Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast, I'm your host Sean Carroll.

The world you may have heard is in a bit of a mess, and I know you're immediately thinking

well which way is in a mess, is it because democracy is dying or because the climate

is falling apart or because there could be another global pandemic?

All of these AI extinctions, solar flares, there's a worry that bad things are happening

to the world.

Today's guest, Hannah Ritchie, is here to tell us that not everything is necessarily

completely impossible to solve.

So today's guest, Hannah Ritchie, is here to say that for certain problems, we might

actually be able to solve them, in particular the environmental problems.

Now this is one of those things where it's a subtle, careful, very specific message

that is easy to caricature.

So let me try to get it right, Hannah is saying that when it comes to the environment,

so climate change, food sustainability, pollution, things like that, the situation is bad.

No doubt that the situation is bad and getting worse in some ways, but not necessarily going

to continue to get worse, that there are reasonable solutions that are within our grasp

if we make the effort to do it.

So her point is that there's a kind of inaction that comes from just ignoring the problems,

but there's also a kind of inaction that comes from being too sad, too bleak in one's

outlook.

If you don't think the problems are addressable, you don't do anything either.

So Hannah has a new book coming out called Not the End of the World, where she makes

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