Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Denise RQ
We have so much power,
we've even taken not only to alter the landscapes,
we have come to alter the way elements flow in this world.
We've altered the natural cycle of carbon, of phosphorus, of nitrogen,
and this has allowed us, in the Western world especially,
to enjoy an extraordinary level
of material comfort, of material luxury.
When you think about all this power,
there is amounting evidence
that we might be using our power in a way that could harm us,
that we have only one planet and we might be soiling our nest.
In response to this fear, there has been a new branch in science
that has looked just at the connection between technology and the environment,
that has asked the basic question:
how can we live within our means?
While at the core of this is some kind of compromise,
we want to keep on altering the world for our benefit, don't we?
We want to keep on reshaping the world with technology and its power.
But we don't want to alter the world too much,
we don't want to scrap our environment.
And really what this is about
is about traying to balance two very complicated systems:
the environmental system and the technological system.
Alright, how do we start balancing this?
What do we mean by too much damage to the environment?
How much is too much? There's the rub.
And you can't just add it up, there is different kinds:
there is global warming, the chief enemy right now,
there is acid rain, there is the ozone hole,
there is toxic releases, nuclear waste, noise pollution, habitat destruction,
loss of biodiversity, eutrophication.
Eutrophication is something we should all know about.
This is when too much fertilizer reaches a water ecosystem,
and things start to choke up because there is too much food.
Reminds you of a society here or something?
Eutrophication of Western society, yes.
Alright, enough of the editorial.
There are other problems we need to take into account also,
problems more on the long term:
nuclear waste - that lasts a long time -
and also fossil fuels;
well, they have lasted a long time, we see how long now.
OK, technology as we saw is very powerful, we can use our power for good,
we can try to introduce a new technology
that would diminish our impact on global warming.
But very rarely will you find a technology
that will reduce all impacts simultaneously.
Typically, you will reduce one impact at the cost of another.
You will introduce, for example, a special kind of biofuel
that will help you with global warming,
but that will require a large expanse of land for cultivating it,
and as the land is becoming more scarce, and there is more people,
eventually, some Amazon forest might end up getting cut.
This is what we call problem shifting.
OK, let's not give up.
How do we go about handling this, managing this?
What the scientific community has done
is to try to regroup these impacts into what we call areas of protection.
So one thing that we all want to protect,
that is very important for the people in this room,
is human health.
And then we can regroup everything that impacts human health.
How does global warming impact human health?
For example, in changing the way that malaria is spread across the world
as the climate changes.
How does air pollution affect human health?
What is the carcinogenic power of some these toxic releases that we have?
So that is one thing we'd like to protect, we'd like to stay healthy, everybody.
Then there is the more classical definition of our environment:
we want to preserve ecosystems.
We want to preserve especially their diversity,
and we start asking,
"Well, how does global warming affect ecosystem diversity?
How do toxic releases affect ecosystem diversity?"
The third area of protection and the final one is access to resources.
We have access to a lot of resources now;
do we want them to still be there for future generations?
Or, if I have a cotton production that uses all locally available water,
this is not one generation versus another, it is me versus everybody else.
So this is already a more managable set of trade-offs, right?
We have three things that we try to balance
as we move along in technology.
Of course, you may ask, "Well, three ...
When I choose what to buy, I have a single price.
Could I have also a single environmental indicator?"
It is really a question of values.
Do you value humans more than a national park?
How many human lives is a national park worth?
Do you value the present generation more than the next one?
By how much?
How much petroleum should we leave for the next one?
These kinds of considerations.
So there are no simple answers.
In addition to this problem, there is the elephant in the room,
which is that there are huge uncertainties
surrounding the effects of our technology
on human health, ecosystems, and resources.
We are very much playing sorcerer's apprentice really,
and so it is very much
not only about balancing our options but about risk assessment.
Alright, the picture is pretty grim.
Well, this is not the only thing
that industrial ecology or that science does:
to say that things are grim.
We also try to look on the other side, at the technology.
How can we make our technology better?
Well, alright, let's try.
Technology seems to be a bit complex, right?
What is technology?
It's in everything we do. It's everywhere.
So again, we need to try to simplify this problem to solve it.
One approach is to say that all technologies require material,
and that matter is never created nor is it destroyed.
So as some material enters our economy or enters our technological sphere,
where does it flow?
Where does it go? Where does it accumulate?
And then, when do we just return it to the environment?
This is called material flow analysis.
And just to give you a quick example without getting too much into the details,
this is the best picture we have of how nickel flows in our economy.
It enters from a mine, it is refined,
and we see from the very closed loop around fabrication and manufacturing
that there is actually a very high level of recycling of nickel by the industries.
But when it's our turn as consumers,
and when we discard our goods that contain nickel,
only roughly 50% of this nickel ends up getting recycled.
So obviously, MFA, or material flow analysis,
has quite a bit of potential in helping us to close the loop,
in helping us to dematerialize our economy,
in helping us not always needing new inputs of resources,
but recycling materials more efficiently.
And, of course, this is of great interest to policy makers,
it can be of great interest also to some key industries
like the steel industry or the aluminum industry.
That is one approach we can have about technology.
But we can also simplify technology in some other way.
We can say that technology is a set of products,
and then we can ask, "What is the impact of each product?"
This is called life cycle assessment.
Why is it called that?
Because you can't just look at the product and ask,
"How much is it polluting right now? My battery is not emitting anything."
