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Stefania Juks: From Professor Julia Steinberger.

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Stefania Juks: She researches ecological economics at the University of Lazanne, in Switzerland.

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Stefania Juks: after doing a Phd. In experimental physics, and today we will have a very nice talk with the title, living with well, within the limits. Is this possible? And what will it take?

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Stefania Juks: 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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Julia Steinberger: Hi, everybody, thanks to Fana. Thanks, shirayasi, thanks everybody for being here.

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Julia Steinberger: 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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Julia Steinberger: That's correct.

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Julia Steinberger: Okay, all right. So and we won't

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Julia Steinberger: now do the screen sharing thing

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Julia Steinberger: which is not there. We go.

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Julia Steinberger: Okay. So you should be able to share to see the screen.

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Stefania Juks: Yes, that's perfect.

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Julia Steinberger: Fantastic, and I'll hide this stuff and give myself a time.

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Julia Steinberger: 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 you, not a particle physicist, but I did do a Phd. In physics, and then I drifted away more and more, and I guess I should just say a few things about my drifting, because it sort of took a path that maybe physicists would recognize. Which is that when I decided I wanted to start looking at sustainability and environmental

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Julia Steinberger: 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 20 years ago that technologies were pretty great, and they've only gotten more fantastic since then. I guess we I hope Ruth showed some of that?

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Julia Steinberger: I'm sure she did. And

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Julia Steinberger: and that what we're really sort of facing is we're facing problems of the economy and our political system. And so what I started wanting to do was sort of trying to understand what is the 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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Julia Steinberger: and industrial ecology, tries to consider societies, economies, cities. Whatever you, your unit is through the lens of material and flow analysis. And there's this idea of social metabolism, which is that you can consider you can. You can analyze a society from the scale and composition, the way it uses the resources in the environment, the way it uses trade, etc.

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Julia Steinberger: and

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Julia Steinberger: that when I was doing industrial ecology, I was doing what everybody is doing in industrial ecology, 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 impacts on the environment fast enough to avoid. You know, planetary breakdown.

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Julia Steinberger: And we did not find that I didn't find that to my status, you know, I satisfied myself that this was not a thing that existed in reality

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Julia Steinberger: around 2010 I was pretty. 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

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Julia Steinberger: And so then I started looking at. But what I did find 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 a really strong evidence of decoupling and really strong evidence, that of potential of living well at much lower resource use. And then that asks the big question, which is, why aren't we doing it?

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

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Julia Steinberger: And 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 at much lower resource use. And this is what the talk is about, and I hope you don't see the annoying rectangle. You see the whole screen. Right?

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Julia Steinberger: I hope. Okay.

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Maxim Titov: So you can see the full screen. But 1st slide.

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

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Julia Steinberger: Shreyase 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 cataclysm. The the 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.

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Julia Steinberger: and it's something that we learn far too little about in the physicist community is the long history of the planet and the long history of human existence, Homo sapiens, and who we are and what we've been doing around. And so one of the things that I'll use this plot, even though it's from them already from an Ipcc report that's already 7 years old

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Julia Steinberger: is because it shows the Tylosine temperature range in pink.

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Julia Steinberger: and what 0 is on the vertical axis is the baseline temperature, which is pre-industrial.

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Julia Steinberger: Before you know, we started bringing lots of coal in the Uk

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Julia Steinberger: and other places, and the Holocene temperature range is extremely narrow

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Julia Steinberger: and the Holocene temperature. So it's about a degree right? You see it in pink. 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.

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Julia Steinberger: and in that temperature range, that very narrow, stable sort of warmish temperature range compared to the ice Age. That's where humanity has

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Julia Steinberger: 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 we developed cities. We developed writing all of that stuff happened since the end of the last age during the Holocene, and that is not a coincidence. So humanity

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Julia Steinberger: 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 1st year above 1.5 degrees 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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Julia Steinberger: And this means that ecosystems don't have a chance to adapt, and probably our agriculture systems do not either, and the importance of getting back or staying as close as possible to Holocene. Temperature range cannot be overstated, and that's what the 1.5 degree target is about.

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Julia Steinberger: 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. This is not a joke. This is not just the history of the recent couple of 100 years. Whatever a couple past decades, it's the history of our species. So

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Julia Steinberger: 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. 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 2. This is a downpour that dumped several months worth of rain over a couple of days in Greece.

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Julia Steinberger: and that water is not supposed to be there. That's not like the Mediterranean or anything, and that's the major the large, most important agricultural region in Greece. It will never be as productive as it was before this event.

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Julia Steinberger: But in Greece, despite the magnitude of this cataclysm. Nobody really died, which was not the case for the same weather event in Durinna Libya.

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Julia Steinberger: So which is so just across the Mediterranean, and in this is

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Julia Steinberger: probably the deadliest climate incident nobody has really heard, maybe heard of it or remembers it.

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Julia Steinberger: Because it happened in Libya.

