Is Green Growth Possible?

This episode explores whether societies can maintain or enhance their material and energy-intensive lifestyles without causing irreversible environmental damage, focusing on the feasibility of decoupling economic growth from environmental impact.

1. Decoupling Economic Growth from Environmental Harm is Possible but Challenging: The episode argues that aligning economic prosperity with environmental sustainability can avoid the politics of sacrifice.
2. Technological Innovation is Crucial: Advances in technology, such as energy-efficient solutions and renewable resources, are vital for reducing environmental impacts without compromising living standards.
3. Policy and Regulation Play Critical Roles: Effective policy and stringent regulations are necessary to drive the adoption of cleaner technologies and practices.
4. The Role of Individual Choices: Consumer choices, particularly in energy and food consumption, significantly impact environmental outcomes.
5. The Need for Global Cooperation: Addressing climate change and environmental issues requires concerted global action and cooperation.

1: Introduction to Green Growth

An overview of the challenges and possibilities of achieving prosperity without harming the environment. Key points discuss the potential of sustainable practices to support continued economic growth. Josh Klein: "Is there a way to live lives as energetically rich, as materially prosperous as Americans do now, without doing irreparable damage to the world?"

2: Technological Innovations and Their Impact

Discussion on how technological advancements can mitigate environmental impacts, with examples such as cleaner car emissions and energy-efficient technologies. Hannah Ritchie: "You can improve the technologies so you can get the same stuff just with less pollution or less externalities."

3: Politics and Economics of Environmental Policies

Exploration of the economic and political dimensions of environmental policies, emphasizing the need for policies that do not require significant sacrifices from the public. Josh Klein: "If you can marry prosperity to sustainability, we have the politics of transition."

4: The Future of Energy and Agriculture

A look at the future of energy production and agricultural practices, discussing how changes in these areas can significantly reduce environmental footprints. Hannah Ritchie: "We need to stop burning stuff for energy and we need to find a way of feeding people on much less land."

1. Adopt Renewable Energy: Transition to renewable energy sources like solar and wind to reduce dependency on fossil fuels.
2. Support Sustainable Agriculture: Choose products from sustainable agricultural practices to minimize environmental impact.
3. Advocate for Environmental Policies: Support policies that promote sustainable growth and technological innovation.
4. Reduce Personal Energy Consumption: Implement energy-saving measures at home and in transportation.
5. Educate Others: Share knowledge about the importance and feasibility of green growth to encourage community action.

A decade ago, I was feeling pretty pessimistic about climate change. The politics of mitigating global warming just seemed impossible: asking people to make sacrifices, or countries to slow their development, and delay dreams of better, more prosperous lives.

But the world today looks different. The costs of solar and wind power have plummeted. Same for electric batteries. And a new politics is starting to take hold: that maybe we can invest and invent and build our way out of this crisis. But some very hard problems remain. Chief among them? Cows.

Hannah Ritchie is the deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data and the author of “Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.” She’s pored over the data on this question and has come away more optimistic than many. “It’s just not true that we’ve had these solutions just sitting there ready to build for decades and decades, and we just haven’t done anything,” she told me. “We’re in a fundamentally different position going forward.”

In this conversation, we discuss whether sustainability without sacrifice is truly possible. How much progress have we made so far? What gives her the most hope? And what are the biggest obstacles?

People

Josh Klein, Hannah Ritchie

Companies

None

Books

"Not the End of the World" by Hannah Ritchie

Guest Name(s):

Hannah Ritchie

Content Warnings:

None

Elise Hu
How can a microchip manufacturer keep track of 250 million control points at once? How can technology behind animated movies help enterprises reimagine their future? Built for change listeners know those answers and more. I'm Elise Hu. And I'm Josh Klein.

Josh Klein
We're the hosts of Built for Change, a podcast from Accenture. We talk to leaders of the world's biggest companies to hear how they've reinvented their business to create industry shifting impact. And how you can, too. New episodes are coming soon, so check out built for change wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everyone. It's Esther Herndon, political reporter for the New York Times. When I became a journalist, I made a promise to my readers, like the way the doctors take an oath to their patients. I committed to bringing the truth to light. No matter which party, business, organization, or person I'm reporting on, I have to be persistent.

Esther Herndon
I have to do research, and I have to push back when someone tries to hide or spin the facts. And I know im going to write stories that both Democrats and Republicans dont like, but thats what the New York Times has been doing for more than a century, and thats what were going to keep doing. We believe the public deserves the right to make up their mind based on the facts. So if you want to support this kind of work, you can subscribe to the New York Times@nytimes.com. Subscribe.

Josh Klein
From New York Times opinion this is the Ezra Klein Show.

I think one of the questions on which our whole future hinges is whether the lives that we have, the lives that we want, can exist within our environmental limits. Is there a way to live lives as energetically rich, as materially prosperous as Americans do now, without doing irreparable damage to the world? Is there a way for people all over to live lives even better than Americans do without doing irreparable damage to the world? Can we decouple material prosperity from the environment? If we can't, then what we're left with is a politics of sacrifice.

Then we're asking residents of rich countries to give up what they have. We're asking residents of poor and middle income countries to give up what they want. There is no way around that. I've read the degrowth books. That is, in any honest rendering.

What they are asking and the politics of sacrifice, they're abysmal. They're really hard, particularly the speed at which we need to act on climate. You try passing a global carbon tax and enforcing it. You try doing energetic redistribution between rich and poor countries. You try banning God forbid, hamburgers.

But if you can marry prosperity to sustainability, if we can power the lives we want with clean energy, if we can feed the world without wrecking every ecosystem in our sight, then we have the politics of transition. And the politics of transition is hard. Deployment is hard. Change is hard, but it is more imaginable. And maybe you can even promise that things get better, too, that we get cleaner air, healthier food, regenerated forests.

Thats a bet a lot of the climate movement is now making. Its a bet most countries are now making. But is it possible, or is it just a fantasy? Do we actually have the critical minerals, the land, the technology? Thats a question that Hannah Ritchie, the lead researcher at our world and data set out to answer in her book, not the end of the world.

Its a question that obsesses me. So ask her to come on the show to talk about it. As always, my email for guest suggestions for feedback for reflections Ezra Klein show@nytimes.com dot Hannah Ritchie, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. Ive heard you say something that has stuck in my mind, which is that air pollution is a problem of energy poverty.

