'We're a bit late on the case, but we are on the case': Author Fred Pearce on the rise of renewables, a defused population bomb, and letting nature find its own way

Climate change's impacts are being felt everywhere, from health and food security to extreme weather, sea level rise and collapsing ecosystems. World leaders have been slow to adapt to the warnings, despite an ever-growing body of evidence showing the compounding risks of greenhouse gas emissions.

But despite fossil fuels remaining the world's primary source of energy and emissions continuing to rise, there are changes afoot.

In his book "Despite it All" (Granta, 2026), author and journalist Fred Pearce looks at the shifts that have taken place over the last 40 years, highlighting how far humanity has come in the green transition. He believes this progress gives us reason to hope that we can eventually overcome the challenges we face today.

Pearce spoke with Live Science about his book, which has been shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Hannah Osborne: There are a lot of positive environmental stories throughout the book, including those that aren't necessarily being told. Do you think that there is a growing appetite for positive climate news now? And will it help us?

Fred Pearce: I detect a kind of desire to be told something other than it's all hopeless and there's nothing we can do. Some people are therefore saying, "Well, what can I do?" And they're very sort of personal stories about how they can contribute. But also people who think more, if you like, strategically: What can the world do, what can governments do, what, how can we influence that?

I try not to write what I think people want to read. I try to write what I want to say. And it seems to me that we do so many things so badly, whether it's managing our resources or water or handling forests or the climate, or pollution or whatever. We do things so badly that there is a great deal of scope for doing things a lot better. So, we need optimists and we need pessimists. We need pessimists to point out the problems. We need optimists to come up with some solutions or suggest where [there are] half open doors that we can push open.

I wrote this book in that kind of spirit to say "Look, yes, things are bad, yes, I'm not denying that they're bad, but there's an awful lot that we can do about it and in some cases are doing about it." That then divides into whether we're talking about human activity, our technical solutions to climate change. Tech fixes are good, not bad, which is something that can be a hard sell in the environment community sometimes, so I want to stress that.

I went to the Earth Summit 30 years ago where they agreed [upon] the original climate change convention. Back then they said we [need to] prevent dangerous climate change, but they really didn't know much about how to do it. Wind turbines were just, you know, a few masts on a hill in California. Nobody was dealing much in solar power because it was just so expensive. It had been developed for powering satellites and electric cars. Nobody was talking about [it].

We have made quite a lot of progress and it's not fast enough and CO2 emissions are stable, they're not going down. We need to do a hell of a lot more and we may have passed climate tipping points. I'm not denying any of that, but rather than throwing up our hands or saying it's hopeless, let's get on with the tech, let's also recognize that nature is very good at recovering. You destroy a forest, a rainforest, it doesn't mean that it's destroyed forever. It will, given the chance, come back if we give it room. So let's give forests room to recover.

In large parts of the world it's already happening — in Europe, even in North America. Agricultural land is being abandoned, and when it's abandoned nature comes back and not necessarily in the sort of ways that we might think. But nature does come back, stuff regrows. We can see how evolution is being kickstarted, if you like, by the chaos that we're creating. That's not to say we shouldn't stop creating the chaos, but we can see how nature recovers.

These are things that we can recognize and respond to; giving nature room to recover, rewilding projects, therefore I'm all in favor of [them]. We're not rewilding where we're trying to garden nature to get back to some sort of perfected past, a pristine system where we thought that everything was great — pre-industrial revolution or before Europeans arrived in North America or whatever it might be. But, we can give nature room to evolve and adapt and change. We can see that nature's doing that all the time, with or without climate change and with or without humans. Nature is constantly, if you like, remaking itself.

I'm not saying nature always comes back in ways that we approve of. Let's recognize the distinction between our sort of slightly romanticized idea of what nature should be and what nature actually is.

HO: You talk about rewilding and letting nature take its course, but how do humans fit in with this? Can we adapt our own perceptions of what nature is allowed and what's not?

FP: I think we can probably forget about what's allowed and what's not. Nature will do what it wants to do. We pride ourselves on our ability to garden nature in a way, or manage ecosystems. We're not really very good at it. Nature will very often take over and do what it wants to do.