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Julia Steinberger: and it was a predicted accident. What happened was a dam failed, and that dam that dam was known to be at risk. That dam was, and there were papers published on the risk that this dam posed to the city. There was a poet, a very famous Libyan poet, who lived in the city, who predicted the day of the big of the flood

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Julia Steinberger: in one of his poems, and he died along with 10 upwards of 10,000 people overnight in this flood. And this is what you know our landscape looks like. And already and this year, of course.

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Julia Steinberger: 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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Julia Steinberger: and one of the reasons it touched me, and I'm including this sort of frame in all my talks is because in Los Angeles the fire swept through Altadena.

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Julia Steinberger: And Altadena is a historically black neighborhood.

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Julia Steinberger: and it is the place where Octavia Butler is buried.

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Julia Steinberger: 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. She wrote about sort of Science Fiction dystopian fiction. She was an extremely

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Julia Steinberger: just. You cannot overstate how important and intelligent and and great Octavia Butler is.

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Jie Gao: Butler is and and I'm sorry

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Jie Gao: I'm sorry I'm getting an echo.

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Julia Steinberger: Jig out. Do you think you could turn off your microphone?

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Julia Steinberger: Hello, okay. So I hope that that worked.

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Jie Gao: Sorry.

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Jie Gao: Sorry.

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Julia Steinberger: No worries.

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Julia Steinberger: Okay, so hopefully, the the echo is gone. 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 autocratic trend, etc. 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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Julia Steinberger: 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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Julia Steinberger: 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 2,010 ish, so already about 25 years ago. But I and and other people were studying

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Julia Steinberger: earlier. But it's still not stuff that most people know about and understand, I think, despite its importance. So we'll just go over the basics.

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Julia Steinberger: The 1st stylized fact is that beyond a certain level energy increases do not result in measurably higher well-being, and this result has been known since the year I was born. I am 51, it was known, published in science in 1974, and this is a great article. You can go and read it. It's splendid in lots of ways.

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Julia Steinberger: And yes, massive energy consumption is not necessary at all for well-being

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Julia Steinberger: and what it looks like in terms of data, and this plot is

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Julia Steinberger: sort of Oldie and Goldie favorite of mine. But it it doesn't matter what you put on the vertical axis in terms of a well-being metric. 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.

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Julia Steinberger: this sort of very flat curve

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Julia Steinberger: that I mean. It's very steep at the beginning, where a little goes a long way

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Julia Steinberger: in terms of increasing, you know, having a high correlation with increasing, well-being, increasing human development in this case. And then it just sort of flattens out, and it just does not matter anymore.

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Julia Steinberger: and over almost an order of magnitude, of energy usage.

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Julia Steinberger: That's it.

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Julia Steinberger: 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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Julia Steinberger: In such a way that you can actually, you can actually do sort of projections with it. So this was a paper I published in 2,010, so already a little while ago. But this trend is just very, very steady.

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Julia Steinberger: and people have run scenarios based on it. So the fact is that one of the things that we learned in this article is that whereas we used to be in the 19 seventies, in a situation where the energy requirements for universal high human development

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Julia Steinberger: would have been something like twice as much energy as was globally consumed available. That situation changed dramatically over time, not because our energy consumption is increasing, because that's staying relatively constant per capita going up a bit, but because the energy requirements of well-being are dropping so fast.

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

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Julia Steinberger: 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

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Julia Steinberger: to a situation of distribution. Right? That's the issue.

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Julia Steinberger: 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. This is the one that we developed for the living. Well, within limits project.

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Julia Steinberger: 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. And the idea there is, you can study physical and social

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Julia Steinberger: 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. So we had to go and read stuff from way back. And yes, this is Western

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Julia Steinberger: oriented direction. There are other directions. But the fact is that you know, a couple 1,000 years ago people were saying interesting things about what they thought about the human condition and human well-being.

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Julia Steinberger: and so Aristotle was one of the the 1st ones to sort of articulate it, and for him our well-being was living life fully as possible is very active notion.

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Julia Steinberger: and to flourish within society. It's a very social notion, and Aristotle's great. I follow Aristotle full disclosure, he writes, should be noted that he writes this in the Ethics a few pages after his justification of slavery, and a few pages before 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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Julia Steinberger: and then epicure has a much more. A few decades later. Has a couple has a much more emotional perspective on well-being. It's about feelings.

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Julia Steinberger: it's about positive feelings, negative feelings, and it's very much individual. And as in all good academic disputes, the 2 camps persist to this day with epic. What happened to Epicure's ideas was not what he would have wanted. 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. 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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Julia Steinberger: 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. 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 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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Julia Steinberger: If you're on team, Aristotle, your view is very different. Well-being is a flourishing. It's about flourishing in society. It's an active perspective. It's social, whatever the even if you use a single dimension generally, you're using a multi dimensional way of thinking about it, like the Human Development Index or the Sustainable development goals or other frameworks like capabilities.

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Julia Steinberger: And the view of the economy is very different.

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Julia Steinberger: So if you've ever read Amartya Sen. So the great Indian economist, Nobel Prize winner, and so on. One of the good economics, Nobel Prize winners to be said, the view on the economy is that it is only justified. The 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. It is not justified

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Julia Steinberger: as an end in itself, only as a means to an end.

