on a few of the questions. And it is definitely much more accessible and welcoming. I suspect it will persuade absolutely nobody who has already made up their mind and is already proactively spreading this misinformation. But I suspect, in fact, I'm pretty sure it will help deny them their audience. It might inoculate their audience. Is that your goal?

Yeah, so I always view this as a spectrum, and you've got people on one side, one extreme, that are fully bought into this transition. They're full steam ahead, let's go. I'm not going to change their mind. They probably agree with most of the stuff that's in the book. What I hope it would do for those people is equip them with better information, and, I guess, better context, so that if they are in a conversation with someone else, they have a better grounding to be able to explain why that might not be correct, or why that skepticism might be wrong. Then there's the other extreme, as you say, where I'm really not going to change anyone's mind there. If you're really, really against this, I'm probably not going to change your mind. But I think actually the majority of people are somewhere in the middle. They are not fully immersed in this stuff. They don't feel really passionately against solar panels or wind turbines or electric cars. They would be willing to change and take part in this transition, but they are just confused. And as I said before, they're confused because there's so much conflicting information out there, and it is mostly for that middle group that I'm trying to reach who might be on the fence, might be feeling a bit cynical, and trying to give them context and information that can help them understand this.

And they need to be on a journey, if it's that middle group not really knowing, maybe being a bit skeptical, being bombarded with all this information. But they actually have to be on a journey to spending money and making decisions. So it's a very, very important constituency.

Yeah, one it’s about them making individual choices and spending money in a way that will help us get there, but also being able to ask governments, companies, financial institutions, for the right things. When this is a kind of systemic level problem, the government needs to, in some way, make popular choices if they want to stay in government, and they will try to do that. But that means you need an informed electorate and an informed public that can assess ‘does the government strategy on EVs make sense?’ Or are EVs the wrong way to go? Obviously, in the book, I say that it’s not the wrong way to go, but you need a public that's informed and can understand this to ask the government for the right things, and for the government to have confidence that they can step forward and move in that direction.

Let's dive in and do a few questions, because that will give people a sense of what is in the book. I want to start with one that we spoke about when you came on the show before which, by the way, was episode 147, we'll put a link in the show notes. If somebody wants to start there they can. If not, we talked quite a bit about electric cars. So you've got question 25 the old chestnut: aren't electric cars just as bad for the climate as internal combustion?

Yeah, and I guess the argument there comes from two strands. The first strand is that it's really energy intensive to make batteries and electric cars in the first place, and therefore it's worse than a petrol car. And surely it can't be better for the climate if you're just powering it with coal electricity, right? And that's always the argument that's put forward. And the answer there is that yes, at the moment, if you were to just produce a petrol car next to an electric car, after manufacturing, the electric car would have a slightly higher carbon footprint because it takes more energy to produce the battery. But once you start driving it, you very, very quickly pay that off, right? So the carbon emissions from driving the car per mile, electric car per mile are much lower than the petrol car, and to give some perspective, here in the UK, for example, for the average driver, you're paying off that debt of the manufacturing in less than two years, probably like one to one and a half years after that, your driving of the electric car is much, much better for the climate, and will only continue to get better as we decarbonize our electricity grids. If you are driving in a country that's more coal heavy, take China as an example. Even there, the electric car, once you start driving, is better for the climate, less than if you are running on renewables or nuclear energy. But even then, your carbon footprint of driving per mile is less in the electric car. And as I said, the transition that we're doing towards electrified transport, we're also decarbonizing our grids at the same time. So if you look at it this way, this is as bad as we’re ever going to get when it comes to the carbon footprint of electric cars. It will only get better as we decarbonize.

Let me give you another one on electric cars. Question 26: don't electric cars contribute to air pollution?

So when it comes to local air pollution, there are four main contributors. There's the tailpipe emissions, and electric cars just don't have tailpipe emissions. And even if we exclude the other stuff and just focus on that, the health benefits of getting rid of tailpipe emissions versus a petrol or diesel car means you win on air pollution. The other stuff is not going to offset any of that. So just based on tailpipe emissions and no tailpipe permissions, electric cars will reduce air pollution. And then the other stuff that gets brought up is the pollution from brakes. So when you brake some of the kind of plastics and other particles break down and are emitted. Road wear: so the roads kick up dust, and you get road wear, and then tire wear. And when it comes to brake wear, electric cars are generally better, they have regenerative braking, the pressure there is not as high. So they win on brake wear. Where there are more question marks, is the tire wear, because like for like, an electric car will be a bit heavier than a petrol car, at least at the moment. And road dust, because often that has some relation to the weight of the car. So tire wear, road wear, it's up in the air. Electric cars might be slightly worse, but on brake wear, and especially on tailpipe emissions, electric cars win by a long way, and that's more than enough to offset the tire and the road dust.

I'll give you another one on electric cars: they're useless in the cold. Sorry, I shouldn't say that, because that's then breaking your methodology of just asking a nice, friendly, happy, open question. Don't they struggle in the cold?

