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Okay. Thank you, Shirazi. I will try to be very short just in the interest of time so we can start with a very nice session from Professor Julia Steinberger.

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She researches in ecological economics at the University of Busan in switzerland After doing a PhD in experimental physics.

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And today we will have a very nice talk with the title living well within the limits is this possible and what will it take?

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And I think it would be best if I just let her… start sharing and give us a great talk for the start of the day.

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Hi, everybody. Thanks, Stefania. Thanks to Rayasi. Thanks, everybody, for being here.

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And okay, so off we go. And I'm assuming that we have about an hour and a lot of that should be discussion, right?

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That's correct. Okay. All right, so… And we won't.

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Now do the screen sharing thing.

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Which is not, there we go.

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Okay, so you should be able to see the screen.

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Yes, that's perfect.

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Fantastic. And I'll hide this stuff and this stuff Give myself a time.

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So I guess one of the things I should say is that it's very nice to be talking to physicists. I used to be one of Not a particle physicist, but I did do a PhD in physics and then I drifted away more and more.

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And I guess I should just say a few things about my drifting.

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Because it sort of took a path that maybe physicists would recognize, which is.

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That when I decided I wanted to start looking at sustainability and environmental things, I decided I didn't want to look at technology per se or work on technological development which would have been maybe a logical direction Because it seemed to me that the technological development was not, it was already pretty clear

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20 years ago that technologies were pretty great And they've only gotten more fantastic since then. I guess I hope Ruth showed some of that.

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I'm sure she did. And that what we're really sort of facing is we're facing problems of the economy.

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And our political system. And so what I started wanting to do was sort of trying to understand what is the scope of the issue and the scope of the issue The way I decided to look at that was using a topic called through the lens of a field called industrial ecology.

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An industrial ecology tries to consider societies, economies, cities, whatever your unit is, through the lens of material and flow analysis.

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And there's this idea of social metabolism, which is that You can analyze a society from the scale and composition, the way it uses the resources in the environment, the way it uses trade, et cetera.

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And when I was doing industrial ecology, I was doing what everybody is doing in industrial ecology.

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Or was doing at the time. I think since then people have moved on because Basically, we didn't find it, which is looking for green growth. It was like, okay, where do we find evidence that our economies can continue to function and decrease our

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Impacts on the environment. Fast enough to avoid you know planetary breakdown. And we did not find that. I didn't find that to my status. I satisfied myself that this was not a thing that existed in reality.

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Around 2010, I was pretty satisfied from my own research and from the research of colleagues that this was just not a thing and this evidence has, I would say, gotten stronger since And so then I started looking at, but what I did find

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Is what I'm going to be talking about in this talk, which is that if you look at indicators that are not GDP, that are not economic growth, if you look at indicators that have to do with quantity and quality of life, you do actually find

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Really strong evidence of decoupling and really strong evidence of potential of living well at much lower resource use.

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And then that asks the big question, which is why aren't we doing it?

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Which is a political question. It's a distribution question. It's inequality, it's power, it's wealth.

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And what do we need to do to challenge that? So how do we get to this place, to this point where we could in fact be providing good living conditions for everybody?

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That much lower resource use. And this is what the talk is about.

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And I hope you don't see the annoying rectangle. You see the whole screen, right?

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There's a full screen, but first slide.

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I hope. Okay. Yeah, that's great. So we're going to start with a bit of a I think, you know.

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Shrey Asi said that we should be optimistic. I have to admit that I am not. So I think that the evidence is very clear that we are headed for a cataclysm.

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Obviously, climate change is real and the impacts are devastating. And I think so one of the things I want you to take away from this slide And it's something that we learn far too little about in the physicist community is the long history of the planet.

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And the long history of human existence, Homo sapiens, and who we are and what we've been doing And so one of the things that I'll use this plot even though it's from the already from an IPCC report that's already seven years old.

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Is because it shows the hallucin temperature range in pink. And what zero is on the vertical axis is the baseline temperature, which is pre-industrial.

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Before, you know, we started burning lots of coal. In the UK and other places.

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And the Holocene temperature range is extremely narrow. And the Holocene temperature, so it's about a degree, right? You see it in pink.

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And the Holocene range is extremely narrow and it's the temperature range that humanity and the whole planet have existed in since the last ice age about 10 to 12,000 years ago And in that temperature range, that very narrow, stable sort of warmish temperature range compared to the Ice Age.

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That's where humanity has flourished and thrived and done crazy things like invent agriculture, which is one technology we think we know how to use, but we are sort of dismantling the conditions of the We developed cities, we developed writing. All of that stuff happened since the end of the last during the Holocene.

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And that is not a coincidence. So humanity And our current conditions of life are entirely dependent on this very narrow planetary stability. And as you can see, we're absolutely shooting out of it. Last year was the first year above 1.5 degrees.

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Already and so we're shooting, you know, and we've shot out of it at a speed That is, in geological terms, extraordinarily rapid.

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And this means that ecosystems don't have a chance to adapt and probably our agriculture systems do not either.

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And the importance of getting back or staying as close as possible to Holocene temperature range cannot be overstated.

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And that's what the 1.5 degree target is about. And so the quote of Deborah Roberts, the co-chair of Working Group 2, that the next few years are the most important in our history.

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This is not a joke. This is not just the history the recent couple of hundred years, whatever, a couple of past decades is the history of our species.

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So this is not to be underestimated. And what this already looks like, it looks like this. It looks like cataclysm in various places around the world.

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This is a weather event where basically climate change is disrupting major weather patterns, which means that And it also causes heavier downpours. And this is a combination of the two. This is a downpour that dumped several months worth of rain.

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Over a couple of days in Greece. And that water is not supposed to be there. That's not like the Mediterranean or anything. And that's the large most important agricultural region in Greece. It will never be as productive as it was

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Before this event. But in Greece, despite the magnitude of this cataclysm, nobody really died.

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Which was not the case for the same weather event in Durna, Libya.

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So just across the Mediterranean. And this is probably the deadliest climate incident. Nobody has really heard maybe heard of it or remembers it.

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Because it happened in Libya. And it was a predicted accident. What happened was a dam failed.

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And that town was known to be at risk. And there are papers published on the risks that this dam posed to the city.

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There was a poet, a very famous Libyan poet who lived in the city who predicted the day of the flood.

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In one of his poems and he died Along with upwards of 10,000 people overnight in this flood.

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And this is what our landscape looks like and already. And this year, of course.

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The you know it's always coming it's always coming close to home somewhere. This was in Los Angeles earlier this year.

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And one of the reasons it touched me, and I'm including this sort of frame in all my talks.

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Is because in Los Angeles, the fire swept through Altadenina. And Altadinea is a historically black neighborhood.

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And it is the place where Octavia Butler is buried. And Octavia Butler, if you take one thing away from this talk, the only thing is do yourself a favor and go and get the parable of the sower and read it.

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She wrote about just sort of science fiction, dystopian fiction. She was an extremely You cannot overstate how important and intelligent and great Octavia Butler is.

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I'm sorry, I'm getting an echo. Jig out, do you think you could turn off your microphone?

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And great Octavia Butler is. And…

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Hello? Okay, so I hope that that worked.

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I'm sorry, I'm getting an echo.

