Climate stories usually start the same way: fire, flood, loss, collapse. The charts are grim. The vibes are worse. But there’s another story in the numbers that starts with what’s working, what’s already being built, and how far we’ve actually come.

Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist at the University of Oxford and the author of Clearing the Air, a book that offers encouraging answers to some of our hardest questions about the climate. She’s a “data optimist” who doesn’t ignore the dangers of climate change, but recognizes how the world is decarbonizing faster than most of us realize.

The real bottleneck now, Ritchie argues, isn’t technology so much as belief. Belief that progress is still possible without shrinking our world; belief that the cleaner option can also be the better, cheaper one; belief that the future is worth racing toward.

I invited Ritchie onto The Gray Area to talk about the dueling climate narratives of denial vs. despair, where individual choices meet systemic change, and how the politics of clean energy are quietly shifting. We also get into nuclear, agriculture, carbon removal, and the kind of story that might move people from doomscrolling to building.

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What changed your mind about the path we’re on?

Two things. First, zooming way out. If you look across decades and centuries, humans have solved a staggering number of problems. Poverty, hunger, child and maternal mortality, life expectancy — almost any human-development metric you pick has improved dramatically, especially in the last 50 years. You don’t get that perspective from the news cycle; you get it from long-run data. We are capable of solving big problems.

Second, zooming in on climate. We are still in a bad place and progress has been too slow. But we have made progress, and there are now objective trends you can’t see in a headline: the collapse in the costs of solar, wind, and batteries; the pace at which those technologies are being deployed; the rate at which grids are getting cleaner. If you step back and look at the data, the scale and speed of these shifts are unmistakable.

But your views have shifted, right?

They shifted a lot. Fifteen years ago, I was a doom person. I was convinced climate change would make my life unlivable. The change wasn’t a personality transplant; it came from the data. Stepping back, getting the long view, and then watching the cost curves and deployment numbers bend changed my mind.

We seem stuck between denial and despair. Why is the nuanced middle so hard to sustain?

Partly human........

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