CLEARING THE AIR

It’s never “too late” to fight climate change, says a data scientist.

Media coverage and political rhetoric about climate change is often confusing and contradictory. The solution, says Ritchie, is to examine the numbers. She does just that in her second book (after Not the End of the World). Climate change is a “massive but solvable problem,” she writes, and we already have many of the tools needed to solve it. Perfect climate solutions don’t exist, and postponing action while searching for them wastes time when workable answers do exist. “We have good—even great—ones, but many have some environmental or social cost that we need to deal with,” she writes. Every generation has solved problems while creating new ones, the author says, and no energy source is completely pollution- or impact-free. Addressing 50 commonly asked questions about climate change, her book provides actions that individuals and countries can put into practice. The path to global climate change and energy sustainability is “a journey with no finish line; humanity will never be problem free,” she writes. But the relatively small and solvable problems should not block the path to moving forward: “We need to deploy these technologies, invest money, and form policies while we work on making them better.” Individuals, for one, can eat less meat and more plants, use public transportation when possible, and drive electric cars; business and industry can replace gas and oil burners with heat pumps in office buildings and factories; and governments can support the use of renewables, revive nuclear power, set standards for decarbonizing cement and steel, and provide incentives for building electric vehicle charging stations. “We need to rethink and rebuild almost everything around us,” Ritchie writes. “This transition is not a sacrifice; it’s an opportunity to build a better, fairer, and more sustainable world: one that works for those who are alive today and is compassionate for those who come after us.”

A hopeful guide to solving climate change offers some steps we can all take now.