The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Who Will Power the 21st Century? — with Hannah Ritchie

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Hannah Ritchie, deputy editor of Our World in Data, joins Scott Galloway to examine the new global energy race.  They discuss whether AI’s power demands are being overstated, how China built its clean-energy advantage, and why the United States risks falling behind on electrification. Plus, Hannah explains why the climate outlook is more hopeful (and more complicated) than the headlines suggest. Check out Hannah’s Substack, By the Numbers, here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the world. The Fear of Cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Our earliest childhood memories can feel so visceral. I have this memory of my mother standing on the beach, you know, the wind whipping her hair and her jacket, calling into the wind with my siblings out in the lake and the dam, you know, looming in the distance. But none of these memories were true. This week, Unexxxed

to me from Vox. Why can't I remember being a baby? Episode 410. 410 is the area code serving Eastern Maryland. In 2010, Instagram launched. True story, I've become the CMO for META

and have come up with a bunch of new ads. Meta. Ignore the smell coming from the basement. Facebook, elevating your aunt's conspiracy theories. Meta. Fucking election since 2006. And finally, my new tagline. Meta, we're hurting children. Welcome to the 4010th episode of the Prof G-Pod. In today's

episode, we speak with Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and writer working at the intersection of environmental change, technology and global development. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Hannah Ritchie. Hannah, where does this podcast find you? Edombrun, Scotland. Oh my gosh. I knew I knew I liked you. You couldn't tell by the accent? Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's, It's a wee bit of a tell. Born and raised in Edinburgh? Falkirk, so like pretty close by. It's kind of in the middle of Scotland.

Wow. And have you lived there your entire life or any ventures overseas or? No, I moved down to south. So I was in London for a while. I was in Oxford for a while. So this is my, I always say this is my posh accent. This is my podcast accent that I picked up from England. My father in America got away with so much professionally and personally,

because of a Scottish accent. Anyways, I think you're blessed with something that's not your fault. Anyway, neither here nor there. Let's bust right into it. The biggest stories this year, Iran, AI, have largely been energy stories. So let's start with AI,

because most of that conversation is about models and jobs and valuations, but it's also a story about power, literally. You've done the actual accounting here. Your piece last month at Our World and Data puts data centers as a hope, whole at roughly 1.5% of global electricity with AI-specific facilities at about a half a percent. Walk us through the energy picture here. What's your read on the data center outrage?

Yeah, so these estimates come from the International Energy Agency. And as you say, they put data center electricity consumption around 1.5% of the world's electricity. And I think that's not just AI. That's everything we use that's digital. So us recording this podcast, people listening to it, most of our daily lives are consumed by data center usage. And AI is a component of that. So AI is roughly around half a percent of the world's electricity. And I think people are always very surprised because that probably seems quite small to people. I think there are two things going on there.

One is that those are current estimates, right? We don't know how that trajectory is going to change in the future. You know, there is this kind of explosion of investment in an AI and data center. so that could change quite rapidly. But I think the second thing that I think people under appreciate is the challenge with energy demand for AI is really a geographical and localized problem. So even though it's not a huge share of the world's electricity,

almost all of the world's demand has been served by a very few select locations. So you can still have this issue where you're basically powering the entire world's AI demand from a few centers in the US and a few other data centers across the world. And that's a really, really key local concern and puts pressure on local grids, even if it doesn't consume a huge amount of the world's electricity.

So you actually wrote that AI could optimize grids, charging, permitting, and with materials discovery, and that on net, AI could be a service as a positive for energy transition. Walk us through how AI could be a positive, for energy transition? Electricity demands to power AI, I think we'll go up in the future. I think it's hard to see that going any other way.

