Geothermal energy may very well be a key a part of the UK’s power combine sooner or later
Jim West/Alamy
Clearing the Air
Hannah Ritchie, Chatto & Windus (UK); MIT Press (US, out 3 March 2026)
Just a few weeks in the past, I used to be having dinner with some associates and the dialog meandered – as it would when there’s a local weather journalist, a campaigner and two civil servants seated on the desk – onto the subject of renewable power.
As you could have already guessed, I used to be eating with some fairly clued-up people, well-versed within the risks of local weather change and the pressing want to modify to cleaner types of energy. However nonetheless, the query was posed to me: certainly we are going to nonetheless want some gasoline in our energy grids for back-up gas? A rustic just like the UK can’t depend on simply wind, photo voltaic and batteries through the boring and darkish winter months, can it?
It’s moments like these when information scientist Hannah Ritchie’s new ebook, Clearing the Air: A hopeful information to fixing local weather change in 50 questions and solutions, excels. Because of my well-thumbed copy, I used to be capable of take my associates on a whistle-stop tour of a few of the storage choices that might assist energy the grid when the wind doesn’t blow and the solar doesn’t shine. Pumped hydropower, geothermal power and hydrogen may all play a job, I advised them.
Ritchie’s earlier ebook, Not the Finish of the World, was a crash course in how you can resolve the planet’s environmental challenges. Clearing the Air strikes the identical optimistic tone, however is extra of a “how you can” information, offering data-led solutions to any questions you could have in regards to the street to internet zero.
The queries are organised by matter, starting from fossil fuels and renewable power to electrical automobiles and residential heating. Studying it, you possibly can’t assist however really feel that is Ritchie’s response to the continuing deluge of ill-informed – and sometimes outright deceptive – media reviews and political pronouncements on the net-zero transition, the type that inform folks electrical automobiles will run out of juice on the motorway, warmth pumps don’t work in chilly climate and the world doesn’t have sufficient spare land for solar energy.
Clearing the Air pushes again on this disinformation utilizing the ability of scientific analysis and high quality information. For instance, one of many questions Ritchie solutions is about whether or not wind farms kill birds – a favorite assault line of US president Donald Trump. The reply is sure, wind generators do kill some birds, however that quantity is dwarfed by the annual kill charge of cats, buildings, automobiles and pesticides.
However, wind generators do pose an actual risk to some bats, migrating birds and birds of prey. However Ritchie is fast to level out that there are measures we are able to take to cut back the chance, resembling tweaking the placement of wind farms, portray generators black and powering down blades in periods of low wind. That is the type of nuance that you simply received’t get from a newspaper headline or a political quip, however it’s important for understanding the advantages and dangers of our shift to wash power.
Every question-and-answer sequence follows the identical format, which makes this a simple learn to dip out and in of, nevertheless it veers in direction of the formulaic if learn in a single sitting. Clearing the Air works finest as a type of reference information, to maintain inside shut attain when a climate-sceptic uncle turns up for Christmas dinner, say.
All through, Ritchie’s now-trademark optimism shines by way of. She makes it clear that for almost each facet of the net-zero transition, now we have viable choices for decarbonisation, with out shying away from the challenges or straying into wishful considering. The impact is highly effective: you come away feeling knowledgeable and hopeful, with the arrogance that it is going to be attainable for humanity to navigate a path out of the local weather disaster. In a world of faux information and political spin, this ebook is a breath of contemporary air.
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