We can have growth while fighting climate change

Climate stories usually start the same way: fire, flood, loss, collapse. The charts are grim. The vibes are worse. But there’s another story in the numbers that starts with what’s working, what’s already being built, and how far we’ve actually come.

Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist at the University of Oxford and the author of Clearing the Air, a book that offers encouraging answers to some of our hardest questions about the climate. She’s a “data optimist” who doesn’t ignore the dangers of climate change, but recognizes how the world is decarbonizing faster than most of us realize.

The real bottleneck now, Ritchie argues, isn’t technology so much as belief. Belief that progress is still possible without shrinking our world; belief that the cleaner option can also be the better, cheape