But there is another flip side to this, which is that we are going through this energy transition. We are many countries across the world are trying to electrify their grids. They are trying to electrify transport, electrify industry. There are huge demands that are going to be placed on electricity grids across the world. And there is huge upside to being able to unobstive. understand how do you balance these different sources and sources of demand? How do you balance different sources of energy? And that's where I think there is scope for AI to optimize that, right? And there is the, I think a reasonably realistic scenario that you actually also get pretty large energy

efficiency gains there. So it's how those two offset one another. Does the increase in electricity demand for AI overpower those efficiency gains? Or is it actually the opposite? Is it actually the opposite. And I think the honest answer is we don't know what that looks like at the moment, but I think there is lots of scope for AI to better optimize these systems. People talk about choke points around AI, and one of the choke points they constantly talk about is energy. So if you were loosely to say three buckets, Europe, the US and China, you know, expensive, less expensive, cheapest in terms of energy, or that's my sense, the Europe has the most expensive energy production supply chain. The U.S. in the middle, call it, and China has the least

expensive. And I might be wrong about that. I know they don't have many natural fossil fuels, but huge investments in renewables, less regulation, less taxation. Do you see energy prices in Europe to U.S. and China being a big factor in the AI race? I think it could be a bottleneck for Europe. I think when it comes to the US and China, I would think that it is less about prices and more about the pace by which they can build infrastructure. So the challenge when it comes to power demand for AI is that Europe and the US have actually gone through a very, very long period of not really building out an electricity grid, right? Electricity demand across Europe has actually fallen in the last 30 years. in the US it basically hasn't grown much at all. And now we're starting to see this huge demand from AI.

And the question is, can the US build out electricity grids as quickly as to keep up with that demand? I think when you look at China, China is just building electricity sources extremely, extremely quickly. So to put into context in just a single year, the China's electricity generation is increasing by a Germany-sized grid.

that's how much additional electricity they are producing every single year, and that's been the rate over the past few years now. So I think when it comes to... I just want to make sure I have that right, because that was staggering. China is adding the electricity, the electric grid of Germany every year? Yes. And last year, all of that came from solar and wind. So they are deploying electricity sources very quickly,

and I think what surprises people is that most of that is now green or clean energy. And the US and Europe have kind of reached this kind of stagnant state where they're just not used to building out infrastructure at anywhere near that pace. And I think that could be the real bottleneck when it comes to AI and other electricity generation. That's staggering. Let's talk about another source of energy. And that is what I think until recently had been one of the worst managed brands in the world, and that is the brand nuclear. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have each signed a nuclear deal to pay. power their data centers. What do you make of big tech financing and leveraging their own nuclear energy?

I see it as a positive. I think when it comes to nuclear, it has had a very, very bad rep. And a lot of that has been focused on nuclear safety. Right. So I think people have this image of nuclear. When they think about nuclear, they think about Chernobyl, they think about Fukushima, these really salient, high-impact single events. And I think that, in some sense, that skews our perceptions to thinking that nuclear is incredibly unsafe source of energy. The challenge there is that when you compare the number of deaths that have happened from nuclear power compared to burning fossil fuels, where the impact there, even if we take climate change out the picture and just think about air pollution, millions of premature deaths

every year from burning fossil fuels, if you look at the number of people that have died from nuclear power over these major events, you're probably talking about a few thousand, would probably be the best estimate there. So orders and magnitude more dying from fossil fuels, but we don't really think about that because it's kind of there in the background. We don't think about air pollution a ton, but we have these really highly salient nuclear events

that stick in our minds. So I think I'm not concerned about the nuclear safety part of this. The challenge for nuclear recently has been, can you build a power plant on time and on budget? And there are a couple of countries that are doing this reasonably well. China is one good example. The US and Europe have not been able to do that recently. If this huge demand and power from AI can stimulate that a bit and drive some innovation there and potentially drive the cost down, I think that's very, very positive. You get these data centers which at the moment are largely being powered by gas by this clean source of energy. And I think there is some scope. there to also push the nuclear energy innovation forward at the same time. I just want to go back to renewables. Someone, I spoke at South by Southwest in Austin, and a woman came out to me and showed me

this app that shows you where electricity is coming from that's powering Texas at that moment. And she showed me this staggering stat, and that's 60% at that moment, in the middle of a fairly warm day in March, at that moment, 60% of the electricity being concerned. assumed in Texas was being supplied by wind power. And then 18% was solar. So three quarters of the electricity powering, you know, air conditioners and homes or whatever it is, was coming from renewables. And this is in a state not known to be woke. That just struck me as clearly the economics of renewables are, you know, a feature, not a bug here. And they've constantly, in my opinion,