What do you mean by that? So air pollution is generated when we burn stuff. And I think when people think of burning stuff, they automatically think of burning fossil fuels, which is absolutely correct. But we also generate air pollution when we burn wood or charcoal or crop waste or dung, which many people in the world, especially the poorest people in the world, rely on as their main energy source. If you see images of Lahore or New Delhi in the US, we think, oh, my God, the levels of pollution there.

Hannah Ritchie
But go back less than a century. And that's what I mean. I'm in Edinburgh and Scotland. That's what Edinburgh looked like. That's what London looked like.

That's probably what New York looked like. It's just that we are now further along the curve of pollution than many of these cities. What we tend to find is that air pollution follows what we call the environmental Kusnens curve. So if you imagine a graph and on the y axis you have air pollution, and on the x axis you have GDP or income or wealth. What you tend to see is this upside down u shape.

So at very, very low incomes, outdoor air pollution, for example, can be relatively low. What happens is that people get access to energy, they get access to industrial production, they get access to cars, and pollution starts to increase. Now, on that part of the curve, people accept that there's a trade off. Their need for energy trumps their need for clean air, and therefore they put up with the dirty air because they just need it for energy. Or it should be said they dont always have a choice.

Or they dont have a choice. Yes, if they dont have alternatives and fossil fuels is the only option they have, millions of people die simply because they do not even have access to fossil fuels. Theyre stuck on wood or charcoal. Whats the death toll of air pollution annually? So there are a range of estimates.

All of the estimates are in the millions. I mean, the WHO, the World Health Organization has a figure of around 7 million every year. And around 57 million people die every year. It was slightly higher during COVID If you take 57 million and you say 7 million are dying from air pollution, you're talking about more than 10% of deaths can be attributed in some way to air pollution. I want to zoom in on something happening on the part where the curve begins to slope down as the country gets richer.

Josh Klein
Because one way of thinking about air pollution, but a lot of environmental problems is that to get less of the bad thing, you need less of the good thing. To get less air pollution, you need less industry. To get less air pollution, you need fewer cars. But to use the example of the United States, we have many more cars today than we had in 1970 or 1975. But the air in 1975 was much worse than it is today.

You go to California, you go to Los Angeles, where I grew up. I mean, the smog that would settle over LA was legendary. So how is that part happening? How are you getting less air pollution even as you are having an energetically richer life, even as you're having a rise in the quantity of industrial production? Yeah.

Hannah Ritchie
So you've got two options. You can do less stuff, as you see, or you can improve the technologies so you can get the same stuff just with less pollution or less externalities. And there are a couple of key innovations here. I mean, I think that your example of cars is absolutely correct. There just have been massive developments in the reduction in pollution from cars.

That's a combination of one policy controls, so forcing manufacturers to develop cars that emit less. But it's also about then the technological innovation that comes from that kind of forced policy setting on industrial sites. For example, a big issue across Europe and North America, which is basically gone, was acid rain. And there the problem was sulfur dioxide. So when we burn coal, you produce sulfur dioxide, and that was leaking out into the environment and causing acid rain.

Emissions of sulfur dioxide have plummeted. And there again, there were two ways to do that one, you could just stop burning coal. And to some extent that transition has happened. But another big innovation there is that we just developed a technology called a scrubber or desulfurization technology that you could literally just put in the smokestack of the coal plant and take the sulfur out. That needed some push from government policy to force that innovation, and then it needed some investment to get there.

But that was the flip side of the coin of you don't need to just necessarily do less, you can develop technologies that can do better. Sometimes there's an argument, and certainly there's a suspicion that what is happening is the rich countries are pushing their environmental problems out into the poor countries, right? We used to make the dirty stuff here, burn the coal here, now we do it in China and we just buy the end product from China. We're going to talk about that in the carbon case a bit later on. But is that the case for air pollution?

No, I don't think that's really the case with air pollution. Yes, the UK and the US have reduced levels of air pollution, but so has China. So it cannot possibly be the case that we're just offshoring all of the pollution to China. If China's pollution is also falling rapidly, and it has fallen rapidly, especially over the last decade, local air pollution in cities like Beijing and other major cities across China have really plummeted, with massive health benefits for those populations. To just add some numbers to that, because I think they're really striking.

Josh Klein
In Beijing, air pollution fell by 55% between 2013 and 2020. The number, even the book for China as a whole is 40%. So how did they do that? What is happening that China could make air pollution fall so much faster than other countries have been able to do it in the past. So this was really kick started by the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Hannah Ritchie
Pre 2008, if you were to ask someone picture a city with really high levels of air pollution, they'd probably picture Beijing. And the world was descending on Beijing for the Olympics. The top athletes in the world were coming to the city and all eyes were on Beijing. The chinese government realized, you know, we can't have just horrendously polluted city. We need to clean this up for the athletes that are coming in.

And it was still one of the most polluted Olympics ever. But emissions and levels of air pollution were much lower than they were pre Olympics. The problem is that when all the athletes went home and all of the ice turned away, the pollution levels came back. It was a very short term reduction in order to facilitate the Olympics a couple of years on, and it was actually really a public backlash that said, why would the government do this for people coming in to watch the Olympics, but not do it for us? And we have to live here day after day, year after year, with terrible impacts on health.

And it was really this public pressure that kick started action on concerted reductions in levels of air pollution. A key one has been really strict reduction in coal burning in households, for example, which you would imagine in Edinburgh or London a century ago as well. It's the same in China, where people were using coal in cities to heat their homes. And there was a really strict crackdown on that. In some sense too strict, such that some households were temporarily left without energy, a shifting of industry outside of the city.

The problem is that often you'll have industrial site. It's very, very close to dense population centers, so you can move those industrial sites further out where there are less people, and then strict industrial controls. And in China, strict regulation can be put in place very, very quickly. And actually, industries do take action very quickly. How much is the rapidity of what China was able to do?

Josh Klein
Because we simply have more ways to generate energy in 2024 than we did in 1904 without burning things. We have nuclear energy, we have solar energy, we have wind energy, we have advanced battery technology. How much is that an enabler of the possibilities here? I think for China in the last decade, it hasn't been. That contribution hasn't been massive.

