Not the End of the World

By Hannah Ritchie,

Book cover of Not the End of the World

Book description

This "eye-opening and essential" book (Bill Gates) will transform how you see our biggest environmental problems—and explains how we can solve them.

It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Not the End of the World as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

As a scholar and a concerned citizen (and an often rather gloomy private individual), the end of the world has long been a major preoccupation of mine, and wherever I look, it seems the news is not good.

Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World offers a different perspective. The book does not downplay how terrible the state of the world is and how great the dangers for its future are. But it provides plenty of evidence that, by and large, the world has been getting better across history. Acknowledging this can help us to overcome paralysing pessimism and…

A clear-eyed introduction to the evidence that we've got a lot of work to do to ameliorate the worst impacts of climate change, but that we'll probably be okay and it's within our power to do some substantial good along the way.

None of which suggests we should rest on our laurels, but it's a good counter-point to climate doomerism, which can (counterintuitively) lead people to just throw their hands up and do nothing because it seems like there's nothing we can do.

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