And the reputation of renewables is that, you know, go woke, go broke. Can you talk a little bit about the economics of fossil fuels versus renewables and where we are now and what it probably means in terms of the future of CAPEX around new sources or developing sources of energy? Yeah, so if you were to ask this question 10 or 15 years ago, the answer would have been that renewables are much more expensive than fossil fuels. And when I was looking at, I come from a climate change background. And to me at that moment, the outlook was extremely pessimistic because I didn't think, to put it in your words, people would be woke enough to just go for it for the climate reasons if the economics didn't work and renewables weren't cheaper than fossil fuels. That's changed pretty dramatically over the last decades, such that the price of solar power has fallen by more than 90%, batteries by more than 90%, wind by 60 or 70%.

And they're now at the margin cost competitive or undercutting the cost of fossil fuels. And that's also in some countries when you combine solar with batteries. So that's not just solar or wind on their own. And that's dramatically changing things, right? Like when you look across the US, it's not just Texas, you when you look at what, when you look at the partisan divide on people's opinions on climate change, there actually is quite a wide gap, right? People on the left tend to be more in favor of climate action than people on the right.

But that largely disappears when you just focus on clean energy, right? People on the right are also very in favor of clean energy. And you see it in the deployment of clean energy across many red states in the U.S. And I think that's not necessarily because they're doing it for climate reasons. They're doing it for energy security or they're doing it just because the economics makes sense, right? There are many red states sit in this kind of wind belt where the wind resources are just fantastic. and it doesn't make sense to not take advantage of that. And I think for me, that's very positive moving forward.

I would love it if people would be as enthusiastic about stopping climate change as I am. But if states or countries are going to deploy this purely based on economics or purely based on energy security, I just think that's a huge win. I want to talk about Iran. Do you think the war in Iran will result in a structural shock, if you will, around energy reshaping supply chain for a long time, or do you think it's a cyclical shock? Or sooner rather than later, will we return to just kind of energy production and consumption as we know it? I think in many parts of the world it will be the, I think it will be a key structural shift.

And I think it's not just Iran. I think it's the compounding of the energy crisis sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And then very shortly after that, being hit with another one. And I think there are many countries across the world now looking at this situation, either countries that are already very reliant on fossil fuels saying, we don't want to get stuck in this again, we need to find a way to transition here. Like I think the EU is a good example where it has just recently released much more ambitious electrification targets for 2040. And I think at least part of that has been sparked by this seeing this need to basically get off.

this roller coaster of fossil fuel prices. In other parts of the world, even where people currently don't have very much energy at all, I think they are starting to see, is that the trajectory we really want to go on, the one where we are quite frequently hit by these energy shocks, these spikes and prices, or is another trajectory becoming increasingly feasible where we can have clean energy and it can be cheap and we have the energy security that that brings. And coming back to China, I think the point there is that China is ready to provide that, right? So if you look at exports of batteries or EVs or solar panels and you look at the curve of what's happening in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa,

it's a flat line, it's a flat line and then it spikes up. And I think that's the current situation that many countries are in where they see the viability of a different path. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Engine. The company's winning right now aren't cutting travel. They're booking smarter. Here's the reality.

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rate just takes a few minutes online. Head to sophy.com slash profitee student to explore your options and get started today. SoFi student loans are originated by SOFI Bank, N8, member FDIC. Additional Terms and Condition Supply, NMLS 69-6868-91. Please borrow responsibly. Who would you describe as having, when you look at overall energy policy, what governments do you admire when you say they get it and they don't. Who's getting this right and who's headed in the wrong direction? I think I would say the governments that are getting it right are the ones that are actually acknowledging that there's a 21st century transition going on here. The ones embracing clean energy, the ones embracing what we call electrification technologies. And that's

electrifying transport, that's electrifying heating, that's electrifying industry. And the reason I'm so passionate about electrification, and the main reason that makes sense is one, we know how to decarbonize electricity, right? So if you can shift your cars to electricity, you can provide that with low carbon sources. But the other huge benefit comes from efficiency, right? Like I think people underappreciate just how much energy is wasted when you burn fossil fuels. So if you were to put a dollar of gasoline in your car, only around 20 cents of that actually go towards turning the wheels and getting you from A to B.