They do struggle in the cold in the sense that the range that you would get driving at pretty low temperatures, and especially sub-zero temperatures, is lower than what you would call the advertised range. But the drop in the range there, or the drop in the efficiency there, for most people, will still be absolutely fine, right? So the biggest study here we have is the Norwegian Automotive Group. They ran a large study across a range of EVs, and basically tested them at very low temperatures. And the average drop in range in pretty low temperatures was about 15%. That varied a bit depending on the model, but it was about 15%. So yes, you will get a drop in range in the cold. And I actually think it's very important to tell consumers that. I think it's not acceptable to advertise a range and then not advertise some of the caveats around that. I think that's useful consumer information to have, but for most drivers, it's not going to be a deal breaker, losing around 15%. I think it's important for consumers to know. It's also worth pointing out that you also get a drop in efficiency in petrol and diesel cars, right? This is not exclusive to electric cars. You also get that drop in cold conditions for petrol and diesel.

Yes, and just technically. I think a lot of people think, well, because it's a battery, and they know that if you've got, let's say, a video recorder, even a camera, if you're trying to film at a sports event, and it's very, very cold — as I used to do quite often, you know, when I was skiing — then you do get dramatic reduction in the the output of the of the battery. But of course, in a car, the batteries will be warm, they'll be heated. So it's not that, it's actually just the fact that there's more load. You're actually heating the cabin. You've got more resistance. The lubricants don't work quite as well in the cold and so on. So these are all things that will hit an internal combustion car just the same as they hit battery cars. Just with internal combustion we're not obsessed with range, but with electric cars, we are. So it's really no more than that.

One of the challenges we have is, I think when people think about batteries and electric cars, they obviously try to relate that to batteries they have in other things. So the clear example here is that people think about the battery in their phone. Now I know from experience that the battery in a phone degrades quite quickly. For me, it's always the first thing to go. The only reason I would replace my phone is if the battery runs out, which is quite common. And in fact, people associate that with electric cars. So you get this notion that after a year, they're going to be kind of useless. Or you should never buy a secondhand car, because then you would be buying a secondhand battery. And the data on this kind of degradation over time is also very clear that for most EVs, even after 200,000 miles, your battery is still at 85 plus percent, right? The degradation is much, much lower than the batteries you'd see in consumer electronic products. And I think that's important for people to understand, because the only frame of reference they have for batteries at the moment is stuff like a mobile phone or a camera or a video recorder.

What's also interesting is the industry dynamics within the manufacturing sector, right? So phones, they know the only way to get you to buy another phone is actually to have the battery degrade. It is in their interest to have batteries that degrade. And broadly speaking, if you are an Apple person, you'll just buy another Apple. And if you're a Samsung person, you buy another Samsung, and so on. So they have an incentive to degrade the battery. But of course, for the car manufacturers, they know that if their batteries degrade, they won't sell any cars, so they put an enormous amount of effort into managing that degradation and eliminating it. So I think people are, I agree, skeptical because of the experience with phones, but it just doesn't map over into cars.

Yeah, like the dynamic there is at the moment, I guess for EV manufacturers, it's electric versus petrol or diesel. And as you say, if they build electric cars where the battery degrades quickly, people will just revert back to petrol and diesel, whereas in the phone market, you're just comparing one brand to another brand with a battery. There's no kind of petrol and diesel equivalent in that sector.

Before we move on from EVs, as an aside, I want to mention just this extraordinary comparison that I came across between the 2011 Nissan Leaf — We had the guy behind the Nissan LEAF, Andy Palmer has actually been a guest on the show, and drove the process of producing the 2011 pioneering Nissan Leaf, the first mass market electric car, because Tesla was making sports cars at the time. And then you compare that to the 2026 specs. And what you've got is the range between 2011 and 2026 goes up by a factor of four, from 75 miles to over 300 miles. The power output doubles, and the speed of charging, I think, triples. And the extraordinary thing is, the cost in nominal value remains approximately the same, which means it becomes 1/3 cheaper. And so to the point about the climate impact of the batteries or the electric cars, if you actually extrapolate out into the future, it's going to get even better than the figures that you've got in your book, right?

Yeah, exactly. And the issue always with writing a book is it's a very static thing. Once you've published it, you've published it. And I guess the tricky part, and also the exciting part, is that the stuff in the sector is moving quickly, right? So I don't think you actually need to extrapolate that far into the future before the stuff I've said in the book is actually maybe a bit pessimistic or conservative in some way. And since I'm putting forward a more optimistic take, I'm fine with being then on the side of my work having been pessimistic or conservative in that way. But as you say, I think you don't need to be that far into the future before things are actually even more dramatic, from where we are today. And as you said, relative to where we were even just 10 years ago or so, we've already made huge gains.

I'm smiling because of your description of a book as being instantly out of date. That is actually why I have not written a book, because I would have to do what you're doing, and what Vaclav Smil does, which is write a book every year or every couple of years, because I couldn't bear to have some sort of out of date pessimistic book. And so I would need to update, or I would need to write a new book every year, which I just couldn't envisage, so I haven't written one. I really need to. The impact on EVs, though, going forwards, is partly the cars, like the Nissan Leaf example. It is also the grid, as you've pointed out, it's the fact that the electricity gets cleaner. So let's talk about renewables, and then nuclear power. Question 15: what happens when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine?