Hannah Ritchie
Now, to be clear, China is rolling out renewable energies very, very, very quickly. It's rolling out electric cars extremely quickly, but it's still burning more coal than it was a decade ago. As I say, going forward, and I think for many other countries, this opportunity to skip a lot of the burning stuff phase of energy and moving straight to energy technologies where you don't burn stuff, is a massive opportunity to avoid the really high emissions and high polluting pathway that most countries have now been through. I mean, I think people underestimate how unique this current position is that we're in. You said a century ago, but literally, since the invention of fire, humans have been burning stuff to generate energy.

It's only very, very recently that we now have the technologies and the opportunity to generate large amounts of energy, large and cheap energy, without burning stuff. And I think people underestimate the scale of that opportunity. One reason I really like the air pollution chapter in your book is that it sort of operates, I think, as a metaphor, which is, is this thing we did with air pollution, this thing we keep doing with air pollution, where we were able to bring it sharply down, the air in London, as you say, might be cleaner now than it has been in centuries, is that possible for other kinds of environmental harm? Because I do think there is this question that sits in people's minds of whether the materially rich lives that we live in, in richer countries today, is possible for the planet without completely cooking it. And one of the ways you look at this is by comparing your carbon footprint to that of your grandparents.

Josh Klein
And it's a kind of surprising comparison. So can you walk me through that? Yeah. So if you look at the carbon footprint of the average person in the UK over time, what you see is that over the last few decades, emissions in the UK have fallen really sharply. So since 1990, they've fallen by around 50%.

Hannah Ritchie
The pushback on that is always, well, we've only achieved that because we've offshored emissions to other countries and that's not a genuine reduction. Now, it's completely true that the UK has offshored some of its emissions, but even when you account for that, and you account for that based on what we call consumption based emissions, so it tries to adjust for the goods and services that the UK is buying and importing, and allocates those emissions to the UK rather than China, for example, what you find is that emissions are still falling, and still falling pretty quickly. And what that means is that my carbon footprint today is less than my grandparents when they were my age. Despite the fact, if you looked at our lifestyles, I think you would think that mine is much more luxurious than theirs was. And I'm sure they would say the same.

And this was really the result of just technological change and decarbonisation. And if you look at pre Paris agreement, so Paris Agreement 2015, the course that we were talking about the world heading towards then was like four to five degrees. And that was just, you know, completely catastrophic. That's not really the pathway that we think we're on anymore. We're kind of on track for between two and a half to three degrees.

Now, to be clear, that's not unacceptable. We do not want to be on a path towards two and a half degrees, but it is vastly different from a world of four degrees. You know, we've chopped off a degree of that trajectory, at least a degree of that trajectory that we thought we were on. A point you make that I found somewhat revelatory, even though it makes total sense now that I think about it, is that actually, as you get into higher numbers, right, as we hit one and a half degrees, if we hit two degrees, that every 10th of a point after that becomes more, not less, consequential. Can you talk through that idea of the increasing marginal value of reducing climate change?

Yeah. So we know that the impact of climate change, and by that I mean the impact that temperature has on stuff like precipitation, for example, does not scale linearly with warming. So going from 1.5 degrees to two degrees is worse than going from one degree to 1.5 degree. So as we get into these higher and higher temperature ranges, we expect that the impacts will not be linear and they will scale much more quickly, which means that, you know, our emphasis to keep temperatures as low as possible increases the higher the temperatures go. We also risk hitting feedback loops, or to some extent, tipping points, which can amplify warming.

And the words tipping points are kind of thrown around quite freely, and often people don't define them very clearly here. I'm not necessarily talking about really large planetary scale tipping points that somehow flip us from one system into another. I'm often talking about more localized tipping points that we know exist in the system, but don't know exactly where they are. So if you take an example, for example, of arctic sea ice, it is quite likely that by 2050, we will have some summers where there's no arctic sea ice. It will recover in the winter, but during the summer, we might have no arctic sea ice.

Ice reflects sunlight, and therefore you have less being reflected. Now, that's not going to have a massive impact on the global climate system, but it could increase, are warming by, I don't know, the estimates, about 0.15 degrees. Now, if you hit several of these feedback loops or tipping points, again, you might not go from two degrees to five degrees, but you could very easily increase the temperature by 0.2 degrees, 0.3 degrees, 0.4 degrees. Which means that if you are at a temperature of 1.8 degrees, you're then shifted into a world of 2.2 degrees. And I think the key point here is that we don't know exactly where these tipping points are, but some of them are potentially in that 1.5 to two degree range.

And you'd certainly massively increase the risk of hitting them the higher you are and closer you are to two degrees. So that's why, you know, going from 1.8 to two degrees is much more consequential than going from 1.3 to 1.5. I was struck, reading through your book, how much the solutions or the ameliorating policies seem to stretch across problem areas. I mean, it seems to be basically you're talking about really two things over and over and over again, which is don't burn so much stuff and try to reduce the human footprint over land. And if you could get those two things more or less right, we could be in a much better place.

Josh Klein
That's a question of political will and organization and cooperation. And it is an extraordinarily hard question, as we've talked about and as everybody knows. But it is not an unsolvable problem. It is a set of choices we make or we do not make. I think these are tractable problems.

Hannah Ritchie
Theyre not easy problems. Theyre really, really difficult to tackle, but theyre tractable. And the solutions that we have to solve them are getting better year after year after year. For me, whats key is that theyre linking up with other co benefits and stuff that people care about in the shorter term. So if youre talking about energy, for example, we're in a vastly different position from where we were a decade ago, because it's not just about tackling climate change or tackling air pollution, it's also about energy security, it's about having lower energy bills, it's about having more localized energy systems, which makes me more optimistic that they become viable and accelerate.

When people think about the vast array of environmental problems that we face, they get really overwhelmed. And they get really overwhelmed because they assume there are 50 solutions to ten different problems. And therefore we need to a way of implementing 500 different solutions. And as you say, the reality is that, you know, when you bring it down to the basics, we need to stop burning stuff for energy and we need to find a way of feeding people on much less land. And I think we are getting closer and closer to the solutions we need, and the solutions are getting better and better for us to do that every year.

Josh Klein
One of the most common questions I just hear at all is whether it is possible for all these different countries to be powered by clean energy sources, renewables, nuclear, and I mean, we know there's a lot of solar power, right, the sun is big and it keeps shining. We know there's a fair amount of wind, but other things are limiting factors. The number of minerals we have to create solar panels with. You got to mine all this lithium and mine all this cobalt to get your batteries. As a matter of material, as a matter of how much the earth has to give us, can we do what we need to do?