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No worries. Okay, so hopefully the echo is gone.

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And so one of the things Octavia Butler did is she even in the subsequent book to this predicted Trump, including the Make America Great.

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Autocratic trend, et cetera. And she talks about what it's like to be human in an era when things are sort of crashing around.

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Around you down around you. And I think that that's sort of an important thing we need to be thinking about So now I will get to sort of the more scientific content of things.

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And I'll talk to you about some stylized facts on energy and well-being. So this is the kind of stuff I was studying and researching around 2010-ish, so already about 25 years ago, and other people were studying earlier, but it's still not stuff that most people know about and understand, I think, despite its importance.

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So we'll just go over the basics. The first stylized fact is that beyond a certain level, energy increases do not result in measurably higher well-being.

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And this result has been known since the year I was born. I am 51. It was known published in Science in 1974. This is a great article. You can go and read it.

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Splendid in lots of ways. And yes, massive energy consumption is not necessary at all for well-being.

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And what it looks like in terms of data and this plot is sort of oldie and Goldie favorite of mine. But it doesn't matter what you put on the vertical axis in terms of a well-being metric.

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It doesn't matter what you put on the horizontal axis as an energy per capita metric. This plot always kind of looks the same. It's always this the sort of very flat curve I mean, it's very steep at the beginning where a little goes a long way

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In terms of increasing, you know, having a high correlation with increasing well-being, increasing human development in this case.

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And then it just sort of flattens out and it just does not matter anymore.

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Over almost an order of magnitude of energy usage That's it. And the other interesting thing that even fewer people know and understand is that there's this dynamic decline. So the energy threshold associated with any given level of well-being is decreasing dramatically over time.

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In such a way that you can actually You can actually do sort of projections with it.

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So this was a paper I published in 2010. So already a little while ago, but this trend is just very, very, very steady.

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And people have run scenarios based on it. So the fact is that we're we're One of the things that we learned in this article is that whereas we used to be in the 1970s in a situation where the energy requirements for universal high human development

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Would have been something like twice as much energy it was globally of consumed available That situation changed dramatically changed dramatically over time, not because our energy consumption is increasing.

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Because that's staying relatively constant per capita going up a bit.

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But because the energy requirements of well-being are dropping so fast.

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And so that's what's the thing that's really changing dynamically is our ability to deliver high human development at low energy use.

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And this is a splendid great thing and we should take advantage of it. So we've gone from a situation of constraint to a situation of a situation of to a situation of distribution, right? That's the issue.

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If we want to go beyond these sort of black box results, you know, resource in, well-being out, we have to have an analytic framework.

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This is the one that we developed for the Living Well Within Limage project.

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And basically it's quite simple. You have sort of your biophysical issues On the left hand side, you have your social outcomes on the right-hand side. And in the middle, we decided not to put economy We decided not to put technology. In the middle, we decided to put this object of heterodox economics, so non-mainstream economics, which is called provisioning systems.

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And the idea there is you can study physical and social objects together and try to understand how they interact. And I'll get into what that allows us to say a bit later. But for now, I am going to tell you about well-being and how we study that.

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So we had to go and read stuff from way back. And yes, this is Western oriented direction, there are other directions. But the fact is that, you know, a couple of thousand years ago, people were saying interesting things about what they thought about the human condition and human well-being.

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And so Aristotle was one of the first ones to sort of articulate it.

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And for him, our well-being was living life fully as possible. Very active.

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Notion and to flourish within society. It's a very social notion And Aristotle's great. I follow Aristotle uh Full disclosure, he writes that it should be noted that he writes this in the ethics a few pages after his justification of slavery and a few pages before

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His justification of women staying in the kitchen or the other way around. Anyway, don't take everything he says for granted.

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And then Epicure has a much more, a few decades later, has a much more emotional perspective on well-being. It's about feelings.

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It's about positive feelings, negative feelings. And it's very much individual. And as in all good academic disputes, the two camps persist to this day with epic, what happened to Epicure's ideas was not what he would have wanted.

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But it's sort of the dominant perspective. So Team Epicure has this perspective on well-being that's sort of this emotional state, sort of like happiness.

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It's an individual perspective. You measure it as like the happiness indicator going around asking people how happy they are.

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Or if you're in a mainstream economist, you use the utility function. You basically say people go out and maximize utility by spending whatever budget they have in the market.

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And in that view, the way you see the economy is that more economic growth is good because more economic growth means more income, means more consumption.

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Means more positive feelings. And that's the dominant view in everything that is happening all around us and in the decisions that are being made by policymakers and businesses that determine our lives.

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If you're on Team Aristotle, your view is very different. Well-being is flourishing. It's about flourishing in society. It's an active perspective.

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It's social, whatever, even if you use a single dimension, generally you're using a multidimensional way of thinking about it, like the Human Development Index.

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Or the Sustainable Development Goals or other frameworks like capabilities And the view of the economy is very different.

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So if you've ever read a Marchenne, so the great Indian economist, Nobel Prize winner, and so on, one of the good economics Nobel Prize winners should be said.

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The view on the economy is that it is only justified to economic decision making is only justified if it supports human potential if it supports human beings flourishing, being able to make life plans in our societies.

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It is not justified as an end in itself, only as a means to an end.

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And of course, as you can tell by this description, we decided to be on Team Aristotle and we wrote a couple of papers about this so you don't have to You can just go and see what we were thinking about if you want to go and look at those papers.

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Now, as physicists, you might want to think you might think.

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Does this matter? Who cares? And also, can it be tested? And so can we test Aristotle's theory? And indeed, we do our best to try.

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And what we're doing here is we're using the theory of human need which is an Aristotelian, eudaimonic is the technical term framework.

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Where we basically say human well-being is built up from human need satisfiers. So you need to satisfy a certain finite number of human needs.

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You don't need to do more than satisfy them. So this is a perspective that has satiability and sufficiency baked into it.

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And um So one of the things, so we tried to test this And what we did is we looked at average life satisfaction. So this is you know how happy how satisfied are you with your life on a scale from 1 to 10?

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Versus the number of human need satisfiers achieved. And that's just based on like, you know, are people getting enough food, enough education, et cetera?

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Around the world. And these are national level indicators. So they're national level averages And this is what we found, which is obviously correlation is not causation, but this is a pretty strong trend for physical well-being, so average healthy life expectancy versus numbers of human need satisfiers.

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It's an even stronger result because it actually has some kind of a saturation And since then, so that was in 2018 that we did that work So this is now a recent result from the real project, which is my new research project on looking at post-growth economies.

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And this is the first paper of the PhD of Leah Tamburg.

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And it's a splendid result. It's on the preprint server if you want to find it.

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And basically she's using Gallup World poll data So these are hundreds of data points every year in multiple countries around the world, looking at this subjective aspect of life evaluation. It's like, how are you okay with your life?

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And finding that the blue curve basically is the model with the blue band is sort of the model with normal economic growth and need satisfaction just being achieved as normal economic growth would allow it.

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And it's not really a sort of high priority necessarily. The orange one is with individual needs satisfied and the grid one is with individual needs satisfied.