I opened that chapter by pointing out that the people that design wind turbines and the engineers that design this stuff, they know that actually the wind doesn't blow the time, so it's not news to them. But people like to point out that all the time. And it is obviously a valid concern, right? Like, we don't just want cheap power. We want cheap, reliable power that's available 24/7, but I think importantly when it comes to renewables, I think we made rapid progress such that actually in many parts of the world, you would actually get to pretty high penetrations with solar, wind and batteries alone. And that might not do 100% of the time everywhere, but I think actually in many countries, getting relatively close to that. But when it comes to dealing with the kind of variability of renewables, I think it's useful to break it down into kind of time frames, right, and what kind of solution you might need over different timescales. So the kind of short-term stuff, the minutes to hour stuff, we have batteries, and the batteries are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and they work, right? And that's fine. Then you get to longer, slightly longer timescales, such as hours to days, right? And there you're talking about a range of solutions. Batteries can play one role. The problem is that when you get to much longer periods, that you start to get pretty expensive if you want to store that amount of energy for that long. But there are also other quite exciting emerging storage solutions, like iron-redox batteries. You have heat storage, which is getting a lot of attention. The other ways you can balance that. One, you can balance it out with, you mentioned nuclear there, to balance it with other low carbon energy sources, not just solar and wind. So geothermal, nuclear, you can debate biomass, but other low carbon energy sources. And then I think the other really underrated part of this is the point that, yes, in your particular location, the sun is not always shining and the wind is not always blowing, but it's always blowing somewhere. So this long range transmission, where you're effectively balancing out this variability across geographies, is actually, I think, a very underrated part of this, but could be really, really valuable. I think when it comes to this variability, this storage challenge, I think so much of the conversation focuses on what we'll do for the last 5% rather than getting up to 90-95% which I think, as I said, in many parts of the world, I think you can do and you can actually do relatively cheaply. And yes, maybe there's a final 5% where we still need to work on the solutions, or getting those solutions cheaper, but it is the final 5% and even if we got to 95% clean power globally, I would be extremely, extremely happy. But so much of the discussion, and actually so much of the projected costs, are put on that final 5%, and I think people don't realize that, and assume that they were talking about storage from 20% up to 90% and we're really, really not.

This resonates very strongly. The funny thing is, you've got in your book, you have a diagram showing the solutions that will keep the lights on at different time scales from the sort of seconds through to months. And you know, I had flashbacks to a chart that I've been using for quite some time, as in more than a decade, I believe, which does exactly that. It goes from milliseconds, so the frequency management, those sorts of things, all the way to seasonal. And it postulates that actually all of this is solvable. So you're preaching not just to the converted, but to somebody who's kind of almost got tired. I almost don't talk about it anymore because I've been doing it for too long. So that's one of the reasons I love your work, because it refreshes and brings things I have been saying, in some cases, for a while, to new audiences, and just communicates it so well.

Yeah, I think, I think even if you look in the media, a lot of people's concerns about this are, I think, I get why you're tired of talking about it, and don't want to talk about it anymore, but I think it dominates so much of the discussion on this. And I think in some ways, it taints people's perspective of what's possible on this. I'm happy to now take the torch and try to raise the torch of it.

And I think, to be fair, I haven't just taken myself out of the flow of the to and fro. What I find myself being pulled into, or also being interested in, is some of the very specific criticism. So as an example, I wrote on Substack a piece called decarbonizing the final 10%, and that will also inform the second part, which is about to appear, of my pragmatic climate reset, where I make exactly this point and say: getting to 90%, even 95% decarbonization in a grid is actually pretty cheap, and we're talking about carbon prices of $100 per ton, that sort of order of magnitude. And then, of course, it goes almost vertical when you get to the last few percent. So I'm totally on board with that model. Now, what happens, though, is I say, even if that 5% is just gas peakers, that's actually better. It's better if we got there. That's better than doing nothing, because we're worried about having 5% gas peakers. As you point out, there are other things, not just gas, that we could do. I do get pushback from people saying that all wind and solar needs 100% spinning backup, which is just as expensive as if you don't have the wind and solar. So very specific, much more detailed critiques than would be answered, I think, by the question you've addressed or that you cover in your book.

Yeah, I mean, I think that partly comes down to modeling assumptions. And I think when you look at the these models that do the projected costs of how much it would cost to get to 100%, I think often you start to find these assumptions which I think are incorrect, but there are assumptions that really, really dramatically push up the price, as you see making the difference between 95% and 100% where the final cost component of that can be pretty astronomical and make it seem totally unfeasible. And I think that raises the question of, even if you're looking at this from a government perspective on economy wide decarbonisation, like would you rather get to 95% clean power and then spend that amount that you would spend on the final 5% to decarbonize transport or decarbonize heating, invest in other areas where progress has been much slower. Or do you want to put all that money into getting the final 5% and even from a carbon and climate perspective, I would bet that you would be more effective in using that money elsewhere to decarbonize other sectors, rather than focusing on getting that final 5%.

