Ritchie is the author of a new book Clearing the Air<\/a>, which uses data to tackle common misconceptions about climate change. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, she explains why she isn\u2019t worried about China\u2019s coal-building spree<\/a>, why she believes the impact of A.I. on electricity demand is largely overstated, and why the U.S. reversal on clean energy may do little to slow global progress on climate.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hannah Ritchie. Yale Environment 360: In the past few months, the U.S. has slashed support for renewable energy. How do you think that will impact the global energy transition?<\/p>\n Hannah Ritchie: Obviously at a national level, I think the U.S. transition will slow down. I think people\u2019s assumption would be, of course, that it will also slow down the global transition. I\u2019m not fully convinced of that. I think that often you get a scenario where a large, powerful country like the U.S. leans back, it often creates room for others to lean forward.<\/p>\n I think you\u2019re very much seeing this, even if you just look at China. They\u2019re not just deploying<\/a> clean energy very quickly domestically. They\u2019re also really dominating<\/a> global markets and really seeing this as an opportunity. And I think the U.S. pulling back on this is probably giving China even more motivation to move faster.<\/p>\n e360: How is China able to produce so much cheap clean energy?<\/p>\n Subscribe to the E360 Newsletter for weekly updates delivered to your inbox. Sign Up<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ritchie: If you compare the cost of solar or batteries between China and the U.S., people always point to labor costs. They say the only reason China can make cheap batteries is because they have really cheap labor. I think even more important is they\u2019ve heavily invested in automation. The number of workers per [battery produced] is about six times lower than it is in the U.S.\u00a0<\/p>\n e360: What impact do you think the U.S. putting tariffs on Chinese goods will have?<\/p>\n Ritchie: Often the argument for putting tariffs on is to protect domestic jobs, but it\u2019s only protecting domestic manufacturing jobs. And when you look at jobs in clean energy, a relatively small share come from manufacturing. Most jobs in clean energy are in procurement or development or the installation or repair. They\u2019re in other parts of the supply chain beyond manufacturing.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t care how many coal plants China builds. I care how much coal China burns. And it is possible to build more coal plants that burn less coal.\u201d<\/p>\n If you put the price up of these technologies, and the deployment slows down, that means that you have fewer jobs in other parts of the clean energy supply chain. If your sole goal is to stimulate manufacturing jobs, then of course you should put a high tariff on. But if you want to optimize clean energy jobs as a whole, tariffs actually work in a negative direction.<\/p>\n e360: U.S. automakers are now backing off<\/a> from building EVs, and sales are expected to slow<\/a>. What does that mean for the shift to electric cars?<\/p>\n Ritchie: I think if you look outside of the U.S., EVs are growing pretty quickly. The share of new sales that are electric in the U.S. is far below most of the rest of the world. In Norway, you\u2019re talking about 80-plus percent of new cars being electric. Over half of new sales in China are electric. And that\u2019s a really fast evolution. In 2020, it was around 6 percent.<\/p>\n And I think you\u2019re going to increasingly start to see this in other low- to middle- income countries. For many countries, they will just get cheap EVs or cheap scooters from China, and they will be independent from oil markets.\u00a0<\/p>\n e360: China is building more clean energy, but it is also building more coal plants. How do you think about that?<\/p>\n Ritchie: The honest answer is I don\u2019t actually care how many coal plants China builds. I care how much coal China burns. And it is possible to build more coal plants that burn less coal and have coal plants that are running less often. And that\u2019s the general trend that we\u2019re starting to see in China.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pakistan\u2019s solar revolution is bringing power to the people. Read more<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the U.S. or in the U.K., we use gas plants to fill in when the sun isn\u2019t shining and the wind isn\u2019t blowing. China is basically trying to do the same, but with coal instead of gas. Which means that it is either retrofitting existing plants to be able to do that \u2014 ramping up and down when you need to fill in the gaps \u2014 or it is building new plants with that capability.\u00a0<\/p>\n e360: Is the proliferation of A.I. and the electricity it demands going to be a lifeline for fossil power?<\/p>\n Ritchie: Potentially in the short term. It\u2019s obviously very hard to predict these trends, but when I look at projections, I don\u2019t see it as a dramatically different challenge from any of the other electrification challenges that we have.<\/p>\n If you look at projections<\/a> of the growth in electricity demand by 2030 [from data centers], it\u2019s actually lower than the increase from air conditioning or EVs or industry. I think in people\u2019s heads they often think about A.I. as much, much bigger than that.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re talking about thousands of deaths over decades [from nuclear accidents], relative to millions of deaths from fossil fuels every single year.\u201d<\/p>\n I think the key challenge is not necessarily about total electricity demand. [A.I.] is moving extremely quickly, and it just takes time to build [new power plants], unfortunately, which means that you just go for what is available, which often is a gas plant that\u2019s not running at full capacity. And the other challenge is that data centers are very highly geographically concentrated, which means that there is a lot of local pressure on the grid.\u00a0<\/p>\n e360: A lot of tech companies are looking at nuclear plants to power data centers. Do you see risks there?<\/p>\n Ritchie: Burning fossil fuels, through air pollution, kills millions of people every single year. And you compare that to the biggest nuclear disasters we\u2019ve had. No one died in Three Mile Island. No one died directly from Fukushima, even though a tsunami hit the nuclear power plant. And the estimates for Chernobyl vary, but they\u2019re maybe in the low thousands. You\u2019re talking about thousands of deaths over decades, relative to millions of deaths from fossil fuels every single year.<\/p>\n I think for me the safety component is just not an obvious deal breaker. The key challenge is, one, cost and, two, construction time. And I think they\u2019re very much interlinked. Often these very large time overruns inevitably lead to extremely high costs. And the reality is that in a country like the U.S. or many countries across Europe, it now is pretty expensive to build a nuclear plant.<\/p>\n![\"Hannah](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Ritchie_Ritchie.jpg\")
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\n Courtesy of Hannah Ritchie<\/p>\n
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