The head of research at online publication Our World in Data, Hannah Ritchie, joins the Mongabay Newscast to discuss her new “radically hopeful” read, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. While containing a hopeful array of technological advancements and potential fixes to many […]
Short answer is yes, even the Guardian calls her out for not saying anything about capitalism.
I’ve been pretty fascinated with the press coverage the book has gotten because it seems like a Pinkerian “look things are better than you think” spin on climate change that’s emerged as a counterweight to the “doomer” takes in the wake of the latest IPCC reports where the panel’s contributors have gotten increasingly alarmed. I think it’s a sign the capitalist class is still pushing individual lifestyle changes and “techno optimism,” and I’m wondering whether it’s going to keep sticking.
Steven Pinker and his ahistorical, immaterial toxic optimism were the first things that came to mind when I saw the words “it’s not the end of the world.”
Okay, having listened to the interview my impression of the book is that it’s a textbook case of capitalist realism. The only solution is growth, the market will provide solutions (it seemed like her two strongest arguments were renewables are cheaper than petroleum and electric cars are getting cheaper). She seemed to get genuinely flummoxed by questions like what about the state interests in maintaining oil consumption even if it is no longer the cheapest source of energy and what about public transportation. I thought the interviewer was really patient but it was a little bit shocking that someone with a PhD from an elite institution who wrote a book about climate change came across as someone who barely understood the science.
If it’s apolitical then it’s guaranteed to be capitalist realism, which is the hegemonic—and therefore invisible/“non-political”—ideology.
The interviewer said almost exactly that! Except nicer and more circumspect. It didn’t seem to make much of an impact but maybe she had something to chew on after the interview.
Elite universities are… elite: they’re bourgeois institutions. And many of their students come from wealthy families. If they have a class consciousness at all, they know they’re on the other side in the class war.
Oxford apparently has a history of big oil funding.