We can have growth while fighting climate change

Climate stories usually start the same way: fire, flood, loss, collapse. The charts are grim. The vibes are worse. But there’s another story in the numbers that starts with what’s working, what’s already being built, and how far we’ve actually come.

Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist at the University of Oxford and the author of Clearing the Air, a book that offers encouraging answers to some of our hardest questions about the climate. She’s a “data optimist” who doesn’t ignore the dangers of climate change, but recognizes how the world is decarbonizing faster than most of us realize.

The real bottleneck now, Ritchie argues, isn’t technology so much as belief. Belief that progress is still possible without shrinking our world; belief that the cleaner option can also be the better, cheaper one; belief that the future is worth racing toward.

I invited Ritchie onto The Gray Area to talk about the dueling climate narratives of denial vs. despair, where individual choices meet systemic change, and how the politics of clean energy are quietly shifting. We also get into nuclear, agriculture, carbon removal, and the kind of story that might move people from doomscrolling to building.

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What changed your mind about the path we’re on?

Two things. First, zooming way out. If you look across decades and centuries, humans have solved a staggering number of problems. Poverty, hunger, child and maternal mortality, life expectancy — almost any human-development metric you pick has improved dramatically, especially in the last 50 years. You don’t get that perspective from the news cycle; you get it from long-run data. We are capable of solving big problems.

Second, zooming in on climate. We are still in a bad place and progress has been too slow. But we have made progress, and there are now objective trends you can’t see in a headline: the collapse in the costs of solar, wind, and batteries; the pace at which those technologies are being deployed; the rate at which grids are getting cleaner. If you step back and look at the data, the scale and speed of these shifts are unmistakable.

But your views have shifted, right?

They shifted a lot. Fifteen years ago, I was a doom person. I was convinced climate change would make my life unlivable. The change wasn’t a personality transplant; it came from the data. Stepping back, getting the long view, and then watching the cost curves and deployment numbers bend changed my mind.

We seem stuck between denial and despair. Why is the nuanced middle so hard to sustain?

Partly human psychology: We’re tuned to scan for threats. Partly media dynamics: Nuance doesn’t perform. Extremes get clicks and shares, so that’s what we see. If your information diet is headlines and feeds, you’ll mostly encounter the “nothing to see here” take or the “end times tomorrow” take. Even journalists tell me they want to publish more measured stories – and then watch them die in traffic. It’s kind of a feedback loop between what’s produced and what we reward.

The question you get most often is: Are we doomed? I think what people are really asking is whether anything we do — innovation, growth, building — really makes a difference. How do you think about our agency at this stage of the crisis?

We have a lot of agency. All credible pathways show the range of future temperatures is driven by choices we make now. People imagine “the threshold” – cross 1.5°C or 2°C and it’s over. But impacts are incremental. 1.6 is worse than 1.5, 1.7 worse than 1.6. That means every tenth of a degree matters. Even if we miss a target, pushing for a lower peak still saves lives and ecosystems. It’s not binary.

And agency isn’t just “individual” or “systemic.” That’s a false choice. Governments and firms make the substitutes available, affordable, and easy — clean power, efficient buildings, EVs, good transit, better food options. But once those exist, people have to choose them. Individuals create the demand signal that drives the systemic change forward.

You note that the world is improving faster than people think, but the public mood is still grim. How much do people actually care about climate action?

More than we assume. International surveys show majorities in every country say climate change is real and want more action – including in the US. There’s polarization, and the partisan gap in the US is larger than elsewhere, but even many Republicans express support. Crucially, Republicans underestimate how many other Republicans care. It’s a quiet consensus.

“Saying you care,” of course, isn’t the same as paying a premium. The lesson I take is: People are receptive to solutions, but the alternatives have to be there and affordable. Many cannot and will not pay more. Build good substitutes at good prices and adoption follows.

Politically, asking people to give up things they like is a hard sell. Substitutes are better than sacrifice. Is that what makes you optimistic?

Yes. Ten years ago, even after the Paris Agreement, solar and wind were far more expensive than coal and gas. It seemed implausible to me that the world would voluntarily choose costlier energy for decades. Then the costs collapsed. Solar is down around 80 to 90 percent, wind around 70 percent, batteries around 90 percent in a decade. In many places, solar and wind are simply the cheapest new power. The short-term economic incentive now aligns with the long-term climate imperative. That’s a very different political proposition than “pay more now for a benefit later.”

So growth and climate action aren’t opposites anymore. The bottleneck is belief.

Exactly. Some countries still see growth as “drill, baby, drill.” The US has elements of that mindset. Contrast that with China, which sees internal-combustion engines and fossil power as 20th-century tech, and wants to build the 21st-century industries: solar, wind, batteries, EVs, electrification. The belief that “green = decline” lingers in some places, but it’s increasingly disconnected from the economics.

How do you talk to people who are skeptical or even hostile?