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And everybody's needs satisfied within that society as well as some good governance parameters. And what you can see is that it is All of these curves move upwards and flatten out. Basically, as soon as you start taking need satisfaction into account

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At the individual or social level. The importance of economic growth disappears and becomes really a very, very inefficient way of achieving well-being. So the idea here, what we're really showing here is that Aristotle's perspective is correct. And human needs satisfaction is what matters and it is what our economy should be doing.

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Once human needs are satisfied, people are able to make life plans.

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They are okay with their life. And you don't need more than that.

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For people to really to really have very high levels of well-being. In fact, higher than would be achieved with economic growth just on its own.

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Okay, now that's nice in theory, but we also wanted to test whether or not countries are really doing this thing of possibly achieving human needs satisfaction within planetary boundaries, within environmental limits.

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And basically what we did here is we tested environmental indicators that were consumption based. They were trade corrected, which means that we were looking at how much a country really consumes total when you take trade into account.

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And what their level of well-being needs satisfaction. So their environmental ceiling, their social foundation And I'm not going to go into great detail over this, but the news is bad.

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Basically, countries come in three flavors either they're not damaging the planet, which is low on the horizontal axis, sorry.

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Cut out the the legend on the horizontal axis. The horizontal axis is number of biophysical boundaries breached.

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So number of planetary limits breached. So either they're low on the environmental damage scale and low on the social achievement scale.

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Or they're high on the environmental damage scale and high on the social achievement scale.

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Or they're high on the environmental damage scale. And low on the social achievement scale, that's entirely possible.

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But the neighborhood that's really empty is this sort of little green circle, like the green donut there is where we want to be.

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With high social equality and low environmental damage. And then the question is, what do we do about this? Because that's where all of these countries would want to be going.

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In order for us to have good lives within planetary boundaries.

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So where do we go from here? And I'll sort of do a whistle stops tour of recent results.

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The first sort of organized into three facts and three ways forward. So inequality and sufficiency.

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Possibility and investment. And dependency versus economic democracy.

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The first fact is inequality. Possibly other speakers have talked about this. I don't want to dwell on it.

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Too much but too much Long story short, climate change is a problem that reflects economic inequality.

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The wealthiest are to blame for the vast majority of it from their consumption, even worse from their investments if you take that into account.

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In this case is from a consumption perspective, the top 10% Which probably most people on this call, unless you're PhD students fall into.

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Are responsible for globally are responsible for about half of global emissions.

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So we see this huge inequality the lowest half of humanity, the poorest half of humanity is responsible for something like less than 10% of global emissions.

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So we have this huge inequality problem. And I'm not going to go into details on this one. I just want to sort of show you, it's easier to show you, but this is a result that we see. This is a national result.

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Is for the UK, but it's something that we see internationally in countries Hi, Farida, can you block your microphone?

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Hotel email.

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Thank you. So this is something that we see internationally. So we see it in the countries we look at and we see it internationally as well.

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This is sort of really a universal pattern. So what you see in this plot is that the lowest 10% and the Basically, it's the UK population divided by deciles so lowest 10% at the bottom, poorest 10% at the bottom, richest 10% at the top, and what their energy footprints look like.

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And you can see that housing is remarkably equal. The UK is kind of crazy about this, but other countries are housing is one of the most equal energy use categories and their reasons for this.

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That we can go into if you want. But this is something we see. And where you really see inequality glumphing is transportation. It's flight use, it's car use. It's also public transportation use.

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And this is so huge You see the red flights and the orange cars that in the UK, the richest 10% use more energy on flying than the poorest 20% do total.

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So this is really this huge, huge inequality. That we see. And then the way forward is obviously something like sufficiency that Yaminasa have talked about And obviously she's responsible for the definition that's in the IPCC.

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So I won't repeat what she said, but basically we need to move towards reducing this inequality while satisfying everybody's needs.

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And that's what sufficiency looked like. So the second fact I want to cover is possibility. Is this condition possible or not?

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And this is one of the things we tried to do in the The Living Well With the Limits project is we wanted to try to model what it would look like for everybody to be fine, have enough.

00:25:24.000 --> 00:25:33.000
So have high well-being and as low at low energy as possible. So we were trying to sort of square that circle and see what it would look like.

00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:40.000
And one of the things we wanted to do is we wanted to base it on Technologies that were super efficient, especially at the end use level.

00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:49.000
Because we have these magical technologies like heat pumps. Like induction stoves. So we wanted it to be sort of, you know, high tech in the sense of like we're doing things super efficiently.

00:25:49.000 --> 00:26:00.000
But then everybody has the same energy services. So we're doing this based on the decent living energy framework of Narasimar Rao of Yale University.

00:26:00.000 --> 00:26:05.000
And probably one year you should invite him. Because doing really super interesting stuff.

00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:16.000
And his framework connects needs to sufficient level of energy services. And then what we did is we sort of took this and made this quite simple global model based on certain technology choices.

00:26:16.000 --> 00:26:25.000
And everybody has access to the same level of energy services, but these are differentiated by For instance, if you're younger or older, you have different food requirements.

00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:31.000
If you're living in a rural place, you have more transportation requirements than if you're living in an urban setting.

00:26:31.000 --> 00:26:40.000
And things are closer to you. And we took into account embodied energy. We took into account the energy required to build up infrastructure.

00:26:40.000 --> 00:26:46.000
Public spaces, we only had schools and hospitals but we at least tried to represent those in some way.

00:26:46.000 --> 00:27:05.000
And private consumption. And so off we go. Oh yeah. So this is, and everybody has a laptop, everybody has a phone, every household has a laptop every um person has a phone with data You know, so it's not luxury, you know, 15 square meters per person is a lot less than most of us, myself included, living in.

00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:11.000
Live in, but that space is that living space is heated and cooled to 20 degrees year round.

00:27:11.000 --> 00:27:28.000
So, which is huge levels of comfort. If you live in the UK, you know what I'm talking about. So this is a lot better life then a lot of people are living in. And obviously, if you have space that is not necessarily heated or cooled to that level, then you can make the space bigger, right? So that's another.

00:27:28.000 --> 00:27:32.000
Another thing. So this is it's an estimate. It was a first try.

00:27:32.000 --> 00:27:50.000
And what this looks like is that So here what this plot shows is final energy demand. We didn't want to look at primary energy for reasons I can get into, but primary energy is basically a bad place to start making estimates and decisions because right now it's dominated by fossil fuel use.

00:27:50.000 --> 00:28:01.000
And fossil fuels are comically, stupidly inefficient, the loss rates from what you are using the energy for to what you want to do with it.

00:28:01.000 --> 00:28:08.000
Are upward, you know, two thirds is normal basically certainly upwards of a half.

00:28:08.000 --> 00:28:15.000
So we wanted to look at final energy, electricity, and things like that, because that's a more sensible place to start thinking about stuff.

00:28:15.000 --> 00:28:30.000
And you see the sort of international, so that that's an exajoules on the vertical axis And you can see The International Energy Agency, so the IA reference sort of has us cruising upwards And, you know.

00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:40.000
Upwards of 400 exajoules, which is where we are now. And our result show that it would be possible to satisfy everybody's needs just by population growth.

00:28:40.000 --> 00:28:48.000
At around 160 exajoules. So a huge amount lower based on feasible technologies.

00:28:48.000 --> 00:28:59.000
And one of the things that's important about this is that this scenario might sound crazy and either utopian or dystopian, depending on your views on inequality, I guess.