80% of that is completely wasted as heat and friction and stuff that's actually not serving you or giving you what you need. With electrification, that's basically flipped. So nearly all of the electricity you put in the car is actually converted into motion and getting you from A to B, and far less of it is wasted. So you could take all the cars in the world, electrify them. No one changes how much they drive, no one changes, how many cars they have. And if you just electrify that overnight, we would cut energy use by probably at least two-thirds, if not three quarters. So you see these huge efficiency gains when it comes to electrification. So those are the countries that I think are making good decisions here is embracing clean energy, but importantly also embracing

electrification. I would say the US is not on that track. I would say the US is hunkering down and sticking with what I'd frame as a 20th century technologies, and I think that will be fine for a while and work out for a while. But I think the reality is that the US will also just start to lose competitiveness as the rest of the world embraces these new technologies. I agree with you from what I'll call an administrative complexion, like the administration embracing coal and, you know, drill baby drill. But it appeals to, it would strike me that the underlying gears of the economy continue to grind in the right direction. And that is, I think last year for the first time, in the U.S., we got more electricity than coal. And the EIA predicts that solar wind and storage

will make up roughly 93% of new capacity added in 26. So distinctive, the rhetoric in some of the investments, which obviously have a big impact from a government level, the economy wins. And the economics are pointing towards more renewables in the U.S. Do you think that's fair? No, I think that's fair. I think the US is building predominantly clean energy. I think where the US is maybe falling behind us on the electrification piece, where if you look at EV sales, for example, China's now above 50%, Europe is flying close to many countries above 50% or close to 50%. The US has been stuck on 10% for several years now. And it's hard to see when that's going to shift. So almost every other country in the world is adopting electric vehicles pretty rapidly, and the U.S. is kind of stuck where it's been for several years. That's really, I kind of knew that, but I didn't know the scale of it,

that Europe and China five times the share of EVs, do you think that's a cultural thing that, quite frankly, we just love our internal combustion throaty engines in the U.S.? Any thoughts on why that's it? I mean, that is an enormous delta. Any thoughts? I think part of it is you can encourage adoption through policy and investment and charging. And so I think in other parts of the world might be doing that better. But I think there is a strong cultural piece where I think there is a strong culture.

There's a very strong car culture in the US relative to many other places. But in particular, big cars, I mean, in the UK, we just don't have pickup truck culture, right? And I think part of that is kind of linked to the combustion engine rather than a battery. Yeah, it's really, I do think it's shifting, though, dramatically. On my 16th birthday, I got my driver's license, and a day later I went and bought a really bad car with every dollar and more that I'd ever had. And I have this compact with my sons. I've said, no tattoos, no motorcycles, and I will buy you a car. and the response back was, I don't want a car.

I thought at that moment he was going to pull up his sleeve and show me a tattoo, but kids do seem to not be placing the same, or at least American kids. There's a dramatic turnaround in terms of their affinity for cars. So let's talk, let's take the lens out a bit. The climate coverage skews pretty catastrophic, and you've spent two books arguing the data tells a more complicated story. what does the average person get wrong? What does the media get wrong

about where we actually are with respect to climate change? I think a couple of key things. I think the world to set these ambitious climate targets, you might have heard of the one and a half degree target or the two degree target.

And that's basically, targets the world to set on what we're going to limit temperature rise to. And we're very rapidly approaching one and a half degrees of warming. We will pass that. There's no way. that we're going to stay below that.

