It seems that the Moon measures 3474 kilometers in diameter. But I’m not so sure.
I’m not sure, because every time I look at it, the Moon seems to be smaller than my hand. And my hand is certainly not 3474 kilometers in diameter.
OK, that’s an absurd observation. We all understand why it doesn’t hold up.
The problem is, we all walk around with equally ridiculous notions nestled comfortably in our brains.
For example, an often topical subject: the use of plastic in food packaging.
Plastic is made from petroleum, and is rarely recycled. Plastic also keeps food fresh longer and improves its lifespan during transport. Without plastic, we would have to produce more food, clear more land, use more water, more pesticides, more fertilizers, emit more CO2increase prices…
Oh yes, and packaging accounts for 4% of CO emissions2 of the food industry.
SO This that we pack is much more important for the future of the planet than how we pack it.
I’ve been showering these kinds of statistics on my (excited) friends and family lately. It’s because I just finished reading Not the End of the Worldthe new book from author Hannah Ritchie, a book that Bill Gates called “an essential antidote to environmental doom and gloom.”
I want to be clear here: Hannah Ritchie is not one of those climate change deniers. She also does not deny the urgency of reducing CO emissions.2. Quite the contrary.
Hannah Ritchie, a Scottish data scientist at the University of Oxford, is deputy editor of the data site Our World in Data. It tells us about the main problems and challenges of our era, but without telling us that we have no future. And it succeeds in reducing ambient anxiety, and increasing our appreciation for our times, and therefore our level of happiness.
In her book, the author begins by chopping up the often conveyed idea that humans of the past (read before the industrial era) lived in a sustainable world. According to the UN, a sustainable world “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Before the year 1800, almost half of children died before reaching the age of 5, due to malnutrition and infectious diseases, in particular. A world where parents bury one in two children does not “meet the needs of the present”, and therefore cannot be called sustainable.
Since then, innovation and industrialization have driven down child mortality and allowed us to make significant progress in meeting the first half of the UN definition. Everyone knows that we must urgently work to resolve the second.
The planet faces seven major environmental problems, writes Mme Ritchie: air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, biodiversity loss, plastic in the oceans and overfishing.
Although results are still awaited in several of these areas, she writes, recent trends in each are encouraging.
One of the recurring themes in Not the End of the World is that the point at which the trajectory of an environmental problem reaches its peak is often behind us. And that things are evolving – sometimes too slowly – in a more sustainable direction.
For example, who knows that China has halved its air pollution level in seven years? That global deforestation peaked in the 1980s and has declined since, the result of a five-fold increase in agricultural productivity, which allows more food to be produced on the same cultivated area? Or that the number of humans killed in natural disasters has fallen by 90% over the past century?
The radical reduction in the price of renewable energies, such as solar and wind energy over the past 10 years, also means that carbon-free electricity is increasingly attractive, both for rich and developing countries. The fall in battery prices (the cost of storing a kilowatt hour of electricity in a lithium battery has fallen by more than 98% since 1991) provides a glimpse of the moment when batteries will help decarbonize energy production. electricity.
The notion that we should be frugal to live a low-carbon life is simply false. In the United Kingdom, each citizen today emits as much CO2 than a citizen of 1850. I have the same level of emissions as my great-great-great-grandparents. And I have a much higher standard of living.
Hannah Ritchie, author and data scientist at the University of Oxford
This makes her say that with a lot of work and a sense of urgency that does not waver, her generation (the author is 31 years old) could be “the first sustainable generation in history”.
Hannah Ritchie also gives her recommendations. When asked what they do to help the planet, residents of rich countries name recycling at the top of the list. But recycling will not help us decarbonize the economy. Worse: it can give us the false impression that we are doing a lot for the environment.
One of the best things we can do is to eat less red meat, especially less beef, which produces nearly 10 times the level of CO emissions.2 chicken, the meat most compatible with a carbon-free economy. Beef produces 100 times the emissions of an equivalent amount of protein from plant-based foods, like nuts or tofu.
The author also explains to us that eating “locally” often does nothing to save the planet, and can even pollute more. This is because food transportation accounts for less than 5% of their carbon footprint. So a tomato grown in Spain or Mexico may require a fraction of the energy of a tomato grown in a local greenhouse that had to be heated.
Mme Ritchie also advocates the mass adoption of walking, cycling and public transport as sustainable ways of getting around. When the use of a motorized vehicle is necessary, choosing an electric vehicle will significantly reduce carbon emissions (this is true even when an electric vehicle uses electricity that would come from a gas or coal power plant) . Global sales of new vehicles running on fossil fuels reached a peak in 2017, and have been declining since.
Finally, the author shows how “degrowth”, the idea that negative economic growth is the solution to our environmental problems, is not desirable.
“In rich countries, CO emissions2energy use, deforestation, chemical fertilizer use, overfishing, plastic pollution, air pollution and water pollution are all in decline while these countries continue to get richer, she writes. The idea that these countries were more sustainable when they were poorer is simply false. »
One less notion to carry around with us.
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