00:28:59.000 --> 00:29:05.000
But everybody's okay. This is a scenario where based on feasible technologies.

00:29:05.000 --> 00:29:11.000
Everybody is okay. Nobody is separating from deprivation. Nobody is unhealthy.

00:29:11.000 --> 00:29:18.000
Everybody is fine. And it's based on feasible technologies, which the IPCC scenarios are not.

00:29:18.000 --> 00:29:28.000
Because of their wild, wild dependence on negative The so-called, you know, get out of jail free card of negative emission technologies, which don't exist in reality.

00:29:28.000 --> 00:29:32.000
And this is a huge problem that we have within the IPCC.

00:29:32.000 --> 00:29:42.000
And sort of policy guidance is that we have this huge amount of negative emissions Which, you know, maybe in 1990, that was a reasonable thing to sort of have as a possibility.

00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:52.000
But it is no longer the case. Nobody could claim that these things are on the horizon or about to become important at all. And we need to act fast.

00:29:52.000 --> 00:29:59.000
So it's much more important to act fast in reducing energy demand than it is to imagine that.

00:29:59.000 --> 00:30:17.000
You know, in a couple of years, we're going to have gigatons and gigatons of of negative emissions. Okay, that was sort of a side point. What does this mean, though? What would this world require sort of physically in terms of our economies. And this is a beautiful paper that I cannot recommend too highly by Yermo Kickstra and colleagues.

00:30:17.000 --> 00:30:34.000
Also involving Narasima Rao. And um So one of the things that Yermo did in this paper is try to estimate how much energy it would take. So again, in biophysical terms, material terms.

00:30:34.000 --> 00:30:38.000
To get to a future where people would be able to live at low energy.

00:30:38.000 --> 00:30:56.000
Because it actually takes a lot of investment, right? You're talking about really high levels of energy efficiency in housing and transportation, building up public transportation capacity all of this stuff, you know, new appliances, heat pumps, all of this, right?

00:30:56.000 --> 00:31:01.000
And what you can see is the investment on the end use side is huge.

00:31:01.000 --> 00:31:10.000
It's on the order of 290 exit tools. Which is large. It's roughly, as you saw in the last plot, a year of final energy use.

00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:16.000
Globally. But That's spread over a couple of decades, right?

00:31:16.000 --> 00:31:22.000
So it's big. It's a huge effort, but it's also a feasible effort.

00:31:22.000 --> 00:31:36.000
And what's super interesting is look what happens once you've invested that energy you have you know the investment on the a plot on the left hand side on the right hand side Look at what happens to the energy use and shelter. It almost vanishes.

00:31:36.000 --> 00:31:41.000
Because the thing is we can do so much with efficiency and efficient technologies.

00:31:41.000 --> 00:31:54.000
And the problem is that the shelter sector, the dwelling sector that is so important is not a profitable, this is not a profitable way for capitalism and the financial sector to invest their money.

00:31:54.000 --> 00:31:59.000
So we have a real

00:31:59.000 --> 00:32:15.000
Divergence and what we should be doing and what the interest of the capacity the people who have the capacity to do this investment what they're doing. And this is a very, very large problem around the world. It's also a development problem in terms of where this investment should be happening.

00:32:15.000 --> 00:32:23.000
So it's technically possible, it's physically possible it's We have the capacity to do it. We have the workforce to do it. All of these things, everything is feasible.

00:32:23.000 --> 00:32:38.000
It's just not the way our economies are oriented. What's also interesting is mobility. Obviously, mobility, it's a quarter of the investment necessary then it becomes half of the energy use. That's because physics is real and you can't move stuff around without using energy. That's just the way things are.

00:32:38.000 --> 00:32:41.000
Okay, but have a look at that paper because it's so cool.

00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:50.000
Fact three, dependency. So this is probably where I sort of wander into areas that are less comfortable for you.

00:32:50.000 --> 00:33:01.000
So we were looking at what factors enable or disable societies from living Well, at low energy and we're getting into political economy here.

00:33:01.000 --> 00:33:06.000
This is where we go back into this idea of provisioning systems. So really what we're saying is.

00:33:06.000 --> 00:33:14.000
The thing that's mediating resource use and well-being. Is these provisioning systems that have social, political.

00:33:14.000 --> 00:33:22.000
Technical and economic characteristics and provisioning systems is where it's at if you want to understand how to trans what when you need to transform.

00:33:22.000 --> 00:33:30.000
So, um. Crash course on what provisioning systems the the what the dream and the reality.

00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:36.000
So the dream is that in fact provisioning systems could enable good lives at lower resource use.

00:33:36.000 --> 00:33:43.000
The reality is that they're often engineered deliberately to do the contrary, to create resource dependency.

00:33:43.000 --> 00:33:49.000
So we have this divergence in what could happen and what should happen.

00:33:49.000 --> 00:34:06.000
From a human well-being, from a social priority perspective. And one of the things to understand is this is something that is researched a lot in the social sciences, political sciences, so political economy sociology of consumption, sociology of production.

00:34:06.000 --> 00:34:12.000
The dependency on resource consumption is itself one of the core products of the industrial age.

00:34:12.000 --> 00:34:24.000
And this is something that industries have done for decades in fact set up like a century. We know we can study sort of a century of them behaving in this way, basically.

00:34:24.000 --> 00:34:28.000
Ensuring that there will always be a market for their product.

00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:33.000
And the way they do this is they use lobbying, they obtain subsidies from governments.

00:34:33.000 --> 00:34:49.000
And we have this whole phenomenon that we call state regulatory capture, where the industry forces the state to make sure that they impose conditions of resource dependency And the United States is a beautiful example of this. For car dependency, for instance.

00:34:49.000 --> 00:34:56.000
Princeton zoning laws that really impose car dependency. You cannot live without a car because everything is zoned to be miles away.

00:34:56.000 --> 00:35:04.000
Separated from each other. You don't have integrated neighborhoods you don't have any kind of public transit investment at the level that's required.

00:35:04.000 --> 00:35:18.000
And we also see it, yeah, we see it in lots of different ways you know parking space requirements in cities uh Anyway, so the automotive industry, the fossil fuel industry in general.

00:35:18.000 --> 00:35:25.000
Have been absolutely great at creating dependency on their products, but we see it in other areas as well.

00:35:25.000 --> 00:35:33.000
My favorite is the recent fashion for white t-shirts which You know, every time you eat pasta, you have to get a new t-shirt.

00:35:33.000 --> 00:35:51.000
Okay, I'm going to skip this. You can look at it if you want later. I'm going to skip this. I'm just going to say that our studies on political economy allowed the uk wrap special or the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in his UK visit report say

00:35:51.000 --> 00:36:02.000
That privatization of public services goes against human rights. And it does. There are some things that cannot be left to the market Because people are not able to live and be okay.

00:36:02.000 --> 00:36:05.000
And healthy and safe if they do not have access to them.

00:36:05.000 --> 00:36:15.000
And that's something that our research really shows. And I'm proud of that. I am less proud of what the UK government did with that report, which was tear it up and say it wasn't based in reality.