That's absolutely correct. It's very relevant in the UK context, where the centerpiece of the government's energy policy is clean power 2030, by which they sort of mean 95% but even getting from 80 to 95 I think is a mistake to go so fast, so aggressively, whilst having much, much less emphasis — and that's being very kind — on heating and on electric transportation, where we are almost fully fossil dependent. And so rapid and relatively cheap progress should be pretty cheap. Just to the point about keeping spinning reserves, by the way, if there's anybody listening: if you have spinning reserves, and all it is doing is sitting there waiting to be back up, it is not consuming the fuel in remotely the same volume as if you're actually generating. So it's not like you have a gas fired power station and a solar farm, and the gas fired power station consuming at the same rate. As it sits there spinning, it uses very, very little power to do that. And in fact, it can still provide what are called stability services. So it can still provide the frequency management and something called reactive power, which engineers in the audience will understand, and nobody else will, and so on. So this idea that because you have a backup from gas that you might as well not bother with the clean stuff, is completely ridiculous. The clean stuff is reducing emissions. It is doing the heavy lifting, and the gas at that point is only either doing nothing or providing useful services to the grid. So that was a short service announcement from the engineering side, because it's such an important point, and it's such a frequent trope that is brought up, that you're going to burn the gas anyway, so why bother? There's another one in the section on renewables. Can we build electricity grids fast enough? Now you've said: Well, it's always windy or so or sunny somewhere. Well, sure, but can we build the grid to those places fast enough?

Yeah, so for me, this is a bigger issue than the variability issue. And I think if you ask most people working in this space what's the biggest barrier we, or you are facing at the moment, they would say, we can't get a grid connection. Or the queues for a grid connection are extremely, extremely long. And then you project some of the numbers on the amount of capacity potentially sitting in the queue in the US or in the UK and it’s huge, actually huge, relative to the total amount of capacity on the grid. Now it's not that all of those projects sitting in the queue would get built. I actually think one of the solutions to this is to figure out which projects in the queue would get built and wouldn't get built. But there is a huge amount of potential capacity, and the limiting factor is getting a grid connection. There are some things we can do to accelerate that. I think the UK so far has had a kind of first come first served basis, and that's how the queue has worked. And I think that just makes no sense if you want to build the best projects as quickly as you can. As I said, the seriousness and the quality of the projects and setting in that queue can be extremely variable, right? We can both add a project to the queue, but I can be totally unserious about building mine, and you can be ready to go tomorrow. So they are switching from a first come first serve to basically a merit-based system, where the biggest or the most advanced projects with the clearest pathway to actually getting built, they basically hop to the front of the queue, which I think is a very positive direction. And then, more broadly, and this gets more into kind of policy wonk stuff, I think there is just permitting reform needed across many countries. The US and UK, where we've basically set up the challenge of getting a grid connection. We've set this up based on a system that's been based on a few fossil fuel plants, and now we're now trying to build lots and lots of much smaller renewable plants. And you can see why there would be tension there. The former system that we had in order to get permission to build and connect is outdated relative to what we need now. And I think we are kind of playing catch up on that.

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One of the things happening these days is actually tremendous acceleration, particularly solar, but also wind in the Global South. We're really seeing big numbers now coming out of Africa, but also coming out of Southeast Asia and so on. And it seems like they're struggling a lot less, because they've always had electricity demand growth. In the developed world, we've had 20 years of essentially static demand for electricity. And so suddenly we've got demand from whether it's from AI data centers or whether it's the stuff you're talking about, lots of smaller power generating capacity. And our policy environment, politicians, supply chains, seem to be completely paralyzed by this shock that there's actually demand growth for electricity and there's enormous grinding of gears because they are not able to deal with it.

Yeah, I think that's a huge difference. I think for most countries across Europe and across North America, there has been just very stagnant, or even in the UK, declining electricity demand for many decades now. And I think that the challenge is that now, for the first time in a long time, we're starting to see electricity demand growth, and from a climate energy perspective, that's good, right? That means we're actually moving in a positive direction in terms of electrification. But from a grid perspective, we're kind of confused about what we do now. In lower income countries, as you say, they're basically following the path that we followed a long time before, where they are building up grids. The grids there are much younger than they are in North America or Europe, and they're just used to building stuff. So sorting in renewables into that grid plan is much easier than if you've had a very, very stagnant grid for a long time and are trying to to then adapt to that. To be clear, countries like the UK or the US did do this before. We did have a rapid build out of the grid. So this is not, from a physics perspective, impossible. We know how to do this, we've done it before. But it is, I guess, getting back that muscle memory of how we did that 50 or 60 years ago.

I'm thinking of the analogy of me getting up off my couch and trying to do the athletic feats of my youth. Though there's definitely grinding of gears, or, in my case, grinding of vertebrae or whatever. But we're not talking about vast, 10% per year growth that needs to be delivered in the developed world. It's 2 or 3% a year, but it's over the next 2-4, decades, is what we're going to have to do. I think it's very healthy for the industry. But I want to link that to your question 16, which is, aren't renewables too expensive? And I want to just probe what definition did you use for renewables in Question 16. Was it just the renewables, or was it the renewables, plus all these other things that we've just talked about, whether it is storage or something for the last few percent, when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine and all of this transmission. So is it the narrow definition of renewables, or was it the broader definition of a renewables heavy system?