Some of the world's biggest rewilding projects have gone quite badly wrong because we haven't quite thought it through. The one I'm thinking of really is the large project in the Netherlands where they're trying to sort of recreate ancient European ecosystems and they ended up with mass deaths of animals because their conception of the ecosystem didn't quite figure out. They then largely abandoned the project because they didn't like to see large numbers of animals dying.

A hardline rewilder would say let nature take its course. I see the case for that, and often I would support that, but we have our own sensibilities and our own concerns and we are living in a world where we are very much in charge of what's going on. So while I'm in favor of standing back and letting nature take its course, we have our own sensibilities, and it's not wrong for us to want to intervene sometimes.

The UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. (Image credit: Getty Images)

HO: There's a chapter on human population and fertility rates, and how this is very much a climate change story as well. We're now seeing a lot of the rhetoric around this, and rights being stripped back and taken away. What's it like for you, having seen the changes from the UN International Conference on Population in Mexico in the 80s, to Cairo in the 90s to now?

FP: It's an extraordinary story. I've been working on these issues for 40 years now so I've seen a number of changes. Some of the changes I've seen are how technical fixes somehow became a reality when they seemed very distant a while ago.

But our perceptions change too on many things. We are, in many ways, more attuned to environmental issues now than we were 30 or 40 years ago. One of the big changes that I've seen is the notion of the population bomb, which for much of the 20th century was seen as the number one issue. People would say, "Well, there's no point in fixing the climate, there's no point in reducing our pollution because there are more and more people on the planet, and we're kind of doomed for that reason."

Well, it hasn't [happened]. When I went to my first international conference, which was the UN Population Conference in Mexico City in 1984, that was all the rage. They gave the UN Population prize to the mastermind of China's one child policy, which — in terms of human rights and what I would regard as acceptable human behavior — was dreadful. But such was the concern about population issues that they wanted to give a prize to the operator of that program.

A lot has changed. A feminist agenda, if I could put it that way, and I would say that approvingly, has taken over in reproductive politics. I saw it at a UN population conference in Cairo in 1994, 10 years after the Mexico event, that we need to assert reproductive rights. Many environmentalists said that's a cop out. It was all "it's feminist perspective, but it's dooming us."

Well, it didn't, because what we found was that by and large, women wanted to have smaller families because their children got to grow up. Medical improvements meant that you didn't have to have four or five children to secure the next generation. Two would usually do, sometimes you just wanted one. Women wanted to have lives outside the home. The population people seemed to be a bit surprised by that.

The environmental agenda was a very male-dominated one for a long time. So that came as a bit of a surprise, but the net result is that we've halved our fertility rates. They're more or less down to replacement levels [of reproduction] now globally.

I'm not just talking about Europe or North America. I'm talking about almost everywhere except Africa, and African levels have come down. Sometimes they're coming down to super low levels, so that people are now talking about not having enough babies and how we can encourage people to have babies. There are parts of the world where we're down to one child per woman and even a bit less.

My argument is that we need to carry on. Not take a sort of Elon Musk approach [or] send the women back to the home and [do] reproduction and that's what their job is. We need to complete the feminist revolution so that women have more rights, can make better choices, and indeed couples can make more and better choices about the family size that they want. We can arrange things so that it is possible to have children and a career, or make it easier to do that, and at that point probably reproduction levels will come back up.

What I'm really saying is that the agenda is now vastly different from what it was as recently as the 1980s and, and into the 1990s. The population bomb is being defused, to put it simply, there's a residual momentum effect which means that our numbers will carry on going up a bit. Sure, that creates strains on the planet, but we're not now talking about double the world population every 30 years, which is what was being talked about back in the mid 20th century. It's tailing off.

We now have, if you like, a consumption bomb more than a population bomb. The global issue is consumption in the rich world, and that's what's stressing the planet now — not too many babies in poor parts of the world.

HO: Inequality between the super rich and people in developing countries is becoming more and more stark. How do we bridge the gap to make sure there's a reasonable living standard for regular people without a huge cost to the environment?