But, of course, my battery has a function, has a past, and has a future,
so we look at it over its life cycle.
My battery stores electricity,
and then it delivers it to my computer and wastes some of it as heat.
It also had to be produced,
and eventually, will have to be disposed off, and recycled, or retreated.
The electricity that it wastes as heat also had to be produced,
so there is a power plant appearing at the top.
So how efficient my battery is matters quite a bit.
Also, my battery had to be produced from components,
which in turn had to be produced from materials,
which in turn had to be extracted and refined.
And all these activities have emissions and impacts.
Then I can start to have a decent picture
of what the consequence of me owning this battery is.
And I can also start comparing it with this other battery.
Our research group is in active dialogue with a battery company,
and they are very interested in knowing,
"If we really want to be environmentally friendly,
what is the component that is at fault?
What should be changed?"
So you have to try to track down in the value chain
where the impact is from.
When I said that life cycle assessment was a simplification, it is.
At some point, you have to stop
because every process certainly requires energy,
requires transportation;
every single one of these activities requires a factory plant and an engineer,
every engineer needs a computer, every computer needs a battery.
Eventually, everything in economy is interconnected,
and so you have a huge mess again.
This is OK,
because there is another tool that we have developed
to pick up the slack.
LCA tracks every product.
But we can just zoom out with what we call input-output analysis.
This is about taking the economy, let's take the US. economy,
and let's divide it into 400 industries,
and look at what industry is buying from what,
and what industry is emitting what.
There is a very nice visualization on the web I encourage all to go and try
called [economymap.org],
which allows you to see
where the emissions are from, and where they are in the economy.
It is based on the US economy, the US input-output table
compiled by Sangwon Suh based on governmental surveys.
So here is, for example, eutrophication that I defined earlier,
the choking of ecosystems.
You can see that there is too much fertilizer reaching the water
because of the cotton production, the grain production, other crops,
and also electricity because of the combustion.
Now, these are the polluting industries,
but they pollute because other industries need their products, right?
So maybe they should be blamed.
And you see that the grain is grown mostly to feed animals for meat,
and also [to prepare] food,
and the cotton is grown for textile.
And we still have the electricity here, that is quite important.
But all these intermediate industries also exist for a reason,
they exist because you and me buy their products.
So let's look
at what household consumptions indirectly cause all the eutrophication in the US.
Well, you see that people buy a lot of clothing,
certainly buy a lot of meat,
use quite a bit of electricity in their households,
and eat a lot in restaurants and bars.
This is pretty much what is driving the eutrophication in the US.
In a nutshell.
Of course, as we talked, this is only one impact.
There is, of course, global warming, other industries
- each industry is a separate dot,
so you have 400 dots there, the whole US economy -
you have human toxicity, and so on and so forth.
Now, what is this all good for?
Life cycle assessment, the tracking of products,
is very interesting for product designers,
it is very interesting for comparing specific options.
Input-output analysis is interesting
partly because it is a good complement for LCA
and partly because it can help stir a whole economy
and give a general diagnosis.
What is there in it for us as citizens and consumers?
As you saw,
our impact on the environment is extraordinarily complex,
our technologies are extraordinarily complex,
so it is not surprising that there is a lot of back and forth,
a lot of debate within the scientific community.
So what do we do today?
It can become very disheartening, it can become very frustrating,
you're told one thing, you're told the other.
A personal story:
it used to take me hours to do the groceries.
I'd stand somewhere on the aile,
and there would be canned chickpeas and dried chickpeas.
What was bad about the canned ones was
that there was so much metal packaging, and it was heavier for transport,
but they recycle these cans rather well all in all,
and the energy efficiency in the cooking industry is probably better
than the energy efficiency
in my appartment when I cook those chickpeas.
And then, there is imported chickpeas,
and there is organic chickpeas that came from further away,
I start to do the LCA in my head and just start to despair,
and eventually, I just go home without chickpeas there.
(Laughter)
So that is not the most constructive approach.
Luckily for us, there are some basic rules
that we don't like to hear about because they are not always pleasant,
but overall, they work.
And all this focus on details is very often just a distraction
because we don't want to remember the general rule.
If you reduce your consumption, if you reuse what you have,
and if you recycle anything that you have to throw away,
in the vast majority of cases, that is enough to get started.
OK, speaking in general, the three Rs.
What can we reduce?
Our homes could be a lot better protected from cold or heat,
so that we don't waste so much electricity.
Eating meat
is one of the most environmentally intensive decisions that one can make.
All the corn and all the grain that goes into feeding animals
could go straight to feeding humans,
so by cutting out the middleman, or the middle animal,
you save on pretty much every single impact
that is associated with agriculture.
So to go back to my chickpeas,
I should have bought whatever chickpeas was convenient for me that day
and felt good about it,
that I was having a vegetarian meal that day.
What else can we reduce our consumption of?
Well, there is the eternal car.
There is a few good messages in there.
Think of all the research that goes into making a car 10% more efficient.
You and me, we can all double our cars' efficiency tomorrow.
You talk to your coworkers, you carpool,
you have two people in the car instead of one,
you just doubled the efficiency of your car.
How we use our technology is eventually what is important
instead of being optimistic or pessimistic about technology.
It's about using it right, using our power right.
Ultimately, living within our means
is about being more careful about how we treat the environment,
making technology better,
making technology work for us on the long run,
making technology work for us and not the other way around.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)