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Julia Steinberger: 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, what we were thinking about. If you want to go and look at those papers now as physicists, you might want to think, you might think, 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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Julia Steinberger: 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, where we basically say, human wellbeing is built up from human needs satisfiers. So you need to satisfy a certain finite number of human needs.

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Julia Steinberger: You don't need to do more than satisfy them.

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Julia Steinberger: So this is a perspective that has satiability and sufficiency baked into it.

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Julia Steinberger: And

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Julia Steinberger: 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 one of the you know how happy, how satisfied are you with your life on a scale from one to 10 versus the number of human needs satisfiers achieved. And that's just based on like, you know, are people getting enough food, enough education, etc, around the world? And these are national level indicators. So they're national level averages.

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Julia Steinberger: And this is what we found, which is obviously, you know, correlation is not causation, but this is a pretty strong trend for physical well-being. So average healthy life, expectancy versus numbers of human eat satisfiers. It's an even stronger result, because it actually has some kind of a saturation pattern to it.

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Julia Steinberger: 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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Julia Steinberger: and

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Julia Steinberger: this is the 1st paper of the Phd. Of Leah Tamberg, and it's a splendid result. It's on the preprint server. If you want to find it. And basically she's using Gallup world poll data. So these are, you know, 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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Julia Steinberger: 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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Julia Steinberger: and it's not really a sort of high priority. Necessarily, the orange one is with individual needs satisfied, and the red one is with individual needs satisfied

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Julia Steinberger: and everybody's needs satisfied within that society, as well as some good governance parameters.

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Julia Steinberger: And what you can see is that it is

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Julia Steinberger: all of these curves move upwards and flatten out. Basically, as soon as you start taking need satisfaction into account at the individual or social level.

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Julia Steinberger: 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

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Julia Steinberger: and human needs satisfaction is what matters, and it is what our economy should be doing. Once human needs are satisfied, people are able to make life plans. They are okay with their life.

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Julia Steinberger: And and they you don't need more than that

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Julia Steinberger: 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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Julia Steinberger: 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 need satisfaction within planetary boundaries within environmental limits. And basically what we did here is we tested

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Julia Steinberger: environmental indicators that were consumption based, they were trade corrected. Which means that we were looking at how much a country really consumes

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Julia Steinberger: total when you take trade into account.

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Julia Steinberger: 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. Basically, countries come in 3 flavors. Either they're not damaging the planet, which is, you know, low on the horizontal axis. Sorry I cut out the

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Julia Steinberger: then

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Julia Steinberger: the legend on the horizontal axis, the horizontal axis is number of biophysical boundaries breached so number of planetary limits breached so either they're low on the environmental damage scale and low on the social achievement scale. Or they're high on the environmental damage scale and high on the social achievement scale. Or they're high on the environmental damage scale and low on the social achievement scale. That's entirely possible.

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Julia Steinberger: But the neighborhood that's really empty is this sort of little green circle like the the green donut there is where we want to be with high, you know, high social quality and low environmental damage. And then the question is, what do we do about this? Because that's where we, where we all all of these countries would want to be going in order for us to have good lives within planetary boundaries.

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Julia Steinberger: So where do we go from? Here?

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Julia Steinberger: And I'll sort of do. A whistle stops. Tour of of recent results. The 1st sort of organized into 3 facts and 3 ways forward. So inequality and sufficiency, possibility and investment

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Julia Steinberger: and dependency versus economic democracy.

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Julia Steinberger: The 1st fact is inequality. So possibly other speakers have talked about this. I don't want to dwell on it.

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Julia Steinberger: Too much. But long story short, climate change is a problem that reflects economic inequality.

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Julia Steinberger: 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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Julia Steinberger: with in this case is from a consumption perspective, the top 10% which probably most people on this call, unless your Phd students fall into

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Julia Steinberger: are responsible for globally are responsible for about half of global emissions. 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. So so we have this huge inequality problem.

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Julia Steinberger: 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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Julia Steinberger: is for the Uk. But it's something that we see internationally in countries.

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Julia Steinberger: Hi, Farida, can you block?

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Julia Steinberger: Thank you.

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Julia Steinberger: 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. This is sort of really a universal pattern. So what you see in this plot is that the lowest 10%, and basically it's the Uk population divided by decile 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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Julia Steinberger: 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 there are reasons for this

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Julia Steinberger: that we can go into if you want. But this is something we see, and where you really see, inequality, galumphing is transportation. It's flight, use. It's car use. It's also public transportation use. And this is so huge. You know, you see the red flights and the orange cars that in the Uk the richest 10% use more energy on flying than the poorest 1020% do total. So this is really this huge, huge inequality

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Julia Steinberger: that we see. And then the way forward is obviously something like sufficiency that Yaminis I have talked about, and obviously she's responsible for the definition that's in the Ipcc. So I won't repeat what she said. But basically we need to move towards reducing this inequality while satisfying everybody's needs. And that's what sufficiency look like.

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Julia Steinberger: So the second fact I want to cover is possibility. Is this, is this condition possible or not?

