Community Spotlight: Sustainability by the numbers
Community Spotlight: Sustainability by the numbers
Using hard data to find the truth.
Good morning, investors!
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Without further ado…
What’s that saying?
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.
Well, aside from the fact that the closest star is trillions of miles away, making this an egregiously inaccurate cliche, you could say the government is shooting for the moon with respect to its climate goals and hoping for the best.
In April 2021, the Biden administration set its sights on cutting net greenhouse gas pollution in half (relative to 2005 levels) by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.
Ultimately, the goal is to improve our collective sustainability.
“Sustainability is based on a simple principle: Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment. To pursue sustainability is to create and maintain the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony to support present and future generations.”
Based on this rather well-articulated definition, sustainability is a universally applicable pursuit. And it shows — just google “sustainable” followed by any industry or sub-industry.
Sustainable mining.
Sustainable energy.
Sustainable farming.
Sustainable finance.
But it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and tangled in buzzwords. That’s where hard data can be useful.
Hannah Ritchie is not only the Head of Research at Our World in Data and a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford but also the author behind Sustainability by numbers, a newsletter dedicated to answering the most pressing sustainability questions by using hard data.
What kind of questions?
Here are just a few she’s explored that happen to relate to some of the themes we’ve discussed here:
Does the world have enough lithium to move to electric vehicles?
The mineral monopoly: will low-carbon technology be controlled by a few countries?
Are electric cars better for the climate than petrol or diesel?
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