Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Hannah Ritchie

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Hannah Ritchie. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I think one of the questions on which our whole future hinges is whether the lives that we have, the lives that we want, can exist within our environmental limits. Is there a way to live lives as energetically rich, as materially prosperous as Americans do now, without doing irreparable damage to the world? Is there a way for people all over to live lives even better than Americans do without doing irreparable damage to the world? Can we decouple material prosperity from the environment?

If we can’t, then what we’re left with is a politics of sacrifice. Then we’re asking residents of rich countries to give up what they have. We’re asking residents of poor and middle income countries to give up what they want. There is no way around that. I’ve read the degrowth books. That is, in any honest rendering, what they are asking.

And the politics of sacrifice, they’re abysmal. They’re really hard, particularly the speed at which we need to act on climate. You try passing a global carbon tax and enforcing it. You try doing energetic redistribution between rich and poor countries. You try banning, god forbid, hamburgers.