And I think maybe what a lot of people get wrong is that they see these targets as these kind of cliffs that we fall off. And once we pass these targets, we hit some tipping, one global tipping point that kind of completely shifts the climate system and there's no coming back. I think people often see it in this very binary,

like either we stay below it or we go above it and we're doomed or not. And that's just not how this works, right? the climate impacts scale with the temperature rise we experience, which kind of means there's no point at which we should just give up, right? Because the hazards at 1.7 are better than they are at 2. And if we go past 2, then it's worth trying to stay below 2.3 rather than 2.5. And I think people don't have that as clear in their head. I think they think once we hit this point, it's over. And that's just not how this works. I think the other challenge that I think people have is that they

often view climate impacts and future climate impacts in this very static world around them. So heat waves are going to increase, other events are going to increase. There might be pressures on our food systems, right? So that's all true and that will all happen with climate change. But the point is that there are all going to be other dramatic changes. happening at the same time, whether that's economic growth in lower income countries, whether that's demographic changes, innovations so that we can produce temperature-resistant crops or investments on making people more resilient to, on systems more resilient to heat. So I think the challenge people has, they see climate impacts rising in the future,

but they somehow assume that the world is going to stay as it is today, and that's just the least likely outcome. Right, the world and economics and demographics and demographics and the future. and all this other stuff is going to change. And I think the, I guess the key kind of statistical view of this is that if you were to look at what's happened to global death from disasters over the last century, I think many people would assume they've gone up because we have faced these increased hazards and we have many more people in the world.

But actually, they've gone down and they've gone down dramatically. And that's because we developed weather forecasting and early warning systems. and we knew how to design buildings that are resistant to extreme weather and floods. So there's all these really dramatic socioeconomic changes that happened at the same time, and that outweighed the increased risk from climate change over that period. So I think that's one of the key things that people maybe get wrong. And then I think the final one is I think people have this sense that we're not making any progress on clean energy or decarbonisation. And I think we're maybe not making as much progress as people would like,

or we're not making as much progress to keep us below one and a half degrees or two degrees. But we actually have made substantial progress on many of these metrics. And I think that's only accelerating and will continue to accelerate over the coming decades. You refer to yourself as a techno-realist. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, I frame myself as that because everyone else frames me as a techno-optimist. and I don't like that latter of framing because I think, and I don't think it's true, but I think it insinuates a techno-optimist as someone that just thinks some technology

will come along and save us in some vacuum. So we'll just invest in the technology and it will come and it will save us. And that's just not my view. I think my view is, I think technology is going to be really crucial in solving these problems. It's going to be really crucial in a tackling climate change, but that doesn't operate in a vacuum. Like, I still think that having the political backing of these technologies is crucial. Having social interventions where societies are willing to take up these technologies is crucial. Reorienting financial markets and investments towards these solutions is really, really crucial.

So I frame myself as a techno-optist because I think technology will be really, really crucial and I'm very pro-technology. But I don't, on its own, think that it's going to come along and save us. Are there different types of energy or tech? that you don't think are getting the attention they deserve? I think I still think the electrification piece is just underrated in people's minds. Like, I think they know it's there, but I think they underestimate the benefits for people. I mean, that's really where people will save money, right? When it comes down to money, we might be able to make a unit of electricity a bit cheaper, right?

But not dramatically cheaper. There could be dramatic cost reductions and price reductions for someone switching from a gasoline car to an electric car or whatever they. the electrification technology is. I think that's where people could really feel it in their pockets. But then there are just whole other parts. I mean, this transport part, the electricity part, is in some way the easy part. There are other parts of our emissions or sources

that people want to underestimate and will be much harder, right? Like cement. Cement is 7% of global emissions, right? It's like double or triple aviation. Lots of people think about, when they think about climate, think about people flying. They don't think about people building houses and bridges. So there's stuff like cement, steel, fertilizer.

The technical term we'd use is like hard to abate sectors, where the solutions are not quite there yet, but there are promising ideas or early stage technologies that might eventually make it to commercial scale. And I think for people, I don't know, with some money that want to get behind solutions that are less well known, I think those are the areas where I would look. Didn't I read somewhere that ships are a much greater polluter than people give them credit for? Yeah, I mean, I think, again, people, when they think of transport, think of cars, and they think of planes, ships are also pretty substantial. What's also promising there is that a huge amount of global shipping is for moving fossil fuels around.