00:36:15.000 --> 00:36:33.000
The way forward, I would argue, is democracy, but including economic democracy. So bringing scientifically based expertise and public deliberation like in citizen assemblies And also having basically giving citizens, giving the people in a society the ability to make decisions on what should be

00:36:33.000 --> 00:36:43.000
Produced, consumed, and how I think that is really important and we should stop pretending that the market makes good decisions for us. It makes very bad decisions for us.

00:36:43.000 --> 00:36:48.000
One of the things we did empirically you might I assume you'll always care about empirical work.

00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:59.000
Is that we showed that democracy is in fact one of the factors that is positive in allowing societies to do better at a given level of energy use and achieve more need satisfaction, more well-being.

00:36:59.000 --> 00:37:13.000
Other things that were great were public services, equality of income, healthcare access, and network infrastructures, negative factors were extractivism, which is when economies are very dependent on mining and fossil fuel extraction, et cetera.

00:37:13.000 --> 00:37:17.000
And economic growth. Above a certain income.

00:37:17.000 --> 00:37:26.000
Okay. I'm continuing this direction of research in this direction This new EU project, a post-growth deal. We're in the second year of it.

00:37:26.000 --> 00:37:33.000
With the lovely Yorgos Callis and Jason Hickel in Barcelona. We're doing a bunch of stuff.

00:37:33.000 --> 00:37:39.000
Including trying to do more modeling, looking at north-south convergence, those kinds of things.

00:37:39.000 --> 00:37:49.000
I am an activist as well as an academic, so I've been trying to push the case that we cannot take our job descriptions as they were written for us.

00:37:49.000 --> 00:38:01.000
And we have to intervene more strongly in the systems of power that are driving that are driving our societies into very, very bad states. We can't just sit back and let that happen.

00:38:01.000 --> 00:38:04.000
And pretend that we're still doing our jobs. We have the responsibility of our knowledge.

00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:13.000
We have the responsibility of the knowledge of our colleagues. If you believe what the environmental biodiversity climate researchers are saying.

00:38:13.000 --> 00:38:21.000
You have a responsibility to try to act on it. And not just sit in offices. I think that that's quite important at this point.

00:38:21.000 --> 00:38:28.000
And I've also been reading up in the last year and a half On climate denial, disinformation.

00:38:28.000 --> 00:38:41.000
And where it comes from, which it turns out is neoliberalism. So there are these fossil fuel funded, going to make this very quick. Fossil fuel funded fossil billionaire funded the Koch brothers, etc.

00:38:41.000 --> 00:38:57.000
A network of think tanks. It's an international network. It's called the Atlas Network. It has more than 500 think tanks around the world, and they don't do any research. They just do propaganda. And their propaganda is on a variety of topics, but including very much climate denial.

00:38:57.000 --> 00:39:04.000
So that's how I came across them is I was trying to understand where the heck this is coming from. But I found that that was just one of the things they were doing.

00:39:04.000 --> 00:39:11.000
And the other stuff that they're doing is going against democracy and going against universities and the public role of science generally.

00:39:11.000 --> 00:39:14.000
And I think that we should be paying a lot more attention to them.

00:39:14.000 --> 00:39:39.000
And that's why i wrote um this blog because who's got time for academic articles So have a look at it if you're interested and I'm happy to stop now and hopefully we still have time for discussion

00:39:39.000 --> 00:39:53.000
Thank you so much, Julia. That is a very interesting talk. And we are also welcoming any questions if you have some.

00:39:53.000 --> 00:40:04.000
I see a few hands. If you want you can also switch on your video Already asked the question.

00:40:04.000 --> 00:40:12.000
I see some raised Ian. And also another one from Dwayne Dwayne, maybe you want to go first?

00:40:12.000 --> 00:40:23.000
Hi there. That was a fantastic talk, by the way. Very interesting and very nice avenue you put on things.

00:40:23.000 --> 00:40:49.000
So one of the things that obviously this is a HEP conference and high energy physics is quite energy intensive And very little emphasis is put on the energy of research in the future because maybe it's seen as small compared to other things but it's necessarily some could argue that it's not necessary

00:40:49.000 --> 00:41:09.000
To do the kind of research that we do. And so how do you factor an argument into making a case for the amount of tonnage of CO2 future physics requires, for example, in comparison to what we should do to try to reduce the overall impact.

00:41:09.000 --> 00:41:15.000
Okay. I don't know, some of you might know this.

00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:23.000
Not only did I used to be a physicist, I'm also um married to one.

00:41:23.000 --> 00:41:29.000
And there's a limit to what I can say without getting divorced.

00:41:29.000 --> 00:41:34.000
Which is extremely inconvenient and involves a lot of paperwork as I hear.

00:41:34.000 --> 00:41:45.000
And so I will try to be diplomatic here. I think that this is always a question in terms of There's always this question, why is science justified when children are dying of hunger? This is always sort of the thing like.

00:41:45.000 --> 00:42:01.000
You know, should we all not turning towards the most vulnerable you know shouldn't our priority always be helping people and i think i think to some extent, there's an argument that, yes, we should always be trying. I mean, I think socially we should be trying to turn

00:42:01.000 --> 00:42:09.000
Our time capacity and attention to helping the most vulnerable that's sort of my orientation.

00:42:09.000 --> 00:42:15.000
But I think that there's also an argument that of all the excesses of our society.

00:42:15.000 --> 00:42:34.000
Science is not the worst one. If you look at what's happening with AI, Which is a complete scandal and scam and theft and piracy and horrific working conditions causing people permanent mental health damage.

00:42:34.000 --> 00:42:37.000
That makes them unable to live with their families kind you know.

00:42:37.000 --> 00:42:45.000
Compare it compared with that, high energy physics is is, you know.

00:42:45.000 --> 00:42:57.000
Peanuts, right? So I think that it's important to ask these questions at the same time Science does have its own justification. I do believe that science, fundamental science has its own justification.

00:42:57.000 --> 00:43:08.000
And to go even further, one of the things that's really important in my field is learning about what it means to be human. The things we've been told about what it means to be human.

00:43:08.000 --> 00:43:12.000
Are wrong. A lot of them. Our civilizations are very young.

00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:20.000
And they've done weird things and they don't represent the full large spectrum of what human societies are capable of.

00:43:20.000 --> 00:43:25.000
Which goes back a couple of hundred thousand years, we're learning a lot from archaeology.

00:43:25.000 --> 00:43:39.000
We're learning a lot from anthropology, you know, people like David Wengro looking at Paleolithic societies and stuff. And that's fundamental science that we absolutely need right now because we need to know what kinds of organizations we're capable of over what time spans.

00:43:39.000 --> 00:43:42.000
Just to give us a bit of courage to change things.

00:43:42.000 --> 00:43:56.000
And, you know, so that research is necessary But it's also not a very high priority It's also something where people are like, oh, we should cut this it's not giving people the skills they need to be employed in the

00:43:56.000 --> 00:44:06.000
Modern workforce, whatever. Anyway, so I think that there is always an argument there is always a strong argument for fundamental science of multiple different kinds to be happening.

00:44:06.000 --> 00:44:13.000
At the same time, it is very important for the scientific community to be thinking, okay, do we really need this? Is this really going to help?

00:44:13.000 --> 00:44:28.000
Or are we keeping something in motion that we could do in different ways.

