It may not feel like it, but the planet has many reasons to be cheerful

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There are broadly three views of the future. One view — held by Marxists, Whigs and followers of the psychologist Steven Pinker — is that humanity progresses. Other people believe that history is patternless, with no set direction of travel. But the view that’s becoming the norm is that we are heading for apocalypse. In this view, the only doubt is over which of the four horsemen gets us first: climate change (now hitting earlier than predicted), artificial intelligence, a pandemic or plain old nukes. In Gallup’s latest Hope Index, which polls global expectations for the year ahead, pessimists exceed optimists by the largest margin since the index launched in 1999.

Pessimism is sometimes rational, but people tend to be irrationally gloomy about the state of their country or the world. For instance, notes the Our World in Data website, most people think global poverty is rising when in fact it’s declining. This bias may stem from media emphasising bad news: the plane that crashed, not the millions that didn’t. By contrast, people are too optimistic about their own lives: few newly-weds expect to get divorced.

Big-picture pessimism is blinding us to cheering shifts now under way. There’s a plausible scenario in which energy generation, health and working life all transform for the better this decade.

Most importantly, renewable energy is advancing unexpectedly fast. The International Energy Agency predicted last December that “global renewable-power capacity” would grow by 2,400 gigawatts from 2022 to 2027, “an amount equal to the entire power capacity of China today”. “This massive expected increase” was 30 per cent above the agency’s previous year’s forecast. The IEA now expects renewables to account for almost the entire global expansion in electricity. Since that forecast, China — by far the world’s largest emitter — has said its solar capacity increased 34 per cent in just the first quarter of 2023. True, today’s level of renewable use isn’t nearly enough to save us. But if this pace of growth continues, it could become so.

The renewables revolution is sustainable precisely because it stems from cold, hard, short-term self-interest. It’s happening because improved technology slashed prices. That trend will encourage countries to build more capacity. Most new renewables projects should prove much cheaper over time than existing fossil-fuel sources.

And when it comes to climate, cheap green tech is our only hope. We’ve learnt these past 30 years that states won’t make collective international sacrifices in order to protect future generations. Nor will countless individual moral awakenings do the job: for every person who stops flying, multiple emerging consumers are booking their first flights. It’s clean tech or catastrophe.

The other main reason for planetary optimism: medical breakthroughs. By one estimate, 2 to 5 per cent of all deaths last century were from malaria. Doses of the first-ever malaria vaccine should land in African countries this year. The UN says we can end Aids by 2030. And scientists produced vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year. The underlying messenger RNA technology has many other possible applications, including multiple cancer vaccines now in the works. Meanwhile, the US Food and Drug Administration this month gave full approval to Leqembi, the first drug found to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s. Admittedly, its effects are modest, but the first drug for anything is usually unsatisfactory. Now that scientists know which mechanisms impact the disease, better medicines should follow. Just this week, the Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals group reported exciting trial results of its own Alzheimer’s drug. There’s also a promising pipeline of anti-obesity medicines. And though AI might end up destroying us, for now it’s turbocharging drug discovery.

AI is already taking over much mundane work: software coding, writing text, filling in forms, even translating 5,000-year-old Akkadian cuneiform. Working life could quickly become more productive and agreeable, especially as the working-from-home revolution solidifies. WFH makes people happier, says Nick Bloom of Stanford University in his summary of recent research. Remote workers are replacing commuting time with family and fun: note the estimated 52 per cent jump in golf played in the US since 2019, as weekday rounds take off. Yes, full-time WFH cuts productivity, but it also cuts employers’ costs, which particularly helps start-ups. Hybrid remote work doesn’t seem to hurt productivity, especially as WFH technologies improve, summarises Bloom. And with WFH becoming the white-collar norm, it could assuage our urban-rural divides, as some well-paid workers leave big cities.

These optimistic scenarios are plausible. Our job is to make them happen.

Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him at [email protected]

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