So actually, if you were to dramatically shift to a lower carbon energy system, you're also dramatically cut a lot of shipping demand at the same time. I mean, the start something like half or two-thirds on a mass basis is basically shipping fossil fuels around the world. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Vanta. What's the one thing in business that's spreading as fast as AI? AI risk. Every new tool your team signs up for, every vendor that turns on AI features, every new integration.

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automate your security and compliance, and earn improved trust. Get started today at vanta.com slash propchit. That's v-a-n-ta.com slash profcheet. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar-raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of

cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. Megan Rapino here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I got to sit down with legendary Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve in Chicago during All-Star Weekend. We get into her personal style of activism, how she supports her players as people, and why she proudly considers herself a dyke. Then we learn if she's more of a mommy, daddy, or baby. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This, wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. We're back with more from Hannah Ritchie.

When I listen to you, Hannah, quite frankly, it just sounds to me, and it feels like any honest economic analysis, runs as an accidental ad for the CCP. I mean, at the end of the day, aren't the Chinese just making more deft investments than the rest of the world? Yeah, I have this problem as well

because, I don't know, sometimes I come across as, I don't know, to pro-China in some way. But you're just calling it as you see it. I mean, 70% of EV production globally, China, 80% of solar panels, China, batteries. I mean, quite frankly, it just seems like they're moving to where the puck is headed.

I mean, I think it's framed as the kind of China paradox, because it's absolutely true that they are, one, they're building huge amounts of clean energy at home. They're adopting electric vehicles extremely rapidly, as I said, more than half of new car sales in China are electric. And they are basically dominating the supply chains of these technologies for exports for the rest of the world. At the same time, they are the world's largest emitter. They do burn a lot of coal. They are still burning coal plants. I think what people maybe get wrong about the coal plant thing is that they see China building new coal plants and inevitably think they're going to burn huge amounts of extra coal.

What China is largely doing there is building new and flexible coal plants because they have much, much, much more variable solar and wind to integrate into the grid. So the way that the US does it and the way that Europe mostly does it is we have solar and wind, And then we ramp up natural gas up in town to fill in the gaps, right? What China is doing, it doesn't have natural gas, it doesn't want to buy natural gas, is basically doing that with coal plants. So even though China is building new coal plants, actually quite pretty rapid rate, that doesn't actually mean that they are burning more coal or will burn more coal. It's more of this kind of adaptive thing.

But yeah, it's often framed as a paradox because they are still a huge emitter. At the same time, they are really, really leaning in to these, technologies, as I said, domestically, but also for export. I think what's really key here, and I think what maybe gets lost is that this wasn't a very recent sudden transition or decision, well, maybe that's what we should do over the next decade. This has been part of an industrial strategy that has been going on and been planned for decades, right? So China was experiencing strong economic growth, its population, would eventually want cars and transport. It doesn't have oil. It doesn't want to have to buy oil and it couldn't compete with

the US and Germany and Europe on building combustion engine cars. What was its way to energy security was to build really good electric vehicles and renewable technologies such that it could serve that demand without becoming energy insecure like many other countries in the world. So that's been decades in the making and it's now coming to fruition. But it did take huge amounts, a huge investments very, very early on when these technologies were very, very expensive. And part of what China has done, along with other countries as well, that invested early, has dramatically brought down the prices for the rest of the world. And many other countries in the world will ultimately benefit from that.

