Sustainability by Numbers
Hannah Ritchie · 24 korrents · 9 pieces · hannahritchie.substack.com
One in ten people are older than 65. Three in four live under a leader who is.2 korrents · 14 Oct 2026 · no page here yet
Young people tend to be happier than older generations, but not in the Anglosphere2 korrents · 10 Sept 2026 · no page here yet
Forget more reservoirs; should the UK just build desalination plants instead?3 korrents · 31 Aug 2026 · no page here yet
The UK needs to build more reservoirs3 korrents · 18 Aug 2026 · no page here yet
Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?4 korrents · 9 Feb 2026
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- Taking away meat and dairy subsidies would raise meat prices by only a few per cent, nowhere near enough to close the gap with meat substitutes.
- Quoted subsidy totals for meat and fossil fuels mostly describe unpriced damage, not money any government could take back and spend elsewhere.
- Making food more expensive is not a way to fix the food system, because higher food prices fall hardest on the poorest people.
- People do not switch from meat to cheap plant protein as they get richer; they switch the other way.
What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?1 korrent · 6 May 2025 · no page here yet
Vertical farming: a local solution for greens, but not feeding the world any time soon3 korrents · 5 Dec 2024
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- Vertical farming swaps a land problem for an energy problem, and the energy cost is what stops it feeding the world.
- Cereals will stay an outdoor crop, because the energy to grow them indoors costs far more than the grain is worth.
- Vertical farms are not automatically better for the climate than farming outdoors.
Meat substitutes need to get a lot cheaper1 korrent · 12 Oct 2023
Biofuels: the US could switch to electric cars and solar power on just a fraction of the land5 korrents · 5 Sept 2023
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- Biofuels have probably raised greenhouse gas emissions rather than lowered them, once the land they take is counted.
- Biofuels cannot supply enough energy to matter for a country like Britain or to replace all transport fuels.
- An acre of solar panels powering electric cars carries you orders of magnitude further than an acre of crops grown for fuel.
- We worry about the land solar needs while ignoring how wastefully the world already uses its farmland.
- Growing food to put in cars is a mistake at a moment when the world should be farming less land, not more.