Can we live and have more people living the kinds of lifestyles we see in the UK, in the US built on a clean energy foundation. So there are a large number of researchers and different research organizations that have studied this question. And the answer that comes out is nearly always, yes, we have enough stuff. This has been said by the International Energy Agency. This has been said by Bloomberg New Energy Finance by the Payne Institute.

Hannah Ritchie
There was a recent paper by Saver Wang and Zeke Hausfaller and colleagues where they looked at the mineral requirements specifically on low carbon electricity globally. And the resounding answer was, you know, there are almost no minerals where total amount is a constraint. What people also underestimate is that the amount of stuff we know we have or think we can extract tends to go up over time. And that's because we found new deposits, we found new ways of extracting stuff that we couldn't extract before. And actually just the drive for low carbon energy will just increase our efforts in order to do that.

The other key change there goes in the other direction where we're becoming much more material efficient about building this stuff. The amount of materials you need to build a solar panel today is not what it was a decade ago. For many of these minerals, you need far, far less. So our amount of supplies are going to go up and our material requirements are probably going to go down. So if we are looking into the future, I'm just not concerned about total material requirements.

Josh Klein
I get constantly emails from people after we do climate episodes suggesting, hey, look, from what I can tell, the amount of mining we are going to need to do here to do this renewable energy transition, this is not a clean transition. This is just hiding the dirtiness somewhere else. Are people right to be suspicious that the mining we're going to need the intensity of getting the earth to give up what it needs to give up, if we're going to have all these solar panels and batteries and turbines, that that's going to blunt a lot of the efficacy of turning over to these fuels. I think what's key to highlight here is that there are no perfect solutions to this. There are no perfect solutions to meeting our energy needs or the energy transition.

Hannah Ritchie
And I think the tough reality is that if we're looking for a perfect solution that needs no materials, that needs no land, that has zero impacts whatsoever, we'll be waiting forever and we'll just stay on this course of fossil fuels. So what we're looking for are solutions that are much, much, much better than fossil fuels. And the reality is that we have them. Estimates for the amount of material requirements for mining is something like tens of millions of tons per year, an upper limit. Compare that to how much fossil fuels we're currently extracting.

That's 15 billion tons every single year. We're talking about mining orders of magnitude lower amount of materials compared to fossil fuels. It's vastly, vastly different, and these are very, very, vastly different systems with fossil fuels. You extract them, you burn them, you extract them, you burn them, you get nothing back in return. What's going to happen with the energy transition is that we're going to need this massive ramp up period where we're building stuff, right?

So we are extracting a lot of materials out of the earth, but you can reuse that stuff at the end of its life. And I think we will also see massive leaps in terms of recycling, of refurbishing these materials back into the system later. So we will have this big ramp up period, but we'll move to a much more circular and sustainable system, which is vastly different from a fossil fuel system where it's just extract, extract, extract. To hold on that point about recycling for a minute. If you have a car that burns gasoline, you burn every tank of gasoline until you're done with a car, and there's no gasoline left at the end of that.

Josh Klein
If you have an electric vehicle, when you want to trade up for a different model, or your car has reached the end of its useful life, that battery still has lithium and other things in it that can be reused. I mean, right now, people reuse the minerals in electric vehicle batteries. And so at the very least, there's a possibility. I'm always a little bit skeptical of recycling because there are plenty of things that people think they can recycle, that they cannot. But the things that are precious, you often can.

And things like car batteries seem to be one of those even now. Yeah, exactly. And I think, again, this comes back to underestimating how rapidly I think, some of these technologies could shift, where it might not even be the case that the materials in your current electric car battery, you know, go into another electric car battery at the end of their life, they might be able to power more than one battery. And that's because the material requirements for a battery in 15 years might be much lower than they are today, just because we've had so much innovation and advancement in these technologies. Let's talk a bit about some of the different sources of energy here and sources of what get called clean energy.

So you have renewables. And mainly, I think what people are thinking of there are solar and wind. The difficulty of solar and wind right now, particularly politically, is that solar and wind require, or seem to require a lot more land than coal and gasoline. I've seen a lot of estimates around how much more land they require. You question some of that in the book.

So tell me a bit about how you think about the land footprint of an economy that is substantially powered by solar versus the same portion of that economy being powered by coal. Yes, I mean, there are some studies that say if you take account of the mining and the transport and the full life cycle, actually, sometimes the land footprint of coal is higher than it is for solar. But the fact that you get for some of these estimates as touch and go, would suggest that the land footprint of solar is not massively bigger than it is for coal. The question of land use for these technologies is a perfectly valid one. But I think it's important to highlight that these are choices.

Hannah Ritchie
And what I often think is a bit suspicious, or people don't take account of, is that there are current land uses that we have that we don't really question. But as soon as solar and wind come along, the guardrails go up and we shouldn't build this stuff. I mean, to give context, if you were to put solar panels in the US, on all of the land that's currently used to produce biofuels, you could power the US three times over. You would be able to easily decarbonize the US and meet its energy requirements. That land use is a choice and you can make a different choice.

Josh Klein
I've never heard that about biofuel production in the US. So we're talking things here like growing corn for ethanol. Yeah. It's nearly all corn production for ethanol that's used for road transport. And we are actually using as much of that as we would need for all solar combined.

Hannah Ritchie
Yeah. So if you put solar panels on that land, back of the envelope, estimates suggest that you could meet the US's electricity demand around three times over. So in some theoretical world, if we just paid off every farmer at above market prices for all the land being used for fairly low output ethanol from corn, we could solve a lot of these problems. I feel like that's a version of this I've not really heard before. I mean, I'm not saying this is a solution.

I'm not saying we should put solar. No, this is your policy. I'm just making the point that we raise our eyebrows. The thought of how much land solar would need. But no one thinks about the land that's being currently being used for biofuels and not particularly productive for us.

Gasoline in cars. Well, the other version of this is nuclear. So you write in the book that the most land efficient source of electricity is nuclear. Per unit of electricity. It needs 50 times less land than coal and 18 to 27 times less than solar photovoltaics on the ground.

Josh Klein
So that's striking. And nuclear is something that is obviously controversial within the renewable energy debates. Tell me a bit about how you think of nuclear, which on the one hand is very clean, and on the other hand, I think people perceive as very dangerous. And on the third hand, if we had a third hand, really has a quality that wind and solar, which is that it can kind of be anywhere and does not require very much land to generate a lot of electricity. Yeah.