00:44:28.000 --> 00:44:34.000
Thank you, Julia. Ian? I think you can go next and then claire

00:44:34.000 --> 00:44:53.000
Yes. Okay. Thanks, Julia, for a great talk. I couldn't help noticing that both you and Yaminas ahib that we heard a couple of days ago at the beginning of this conference put forward sufficiency, of course, but also as one of the

00:44:53.000 --> 00:45:15.000
Main things on which you have to really act and quickly it's housing or sheltering in your plot everybody knows this. You mentioned the 150 assembly in France So on those citizens a couple of years ago They also came up with this as the first thing to do.

00:45:15.000 --> 00:45:28.000
Politicians still are not taking it seriously. We have been hearing for tens of Yeah, we have to invest in the isolation of buildings. We have to refurbish. We have to install heat pumps and so on.

00:45:28.000 --> 00:45:51.000
They keep saying it, but nothing's happening. Is there a way forward to finally make a difference?

00:45:51.000 --> 00:45:54.000
Julie, if you're speaking, you're muted.

00:45:54.000 --> 00:46:01.000
Yeah, so sorry, I'm sharing screens again. So that's me sitting on a motorway in Byrne.

00:46:01.000 --> 00:46:06.000
Trying to advocate for renovation in Switzerland. So that was with Renovate Switzerland.

00:46:06.000 --> 00:46:14.000
And um you know we all got arrested etc and i mean and that that was the thing that we were trying to do is we were just trying to say.

00:46:14.000 --> 00:46:29.000
This should be the priority. It's socially a really important priority. It's economically a really important priority. It gives local jobs All of this stuff, it should be something in theory it's something that all politicians across all parties agree to do.

00:46:29.000 --> 00:46:32.000
And they still don't create the conditions for it to happen.

00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:36.000
And so this was sort of our desperate effort to do this.

00:46:36.000 --> 00:46:49.000
And I think our campaign made the topic a lot more important in the media I'm not sure if it's really… a few local initiatives were bolstered by it, et cetera. I think we did make a difference.

00:46:49.000 --> 00:47:00.000
But honestly, it's a source of desperation as to how, you know, win, win, win, win, win something can be. But if it's not the priority of the fossil lobby.

00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:14.000
Oh, and by the way, our energy minister in Switzerland is a climate denying um career fossil fuel lobbyist named Albert Rushdie, who looks adorable on camera. He has such a nice smile. Anyway, so we're in this real trouble.

00:47:14.000 --> 00:47:16.000
And we do not know how to get out of it.

00:47:16.000 --> 00:47:29.000
And this is why I think that it's really important for scientists to you know including physicists anybody with a brain please join us become and participate in this effort of understanding who the lobby groups are, how they're acting.

00:47:29.000 --> 00:47:37.000
How they're interacting and really stopping our political and economic system from doing the things we should be doing.

00:47:37.000 --> 00:47:48.000
Because it's a scandal. Yeah.

00:47:48.000 --> 00:47:50.000
Snare you can go ahead.

00:47:50.000 --> 00:48:04.000
Hey, like, can you hear me okay? Yeah, great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Steinberger, for your work. It's admirable. And I really appreciate the activism part of your activities. My question is pragmatic. I'm sure a lot of people in this room wants to also act.

00:48:04.000 --> 00:48:09.000
On this activism point of view. It turns out, and you know because you've been at CERN, we're pretty busy.

00:48:09.000 --> 00:48:19.000
I recall a lot of demonstration and such. I can't because there is a key meeting and then the students will be impacted like act of presence that makes us limited in time.

00:48:19.000 --> 00:48:39.000
But yet the wheel is here, right? And I'm sure we can create a virtuous circle of more scientists turning activists, inspiring other scientists to become activists. What would be the best, most impactful activities for people who are actually very limited in time.

00:48:39.000 --> 00:48:49.000
Okay, yeah. There's a couple of things. One is… the busyness is not just a researcher problem, right? I mean.

00:48:49.000 --> 00:48:57.000
People are… the imperatives of modern life are very, very strong.

00:48:57.000 --> 00:49:10.000
In terms of like, oh, you should be doing this, you should be doing that. There's this thing, there's that thing like A lot of people are working multiple jobs or part of the gig economy or or just sort of caught into a lot of different activities that they

00:49:10.000 --> 00:49:19.000
Think they need to be doing. And I think that I really really think it is very important. The first thing you do in physics, right?

00:49:19.000 --> 00:49:25.000
Is you try to understand what your zeroth order issue is and then the first order and so on.

00:49:25.000 --> 00:49:27.000
You take a step back and you look at the whole thing.

00:49:27.000 --> 00:49:34.000
And one of the things you have to ask yourself is, am I spending my time in the way I want to be spending it given what I know.

00:49:34.000 --> 00:49:50.000
And if you need to, I'm working 80%. Partly, so partly because it's necessary for reasons of health And taking care of my kid and so on. But partly because that allows my university not to fire me when I decide to spend one day

00:49:50.000 --> 00:50:05.000
Doing activism and get arrested, they can always say, oh, but that was not one of her working dates you know So I think if that is possible for you. And that is some, you know, creating the time to do important stuff and creating to the space to do important stuff

00:50:05.000 --> 00:50:10.000
Is something that is something that social justice.

00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:24.000
Activists, workers, whatever you want to call them, people throughout time have always found a way to do if Honestly, if the slaves in Haiti, like we have no excuse. If the slaves in Haiti could mount a revolt.

00:50:24.000 --> 00:50:29.000
And kick out the French. We can do this, right?

00:50:29.000 --> 00:50:34.000
They were working on plantations where the life expectancy was way less than 30 years.

00:50:34.000 --> 00:50:42.000
So… So I think that this is just something where we have to decide what priorities are and how to organize ourselves according to our obligations.

00:50:42.000 --> 00:50:48.000
But we live in circumstances where a lot of us have that's that that capacity.

00:50:48.000 --> 00:50:52.000
In terms of what, you know, going back to your actual question.

00:50:52.000 --> 00:51:00.000
How can researchers contribute. I think there's a lot of research to be done. If you want to look at the Atlas network, it would be great.

00:51:00.000 --> 00:51:11.000
Like look at these organizations, figure out who's in them there's a lot of like data scraping, looking, you know, I've been imploring master's students to do this kind of work you're like.

00:51:11.000 --> 00:51:21.000
Look at who's connected to who on LinkedIn. Look at which journalists have participated in their freedom summer schools where they learn climate denial and Ayn Rand worship.

00:51:21.000 --> 00:51:37.000
And figure out what articles those people have then subsequently written And their mainstream journalist careers where they actually put climate denial and delay talking points like You have research capacities that are extraordinarily valuable. You have data synthesis capacities that are extraordinarily valuable.

00:51:37.000 --> 00:51:49.000
So you can contribute to this There's a lot of work to be done from your desk late at night having fun sort of playing with this data and information.

00:51:49.000 --> 00:51:58.000
So, but I think that science communication would have, I would probably have answered that science communication is a really important direction.

00:51:58.000 --> 00:52:03.000
You know, maybe 10 years ago help communicate the science of climate change.

00:52:03.000 --> 00:52:09.000
Make things that people can use in primary schools or secondary schools, make those kinds of materials.