The psychology matters. With skeptical audiences, it often helps to lead with energy security, innovation, and local benefits rather than abstract global climate goals. “Build” beats “ban.” People respond to positive visions — more reliable, cheaper, cleaner energy; better air; less dependence on petrostates — more than to austerity pitches.

You point out that red states have built a lot of clean energy — sometimes more than blue states. What’s going on?

Look at the data: A huge share of US wind was built in red states along the wind belt. Texas is surging on solar and batteries. Often the driver wasn’t “net-zero,” it was local air quality, landowner income, or energy independence. State-level rules that make it feasible to build quickly matter a lot. So there’s a split: State politics can be pragmatic and pro-build even when national politics are combative or, lately, restrictive toward new renewables.

Internationally, rich-world hypocrisy has long been a problem: “Don’t develop the way we did.” Is that still blocking progress?

It was real and still lingers. Countries like mine [the UK] built prosperity by burning fossil fuels without constraint. Many poor countries understandably want energy to escape poverty. Telling them “you can’t” rings hypocritical, especially when rich countries still use far more fossil energy per person today.

But dynamics are shifting. One promising sign is surging exports of affordable Chinese solar to countries like Pakistan and across Africa. That opens a leapfrog path — build modern systems without locking into coal and gas. We should still worry about equity and early adopters tend to be the wealthy within those countries. A national grid that delivers low-cost electricity to everyone, and can power industry, remains essential so progress doesn’t deepen internal inequality.

Let’s hit a few contested topics. Nuclear: misunderstood workhorse or unacceptable risk?

It’s one of the most misunderstood. Nuclear is very low-carbon and uses little land. The fear centers on safety, anchored to three high-profile events: Three Mile Island (no deaths), Fukushima (no direct radiation deaths), and Chernobyl (estimates vary, somewhere around 400–4,000 deaths). Any death is tragic, of course, but we have to compare orders of magnitude. Fossil fuels kill millions annually through air pollution every year, even before you count climate impacts. On a per-unit-of-electricity basis, nuclear is hundreds to thousands of times safer than fossil fuels. Closing nuclear while keeping coal and gas running makes no safety sense.

Agriculture is a quieter giant in the climate world. How big a deal is it?

Enormous. We turn half of the world’s habitable land into farms. Agriculture is the leading driver of biodiversity loss, deforestation, freshwater use, and water pollution. For climate, it’s roughly a quarter to a third of global emissions. And impacts vary hugely by product. Animal products generally require more land and cause higher emissions than plant-based foods; larger animals tend to be worse. If everyone went vegan tomorrow, agricultural land use would fall by around 75 percent.

But this isn’t all-or-nothing. We’ll get more impact if half the population cuts back a lot than if a small share goes fully vegan. Meat reduction — especially from high-impact products — is one of the most powerful personal levers.

Are there climate things we obsess over that don’t really move the needle?

Yes. Plastic, from a climate perspective, is one. People fixate on recycling. I recycle and you should too. but the carbon benefit of recycling plastics is marginal compared with the climate impact of the stuff we put in our bags. In the UK you pay for plastic bags; culturally, forgetting your tote feels like a moral failing. Meanwhile, the food choices that dwarf the bag’s footprint get little thought. It’s not that recycling is pointless; it’s that we misallocate attention. Focus where the impact is largest.

Okay, where is the largest impact for ordinary people?

Support the buildout — politically and personally. Back leaders and policies that make clean options cheaper and easier. Then choose those options: Switch to clean power when you can, electrify cars and home heating as the options become affordable, ride good transit, reduce high-impact foods.

Just as important: how we talk about this. A public that sees the benefits of clean energy — cheaper bills, cleaner air, quieter cities, more reliable systems — gives governments and companies the “permission” to go faster. Culture makes policy possible.

Motivation is the perennial question. How do we move people?

Story matters. The danger story was necessary to wake the world up. Most people are awake now. The next job is the solutions story. We need a credible vision of the world we want in 2050 and a believable path to get there. People need to know there is a path, and that walking it brings collective benefits: health, security, prosperity. “Here’s what we’re building and why you’ll like living there” beats “Here’s what you must give up.”

Paint that 2050 picture. If we mostly get this right, what does everyday life look like?

Energy is cheaper and more reliable. Most countries control much more of their own supply. They’re less vulnerable to distant shocks. Cities are quieter and cleaner; air is better. We use less energy to deliver more services because the system is more efficient end-to-end. Transport is largely electrified. Buildings are comfortable without waste. And we have more resilience — to weather, to geopolitics — because the system is diversified and local where it makes sense.

You dedicate the book to your niece, Mava, who may live to see the 22nd century. What do you hope she says about us in 50 years?

That we were at a crossroads and chose well. That we used the position we’re in — and the tools at our disposal — to build a safer, cleaner, fairer world for her generation and the next. Pride would be nice. Relief might be closer to the truth. But the choice is ours.

We can. And in many places, we are. The optimistic story is an opportunity, not an inevitability. My job — our job — is to push so that opportunity becomes the path we take.