I’m halfway through re-reading a book called Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie and I have to confess it’s making me hopeful, which is a disgrace.

I have a reputation to protect here. You can’t be going around radiating optimism in a weekly column, it frightens the readers. Ritchie is a data scientist who was inspired by the great Hans Rosling, the Swedish statistician of Factfulness fame who spent his life politely pointing out that most of what we think we know about the world is wrong. Ritchie’s argument, backed up with mountains of proper facts, is that on the big environmental questions humanity is doing an awful lot better than the doom headlines suggest. The average person’s carbon footprint peaked all the way back in 2012 and has been falling since. Two hundred years ago, around half of all children died before they grew up. Today it’s about 4%. And we already produce enough food to feed the world twice over, we just need to find better ways of sharing it out. Her big claim is that we could be the first generation in human history to build a genuinely sustainable planet. Wouldn’t that be a cool legacy?

Then, mid-glow, I remembered where I live. The EPA projects that Ireland will cut emissions by 25% by 2030. Our target is 51%. The potential EU fines have been estimated at anything up to €26 billion, which in local currency is roughly a dozen children’s hospitals. And it’s not as if the money isn’t out there. Intel announced a €5 billion investment in Leixlip on Monday, hundreds of new jobs, IDA lads high-fiving in the corridors. We can attract billions from the tech giants, but we just can’t seem to point any of them at the actual planet.

Still, the book’s message stands. There’s always a bit more hope going than you’d think, and despair is a lousy strategy. And there I was thinking I was going to go a full column without mentioning Cork GAA.

A vote for the bin

Speaking of hope, consider events in Clacton, where Nigel Farage has resigned his seat rather than answer awkward questions about his finances, and then called a bye- election so the voters can tell him how great he is.

The main British parties are refusing to take part on the grounds that the whole thing is a stunt, which leaves his only serious opponent as Count Binface, an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. Binface is running on a platform that includes nationalising Adele and the relocation of a hand dryer in a pub toilet that has annoyed him for years. Asked about it all, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves said that if Farage wants to spend his summer arguing with a bin, she won’t stop him. The finest sentence produced by Westminster since Churchill was in his pomp, in my opinion.

Now, you could read all this as the end of British democracy. I’d argue the opposite. A man who has spent the best part of a decade putting a bin on his head and standing in elections purely to remind people that their vote counts, and who has already outlasted Boris Johnson and may yet outlast Farage, is one of the healthiest things in British public life. Hannah Ritchie would approve. The data suggests the bin is winning.

Sky writing got a laugh

Elsewhere, a pilot doing a mandatory two-hour test flight after engine maintenance got so bored over Liverpool last Saturday that he flew his little Piper Tomahawk in a pattern spelling I’M BORED, which was spotted by flight-tracking websites and viewed about a quarter of a million times. His employer pointed out that spelling it out would have taken ferocious concentration, ‘so he was probably anything but’. I admire him enormously.

Any civilisation where a man with two spare hours and a small aircraft chooses sky graffiti is a civilisation that is nowhere near the end of the world. An Irish pilot would never get away with it, mind. By the time you’d spelled AH SURE LOOKIT over the Beara Peninsula you’d be flying on fumes.

Whether this is the sort of thing we should be encouraging to help fix our ailing planet is another thing. We also just need a bloody laugh every now and again.

They think it’s all over

I’ve spent this whole column preaching hope and perspective, so let me be honest about the limits of this approach. As the Lord God himself and all his angels and saints are well aware by now, England are doing rather well in the World Cup.

They beat Norway 2-1 on Saturday, two goals from Jude Bellingham, and by the time you read this they could well be in a final. I watched the whole thing through my fingers like a horror film. Fachtna has gone full novena. Hannah Ritchie has charts proving humanity has survived ice ages and pandemics, but nowhere in the book, and I’ve checked the index, does she model an England World Cup win and the sixty years of songs that would follow it.

And here’s the truly awful part: I’m writing this on Tuesday, the Argentina semi-final is Wednesday night, and this paper is in your hands on Thursday. You already know how it went. I don’t. Sixty years ago this month, Kenneth Wolstenholme produced the most famous line in the history of the sport: ‘Some people are on the pitch. They think it’s all over... it is now.’

Please God, by the time you read this, it is.