Hannah Ritchie
So I think nuclear energy has a lot of merits, one of the primary ones being land use. Like, if you want to conserve land and produce lots of energy, nuclear is ultimately your best option. It's low carbon, it is safe. You know, I give figures in the book looking at death rates from different forms of energy per unit of electricity production. And as we discussed earlier, you know, fossil fuels are off the charts because not even you take climate change out of the picture, even based on local air pollution, they are just like vastly more dangerous than nuclear energy.

Josh Klein
So let me zoom in on that for a minute, because people have probably heard of two major disasters here, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Can you talk about the death rates of both? Sure. So Fukushima in Japan in 2011, the death toll there, I mean, the direct death toll was zero. No one died in that nuclear disaster.

Hannah Ritchie
Since then. There has been, one of the workers has subsequently died of cancer. And then there are what they call excess mortality, deaths from the stress of evacuation, the stress of the event, and they attribute that to several thousand, which is obviously a lot. There is the Chernobyl disaster, and more people died directly from that incident. I think you're looking at tens.

I think maybe up to 50 or 100. It's very hard to come up with an exact total mortality impact from that disaster. But I looked into a bunch of the research on this, and my estimate is somewhere in the low hundreds. So maybe 300 to 500 people died in total from Chernobyl. But as I said earlier, we have millions dying from fossil fuels, solely from air pollution every single year, even taking out the issue of climate change.

So those numbers are just so vastly different that when you crunch the numbers per unit of electricity that we've produced from each of these sources, nuclear energy is just vastly safer than fossil fuels.

Elise Hu
What can you learn from built for change? We could actually turn software into buildings and replicate in a virtual space. So we did exactly this. What will the next breakthrough mean for your enterprise? Reducing that level of complexity, and you can focus on where your real value is.

How can your business thrive in a world that's constantly evolving? That is the difference. It's about breaking the silos of data, bringing all of this together. Check out built for change, a podcast from Accenture. Wherever you get your podcasts.

Josh Klein
This is a o. Scott. I'm a critic at the New York Times. What I do and what the other critics here do is part of the same project that all of the journalists at the New York Times work on every day to give you clarity and perspective and above all, a deeper understanding of the world. When you subscribe to the New York Times, it's not just here are the headlines, but here's the way everything fits together.

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I want to talk about land here because we've been talking about that in terms of energy production, but I also want to talk about it in terms of use, because how we use land is relevant to climate. It's relevant to deforestation, which your book talks about, relevant to biodiversity loss, which your book talks about. And I read this statistic every couple of months because of the kind of work I do. And every time I'm just stopped cold by it, which is that roughly 50% of ice free land on earth is used for agriculture.

It's a lot. Walk me through that. Yeah. So if you take the world, what we call, well, we call it habitable land. So it's basically taking away the ice and the kind of barren land that you, you literally couldn't use for anything else, and other species couldn't really use for anything else.

Hannah Ritchie
Farming uses 50% of that. I mean, we produce around 5000 kilocalories per person per day. Now, that's around double what the average person in the world actually needs. Obviously, that does not end up on people's plates. So there's a massive loss in the chain there.

One just, you know, losses in the supply chain or consumer waste, but there are two other big ones. One is that we feed a lot of those calories and crops to animals, and they convert that to meat, but they do it very, very inefficiently. And we also allocate, like, a good chunk to biofuels. And what you find is that around 75% or three quarters of our agricultural land is this grazing land. And then the other 25% is for growing crops.

Josh Klein
So how does that grazing land break down by animal? So wild grazing land is basically just cattle and sheep and maybe some goats, but stuff like chicken and pork and fish, etcetera. I mean, fish where we actually feed them, not out in the ocean, they are not raised on grazing land. They're raised on land where we grow the crops and then feed them to the animal. So when you do that calculation, sort of virtually everything, because goat and sheep are not major sources of human calories.

I mean, they exist, but they're not a huge part of the diet. All of the other meat, aside from cattle, is actually included in the crop raising calculation? Yes, exactly, yeah. So, functionally, we are using a huge portion of usable human land to raise cows. Yeah, we're using a huge amount of land to raise cows.

Hannah Ritchie
I mean, sheep are not totally insignificant, especially on more marginal lands. They are actually quite large land users in some countries. But, yes, it's primarily cattle. And cattle ranching is also the leading driver of deforestation globally. So, again, it's not just that we're using a lot of land for this, we're actively cutting down forests and more land to raise more cattle.

Josh Klein
So can you talk a bit about where we are on that curve? Yes. If you look at the history of global deforestation, it increased very rapidly in the 20th century, but various estimates point towards a peak in global deforestation around the 1980s. We have targets of getting to zero deforestation by 2030, and we're really not on target for that. So we still have large amounts of forest being lost, but less than we were cutting down in the 1980s.

Hannah Ritchie
What's been really key, there is a shift in where deforestation is happening. In the UK, we cut down our forests centuries ago and we then had all of this agricultural land to use. In temperate countries, deforestation has definitely peaked and now many forests are coming back, like we're regrowing forests on these old lands. The center of deforestation today is in the tropics. So nearly all of our global deforestation is tropical deforestation today.

Josh Klein
Beyond agriculture, to the extent there is a beyond agriculture, what are the drivers of deforestation? If we wanted to take what is happening in the tropics seriously, if we wanted to blunt it, what is the equivalent of shifting the energy system to renewables? I mean, when it comes to deforestation, it's nearly all about farming. Cattle ranching is the biggest driver by far, followed by oil crop production, so soy and palm oil. And then there are a couple of other major drivers or crops crops like rubber, for example, is a growing one.

Hannah Ritchie
There's some deforestation for cereal production in some regions. The primary way to increase food production in the absence of increases in crop yields is to just cut down forest and use more land. And what's the role of this in climate? So I think people underestimate the contribution of foods to climate change. So if you look at the breakdown of emissions, around a quarter to a third of emissions come from food systems.

I think if you take emissions from livestock alone, it's somewhere in the region between kind of 14% to 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. Without any change in this trajectory in food that we're on, emissions from food alone would take us past 1.5 degrees. This was research that came out from colleagues at Oxford, where they looked at just the cumulative emissions from agriculture out to the end of the century, energy emissions would have to go to zero, and even then, emissions from agriculture alone would take us past 1.5 degrees. So, I mean, it's just very clear from the data that we just cannot continue on a business as usual in food systems. And tell me about the role here in biodiversity.