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Julia Steinberger: And this is one of the things we tried to do in the living well within limits. Project is, we wanted to try to model what it would look like for everybody to be fine.

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Julia Steinberger: have enough.

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Julia Steinberger: So have high well-being and low energy as possible. So we were trying to sort of square that circle and see what it would look like, 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.

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Julia Steinberger: 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. But then we're not we're not where everybody has the same energy services. So we're doing this based on the decent living energy framework of Nara Seema Rao of Yale University, and probably one year you should invite him, because doing really super interesting stuff.

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Julia Steinberger: 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. 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. If you're living in a rural place. You have more transportation requirements than if you're living in an urban setting, and things are closer to you.

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Julia Steinberger: and we took into account embodied energy we took into account the energy required to build up infrastructure public spaces. We only had schools and hospitals, but we at least tried to represent those in some way, 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 person has a phone with data.

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Julia Steinberger: you know. So it's not luxury. You know. 15 m² per person is a lot less than most of us, myself included, living in, live in. But that space is that living space is heated and cooled to 20 degrees year round.

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Julia Steinberger: So which is huge levels of comfort. If you live in the Uk, you know what I'm talking about. So this is, this is a lot better life than 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 another thing. So this is, it's an estimate. It was a 1st try.

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Julia Steinberger: And the the 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

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Julia Steinberger: a bad place to start making estimates and decisions, because right now it's dominated by fossil fuel use 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

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Julia Steinberger: are upward, you know. 2 thirds is is normal, basically, certainly upwards of a half.

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Julia Steinberger: 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.

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Julia Steinberger: And this is, you see, the sort of international. So that that's an exit, Jules, on the vertical axis.

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Julia Steinberger: And you can see the International Energy Agency. So the Ia reference sort of has us cruising upwards, and you know.

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Julia Steinberger: upwards of 400 exojoules, which is where we are now, and our result showed that it would be possible to satisfy everybody's needs just by population growth

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Julia Steinberger: at around 160 exiges. So a huge amount lower, based on feasible technologies.

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Julia Steinberger: And one of the things that's important about this is that this scenario might sound crazy, and

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Julia Steinberger: either Utopian or dystopian, depending on your views on inequality, I guess. But everybody's okay. This is this is a scenario where, based on feasible technologies, everybody is okay. Nobody is suffering from deprivation. Nobody is unhealthy.

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Julia Steinberger: Everybody is fine.

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Julia Steinberger: and it's based on feasible technologies which the Ipcc scenarios are not 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.

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Julia Steinberger: And this is a huge problem that we have within the Ipcc. 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, but it is no longer the case. Nobody could claim that these things are on the horizon or about to become important at all.

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Julia Steinberger: and we need to act fast. So it's much more important to act fast and reducing energy demand than it is to act. To imagine that you know, in a couple of years. We're going to have gigatons and gigatons of

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Julia Steinberger: of negative emissions. Okay, that was sort of a side

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Julia Steinberger: 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 Kikstra and colleagues also involving Narasima Rao

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Julia Steinberger: And it tried one of the. So one of the things that Yarmo did in this paper is try to estimate how much energy it would take. So again, in biophysical terms, material terms, to get to a future where people would be able to live at low energy

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Julia Steinberger: because it actually takes a lot of investment. Right? You're you're talking about

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Julia Steinberger: really high levels of energy efficiency in housing and transportation, bigging up building up public transportation capacity. All of this stuff, you know, new appliances, heat pumps, all of this right.

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Julia Steinberger: And what you can see is the investment on the end. Use side is huge. It's on the order of 290 exitols.

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Julia Steinberger: which is large. It's roughly, as you saw in the last plot a year of final energy use globally.

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Julia Steinberger: But that's spread over a couple of decades. Right?

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Julia Steinberger: So it's big. It's a huge effort. But it's also a feasible effort.

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Julia Steinberger: 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, just it almost vanishes.

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Julia Steinberger: Because the thing is we can do so much with efficiency and efficient technologies. And the problem is that the shelter sector, the dwelling sector that is so important

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Julia Steinberger: is not a profitable. That's this is not a profitable way for capitalism and the financial sector to invest their money. So we have a real

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Julia Steinberger: divergence in what we should be doing and what the interest of that of the the capacity, the people who have the capacity to do this investment, what they're doing.

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Julia Steinberger: And 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. So it's technically possible. It's physically possible. It's, you know we have the capacity to do it. We have the workforce to do it all these things. Everything is feasible. It's just not the way our economies are oriented. What's also interesting is mobility. Obviously mobility. You need, you know, 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.

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Julia Steinberger: Okay, but have a look at that paper because it's so cool.

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Julia Steinberger: fact, 3 dependency. So this is this is probably where I sort of wander into areas that are less comfortable for you. 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. So this is where we go back into this idea of provisioning system. So really, what we're saying is that the thing that's mediating resource, use and well-being

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Julia Steinberger: is these provisioning systems that have social, political, 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.

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Julia Steinberger: So crash course, on what provisioning systems, the, the, what, the the dream, and the reality.