00:52:09.000 --> 00:52:16.000
I think now that the knowledge gap is much less on the science heart, although that still exists.

00:52:16.000 --> 00:52:23.000
And much more on the sort of economic and political manipulation.

00:52:23.000 --> 00:52:33.000
And the threats that all scientists are facing. I mean, the Atlas network and the neoliberal project hates universities. It hates publicly funded research of all stripes.

00:52:33.000 --> 00:52:42.000
Certain types more than others, but that's really one of the things that they're trying to do is undermine the place of public science Full stop.

00:52:42.000 --> 00:52:50.000
And in various ways. And so I think that that's something that we should be paying a lot more attention to and communicating a lot more about.

00:52:50.000 --> 00:52:54.000
And I think that there is that role for sort of research data analysis, synthesis.

00:52:54.000 --> 00:52:59.000
And communicating that with the movements that don't have that capacity themselves.

00:52:59.000 --> 00:53:16.000
Which could be really important.

00:53:16.000 --> 00:53:24.000
Thank you so much. If Nobody wants to go ahead.

00:53:24.000 --> 00:53:54.000
I have a few questions. So if So in one of your last flights you had you just mentioned that democracy like decision making based on democracy should work with the public services, but I do have this question where people are not in places where people are not like climate denial but climate ignorance

00:53:54.000 --> 00:54:09.000
Because this is somehow I do also face during conversations where um It's always like, yeah, climate change, we know everything, but it's not my problem or it's not my problem today and we can deal with it later later and that goes on like later.

00:54:09.000 --> 00:54:22.000
And it's not like it's not foremost or one of the foremost things that people do talk about and how Do we address that and make people more aware?

00:54:22.000 --> 00:54:30.000
So when people are, when people are Okay, I almost don't know where to start. A hundred years ago.

00:54:30.000 --> 00:54:40.000
Give or take. The fossil fuel industry And the person of Rockefeller and Standard Oil had real public relations problems and they founded the public relations industry.

00:54:40.000 --> 00:54:44.000
And all the messaging that you hear from climate, all the things that you're hearing from these other people.

00:54:44.000 --> 00:54:58.000
They don't come up with that themselves. They might think, oh, this is my original contrarian whatever original thought on this matter, but they're getting that messaging from media. They're getting that messaging from social media.

00:54:58.000 --> 00:55:09.000
And when you follow… the sort of, you know, this fake news and the propaganda upstream and this sort of messaging frame is upstream.

00:55:09.000 --> 00:55:18.000
You end up with these these public relations firms and these allied think tanks that do things like, for instance.

00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:23.000
They've created curriculum materials in economics for secondary school that pretty much everybody gets.

00:55:23.000 --> 00:55:29.000
And one of the things that they've been doing is they've been pushing climate denial, but that works less among some people now.

00:55:29.000 --> 00:55:35.000
And then they started pushing climate delay. So we called it the Discourses of Climate Delay.

00:55:35.000 --> 00:55:49.000
And so that's one of the things that we we just went around and categorized them so you can have a look at the at that article in terms of what we did and if you there's actually a comic strip version and

00:55:49.000 --> 00:56:00.000
A whole bunch of other versions i can probably find the I can probably find the comic version somewhere, where we actually made cartoons of them. And so I think that that's one of the fun ways if you want to deal with it on a sort of visual level.

00:56:00.000 --> 00:56:05.000
And sort of told people, hey, what you're saying is actually fits in these discourses of climate delay.

00:56:05.000 --> 00:56:15.000
And by the way, it doesn't come from you. This is something that I mean, I… I kind of hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this is not a conspiracy. It is factually founded.

00:56:15.000 --> 00:56:23.000
Like we know so much about this history. We know about Naomi Oreski's and Eric Conway's work on Merchants of Doubt. Oh yeah, I should plug their their work.

00:56:23.000 --> 00:56:28.000
So there's these beautiful historians of science Naomi Oreskis and Eric Conway.

00:56:28.000 --> 00:56:35.000
And they've written two really important books. The second one is quite recent. It just came out last year.

00:56:35.000 --> 00:56:45.000
So there's Merchants of doubt is the first one and which is on the climate denial industry And the second one is the big myth.

00:56:45.000 --> 00:56:52.000
Which is on neoliberalism and in the US context, including these Atlas network think tanks.

00:56:52.000 --> 00:57:02.000
And how that's been driving climate denial and climate delay. And so I think the thing to understand is really where this messaging comes from.

00:57:02.000 --> 00:57:08.000
And one of the things that you have to understand, and I think climate scientists on the natural science side understood too late.

00:57:08.000 --> 00:57:13.000
Is that you don't counter propaganda on a factual discussion.

00:57:13.000 --> 00:57:24.000
So if you're saying if people are saying, oh, CO2 doesn't cause climate change And you're like, oh, yes, it does. And you're getting into that debate. The only thing that you're doing is you're legitimizing the debate.

00:57:24.000 --> 00:57:34.000
What you have to do is you have to attack them at the level of their strategy as to what they're trying to do. And what they're trying to do is slow down action because they're trying to get a few more

00:57:34.000 --> 00:57:41.000
Years of profit like the fossil fuel industry. So you have to say, okay, I know what you're trying to do. You're just trying to slow things down.

00:57:41.000 --> 00:57:47.000
And so I think that it's really important to understand the whole machinery of where this messaging comes from.

00:57:47.000 --> 00:57:54.000
And we don't get anywhere if we don't try to attack it at the source. If we just attack it argument by argument by argument.

00:57:54.000 --> 00:58:01.000
We're just sort of in this losing sort of hamster wheel where we don't have the propaganda tools that they have.

00:58:01.000 --> 00:58:07.000
And so we really need to be a lot more strategic about what we're doing there, I think.

00:58:07.000 --> 00:58:20.000
I'll try to find the cartoon image because it's fun. Well, we talked to Shreya.

00:58:20.000 --> 00:58:27.000
Sushi, I'll go ahead and ask my question. Okay. Thank you, Professor. It was a really good talk.

00:58:27.000 --> 00:58:35.000
And I just have a general question like in high energy physics, as we know it, say since the past 20 years and even now.

00:58:35.000 --> 00:58:54.000
We are moving more towards AI. Like we are building, for example, something I also am involved in like foundational models, something like the chat gpt Like we are going towards that zone. I just want to know, and a lot of companies I read up online, they try to say that there is sustainability

00:58:54.000 --> 00:59:03.000
May be accelerated because of AI. I'm just curious if there's a balance we can reach as a society or is it just a greenwash?

00:59:03.000 --> 00:59:05.000
I'm, yeah. That's up.

00:59:05.000 --> 00:59:08.000
I'm sorry, I didn't understand the last part of the question.

00:59:08.000 --> 00:59:27.000
So I just wanted to know, can we reach a balance between developed in AI and sustainability and climate change or is it going to be a disaster which i i am more towards the disaster side but But I just want to know if that's something possible.

00:59:27.000 --> 00:59:52.000
Um so ai uh well i I mean… Okay, so I think first of all I think it's important to be careful when we talk about AI, what we mean, because there's certain tools like various types of machine learning or whatever that are

00:59:52.000 --> 00:59:56.000
Probably okay. I mean, you always have to think, am I using the right tool for the right thing?