Josh Klein
I think people know that there's a huge, genuinely historic level of species extinction happening right now. And I think in their minds, in many of our minds, people assume it's probably climate, right, or making the world hot and messing with weather, and that's destroying species. And in some cases, that's true. But talk me through the research on the relationship between that and how big of a driver functioning our food system is. I mean, I think the first thing that jumps out when you look at the research is how little we know about the world's biodiversity.

Hannah Ritchie
Quantifying carbon emissions is easy. Quantifying what's happening to the world's biodiversity is really, really difficult. And the researchers in this area do amazing work. But biodiversity is just so vast that they've hardly even touched the sites. But what's clear from the data that emerges is that most of the trends are downward and downward very steeply.

I always get this question, you know, are we in the middle of the 6th mass extinction? And a couple of ways to look at this is the world has been through five big mass extinctions previously, and the definition of a mass extinction is losing around 75% of the world's species in a geologically short period of time. And by short here, we mean within 2 million years. Not short to us, but on geological periods, a relatively short period of time. We're nowhere near losing 75% of our species, but we're also very, very far away from this timeline of 2 million years.

So another way to compare this is to say what is the rate by which species are going extinct and what rate were they going extinct in the previous five mass extinctions? I think what's quite alarming is that when you look at this data, the rates by which species are going at sink today are higher than any of the five previous mass extinctions. The key difference there is that in the previous mass extinctions, there were these sustained very high rates for very, very long periods of time. My optimism on this is that even though extinction rates are very, very high, they can be stopped and they can be stopped because we are literally the handbrake, we are the ones driving this and we can be the ones to stop this or certainly slow it down vastly. Climate change is one driver, and I think will be a growing driver of biodiversity loss in the future.

But it's not top of the list. The biggest drivers of biodiversity loss are basically what we call, you know, direct exploitation or food production. So that's stuff like overfishing, that's stuff like deforestation or logging for wood, that is driving deforestation for food production, that's conflicts with livestock. So it's really food production that is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss by far. And again, climate change, I think, will grow in the future, but it's currently not the biggest threat.

Josh Klein
So this is one of these areas that really bothers me and that I struggle with how to talk about almost it all. The reason I think that the climate movement doesn't emphasize the role of beef and the role of dairy is because it is just insanely, unfathomably, lethally unpopular to do so. Theres a reason the right is always accusing the left of wanting to ban hamburgers and the left does not want to ban hamburgers. And in fact, most people I know who worry about climate eat hamburgers and eat steak and all the rest of it, but at the same time, of the things you could do that would one have a pretty significant effect on emissions, on deforestation, on biodiversity, and I think not totally incidentally, from my perspective, animal cruelty. So there's something here where this is really, really, really big, linked across a bunch of our problems, and yet totally politically untouchable.

I'm just going to put a question mark here and just ask you how you think about this. So on this, I'm just way more optimistic about the energy transition than I am about the food transition overall. People might have some biases towards what energy source they like ultimately, they just want cheap energy coming out of the plug. And if you can give them that, they're not that bothered. That's not the same for food, right?

Hannah Ritchie
People are actively making decisions about what they eat three or four times a day, and they really care about what they eat. And they will push back if you try to tell them what to eat. So even on my work and messaging on this, I do a lot on highlighting. You know, this is the environmental footprint of different foods. In the book I write, you know, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint from your diet, this is the best way to do it.

And cutting back on beef is ultimately the number one thing you can do. But I'm also super careful not to say, you should do this or you have to eat less meat, because I just know that as a communication strategy, it won't be effective and people will push back in the other direction. The easiest way to get someone to increase their consumption of something is to tell them not to do it. So I don't have a good answer to how we actually achieve this. Just to say that I think this will be much more challenging than, for example, the energy transition.

Josh Klein
It's so interesting, though, because it's so technologically simple compared to the energy transition. I mean, on the energy transition, we're having to figure out how to get all of these electrons we generate in other ways and replace them with these space age. We're going to do what they do in stars and create nuclear fusion. We're going to harness the power of the sun. We're going to use a nuclear reaction.

And here it's like you could eat something different. You could shop in just like, literally any other part of the grocery store. But it gets at this truth, I think, across this whole transition, which is that the problems are not nearly as technological as they are political and cultural. And maybe to add one other complication here from the animal suffering side, I think a lot of people in the animal suffering and animal rights movement worry about this because I've known many people who see this data and decide to give up red meat, right? They decide to give up beef.

But from the animal suffering perspective, that's very, very, very bad if you substitute with chicken or fish or other smaller animals. Cows are known for living better lives, even in industrial agriculture, than, say, chickens. And a family can eat a chicken in a night. It takes them a year to eat a cow. So in terms of the total numbers of animals that you are killing or raising in very difficult conditions, cows mean fewer of them.

So there is also this other difficult tension of, well, you don't want everybody to substitute to these other animals, but then people don't want to be told to become vegetarians. It's a genuinely very hard political problem. No. And I think the trade off between animal welfare and environmental impact is a really underrated one. I mean, I wrote about this previously, an article in Wired, where I think the title was something like, should we kill trillions of animals to save the planet or something?

Hannah Ritchie
And it was getting at the heart of this, where the amount of chickens you would need to kill to produce the same amount of beef is just, you know, orders of magnitude lower, despite the fact that, you know, it would have a lower carbon footprint and a lower environmental impact. And that's just a naughty and hard to grapple with tension between these two outcomes. I actually wish I had said more about this in the book. I think my dietary habits have actually changed in the last few years because of this tension, where I had very much motivations that were just about environment and climate. So I cut out red meat, I mostly cut out dairy, and I'd sometimes eat some chicken and fish because they have a relatively low carbon footprint compared to other meats.

But in the end, I just couldn't handle the tension with the animal welfare question, which is, one, the number of animals that you have to kill to produce the same amount of beef. But also, to me, just the welfare standards of many of these animals is worse, right? Like, for me, just a chicken packed into a cage or a barn, you know, just seems to have a lower standard of living than a cow in a field, even if it has a much, much lower environmental impact. So I couldn't handle that trade off and that dilemma. So I opted out and went completely vegan.