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Julia Steinberger: So the reality. The dream is that, in fact, provisioning systems could enable good lives at low resource use. The reality is that they're often engineered deliberately to do the contrary, to create resource dependency.

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Julia Steinberger: So we have this, this divergence in what could happen, and what should happen

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Julia Steinberger: from from a human wellbeing, 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.

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Julia Steinberger: sociology of consumption, sociology of production.

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Julia Steinberger: the dependency on resource. Consumption is itself one of the core products of the industrial age, and this is something that industries have

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Julia Steinberger: done for decades. And can't fact set up like a century. We know we can study sort of a century of them behaving in this way, basically ensuring that there will always be a market for their products.

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Julia Steinberger: and the way they do this is they use lobbying. They obtain subsidies from governments, 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.

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Julia Steinberger: and the United States is a beautiful example of this for car dependency. For instance, for instance, zoning laws that really impose car dependency. You cannot live without a car because everything is zoned to be miles away, separated from each other. You don't have integrated neighborhoods. You don't have

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Julia Steinberger: public any kind of public transit investment at that, at the level that's required. You. And we also see it. Yeah, we see it in lots of different ways, you know, parking space requirements in cities.

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Julia Steinberger: anyway. So the automotive industry, the fossil fuel industry in general have been absolutely great at creating dependency on their products, and we see but we see it in other areas as well. You know 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.

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Julia Steinberger: 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 UN. Special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. In his Uk visit report to say that privatization of public services goes against human rights.

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Julia Steinberger: and it does like. There are some things that cannot be left to the market, because people are not able to live and be okay and healthy and safe if they do not have access to them. And that's something that our research really shows. And I'm proud of that. I'm less proud of what the Uk government did with that report which was, tear it up and say it wasn't based in reality.

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Julia Steinberger: 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 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.

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Julia Steinberger: One of the things we did empirically, you might, I assume you, always care about empirical work 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.

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Julia Steinberger: 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, etc.

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Julia Steinberger: and economic growth above a certain income.

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Julia Steinberger: Okay,

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Julia Steinberger: I'm continuing this direction of research in this new EU project, a post-growth deal. We're in the second year of it with the lovely Yorgos Callas and Jason Hickel in Barcelona. We're doing a bunch of stuff, including trying to make more, do more modeling. Looking at North South convergence those kinds of things.

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Julia Steinberger: 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, 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 and pretend that we're still doing our jobs, we have the responsibility of our knowledge. We have the responsibility of the knowledge of our colleagues.

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Julia Steinberger: If you believe what the environmental biodiversity climate researchers are saying, 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.

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Julia Steinberger: And I've also been reading up in the last year and a half on climate denial, disinformation, 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

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Julia Steinberger: fossil billionaire funded the Koch brothers, etc.

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Julia Steinberger: a network of think tanks. It's an international network. It's called the Atlas Network. It has 5 more than 500

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Julia Steinberger: 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. 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, you know, one of the things they were doing

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Julia Steinberger: and the other stuff that they're doing is going against democracy and going against universities and the public role of science generally, and I think that we should be paying a lot more attention to them. And that's why I wrote 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.

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Stefania Juks: Thank you so much, Julia. That was a very interesting talk, and we are also welcoming any questions. If you have some.

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Stefania Juks: I see a few hands. If you want, you can also switch on your video and

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Stefania Juks: already asked the question.

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Stefania Juks: I see some raised Ian, and also another one from Duane

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Stefania Juks: Dwayne. Maybe you want to go first.st

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Dwayne Spiteri: And

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Dwayne Spiteri: hi! There! That was a fantastic talk, by the way. And very interesting and very nice. Avenue, you put on things. 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 is put on the energy of

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Dwayne Spiteri: 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 to do the kind of research that that we do. And so how do you factor an argument into making a case for the amount of tonnage of Co. 2 future physics requires, for example, in comparison to what we should do to try to reduce the overall impact.

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Julia Steinberger: Okay. I don't know. Some of you might know this.

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Julia Steinberger: not only did I used to be a physicist. I'm also.

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Julia Steinberger: Married to one and I there's a limit to what I can say without having getting divorced.

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Julia Steinberger: which is extremely inconvenient, involves a lot of paperwork, as I hear, 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, you know. Should we all not be

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Julia Steinberger: 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 our time, capacity, and attention

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Julia Steinberger: to the to to helping the most vulnerable.

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Julia Steinberger: That's sort of my orientation, but I think that in there's also an argument that of all the excesses of our society

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Julia Steinberger: science is not the worst one, you know. As if you look at what's happening with AI,

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Julia Steinberger: which is a complete scandal, and scam and theft and piracy and

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Julia Steinberger: horrific working conditions, causing people permanent mental health damage

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Julia Steinberger: that makes them unable to live with their families. Kind, you know. Compare it. Compared with that high energy physics is

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Julia Steinberger: is, you know.

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Julia Steinberger: 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 and fundamental science has its own justification. And to go even further, one of the things that's really important in my field

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Julia Steinberger: is learning about what it means to be human. The things we've been told about what it means to be human are wrong, a lot of them. Our civilizations are very young, and they've done weird things, and they don't represent the full large spectrum of what human societies are capable of, which goes back. You know, a couple of 100,000 years. We're learning a lot from archeology.