So narrows plus a bit of the broad so if you compare just building the solar panels or the wind turbines, and you compare per marginal unit of electricity. And here I'll draw on the LCOE, the levelized cost of electricity, which people like to point out as flaws. I understand that it's flawed because it doesn't contain these additional components, but if we just stick with this, how much you basically would need to pay a developer per unit of electricity over that plant’s lifetime, the LCOE of solar and wind is now below fossil fuels in basically almost every country in the world. That's a really dramatic transition from where we were 10 years ago, where they were much, much, much more expensive than coal or gas. They're now competitive with or undercutting the cost of that. So that's the narrow definition, and solar and wind, they are cheaper. Increasingly, we are seeing when you match solar plus batteries or solar plus plus wind plus batteries in many countries in the world that containing that storage cost is also cheaper than fossil fuels. That's true for many parts of Europe. India is a very good example where probably solar plus batteries is now cheaper than coal. But as we touched on in a previous question, that probably gets you relatively far into the transition, and then there's the final 10% or 5%, whatever you want to call it. And there I think, as I said earlier, I think that part can be relatively expensive, and potentially more expensive than the current system we have. But getting to relatively high penetrations, even if you include the storage part of that, is cheap.

I agree totally with that spot on. But any discussion of whether something is expensive or cheap has to be compared to the alternatives. And a lot of the noise out there that is against renewables is related to nuclear, is in some way, the kind of subtext of the meta discussion is we should be doing this other thing which is going to be better and cheaper. So question 23: isn't nuclear power too expensive on a comparative basis?

Yes, I think if you are trying to compare the LCOE with solar and wind, nuclear is more expensive. It's also more expensive than fossil fuels. You can argue for fossil fuels there's a whole other cost we should be factoring in there, where nuclear would be less expensive. That's totally valid.

Sorry, just to interrupt, that's the climate impacts that are not paid by the fossil right.

Sorry, just yeah, if you were to actually price that based on the climate impacts and pollution impacts, fossil fuels would be much more expensive. But when you compare on that basis, nuclear is more expensive. But you can also note that there are pretty large differences in the cost of nuclear across the world, right? So if you compare the cost of building a nuclear plant in the US or the UK, some of the projected costs there are quite eye watering. They're extremely, extremely expensive. Countries like China or South Korea are not building nuclear plants at that cost. They are building nuclear plants relatively quickly, not at the pace of solar and wind, but they're building nuclear plants relatively quickly and at a fraction of the cost that we are in the West. But even there, nuclear is more expensive than solar and wind, which is why it's growing, or one of the reasons why it's growing much more slowly. I think the one caveat to this again is to come back to how we deal with the final 10% question, where you can argue the costs could be pretty astronomical. And therefore nuclear, in that space is actually very, very competitive. If you were to build nuclear, it might be cheaper than, I don't know, hydrogen or whatever the potential solution is you might need for that final component. So for the bulk of getting your electricity demand, I would say nuclear power is expensive. It could play a role, I guess, in that final component if you're looking for a cheaper solution.

So this is one where I probably diverge a bit from your answer, if I'm honest. I don't want to detract from the work that you've done in the book as a whole. I absolutely think people should rush out and buy it, but on this one I have two critiques. Let me come up with two critiques. One is this idea that they're building nuclear cheaply in Korea, China, India, Russia, the Gulf regions and so on, versus what we're doing, I think, in the UK, in Europe, in the US. First of all, we're building a very different sort of nuclear, these very large plants with unbelievably complex levels, four levels of redundancy on safety and the provision of power supplies in every emergency. So we are just gold plating it. And there's a conversation about gold plating where a lot of the people say, ‘Oh, we over regulate. We over-regulate.’ Well, I kind of like my nuclear plants, not being risky and not melting down. But the other critique of the chart, I think you've got a chart in the book that shows how cheap it is. It's about a quarter of the price in some of these Asian countries. There are so many different places for those countries to hide costs. So it could be giving them free land, or not charging at all for any kind of security issues, or it could be subsidizing through industrial strategy the entire supply chain, or it could be providing free or subsidized capital, or it could be not requiring them to put money into a sinking fund for decommissioning at end of life, or all sorts of subsidies from other industries, principally the military industry, because they also produce the raw materials for a nuclear weaponry and so on. So there are so many places to hide costs which are not available, by the way, if you're in an extremely super transparent country like the UK or the US or most of Europe. So I kind of challenge this idea that nuclear is much cheaper elsewhere, and that it's self harm, that we've made it so expensive. And the second critique is that somehow you can use nuclear only when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, and therefore it's a wonderful backup. Because, of course, if nuclear power is very expensive, it's even more expensive if you only used it for the, let's call it 500 hours a year, the 4-6% of the time when you've really not got enough cheap renewables. You clearly have to run the nuclear, to make it even vaguely affordable, 24/7, 365. and then the question is, who do you ascribe the cost of that inflexibility to? Is it solar and wind’s problem because you're going to have to curtail them, you're gonna have to turn them off, or is it nuclear’s problem because it is inflexible. And I know that people will be writing in and say, ‘Oh, but you can turn nuclear down.’ Of course, you can turn nuclear down, but then its cost soars because as soon as you turn it down, you've got lower output. And you have to divide vast fixed costs over a smaller amount of electricity. So I guess, on both of those, I'm going to say it's a lot more complicated than the answer in your book.

