Hannah Ritchie
Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes Sustainability by Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of her, and revises in public when they say something she did not expect.
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Where they publish
Sustainability by NumbersNewsletter Their newsletter: energy and climate, argued from the data.
Charts-first posts on energy, emissions, food and climate — each one working through a specific number rather than a general position. Has a feed.
Open sustainabilitybynumbers.com
Recent
- Forget more reservoirs; should the UK just build desalination plants instead? 31 Aug 2026
- The UK needs to build more reservoirs 18 Aug 2026
- Tracking global food production through a record El Niño 14 Aug 2026
Show 17 more
- Is Europe having a bad wildfire year? 2 Aug 2026
- Thailand’s population has already peaked 23 Jul 2026
- My book — Clearing the Air — is coming out in paperback in September 21 Jul 2026
- How much deforestation is your country importing through trade? 24 Jun 2026
- How quickly do electric car sales translate into cars on the road? 12 Jun 2026
- Do more Europeans die of summer heat than Americans die of guns? 28 May 2026
- What will future population change look like? 19 May 2026
- How much electricity does AI consume? [2025 summary] 5 May 2026
- Receiving the Unwin Award 29 Apr 2026
- Are only one-third of Britain’s railways electric? 27 Apr 2026
- An end to cervical cancer is possible 13 Apr 2026
- The UK is cutting its aid budget to the lowest level in decades 1 Apr 2026
- Technology can cut plane contrails by two-thirds. Getting airlines to use it isn't so easy 23 Mar 2026
- Will Africa still be energy-poor in 2050? 17 Mar 2026
- Does China have a huge electricity advantage over the United States? 5 Mar 2026
- Does that use a lot of energy? [Update] 3 Mar 2026
- My book is published in the US today, and I'm shortlisted for the Unwin Award 17 Feb 2026
Link verified 1 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
On this site
What they believeKorents 7 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
The one-line wordings are this site's; the quotes are theirs. What is a korent?
Recent
Desalination for drinking and household water is cheap and uses less energy than commonly assumed.
Supplying drinking and household water through desalination is really quite cheap, and uses far less energy than I’d have guessed.
Forget more reservoirs; should the UK just build desalination plants instead? Said 31 Aug 2026
Reservoirs are not inherently cheaper to build than desalination plants.
Reservoirs are not automatically cheaper than desalination plants.
Forget more reservoirs; should the UK just build desalination plants instead? Said 31 Aug 2026
Reserving desalination plants only for emergency drought use does not work well.
The problem is that reserving desalination for emergency situations does not seem to work well.
Forget more reservoirs; should the UK just build desalination plants instead? Said 31 Aug 2026
Show 4 more
The UK will need to build more reservoirs to cope with future water-starved summers
If the UK is to survive water-starved summers in the future, it will need to build more reservoirs and plug holes in our existing pipelines at the same time.
The UK needs to build more reservoirs Said 18 Aug 2026
Britain has a systemic problem building large infrastructure projects, including reservoirs
I think Britain has a real problem with building almost anything, from train lines to houses, and reservoirs to energy infrastructure.
The UK needs to build more reservoirs Said 18 Aug 2026
Privatisation of the water industry created a disincentive for building new reservoirs
There is also a clear rationale for why privatisation would lead to a drought in reservoir-building.
The UK needs to build more reservoirs Said 18 Aug 2026
Concerns about the energy cost of an individual LLM prompt are no longer credible, though the environmental impact of the AI datacenter buildout remains a real worry.
Unless you’re an extreme power user, asking AI questions every day is still a rounding error on your total electricity footprint.
What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? Said 6 May 2025
Beliefs others hold too
Concerns about the energy cost of an individual LLM prompt are no longer credible, though the environmental impact of the AI datacenter buildout remains a real worry. 2 hold this
Unless you’re an extreme power user, asking AI questions every day is still a rounding error on your total electricity footprint.
What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? Said 6 May 2025
Latest
Everything, newest firstFeed Posts, videos, repos and beliefs from every card above, in one stream.
Filter & sortAll sources · condensed
- Forget more reservoirs; should the UK just build desalination plants instead? 31 Aug
- Reserving desalination plants only for emergency drought use does not work well. 31 Aug
- Reservoirs are not inherently cheaper to build than desalination plants. 31 Aug
- Desalination for drinking and household water is cheap and uses less energy than commonly assumed. 31 Aug
- The UK needs to build more reservoirs 18 Aug
- Privatisation of the water industry created a disincentive for building new reservoirs 18 Aug
Show 16 more
- Britain has a systemic problem building large infrastructure projects, including reservoirs 18 Aug
- The UK will need to build more reservoirs to cope with future water-starved summers 18 Aug
- Tracking global food production through a record El Niño 14 Aug
- Is Europe having a bad wildfire year? 2 Aug
- Thailand’s population has already peaked 23 Jul
- My book — Clearing the Air — is coming out in paperback in September 21 Jul
- How much deforestation is your country importing through trade? 24 Jun
- How quickly do electric car sales translate into cars on the road? 12 Jun
- Do more Europeans die of summer heat than Americans die of guns? 28 May
- What will future population change look like? 19 May
- How much electricity does AI consume? [2025 summary] 5 May
- Receiving the Unwin Award 29 Apr
- Are only one-third of Britain’s railways electric? 27 Apr
- An end to cervical cancer is possible 13 Apr
- The UK is cutting its aid budget to the lowest level in decades 1 Apr
- Concerns about the energy cost of an individual LLM prompt are no longer credible, though the environmental impact of the AI datacenter buildout remains a real worry. 6 May 2025