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Julia Steinberger: We're learning a lot from anthropology. You know, people like David Wengrow 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

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Julia Steinberger: just to give us a bit of courage to change things. And and you know, so that research is necessary.

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Julia Steinberger: 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 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 at the same time, it is very important for the scientific community to be thinking, okay, do we really do we really need this? Is this really going to help? Or are we keeping something in motion.

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Barbara Alvarez Gonzalez: We could.

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Julia Steinberger: Do in different in different ways.

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Dwayne Spiteri: Thank you for your answer.

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Stefania Juks: Thank you, Julia. Ian, I think you can go next. And then, Claire, I see another hand.

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Yann Coadou: Yes, okay, thanks, Julia, for a great talk.

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Yann Coadou: I couldn't help noticing that both you and Yamina, sahib, that we heard a couple of days ago at the beginning of this conference.

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Yann Coadou: Put forward sufficiency, of course, but also as one of the main things on which you have to really

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Yann Coadou: act and quickly. It's housing or sheltering in your plot.

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Yann Coadou: Everybody knows this. You mentioned the 150 Assembly in France. So on. Those citizens a couple of years ago.

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Yann Coadou: They also came up with this as the 1st thing to do.

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Yann Coadou: Politicians still are not taking it seriously. We have been hearing for tens of years. Yeah, we have to invest in the isolation of buildings we have to refurbish. We have to install heat pumps and so on. They keep saying it. But nothing's happening.

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Yann Coadou: Is there a way forward to finally make a difference.

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Sukanya Sinha: Julia, if you're speaking, you're muted sorry.

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Julia Steinberger: So sorry I'm sharing screens again. So that's me sitting on a motorway in Bern, trying to advocate for renovation in Switzerland. So that was with renovate Switzerland, and

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Julia Steinberger: you know we all got arrested, etc, and I mean and that was the thing that we were trying to do is we were just trying to say, 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, and they still don't create the conditions for it to happen. And so this was, you know, sort of our desperate effort to do this.

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Julia Steinberger: And I think our campaign made the topic a lot more important in the media. I'm not sure if it's really

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Julia Steinberger: a few local initiatives were bolstered by us, etc. I think we did make a difference. But honestly, it's a source of desperation as to how you know, win win something can be. But if it's not the priority of the fossil fuel lobby oh, and, by the way, our energy Minister in Switzerland is a climate denying

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Julia Steinberger: a career fossil fuel lobbyist named Albert Rusty, who looks adorable on camera. He has such a nice smile, anyway. But so we're in this real trouble, and we do not know how to get out of it.

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Julia Steinberger: 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. Come and participate in this effort of understanding who the lobby groups are, how they're acting, how they're interacting and and really stopping our political and economic system from doing the things we should be doing because it's it's a scandal.

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Julia Steinberger: Yeah.

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Shreyasi Acharya: Yeah, you can go ahead.

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Claire David: Hello, can you hear me? Okay.

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Claire David: 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 on this activism point of view, it turns out. And you know, because you've been at Cern, we're pretty busy. 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.

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Claire David: 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 due to their work commitment. Thank you so much.

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Julia Steinberger: Okay, yeah.

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Julia Steinberger: So there's there's a couple of things. One is

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Julia Steinberger: the the busyness is not just a researcher problem. Right? I mean?

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Julia Steinberger: People are! Are. The

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Julia Steinberger: the imperatives of modern life are very, very strong 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 think they need to be doing. And I think that I really really

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Julia Steinberger: think it is very important. The 1st thing you do in physics right

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Julia Steinberger: is you try to understand what your Zeroth order issue is, and then the 1st order, and so on. You take a step back, and you look at the whole thing. 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.

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Julia Steinberger: And if you need to, I'm working 80%, partly so, my partly because it's necessary for reasons of health

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Julia Steinberger: 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 doing activism and get arrested. They can always say, Oh, but she wasn't. That was not one of her working days, you know. So I think if it, if that

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Julia Steinberger: 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 is something that

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Julia Steinberger: social justice

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Julia Steinberger: activists, workers, whatever you want to call them. People throughout time have always found a way to do. If

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Julia Steinberger: honestly, if the slaves in Haiti like, we have no excuse. If the slaves in Haiti could mount a revolt and kick out the French.

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Julia Steinberger: we can do this right.

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Julia Steinberger: They were working on plantations where the life expectancy was way less than 30 years.

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Julia Steinberger: So

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Julia Steinberger: so I think that this is just something where we have to. We have to decide what priorities are, and how to organize ourselves according to our obligations. But we live in circumstances where a lot of us have

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Julia Steinberger: that capacity in terms of what you know. Going back to your actual question, how 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. Look at these organizations. Figure out who's in them. There's a lot of like data scraping

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Julia Steinberger: looking. You know, I've been imploring, you know, master's students, to do this kind of work you're like.