But it is really hard to communicate this to people, and my approach to this is to give people good information and then hope that they then make the right decision for them. But I'm not going to pretend that this is going to move very quickly because I don't think it will. If you just did, imagine a world where everybody listened to Hannah Ritchie, just like, eh, we're not going to do beef. There's too much of an impact. How much land would suddenly be available for rewilding or the other kinds of things we might imagine that land doing.

So if the world shifted to a fairly plant based diet, which, to be clear, we're very, very far away from, but if we did that, we could reduce global agricultural use by 75%. So we basically shrink global agricultural land to a quarter of what it is today, and you could feasibly feed everyone on that land. I always just find this astonishing. I think people imagine human land use and what they think of is humans. We think of where we live, we think of where we build buildings, but actually just a huge amount of that land is just raising cows for humans.

Josh Klein
That's what we're talking about here, actually, in terms of the human land footprint. Raising cows for us to eat or drink their milk or consume their cheese. Yeah, I mean, I think you're really set on the cows. I think I just say in general food production. But you're right that by far the biggest land user there is cows.

Hannah Ritchie
But you're right, the land footprint of humans is really not about where we live or where we build stuff. You know, urban land area is about 1% of global land, maybe a few percent if you add in stuff like roads and other infrastructure, but you're talking about a few percent for where we live and, you know, nearly half of habitable land for the food that we eat. You know, ultimately, the land footprint of humans is very much what we eat.

Elise Hu
What can you learn from built for change? We could actually turn software into buildings and represent it in a virtual space. So we did exactly this. What will the next breakthrough mean for your enterprise? Reducing that level of complexity, and you can focus on where your real value is.

How can your business thrive in a world that's constantly evolving? That is the difference. It's about breaking the silos of data, bringing all of this together. Check out built for change, a podcast from Accenture. Wherever you get your podcasts, one thing you talk about at the end of your book is the way in which being a good environmentalist by the numbers sometimes makes you feel like you're being a bad environmentalist in your actions.

Josh Klein
And you talk about this as the natural fallacy, that there is this tendency to believe that things that feel natural cooking on a wood burning fireplace or getting all your food from within 10 miles, often do not actually align with what the data tells us is environmentally sustainable. Do you want to talk through that feeling a bit and sort of how you've resolved it in your own life? Yes, I think many of the things that we, we assume to be green or feel our green. When you actually break down the data, the alternatives are often better. And I think the conflict there is that we see natural as good and synthetic as bad.

Hannah Ritchie
So if you take the example of food, you know, what seems good to us or natural to us is a nice picture of a cow in a grass field, and especially if it's from a local farm, right? That seems like, you know, just the lowest way possible to produce that food, right? You're not growing crops on croplands. You're not transporting the food very far. And compare that to, for example, a meat substitute that's grown in a lab or produced in a factory where, you know, you're using loads of energy for the processing, you know, it's coming in packaging, you're putting in lots of ingredients and chemicals, as people would say, that seems really bad.

And the beef in a field or cow in a field seems really, really good. And of course, when you break down the data, the emissions from the meat substitute burger are just vastly, vastly lower than the beef. So many of our kind of gut instincts on this are often very, very off. And as I say in the book, this often makes you feel quite bad as an environmentalist. And you will get pushback.

You'll get pushback on, for example, the local food story, where people just assume that the best way to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet is to buy locally, even if that is beef. And if you're buying a product that's been shipped in from the other side of the world, they assume that that has a very high carbon footprint. And therefore, that's a very bad thing environmentally to do. When you break down the emissions of those two things, the vegetarian product that's shipped in probably has a vastly lower footprint. Even if you think about your living conditions, the picturesque, someone living in a rural area, they've got their own little farm, seems much more green than being packed into a dense city with lots of cement and concrete and noise.

But when you compare the carbon footprints, the dense city living will just give you a much lower carbon footprint. You may not even need a car. If you do, your driving distances will be much less, is much more efficient to build infrastructure and to get goods to you. If you're in a dense, the populated setting is way more efficient to set up heating networks or power networks. So there are a bunch of environmental benefits to city living, but it seems very out of sync with what we'd imagine green living would be in the past.

Josh Klein
So I've done most of the things that would reduce my personal carbon footprint. I live in a building in a dense urban area. I'm a vegan, or mostly vegan. I slip up here and there, but I travel by air. And either I don't go see my family in California, or I am emitting that carbon.

My view on everything we were talking about with cattle and with sheep and with goats. And so I do think there is this question between the places where the only answer is abstention, which is a very, very hard form of politics. The places where the answer is substitution, which is a much easier form of politics, particularly when the substitutes are good. Right. Moving to electric vehicles is much more possible now because the electric vehicles are very good.

And the issue where we believe we might be able to invent a substitute, but we haven't done it yet. My view on the issues of meat is that until we figure out the whole cell based meat thing people are trying to work through, which is going slowly, it's not like we're going to have affordable meat replacements tomorrow where people can eat the meat they want to eat without the animals being nearly so involved. We're not going to solve that. Yeah. I mean, on the beef question, I'm with you.

Hannah Ritchie
I'm very pessimistic that most people make that switch to existing products that we have. And I think my pessimism around that behavioral change pushes me towards a technological vix where we can literally produce a like, for, like, substitution for beef. And I think ultimately, in the end, we'll be able to do that, just not, you know, in a very, very short time scale. My concern with some of this is that we have some fantastic technologies to address some part of our emissions pie. So primarily electricity and road transport.

We now have very, very good solutions for those. We have them. We need to build them really, really quickly. We just need to build, build, build. And my concern often when people talk about aviation, cement, steel, etcetera, is that there's almost this pullback of we need to wait until we have all of the solutions to all of the sectors before we can get going.

And I think a key point for me is that we need to do both at the same time. Right. We need to build the stuff that we have and is already very, very good. And we need to invest in innovations in sectors that we don't have. And in some of those, I'm actually quite optimistic that in the next decade, some of these solutions come online.

But the key thing is not to get discouraged that we don't have all of the solutions now and let that hold us back from deploying the technologies that we have and we urgently need to roll out. This is, to me, something that is actually changed, and it is required to change in our politics. It is happening right now, but is very messy, which is, for a lot of the history of the environmental movement. We didn't have good substitutes. And to get some of these problems to a point where they were being ameliorated, we had to get people to stop doing things or we had to add new technologies to things we were already doing, like the scrubbers for sulfur dioxide.