FP: The truth is, and the numbers have been done by a number of different people, a reasonable standard of living for everybody on the planet is perfectly feasible without destroying the planet.

We need to do some things better, we need to have better technology, but for me, right up there with climate change is an issue of global inequality. When I was young, it was taken [that] inequalities were diminishing and it was taken almost as read that they would carry on diminishing, and a lot of aid policies were directed towards that. That's kind of disappeared since the sort of Reaganomics of the 1980s, all the changes in the finance system and perhaps the fall of the Berlin Wall, which meant that the sort of socialist or, or equality-based agendas collapsed politically.

We're now finding increased inequality, and that, it seems to me, is a threat to the lives of millions and billions of humans, but also to global stability and our ability perhaps to manage.

Serious global issues like climate change and many others are all undermined by the political stresses and economic stresses created by rising inequality. I see them going together.

It's also clear that it's important to level up, but also level down from the obscene riches that we see among a small number of individuals, who seem to be accumulating a greater share of the world's wealth, whether we're talking about dollars or natural resources.

HO: You have a whole chapter on renewables and how they're outpacing fossil fuels. They're the cheaper alternative. How do you see the political opposition to clean energy panning out over the next five to 10 years?

FP: It's fizzling out. It's a weird political backlash and yes, any big social trend or economic trend, they all have backlashes and it feels to me like this is it. What we see in the real world is that the U.S. — not just the U.S., but principally the U.S. — are in a state of near denial about climate and they're wanting to go back to fossil fuels.

In the rest of the world, if you look at it in terms of geopolitics of [the] U.S. versus China, then the U.S. is pushing this rather old agenda of fossil fuels, and China is absolutely going to reap the benefits in many, many ways in its drive towards renewables. China has been a really bad story in the past with its coal burning — and it's still building a few coal-fired power stations. But the really big story is how China has been principally responsible for bringing down the costs of renewable energy, particularly solar power.

You can now go to the most remote corners of rural Africa and you find people putting up their solar panels to recharge car batteries so that they can run their lights in the evening or whatever it is. And then you've got megacities operating using increasing amounts of solar power. India is getting on the bandwagon as well. It's got the fastest growing solar energy economy in the world.

In the real world, renewable [energy] is mostly cheaper than fossil fuels. It is also quicker to install, you don't have to build a huge power station, you can do it in bits and pieces, bolt bits on.

Yes, there are grid issues and they need to be addressed, and there are limits on operating. There are challenges, but renewables are just growing so fast, and it is growing so fast because it is so cheap.

And it's become so cheap, to put it very simply, because the Chinese 20 or 30 years ago decided this is what's going to happen. While everybody else was sort of talking about it and fussing about it and doing it in research labs, the Chinese kind of got to grips with it. I remember back in the 1990s talking about people who were going into China and coming back and telling me stories about how the Chinese are really serious about renewable energy. To be honest, I didn't quite believe them, but they were right, and 30 years on, the world is living with the benefits. That's true whether you're talking about Europe or rural Africa or big cities in Asia or wherever. It's coming.

There will be different solutions in different places and there are undoubtedly things that are harder to do than, you know, running our national grids on renewable energy, which is becoming really quite easy and something that everybody wants to do. The cement industries, fertilizers perhaps, some of these industries will take some more technical innovation. But it's happening, these are technical fixes that are working in the real world. Will we do it in time? Well, we're a bit late on the case, but we are on the case.

A large data center being built in Vernon, California. (Image credit: Myung J. Chun/Getty Images)

HO: We're now seeing a massive rise in AI data centers as well. Is this bad tech, shall we say?

FP: It's a serious issue. Partly because they're growing so fast — they can't just plug into the grid because the grid really can't deliver, so these companies are developing their own energy systems. Even in the U.S. they are very often renewable systems because they're cheaper. If you've got a data center out in Texas, then you're going to use wind power or solar power because it's cheaper and you're in control of it.