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Julia Steinberger: 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 and figure out what articles those people have then subsequently written in 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. So you can contribute to this.

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Julia Steinberger: There's a lot of work to be done from. You know your desk late at night, having fun sort of playing with these, with these this data and information. So. But I think that

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Julia Steinberger: science communication would have. I would probably have answered that science communication is a really important direction.

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Julia Steinberger: you know. Maybe 10 years ago, like help, communicate the science of climate change, you know, make things that people can use in primary schools or secondary schools make those kinds of materials.

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Julia Steinberger: I think now that the knowledge gap is much less on the science part, although that still exists.

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Julia Steinberger: and much more on the sort of

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Julia Steinberger: economic and political manipulation 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, 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.

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Julia Steinberger: Full stop.

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Julia Steinberger: and and in various ways. And so I think that that's something that we should be should be paying a lot more attention to and communicating a lot more about.

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Julia Steinberger: And I think that there is that role for sort of research, data, analysis, synthesis, and communicating that with client, with the, with the, with the movements that don't have that capacity themselves which which could be really important.

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Claire David: Thank you. Thank you so much.

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Shreyasi Acharya: So much if nobody wants to go ahead.

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Shreyasi Acharya: I have a few questions so if so in your one of your last slides. 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

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Shreyasi Acharya: people are not in, in places where people are not like climate denial, but climate ignorance.

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Shreyasi Acharya: because this is somehow I do also face during conversations where? 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. And it's not like the

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Shreyasi Acharya: foremost or one of the foremost things that people do talk about? And how

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Shreyasi Acharya: do we address that, and make people more aware.

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Julia Steinberger: So when people are again okay, I almost don't know where to start. A hundred years ago, give or take

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Julia Steinberger: the fossil fuel industry

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Julia Steinberger: in the person of Rockefeller and Standard Oil had real public relations problems, and they founded the public relations, industry, and all the messaging that you hear from climate all the things that you're hearing from these other people. They don't come up with that themselves, they might think, oh, this is my original

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Julia Steinberger: contrarian whatever original thought on this matter. But they're getting that messaging from Media. They're getting that messaging from social media.

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Julia Steinberger: And when you, when you follow the fake news and the propaganda upstream, and this sort of messaging frame is upstream. You end up with these public relations firms and these Allied think tanks that do things like. For instance, they've created curriculum materials and economics for secondary school that pretty much everybody gets.

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Julia Steinberger: And so, 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 and then they started pushing climate delay, so we called it. The discourses of climate delay

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Julia Steinberger: and so that's 1 of the things that we

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Julia Steinberger: We just went around and categorized them so you can have a look at the

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Julia Steinberger: at that article in terms of what we did. And if you, there's actually a comic strip version and 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 1 of the fun ways if you want to deal with it on a sort of visual level and sort of tell people, hey, what you're saying is actually fits in these discourses of climate delay. And, by the way, it doesn't come from you. This is something that

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Julia Steinberger: I mean. I

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Julia Steinberger: I kind of hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist. But this is not a conspiracy. It is factually founded like we know so much about this history. We know about Naomi Oreske's and Eric Conway's work on Merchants of Doubt. Oh, yeah, I should plug their their work. So there's these beautiful historians of science, Naomi Oreske's and Eric Conway, and they've written 2 really important books. The second one is quite recent. It just came out last year. So there's merchants of doubt is the 1st one, and

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Julia Steinberger: which is on the climate, denial industry. And the second one is the big myth

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Julia Steinberger: which is on neoliberalism. And in the Us. Context, including these atlas network. Think tanks, and how that's been driving climate, denial and climate delay. And so so I think the thing to understand is really where these where this messaging comes from, and one of the things that you have to understand. And I think climate scientists, you know, on the natural science side, understood too late, is that you don't counter propaganda on a factual discussion.

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Julia Steinberger: So you don't if you're saying if people are saying, Oh, Co. 2 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. What you have to do is, you have to attack them at the level of their strategy

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Julia Steinberger: 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 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. And so I think that it's really important to understand the whole machinery of where this messaging comes from, 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.

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Julia Steinberger: we're we're just sort of in this losing sort of hamster wheel where we don't have the propaganda tools that they have. And so so we really need to be a lot more strategic about about what we're doing there, I think.

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Julia Steinberger: and I'll try to find the cartoon image because it's fun while we talk to Shreya.

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Shreya Saha: So she, I'll go ahead and ask my question. Okay, thank you, Professor. It was a really good talk, 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 we are moving more towards AI,

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Shreya Saha: like we are building, for example, something I also am involved in, like foundational model, 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, maybe 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?

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Shreya Saha: I'm yeah.

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Julia Steinberger: I'm sorry I didn't understand the last, but the last part of the question.

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Shreya Saha: So I just want to know, can can we reach a balance between development in AI and sustainability and climate change? Or is it going to be a a disaster which I I am more towards the disaster side. But

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Shreya Saha: but I just want to know if that's something possible.

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Julia Steinberger: So AI well, I I mean.