There's, I want to get your input on a, not a debate, but Americans, especially in the media, especially on the right, are constantly, saying things along the lines of, well, the lack of air conditioning in the EU kills more people than guns in the US. The non-air, not having access to ubiquitous air conditioning has killed more people than COVID. I mean, air conditioning or the lack thereof in the EU has been, it's become just a constant talking point. Here's to get your views on this debate and if it's been framed correctly. I think the comparison to guns is a bit silly, if I'm honest, I don't quite sure why we're specifically comparing those, but I've seen the comparisons. I did check, there was a kind of viral

chart, and I checked the numbers on the chart. The US deaths from heat were lower than they should have been, and there's a complicated reason for that. The key point being that the US numbers were basically deaf from heat on deaf certificates, and the reality is that's not how most people die from heat. I think people when they think of if someone dying from heat, they're like, die from a heat stroke or something. When the reality is what heat does is it really exacerbates underlying health conditions. So what it means is that someone with heart disease would die earlier than they would have if they hadn't experienced this rapid heat event. So the ways to quantify that is very different from death certificates. So that brought the US numbers up a bit. But it's still

true that Europe has much, much higher heat deaths than the US. And I think a big part of that is air conditioning. I think there is, to some extent, a weird cultural phenomenon in Europe where there has been this reluctance to really invest in air conditioning. There is this sense that it's too much of a luxury. I don't agree with that attitude. And the reason I don't agree with that attitude is because that is not how we treat being too cold or heating. So in the UK, if someone cannot afford to heat their home in winter, we say that person is in fuel poverty. It does not make sense to me that if someone is extremely, extremely hot,

sifling hot in the summer in heat, and do not have a way to cool themselves, that's also fuel poverty to me. And the imbalance there doesn't make sense. And I think this kind of long-run cultural thing where heating has been really crucial, especially for northern parts of Europe. At the same time, I mean, it's also true that especially for central and northern Europe, the need for air conditioning and cooling has actually been quite recent.

Like Europe has experienced pretty rapid increases in temperatures over the last decade or so, and it just didn't have that before. So part of it is this kind of shock of like, suddenly we actually do need this. so we didn't need it necessarily 20 years ago. And that's overlapping with this very long, drawn-out kind of cultural sense that our focus is on heating rather than cooling. You're such a clear blue-flame thinker. I want to go off scripture and I want to ask you to give sort of your top line of the cliff notes

on the economy in the UK right now and then drill down on the Scottish economy. My honest assessment is not good. I mean, if you, if you, so often framed, there is always this debate in climate on, you know, whether economic growth is compatible with, you know, achieving our climate goals, or do we need what is framed as degrowth? And they kind of quip as well, just ask the UK, because we've basically been degrowing for about a decade or two now. When you look at the economic situation in the UK, it's basically been very stupt. and productivity has really, really stagnated over the last decade or so. So, and that's true across the UK.

It's also true in Scotland. So I think the overall frame there is not a positive one, and I'm reasonably pessimistic about it. I think it's also quite hard to see where that engine of growth is going to come from. You know, the UK has now has a new prime minister, but we've also been through a long series of prime ministers on a very, very short period of time. And I think part of that is because it's very, very hard to find us. I think we're looking for a quick solution to get out of this stagnation period

and people won't be satisfied until they see that engine of growth. But trying to do that in a stage where also there is rising demand on social care and the demographics are changing pretty rapidly. Actually, I think genuinely makes us a very hard problem to solve. and we're also quite impatient about giving someone the chance to do it. I live in London, and I'm just struck by, so all the numbers on the UK economy are just, it just hasn't grown. And I think the easiest culprit is Brexit.

At least that's my favorite go-to in terms of an unbelievable own goal, but I'm sure it's more complicated than that. And the thing that just strikes me is that the UK is doing better, because amazing universities, fantastic culture. London is a super city. The wealthiest people in the world want to have a second home either in London or New York. It just feels like it has all of the underpinnings are the foundation of what should be a thriving economy. And yet it always seems to steal or snatch to feed from the jaws of victory.

Other than Brexit, can you point to anything that you would argue is, is a culprit here or has gotten in the way of the UK kind of recognizing or commanding the space that occupies, if you will? I think Brexit has had a big impact. I think another big factor is just huge growth in regional inequality where the UK has been, I mean, it's always been quite London-centric, but I think has become increasingly London-centric. And if you go outside of London, you know, some of the economic trends are even, worse and the opportunities I think are even worse. And then that creates this kind of agglomeration

effect where, you know, if you want to be, there's a feeling if you want to be ambitious in the UK, you have to move to London. And then you have this, this twined with this problem of very slow at building infrastructure to change that, very slow at building houses in London, very high house prices in London. So you have this kind of agglomerating problem of this centralisation in a few places, But actually, it's increasingly hard for people to move there and take advantage of those opportunities. I think that regional story is a very, very strong one in the UK. I mean, I think the UK is, there are very, very few countries in the world where the economic engine is so central. Even if you look at Germany, France, it's more decentralized than it is in the UK.

