How do we keep positive about the environment after the hottest year on record? By focusing on wins, not climate change doom reports, says Dr. Hannah Ritchie, who spoke with the New York Times Magazine about her new book, Not the End of the World. In it, she makes the case that the progress we've made to change course and cut emissions is worth celebrating. "For a long time, I felt helplessness, that these problems were massive and unsolvable," she says. "It's important to counter those feelings. We need to go much faster, but there is a lot of progress to acknowledge and lessons to learn." She also suggests that people might not need to even care about climate change to help with solutions—if greener, money-saving options make sense, they'll adopt them, perhaps more so if they're not required to do so.
Ritchie, a senior researcher at the Program on Global Development at Oxford, wasn't always so cheerful about climate change. An excerpt from her book in the Guardian notes that her perspective flipped "after studying the data, not newspaper headlines." By tracking environmental policy changes in governments and how they'll translate to emissions reduction, she projects that all is not lost. For example, the long-sought goal of keeping temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius is dead, but she feels "optimistic" about limiting the hike to 2 degrees and maintaining it there. Meanwhile, hypernegative messaging about climate change sends messages of hopelessness while fueling climate change deniers. "They can weaponize this and say, 'Look how ridiculous these people are,'" she tells the Times.
Following Ritchie's logic, the hottest year on record had plenty of cool news. Parkersburg News and Sentinel cites environmental wins nationally: solar power and EVs are on the rise, coal is on the decline, and bees and the ozone layer are rebounding. Meanwhile, Euronews covers five major shifts since 2015's Paris Agreement, including corporate pressure to change and renewable energy's costs dipping lower than fossil fuels. On an individual level, Ritchie stresses in her book that people shouldn't sweat the small stuff, like occasionally using plastic bags and straws, and instead should make lifestyle changes that are more impactful, like eating less meat, reducing food waste, using heat pumps, improving insulation, and walking, cycling, or using public transport more. (Al Gore: "We can reclaim control of our destiny.")
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