I don't think we diverge as much as you think we do. To be clear, my answer wasn't that we would have solar and wind, and then we would only turn a nuclear plant on for the dunkelflaute. In order to build a system, you would build nuclear, you would need to build less solar and wind for the grid overall. And then you would have some backup when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. And of course, you need to run the system level costs of that mix versus a mix that has much more solar and wind. And then, I don't know, you find some other solution for the last component. And my challenge is that there might be scenarios where some nuclear with less solar and wind might be cost competitive with what the alternative would be. So my suggestion wasn't that it would be off 95% the year and only turn on for that last final 5%. And then on the point about the transparency of costs, I partially agree. I think China, to be fair, is building nuclear at a reasonable rate. I fail to see the incentives for which they would do that if it was extremely expensive and actually the costs were just hidden in some way. And the government was hiding the cost in some way. I just think if it was that expensive, they wouldn't be building it, there would be no need for them to build it. They're dominating in solar and wind. They have an abundant supply of coal. I don't see the incentive for them to build nuclear if it was actually very expensive and the numbers we're seeing are just hidden, are just non-transparent, and there's lots of hidden costs somewhere else.

I'm not saying that Chinese nuclear power stations cost the same as Hinkley C, or now we've got Sizewell C, and I'm going to have Julia Pyke on the show in a few weeks to talk about that. Or the plant in the US Vogtle, which was eye-wateringly, to use your word, expensive. I don't think it's the same, I just think it's not as cheap as it is portrayed, if you really do like for like. And of course, the other thing is, if you say: Well, you've got to go through a permitting process that is European, or US, or Japan, or whatever compatible. They don't have those permitting processes in China, which cuts out probably three or four years from every single nuclear power development process. You have another question in the book on nuclear, which is: doesn't it take too long to build a nuclear plant? What's the answer to that?

Historically, it takes less time than people, I think, would imagine. And I think that's because we're basing it on these now very, very long time scales of projects like Hinkley C or the Vogtle reactors in the US. The majority of plants that have come online have taken less than eight to 10 years, which on the speed with which we're trying to roll out clean energy to tackle climate change, you can argue is too slow, right? You can roll out solar and wind much, much faster, faster than that. But some countries, like China and South Korea, have been rolling out nuclear plants around five or six years, which is much, much shorter than the longer timescales that we're now seeing. And to be clear, countries like the UK or France or Sweden or the US, we were also rolling out nuclear plants much faster in the past. We were rolling them out basically at the same rate with which China and South Korea and some countries in Asia are doing today. But things have dramatically slowed down, and I am relatively pessimistic that countries like the US or countries across Europe, that's going to speed up. I don't see us turning around nuclear plants particularly quickly.

Where I am on the length of time of construction is, setting aside the economic impact of spending all that money and not getting any revenue until 8-10, years into the future. If this was a beautiful solution, and I studied nuclear, I would like to have some nuclear in the mix, which is kind of, in a way, what I think China is doing — have some of it in the mix almost at any cost, useful if it's not too expensive. But if it's going to be part of the mix, and it takes a long time to build, the answer to that is to make decisions and get started, because it might take a while. It is actually just have a rational pipeline of projects and move them through the system. I want to move on. There's a couple of others we talked about, actually, in your first appearance on the show, minerals. Won't the world run out of minerals? I suspect that what you said then is still what's in the book now, which is, ‘no, we won't run out.’ But Question 36: Won't we become dependent on a few countries for clean energy minerals, just like we are dependent on a few countries for fossil fuels.

Yeah. So I think in the last four or five years, there's actually been a growing reason to do this energy transition, because I think the vulnerabilities of relying on fossil fuel imports has become even more apparent, right? So the large increase we've seen in gas prices because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I think for many people has actually brought energy security up on the list, rather than climate change, as a reason to do this transition. But then people have the concern when they see some of the stats on just how concentrated the mining of these minerals are, but even more so the refining of the minerals for solar panels or batteries or wind turbines. And the argument goes, ‘Well, okay, we're trying to solve this energy security problem, but we're just creating another one that might actually be even worse.’ And I think it's really important to distinguish between these two problems. So when you rely on a country for fossil fuels, you are basically tied into them forever, right? You need a continuous supply of fuel year after year, month after month, day after day in order to get power. So if you build a gas plant, you are beholden to the suppliers of that gas forever. If they put the prices up or they shut off supply, you have no energy whatsoever. So there's a very, very clear energy security risk there. If you're building a low-carbon system, once you've built the stuff or bought the stuff, you're no longer beholden to whoever supplied you with those minerals or those goods. Once you have a solar panel, the fuel is free. You are no longer dependent on those particular countries for those minerals. Those countries can make it difficult to build more stuff, so in that sense, there's a risk to the actual speed and success of the energy transition. But that's a different issue from it being a risk to energy security. And I think it's really, really important to differentiate the differences between those two risks and threats.