I suppose we reach a point where [we have to decide], do we want to reduce our use of energy or have almost as much energy as we want, but just green it and green it very fast. It is true that if all the renewable investment is going into electricity for data centers, that leaves less investment for other sectors of the economy, so I'm sure there are trade-offs, and I'm not saying that we should embrace data centers. But they can be a driving force for adoption of different forms of energy, renewable energy, and for perhaps changes in the grid systems as well.

I think we can have both. I think we need to have both because we're probably not going to stop the data engines, so we've got to find ways of greening them. There are issues and there are challenges ahead, and I don't want to diminish any of those, but you know, let's, let's be hopeful.

The title of the book uses the word hopeful rather than optimist because I don't want to sound Panglossian, but I do want to inject some hope.

HO: When you started writing the book, what did you hope people would take from it, and did that change after you'd finished?

FP: Well it kind of evolved. It began as an idea to sort of [be a] retrospective of my reporting, and then the publisher said, "Well, the story changes rather a lot along the way, so rather than just showcasing your reporting over 40 years, why don't you showcase the change, and be hopeful in the context of how things have changed over the last 40 years?"

That was [the] kind of starting point, and we sharpened up on it, as we went along it did become "Despite It All" and you know, the title is important, and not diminishing the "All." There's a lot of bad stuff out there, but despite it all we can have hope and we can find, develop and demand solutions.

HO: Did you find anything during the process of writing the book that surprised you?

FP: As I say, it started as a sort of retrospective project and going through it, [there were places I went years ago] and it did look bad, then I checked up on what had happened over the intervening years and suddenly things looked a lot better.

I went to Alaska and saw how the conflicts over managing caribou herds and the huge migrations that go on and it felt like that was doomed. I was talking to people who were hunting the animals and they were trying to protect them because they wanted to hunt them, therefore they wanted them still to be there, which is kind of counterintuitive for many environmentalists, but you know, they were the best defenders of the caribou because they ate them.

But it felt doomed, and yet 20 years later I checked out the numbers and the population of that herd has doubled and tripled. So stuff does happen and I suppose my surprise was how much good change I found when I looked into it further. Maybe that's me being better at looking for good news stories. I've written quite a lot of "bad news" books over the years and done a lot of "bad news" journalism over the years, so I certainly don't discount that. But if you step back and you think, well did good stuff happen? Well, yeah, sometimes it did.

The bison herds are coming back on the plains of parts of North America, if you go to Montana. The ranches are disappearing and big areas are being set aside for bison, and I've been seeing how farmland in parts of southern and eastern Europe has been abandoned over the years. It's not necessarily good news that we're abandoning farmland, but again, the way that nature comes back and woodlands are growing, there are more forests in Europe than there have been for probably centuries.

There's a lot of bad stuff to say. But it does seem to me that we have to not just cling onto, but embrace good stuff and try [to] take it forward.

Something I really hadn't thought about till I went back was what were the big issues in the 1980s, 1970s when I started out. Well, all our industrial rivers in Britain were filthy. Now our industrial rivers are relatively clean. It's our agricultural rivers that are filthy, so, I mean, there's been a big change there.

Nobody has to talk much about the ozone layer now. That was the number one issue in the mid 1980s, and the absolutely terrifying prospect if we hadn't fixed that. But it's been fixed.

We banned the chemicals that were doing it.

Remember acid rain, lead in petrol. They were hot topics, headline news, part of the rise of the environmental agenda in the 1980s — and they're the ones that we don't have to talk about anymore.

Now we're talking about climate change. I think there are other things coming up. I think the issue of nitrogen pollution is a fast growing one, and we need technical solutions to that.

The green revolution of crops, the high-yielding crops, which got us out of a cycle of ever worsening hunger and famines in the mid 20 century. That was a solution which created new problems. Those crops grew very well, but they required large amounts of inputs, including water, and water is now a growing issue — finding enough irrigation water, but also fertilizer and other agrichemicals. We're now reaping some of the bad effects of that, and we need to solve that. Scientists I know are working on, if you like, high-yielding crops that don't require so much fertilizer and don't require so much water.

It's doable because as I think I said at the start, we do a lot of things really very badly, but that does give us a lot of scope to do things a lot better, so let's get on with it.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.