00:59:56.000 --> 01:00:03.000
Am I over-engineering this or am I using too much resources for something that could be done in a different way? I think we always have to think about that.

01:00:03.000 --> 01:00:08.000
In terms, and I don't think it's intelligent. I think that that's pretty clear it's not.

01:00:08.000 --> 01:00:13.000
And so It's also about not contributing to industry hype.

01:00:13.000 --> 01:00:18.000
It's also because the very name in artificial intelligence is a complete misnomer.

01:00:18.000 --> 01:00:24.000
And they reproduce patterns, right? That's all they do.

01:00:24.000 --> 01:00:33.000
Sometimes not very well But I think it's really important to also understand what that industry is doing. So the political economy of it and who's being supported by that industry.

01:00:33.000 --> 01:00:47.000
So you saw how all the tech bros, they all sort of pretended to be a bit progressive at some point. Maybe they were never really now they're definitely on the pro-fascist side supporting trump Supporting surveillance state.

01:00:47.000 --> 01:01:05.000
You know, just like, again, being part of this project of disabling democracy And I went as far as to write a whole garden column about this. I'll drop that in the in the in the And that link in the chat, but it's a bigger discussion and i think that

01:01:05.000 --> 01:01:21.000
What's probably more important is how these technologies are being used to as an excuse to take power. So AI is being used as an excuse to destroy the civil service, the capacity of a government.

01:01:21.000 --> 01:01:30.000
To employ people to do things for each other because they're basically saying AI will do it to allow us to fire everybody while we take funds for our stupid projects.

01:01:30.000 --> 01:01:41.000
And cryptocurrency, again, there's this whole hype of, oh, it's this free pirate currency or whatever. The reality of it is it's a tool to discipline government. Again, it's a tool to disable democracy.

01:01:41.000 --> 01:01:45.000
In the sense that it allows mass scale corruption, money laundering.

01:01:45.000 --> 01:01:55.000
And it makes it impossible for governments to collect taxes. Right? So at a very basic level, it's just going to only allow rich people to do what they want.

01:01:55.000 --> 01:02:04.000
And do mass scale corruption. So I think we always have to be aware of the hype versus the reality Fortunately, there's some very good researchers and journalists who are looking at this stuff.

01:02:04.000 --> 01:02:11.000
And it's really important to understand to to follow their work. So there's one of the great ones is Gil Duran.

01:02:11.000 --> 01:02:22.000
So if you, and I mentioned him So Gil Duran is the is the is doing really great work. He's got this website called The Nerd Reich.

01:02:22.000 --> 01:02:29.000
And again, just beware of who you're allied with because they're going to they're destroying universities and science on a mass scale.

01:02:29.000 --> 01:02:38.000
And it's not funny. So even more important than the tool itself and the use of the tool. It's also who's lying behind it and what their agenda is sadly.

01:02:38.000 --> 01:02:42.000
Thank you very much, Professor.

01:02:42.000 --> 01:02:49.000
So yeah, we will take one more final question. So Greg, please go ahead.

01:02:49.000 --> 01:03:05.000
Hi, thanks Julia, for your talk. You commented a few minutes ago that trying to bring scientific argument to climate denial only legitimizes the denial. And I see that in my interactions.

01:03:05.000 --> 01:03:20.000
And one of the things I've tried to do with some students is to go about it a slightly different way. We're now in an environment where people are starting to talk glibly about the possibility of nuclear war over Ukraine and things like that.

01:03:20.000 --> 01:03:35.000
And one of the things that I recently said in a talk was consider Larson C. The Larsen c ice shelf which broke off from Antarctica a few years ago. It was around 1,200 cubic kilometres of ice.

01:03:35.000 --> 01:03:43.000
And that moved northward and gradually melted away, reduced the planet's albedo in its departure, that kind of thing.

01:03:43.000 --> 01:03:59.000
The amount of energy taken to melt that ice is more than the entire stockpile of the world's nuclear weapons. And we've got something like 10,000 megatons of TNT equivalent in stockpiled nuclear weapons.

01:03:59.000 --> 01:04:16.000
That might have some value as a shock sidesteps of this uh this problem of bringing scientific argument against climate denial. You can shock people with the militaristic equivalents.

01:04:16.000 --> 01:04:39.000
And I don't know whether that's something we should be trying to do. I mean, on a practical level, you could even argue maybe we should anchor ice shelves that are about to break off so that they don't break off and drift north and reduce the planet's albedo and participate in this positive feedback effect which you don't want.

01:04:39.000 --> 01:04:57.000
I don't know what people think about… bringing in the militaristic argument. It might be more something more people can identify with or accept than than scientific arguments we like to bring.

01:04:57.000 --> 01:05:06.000
So um In terms of climate denial, I think, so I guess maybe the most effective counter argument is the link I just put in the chat.

01:05:06.000 --> 01:05:23.000
In my view, which is that I don't see why people bother pretending to believe in climate denial anymore when we have the scientific evidence that the fossil fuel industry themselves had excellent climate models that predicted warming better than university and IPCC models did up until like a decade ago.

01:05:23.000 --> 01:05:29.000
And Jeffrey Supran, Naomi Oreskis and Stefan Romsdorf were able to show that.

01:05:29.000 --> 01:05:37.000
In the science article. So the fossil fuel industry had great climate models in the 70s and 80s. Fantastic.

01:05:37.000 --> 01:05:50.000
And they knew what they were doing. And they just caused a few fools to believe to think otherwise. So I think for me, that's the biggest argument is just the disinformation argument. Climate denial is industrial disinformation.

01:05:50.000 --> 01:06:05.000
Anybody who they don't they don't believe it themselves okay So why does anybody else bother? That would be my first port of call. I think that comparisons along the the one that you made, I think, you know, everything that sort of

01:06:05.000 --> 01:06:10.000
Any factual statement that sort of helps people realize sort of the magnitude of what's going on.

01:06:10.000 --> 01:06:22.000
Is helpful. I would not rely on those alone because Yeah, because we're facing this big political and economic problem.

01:06:22.000 --> 01:06:32.000
And in the end, what we're facing is not people's scientific understanding It's the interests of interest this industry and the industry is allied with it.

01:06:32.000 --> 01:06:52.000
And until we're willing to face them. And come up with and be very direct about the fact that we're faced that it's an existential crisis of us versus these industries and what they've been doing to us, I don't think we're going to get, we're going to make much progress with scientific arguments alone.

01:06:52.000 --> 01:06:59.000
That's my view.

01:06:59.000 --> 01:07:04.000
Thank you. Thank you very much for the excellent, excellent talk and this discussion.

01:07:04.000 --> 01:07:10.000
Professor, so… But I think in the interest of time.

01:07:10.000 --> 01:07:18.000
We will move forward to the next session and we would like to thank you again and hopefully hear you some Same again.

01:07:18.000 --> 01:07:23.000
And hope you could stay for some sessions if you have time and if you'd like to.

01:07:23.000 --> 01:07:38.000
So we would like to move forward to The next session of submitted talks So the first talk is on countering the biodiversity loss using particle physics research sites.

01:07:38.000 --> 01:07:41.000
Julianne, please go ahead. And share your screen.

01:07:41.000 --> 01:07:47.000
Yes, can