Josh Klein
And now we have this capacity to substitute with solar panels and wind and electric vehicles and heat pumps. And it requires a huge amount of construction transmission lines. And so you have this movement and this politics that for a lot of its life was about trying to get human beings to do fewer destructive things and now needs them very rapidly to do far more constructive things. And that's actually new. That actually is a change from the dominant answer we had to environmental problems in the seventies.

And the fact that it's messy and difficult is a little bit to be expected. I mean, moving from an environmentalism of stopping things to an environmentalism of building things is almost reversing the polarity of an entire political sentiment. No, it's not simple, but I think it also makes me more optimistic, mostly because I think individual behaviour change is really hard. And there are a bunch of studies that would support that. Shifting people's behaviors on stuff like climate, it's just really, really difficult to do.

Hannah Ritchie
If we were relying on that to get out of this climate crisis, you know, I would have very little optimism about our ability to do so. People always frame me as a kind of techno optimist, but I think I lean that way because I'm just more optimistic about the substitution effect rather than a stop doing this effect. But I think you're right, there is a massive change. A point I make regularly now is that many of the big solutions we need, we have, and we have like solar, wind, electric cars, et cetera, you know, they're good solutions. They're now really, really cheap and it's just about building them.

And often they get the pushback of, well, yeah, we've had, but we've had the solutions for decades now and we just haven't done anything. To me that's just like really, really not true. We haven't had cheap replacements for fossil fuels for decades. This is really a change in the last five years. It's only in the last five years that low carbon technologies have now become competitive or undercutting the cost of fossil fuels.

This transition was just not feasible 20 years ago. Of course, you can argue that countries should have been investing more in these technologies 20 to 30 years ago so we would get to the position faster. And I agree with that. But to me it's just not true that we've had these solutions just sitting there ready to build for decades and decades, and we just haven't done anything. We're in just a fundamentally different position going forward.

Josh Klein
When I get called a techno optimist, my answer is always that I'm not a techno optimist, I'm a political realist. And the desire for material prosperity is the strongest driver in politics, particularly for anybody under a certain level of material prosperity. And I just don't believe that there is a political tendency strong enough to overcome the desire for a better life now, to avert consequences in the future. And so in my writing about climate change ten years ago, I was extremely pessimistic. And it was only the shatteringly fast drop in solar, wind and battery cost that has made me relatively more optimistic.

But that's only to say that if you begin from the perspective, and I do begin from it, or at least I've concluded it, that there isn't a politics here that is going to work, that is a politics of sharp and near term sacrifice. The politics here somehow has to align with people's desire for a better life, a more prosperous life than the one they currently lead. And that as that becomes more technologically possible, the politics become more possible in lockstep. And to the extent that is technologically not possible, as in the case of, say, meat, or as in the case currently of cement, the politics are not possible. We're not going to get people to stop eating beef, we're not going to get people to stop using cement.

So I don't really want to have all my chips in on inventing solution after solution to the problems that human beings create. But I don't really think there's a choice. No, I think I've ended up in a similar position. It's often framed as this iron law, where if you put up climate mitigation against either energy security or energy cost, energy security and energy cost will win every single time. And that's just the harsh reality of this.

Hannah Ritchie
And therefore, if we want to make progress on climate change, then what's really key is that we line up this long term incentive of climate change with short term incentives. And short term incentives are primarily about cost and quality of living. And if we can't manage to offer people a better vision of the future of what that would look like, then I just don't think you will get the political backing, especially on both sides of the aisle. Right. You want this across the entire political spectrum.

If you don't get that then you won't get the support that you need for climate action. But I think the key thing is that they are now lining up. They weren't lining up 15 years ago, but they are lining up now. And I think going into the future, they will get closer and closer together. I think that's a good place to end.

Josh Klein
So then, always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So, my first book is called factfulness, and it's by Hans Rosline. And anyone that knows my work, or knows our own data, will know that. We were master fans of Hans Roslyn.

Hannah Ritchie
And he was a big inspiration to me. And he was really the first person that got me into looking at the world through data and really zooming out to understand what was going on. And his book, in factfulness, looks at the long history of many measures of human wellbeing and global change, but more importantly, gives ten key rules or pitfalls that guide you into how to understand the world, how to understand data, how to understand the information ecosystem, and how shapes your thinking in the world. So it had a profound impact on me, and I hope it does on you as well. My second pick is a book called Possible by Chris Goodall.

Now, he is a UK energy analyst, and what he does in this book is looks at the solutions that we need in so called hard to abate sectors on climate. And I think when people hear hard to abate, they think, impossible to abate. And really, the key point of, of Chris's book is that it will be hard, but it's possible. And he breaks down cement and steel and aviation and plastics, a long list of these troubling sectors, and just looks at the hard data on what solutions do we potentially have? How much electricity or energy would we need?

How much might it cost, what companies are working in the space? So for me, it just gives a very, very clear eyed vision of the set of sectors that we need to tackle and what our options in this space might be. It's not prescriptive, it doesn't say we have to do this or we have to do this. It just lays out very, very clearly these are the options that we have. And for me, it made me more optimistic that we will get there.

And then the final book for me is called range. And it's by David Epstein. And it's really a book looking at this contrast between specialists and generalists. And a key point of the book is that really, the world needs more generalists. I think we have a lot of specialists and we absolutely need specialists.

You know, we won't get anywhere on any of these engineering problems or climate problems without specialists. But we also need generalists that can, you know, somehow sit in the middle, pull these different pieces of, you know, complex problems together set in the middle of different disciplines. So whether that's, you know, research and communication or research and policy and be able to incorporate, you know, a wide range of disciplines and inputs and then, you know, somehow drive that to change in the world. So I think my takeaway from that is that we need a bit of a better ratio of specialists in the world to generalists. I can see why you like that book, given that, I think that's something you do very well, and you do very well in this book.

Josh Klein
And it's the connections you're able to draw here between different domains of environmental disaster that ends up being so powerful. Hannah Ritchie, thank you very much. Thanks so much, Esra.

This episode of the Ezra clan Show is produced by Roland who fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Lacher and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Andy Galvin, Kristen Lynn and Aman Sahota. Weave original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina, Sammy Lucas and Shannon Busta.

The executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Anuro Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.