So I'll be honest, this is one of the ones where I am not aligned. I think at the first order, what you say is absolutely true, if we don't have fossil fuels, we have no heating pretty quickly. We have no transportation pretty quickly. So that's clearly a very immediate dependence. Whereas, if you're importing the clean energy technologies, clean energy equipment, and then using local renewables to power them. Then, obviously, at the first order, that's a lot less scary. But if you have no supply chain, then you can no longer repair things. You can no longer build out. You can't expand, but also you can't replace anything that gets damaged. So it might be a slower process but it's just as crippling, ultimately, for your economy. And there are other sources of insecurity. So as an example, they've discovered all sorts of information being gathered by Chinese cars. We also ought to say that the country that people are worried about here is China. It's China, China, China. It's not spread between a number of countries, and you can kind of spread your risk across a number of them. All of these routes, all of those statistics you talked about, they're all about China's dominance. And there has been information gathered by sensors in cars, information gathered from even the solar panels, the inverters in solar panels. And so the worry is not that we will be shut off from energy, but that there are other dependencies or other vulnerabilities in the system if we become entirely dependent on China for our equipment in clean energy, whether transportation, infrastructure, energy and so on.

So I'm not saying that there is zero risk there, or even that we should lean in and get ourselves stuck in a high level of dependency. So at the end of each chapter, I give what we need to do next, and the point of that ‘what we need to do next’ section is to make the point on any of these questions that it's not that we have some perfect solution and we can just go full steam ahead and not bother. It's like we need to go ahead with this, but there are also things that we can do to mitigate those risks, to reduce the impact, whether it's mining or water demand or whatever it is that we're concerned about. There are ways to reduce those risks, and we should be doing those but the point here is that this dependency is not a reason for us not to proceed. The point is that we need to do the other stuff at the same time. I agree on the need for diversification and not to become fully dependent on China. I think the point of, yes, you might need new stuff to replace broken components, etc, is true. I think building a supply chain so you can necessarily repair stuff. It's not obvious to me, though that's different. I mean, you can build domestic capacity to repair stuff and understand the technology, not necessarily needing to be there in the mineral mining, or refining part of that supply chain. I think those two things are slightly different. I just don't see this as a reason not to proceed. I think we need to proceed, and I don't think it's a clear barrier. But yes, as I advise in the book, we also need to diversify at the same time,

I think we have no choice but to proceed and be very dependent on China. We have no choice. But, of course, this keys into conversations that we've had on other episodes about the rivalry between the US petrostate and the Chinese electrostate and the US trying to sell us and make us dependent on LNG, and China trying to make us dependent on their minerals and clean energy technologies. In an ideal world, we would be dependent on neither. And you know, what's extraordinary is, a few years ago, I would have said, you know, if China has 90% dominance of Technology X, we simply cannot be dependent on it, and the US is always our friend. And what's amazing about the damage done by current US policy is that even somebody like me is questioning that and saying, ‘Well, I'm not sure that we can just assume that the US is our unequivocal friend.’ And so now, instead of having one threatening power and one that's our friend, we've now got two threatening powers. And I think that we're seeing the implications of that across particularly European policy. And I would certainly like us to go further, faster and to be more consistent, or perhaps a little bit less rhetoric and a bit more action on doing something about that.

So you said, ‘we have no choice but to go ahead.’ I don't think that's necessarily true. I think the point there is that you need to accept the trade off, right? So other countries can produce solar panels and batteries and EVs, and they can also build up a mineral refining sector, right? But the trade off there is cost, right? So if you want cheap stuff, yes, you are reliant on China predominantly, and you need to accept that, and you need to have no choice but to go full steam ahead. But there's an option that, if you want to try to reclaim domestic control over that, if you want to diversify supply supply chains, you can do that. But it comes at the trade off of cost and the stuff will generally be more expensive. And I being honest and transparent about those two trade offs is really important.

It's a non-trivial cost. If you say, Chinese electric cars will be, I don't know, 40% cheaper than European ones. There's a real implication for how many people will buy them, and what's the speed of uptake, but also time. I think ultimately, yes, we can diversify all of those supply chains. Rare earths are not so rare, and we can look for other sources. I think India's role in all of this is absolutely fascinating, because it does have the potential to be — and not just India, but India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam and African countries. To be honest, a lot of them are also very, very interesting in the sophistication of their economies, and their ability to act as lower cost suppliers for European countries. Turkey or North Africa could be incredibly interesting, but it's going to take a decade or two for them to really kick in a way that could challenge China.

I mean, some countries are, especially in mining, trying to diversify, find domestic deposits. But even if you look at the permitting in the US, for example. To get a permit to open a mine, it takes seven plus years, right? And you're talking about this decade or more time scale before that dramatically shifts.

Okay, so this is a great conversation, fascinating, but we're moving away from the format and structure of your book. I've got one last one that I want to touch on, which is food and meat substitutes questions. Questions 42 to 44 are all about, ‘Oh, aren't meat substitutes too expensive? And are they really this? And are they really that?’ And I must say, on that one, there is a set of questions about meat substitutes, the sort of the technicalities, how much they cost, but isn't the real fact that people just don't trust them, and maybe not for logical reasons that you, with your tremendous methodology, can address?