And certainly when it comes to the US, it's much more diversified. And then last thing we want to touch on, because we have a lot of young. people who listen to the podcast who are looking or trying to adapt to a new media ecosystem and trying to find interesting ways or options for potentially making a living or bringing greater awareness to the work. You're in addition to being a senior researcher at the University of Oxford. You're also a creator. You have a very active substack. You have 75,000 plus followers. Just curious to kind of give us a behind the music. We have a substack offering. We're mostly ad-driven, but we've, you know, we're trying to move to or create a revenue stream that's more

recurring with subscriptions on substack. I'm curious how substack fits into your professional life. Do you see it as just a means to expand your influence footprint? Do you see it someday as being an economic model for you? How do you approach substack? Yeah, I don't monetize my substack. And that's largely because I just have the luxury of having a full-time job. and so I don't necessarily need that as a source of income.

And for me, substack is really this outlet to just, it's a more relaxed environment to share stuff I'm interested in or put a bit of personality into my work. So for me, I very much treat it more like a blog than I do my full-time job, which is also writing, but it's more professional, yeah, more and more technical. in some way. So it is like a little bit of an outlet for that, for me to share ideas, explore ideas, test stuff. And I really, really enjoy it. I mean, I think when it comes to advice for younger people or creators, the work I'm doing now, I never would have imagined

was even a job when I was leaving university. Like someone would pay me to like make charts and write about them. That's incredible. So I never saw that as a kind of job and avenue and I kind of stumbled into it. I just started doing volunteering at the organisation I'm at now and I kind of climbed and grew that into a full-time position. And I think part of the reason why I have the space for myself now is not just about honing one particular skill is actually about finding the unique overlap of a combination of interest and skills that actually makes that like an unsaturated space. right? So for me it's this weird overlap of like I like writing, I have this kind of environmental data lens and I make visualisations and that's actually quite a unique combination.

Like some people have one or the other but they somehow don't have all three or four. So my advice to young people would be to try to look at that intersection of skills and interests and build on that rather than honing in on. I'm just going to be a fantastic writer but I don't know what to write about and it's a very, very saturated space or the same in any other dimension. What are your sources of inspiration? What are your kind of, I don't know, hacks or cheat codes here in terms of creators and finding interesting data? A big part of it is listening to what other people are saying or what questions they have. And that's just a really key source for me is like, I don't know, when it comes to solar power, like, what are the questions or concerns that

people have about solar power. And are they right? Are they wrong? Let me look at the data. And that's a huge part of the kind of idea engine for me is just listening to people looking on social media about what people are arguing about is like a really big one. And then honestly, just a big one for me is just questions that I have. Like I don't come to every question knowing the answer. Like I genuinely don't know the answer to this question. I think it's an important question. I'm going to go and figure it out. Oh, and by the way, I should probably just write this up and share it with other people in case they also find it interesting. So I think part of it is engaging with other people and listening to what they have to say, but also just

having this like inbuilt curiosity to figure stuff up or figure stuff out or just not take someone else's answer for granted. Not because you have an answer, a question you want answered, don't necessarily just take some news source and they have the answer. Also, think about it and go and work it out for yourself. I think that's been a key one for me. Hannah Ritchie is a senior researcher at the University of Oxford and the deputy editor of Our World and Data. Her latest book, Clearing the Air,

answers the 50 biggest questions about solving climate change. She joins us from Edinburgh. Hannah, I really enjoyed this conversation. Just enjoy the lens through which you look at the world. Thanks for your time today. Thanks. Really enjoyed the conversation. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Janair. Cammy Rieke is our social producer.

Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from PropG Media. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer.

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