In this interview with IPCC Vice Chair Diana Urge-Vorsatz she argues that we need to move beyond the phrase 'climate change' and instead build a positive story of climate change. The emphasis should be on how we can make people's lives better, rather than the doom and gloom of ever more worrying numbers. With more walkable cities, greater work-life balance, and more reliable goods, the fight against climate change could be the opportunity of our time.

Climate change and optimism aren’t regular bedfellows, but perhaps climate change could be the opportunity of our time. In recent years political movements across the world have found support in opposition to climate change policies. From farmer protests in France and the Netherlands to a 15% vote share for the UK’s Reform party’s net-zero scepticism. Being against climate change seems to be a real vote winner, especially among working class voters who have been bitten the hardest by the recent inflation crisis. If climate change isn’t politically motivating, how are we to motivate people to vote for ideas that could solve this problem?

In this interview with the IPCC vice chair professor Diana Urge-Vorsatz, she charts a positive story of climate change from the current state of the field, to why technology will be incapable of solving this crisis, to the small social changes that could both improve our lives and incidentally tackle this global crisis.

Harry Carlisle: While it would be great to focus primarily on the positive story, it would be remiss to not cover the prevailing anxiety around the field of climate science. Are you hopeful for our climate future and where does your hope come from?

Diana Ürge-Vorsatz: Of course, scientists often do get in despair, especially when we see the really alarming data and trends. Nevertheless, my optimism and hope comes from the fact that I work on the solutions, and in fact, if you look at what options we have in the end, what I see is that if we pursue social welfare programmes we will have a better work life balance. Our cities will be more liveable. We will lose much less time in traffic and reduce the useless parts of our lives. So altogether, we just can have better lives and an increasing quality of lives when we pursue the right solutions. So that's what gives me optimism that solving climate change can almost be almost a by-product to just making our world a better place to be.

The positive aspect of climate change is usually framed around technological innovation. But your work is more sceptical of technological optimism as it’s known. Why are solar panels and carbon capture and sequestration insufficient to solve this problem and why do you lean more towards the systemic solutions?

Now, of course, technology is a crucial part of the solution. Nevertheless, in my view, and in my scientific communities’ perspective, it is impossible that we can solve this all by technology. Why? There are a couple of reasons.

___

But we cannot just plug in another technology to the previous one and keep growing and growing.

___

Firstly, technology has always been important. But what we see is that in the history of humanity, when we had a major environmental crisis and we deployed technology to fix it, all that happened was that, in the end, they turned one environmental crisis to another. The horse used to be our main vehicle for mobility and in those times the biggest threat to our health and environment was horse manure flooding our cities and causing epidemics. So, when the internal combustion engine came into the cities, that seemed to be an amazing solution. There was no manure; no epidemics. But now as we have discovered, internal combustion engines also produce waste.

So yes, technology is an important solution. But we cannot just plug in another technology to the previous one and keep growing and growing. We have a finite planet, we have finite resources, we cannot grow indefinitely, and this is where, always, our problems start to come up, right from that we are just consuming too much. So yes, for a while we can decouple our growth, or at least our wellbeing from resource consumption, but we have never been able to achieve this decoupling forever.

The second point is that there is no free lunch. There will never be a technology, or never be a consumption which will not come from some environmental harm. Why? Because I'm a physicist, and due to the second law of thermodynamics, whatever we do and we use energy for will always increase entropy in on the planet, and in the end, increased levels of entropy are against our wellbeing, because everything is a resource, and its entropy is low. So if that means it's an organised substance and we can reach out to it and use it, but as mercury, cadmium, lithium, whatever. But as soon as that happens, its entropy is high. As soon as it's distributed around the planet, it's pollution. This is true even for renewable sources of energy. Of course, they are much better than fossil fuel or nuclear power. However, still capturing this dilute form of energy, and concentrating it for our needs, still needs technology, and these technologies will require further forms of pollution. So all in all, while it may be difficult to prove against some hypothetical future inputless technology, in spite of the 30 years of strong efforts into different technologies, we do see that just by technology, without questioning our demand for energy and materials, our mandatory growth in consumption will probably not be sufficient. These are fundamental physical bottlenecks.

This thermodynamic principle seems so simple and yet so divorced from the normal way we think about the economy. Of course, all economic activity is based on energy and resources, with their use also increasing their entropy, and therefore infinite growth seems obviously flawed. But how do you build that into our systems?