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Julia Steinberger: I to. Okay. So I think, 1st of all, the

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Julia Steinberger: I think it's important to be careful when we talk about AI, what we mean, because there's certain tools like,

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Julia Steinberger: you know, various types of machine learning or whatever that are probably okay? I mean, you always have to think, am I using the right tool for the right thing?

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Julia Steinberger: 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

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Julia Steinberger: in terms, and I don't think it's intelligent. I think that that's pretty clear. It's not. And so it's also about not contributing to industry hype. It's also because the very name and artificial intelligence is a complete misnomer, and they reproduce patterns. Right? That's all they do.

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Julia Steinberger: and sometimes not very well.

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Julia Steinberger: But

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Julia Steinberger: 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?

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Julia Steinberger: So you saw how all the tech Bros. They all. They all sort of

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Julia Steinberger: 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, you know. Just like again being part of this project of disabling democracy. And I went as far as to write a whole cartoon column about this. I'll drop that in them.

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Julia Steinberger: in the, in, the, in, the, in, the, in that link in the chat. But it's it's a bigger discussion. And I think that what's probably more important is how these technologies are being used to

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Julia Steinberger: as an excuse to take power. So AI is being used as an excuse to destroy the Civil Civil service, the capacity of a government to employ people to do things for each other because they're basically saying AI will do it so allow us to fire everybody while we take funds for our stupid projects

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Julia Steinberger: 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 in the sense that it allows mass scale corruption, money laundering, 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

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Julia Steinberger: and 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, and it's really important to understand to follow their work. So there's 1 of the great ones is Gil Duran. So if you and I mentioned him.

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Julia Steinberger: so Gil Duran is the is. The

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Julia Steinberger: Is is doing really great work. He's got this website called the Nerd right?

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Julia Steinberger: And again, be just beware of who you're allied with, because they're destroying universities and science on a mass scale. And it's not funny. So even more important than the tool itself and the use of the tool. It's also who's who's lying behind it, and what their agenda is sadly.

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Shreya Saha: Thank you very much, Professor.

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Shreyasi Acharya: So, yeah, we will take one more final question. So, Greg, please go ahead.

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Greg Hallewell: 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.

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Greg Hallewell: 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.

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Greg Hallewell: And one of the things that I've recently said

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Greg Hallewell: in a talk was, Consider Larson Sea, the Larson Sea ice shelf which broke off from Antarctica a few years ago. It was around 1,200 cubic kilometers of ice, and that moved northward and gradually melted away, reduced the planet's albedo in its departure. That kind of thing.

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Greg Hallewell: 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 that might have some value as a shock sidesteps of this

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Greg Hallewell: this problem of bringing scientific argument against climate denial. You can shock people with the militaristic equivalence, 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

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Greg Hallewell: participate in this positive feedback effect which you don't want.

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Greg Hallewell: 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 the scientific arguments we'd like to to bring.

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Julia Steinberger: So.

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Julia Steinberger: in terms of climate denial? I think so. I guess maybe the the most effective counter argument is the the link I just put in the chat, 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.

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Julia Steinberger: and Jeffrey, Supra and Naomi Oreskes and

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Julia Steinberger: Stefan Ramsdorff were able to show that

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Julia Steinberger: in the in the science article. So the fossil fuel industry

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Julia Steinberger: had great climate models in the seventies and eighties. Fantastic.

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Julia Steinberger: Okay. And they knew what they were doing.

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Julia Steinberger: and they just caused a few fools to believe to think otherwise. So I think for me, that's the the biggest argument is just the disinformation argument. Climate denial is industrial disinformation. Anybody who they don't. They don't believe it themselves. Okay?

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Julia Steinberger: So why does anybody else bother? That's that would be my my 1st port of call. I think that comparisons along the the one that you made. I think you know everything. That sort of

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Julia Steinberger: any factual statement that sort of helps people realize sort of the magnitude of what's going on is is helpful. I would not rely on on those

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Julia Steinberger: alone. Because.

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Julia Steinberger: yeah, because we're facing this big political and economic problem. And in the end, what we're facing is not people's scientific understanding. It's the interests of

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Julia Steinberger: this industry, and the industry is allied with it.

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Julia Steinberger: And until we're willing to face them

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Julia Steinberger: and come up with and be very direct about the fact that we're faced that, you know, it's an existential crisis of us versus

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Julia Steinberger: 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, much progress with scientific arguments alone.

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Julia Steinberger: That's my view.

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Shreyasi Acharya: Thank you. Thank you very much for the excellent, excellent talk and this discussion Professor.

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Shreyasi Acharya: So I think in the interest of time

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Shreyasi Acharya: we will move forward to the next session, and we would like to thank you again and hopefully hear you some time again.

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Shreyasi Acharya: and hope you could stay for some sessions if you have time, and if you'd like to

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Shreyasi Acharya: so we would like to move forward to

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Shreyasi Acharya: the next session of submitted talks.

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Shreyasi Acharya: So the 1st talk is on countering the biodiversity loss, using particle physics research sites. So, Julian, please go ahead and share your screen.

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Julien Faivre: Yes. Can you hear me?

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Shreyasi Acharya: Yes.