So I think that's built into some of the questions. One clear barrier for people is cost. And as I say in the book, most of the meat substitute products are more expensive, at least in the cheaper meats that you can get. So they're not currently winning on costs. And I think because some of the skepticism might be relatively high, they at least need to be competitive on cost for them to stand a chance. So that's one part of it, but I think yes, on people's attitudes to them, and I address this partly in a question on the health aspect of it, where I think a lot of people's skepticism, and especially in the last few years, where I think there's kind of growing coverage of this, is the point that they are also processed. And there's this growing narrative about how bad ultra processed foods are. And I think meat substitutes have very much been wrapped up in that. So one is the health component, and then the other one is taste. And yes, I think there are some barriers for people. But if you do blind taste tests, people will often prefer the plant based meat substitute product. So it's not necessarily that this aversion is logical. If you blind them, they actually like those products better, or a hybrid of the products, rather than the fully meaty products. But I also acknowledge that a bigger part of the aversion to this is the feeling that they're ultra processed and therefore unhealthy. And there is just a familiarity aspect to this where people maybe haven't tried them that much before, and therefore they will just stick with what they know.

And just to be clear, the reason that food and meat substitutes are in your book — Clearing The Air — is that it would be tremendous for the climate if people didn't eat meat, and we could make all of the protein and all of the nutrients that people need from a much smaller land area with a much lower carbon footprint, if they would just tolerate meat substitutes. We did a very good episode with Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute. But what was interesting was that he wanted to just call it meat. I would call it synthetic meat. I mean, obviously other people call it Frankenmeat or whatever disparaging words they use, but it was interesting that he wanted to just call it meat. And to my mind, there's an issue of trust there. Meat, everybody knows, comes from animals, not from animal cells grown in factories. And so there was this trust issue, where there just was not a meeting of minds. A meeting of minds was not there because the population, I think, wants complete and open transparency, which I'm not sure the industry is ready to provide.

Yeah, I think I broadly agree with that. I don't think I would call it meat, because I think, especially in the early stages, people definitely want this differentiation, and want to know exactly what it is that they're eating. I'm also not sure about synthetic meat. I think synthetic, automatically, people have an aversion to that. It feels kind of plastic and kind of Frankenstein in some ways. I think even from a kind of branding perspective, we need to hit on a better word there. But I would generally always put something in front of me for that transparency aspect. There are lots of debates and lots of pushback about whether you can even call this stuff a burger or a sausage or there. I think meat doesn't get a monopoly on these kinds of very, very generic terms, but I would always put a word in front of it right. So I'd always put ‘plant-based’ burger. Or, for this transparency aspect, where people are used to eating meat from an animal, and that's what they associate that with. And therefore, if you're giving them something different, at this stage, I would put in a differentiating word.

I'm going to need to let you go. I think one of the messages from our conversation is, it's a great book. It's a wonderful book, and people should read it. Here's the book. It's called Clearing The Air, and it comes out on the 18th, I believe, and you can buy it from all good book retailers, including the online retailers. And I believe there'll be a US version at some point that will be a bit more US focused. But this one is out perhaps as this episode comes to air. The other message, though, is that it is really only a starting point. You and I have immediately arabesqued off into really interesting conversations from the starting point of the numbers and the analysis that's in the book. So does that mean that we'll have to have you back in another couple of years to follow some of those tangents or some of those deeper discussions? Are you going to write another book?

The plan is not right now, but as I said earlier, because this stuff changes so quickly, I think it would be at least interesting to look at the stuff in the book in a few years, maybe pick out what I got wrong or what I got right, or how things have changed since then. I think you're right that it is very much a starting point. These conversations can go much broader and go in different different directions. But what I'm really trying to do with this book is — on the really burning questions that people have about this — give them some level of grounding to make sense of what they see in the media, to make sense of is that right? Is that wrong? Do electric vehicles actually work? Are they better or worse for the climate? To equip them with a basic knowledge that you'd need to make sense of this. And of course, lots of conversations are built on top of that, and I'm very happy, even if the book stimulates some of those different conversations.

So it's a fantastic gift to give to your grumpy aunt or uncle who believes all of this stuff is nonsense. I think it's going to be in a lot of Christmas stockings. Hannah, I absolutely love your work. It's very, very valuable, and I guarantee you, if you write another book we'll have you back on the show. Thank you so much for joining us here today.

Thanks very much, Michael.

So that was Hannah Ritchie, deputy editor at Our World In Data and lead for science outreach, talking about her new book, Clearing The Air. As usual, we'll put links in the show notes to resources that we mentioned during our conversation, and, of course, in particular, to Hannah's first appearance on Cleaning Up, which was episode 147 in December 2023. And with that, I'd like to thank our producer, Oscar Boyd, our video editor, Jamie Oliver, the entire team behind Cleaning Up, the members of our leadership circle without whom none of this would happen. And of course, you the audience for spending some time with us. Please join us at this time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.