Our present economic system just cannot function without constant growth. This isn’t even full blown degrowth. For example, I know a company, the oldest family company of Hungary. They have been producing a spirit like Jagermeister which is very popular, called Unicum. They had been around for 230 years, or maybe even longer. They no longer need to emphasise growth and increased production; they are a household name and highly popular. A sense of equilibrium exists. But they cannot, as you know, the shareholders and the system simply penalizes any company who just wants to stay where they are.

But it's everywhere, for example, with a refrigerator company. And for a while it has been an amazing achievement, to be able to supply to make sure that every family can store their food safely. But after a while, every family has one or even two refrigerators. How could you grow in the next year when everybody already has a refrigerator. What most people would want is a fridge that you can keep practically indefinitely. But the growth incentive is to make a product that breaks. And this is just wrong, because of the problems it results in consumption that is while, maybe it's nice in our numbers, in our GDP numbers, but is it making anyone better off.

So, I think unless we somehow get to fix these, fundamental aspects of our economic system. This is not because of one evil company. It's not because of one evil government. It is because it's the system that penalizes any government who would say, well, maybe we don't really need to increase consumption for next year, they will surely lose the elections next year if a company doesn't grow, then their shareholder value, their stocks go down tremendously. And that's out of step with a finite world.

You spoke a lot about consumption and material products, and I wanted you to talk more about the supply side as well, like the idea of universal basic income or universal basic services. Part of the problem of everyone must consume all the time, but everyone must work all the time to make the stuff that we consume all the time. Is that something you investigate this sort of more radical reclaiming of the supply side of what we do with our time and how we're economically active?

I'm a bit more sceptical about some of these, the more universal jobs and universal services and so on. And the reason is because I have lived in communism, and I know that it doesn't work. And it doesn't work because simply, people are human, and we are complex beings. We have a lot of positive things we do want. We want a better future for our children, better protected environments, but at the same time, we are competing. Adam Smith rightly pointed out the nature of human self-interest and how it informs an individual's decision making— which, in turn, affects collective action.

Take the example of dramatically subsidised energy prices, which sounds like a really nice idea. Why should anyone need to work or pay for their basic human needs, getting energy, but what it resulted in is an immensely inefficient industry and immensely inefficient buildings, which we still keep terribly the legacy of this is we still suffer from because our buildings. What we have done in the end is that we have locked people into energy poverty, because unless we keep subsidising their energy prices, they are not able to pay enormous energy bills. It wasn't that there was no incentive for efficiency. I think an interesting parallel to that is our vision about data. We think that data should be absolutely for free, or at least, you know, flat rate.

___

I don't think we would need that radical change to change people's minds. We are changing people's minds already with aggressive marketing.

___

But, in the end, what results is tremendous data inefficiency. We are storing and producing so much data unnecessarily that it will never really be useful. So I don't think it's evil to say that, yes, data also shouldn't be absolutely for free, even if just a very, very tiny mark would just encourage data efficiency, or we should have some policies for data efficiency as well. It's just, they're just people who won't work as productively as if there is some competition and some reward system. So and the same with utility, I think we should pay for them, but if we have more efficient buildings, it still will be very little cost. In this particular sense, I see Adam Smith’s rhetoric as being particularly noteworthy for the 21st century.

A lot the ideas you have spoken about would require quite large social change. But I think also, as you alluded to a mindset change away from this growth-orientated or maximally productive way of thinking about yourself as one that is more socially egalitarian, and community focused with your loved ones and whatnot. But how can we change people's minds like that, or can change on a broad social scale?

I don't think that necessarily we need a fully egalitarian or socialist economy. Maybe we do, but I don't think we necessarily do; you know, we have been capitalist but more equal and productive in the past. There are just a few fatal flaws at the heart of the economy that when tweaked would cascade up into social progress. I don't think we necessarily need to have a system where everybody needs to care for the environment and society. I don't think so simply, instead I think if we just got rid of the present economic system of being addicted to growth and marketing, we wouldn't need to change people's minds.

They could still want, because everyone, in the end, wants to be happier, wants better wellbeing. Just because of marketing, they think their well-being can be purchased by buying another yoghurt of that kind, buying an even better car, or I will be more masculine and whatever. So I think if we didn't have these forces constantly trying to show us that we, the only way that our wellbeing equals consumption. It somewhat limits our ability to make informed choices, leading to a form of “bounded rationality.” Yes, of course, we would also want consumption, but in the end, we would equally want happiness and we would equally want other signifiers. So I don't think we would need that radical change in what you're saying. I don't think we would need to change people's minds. So I strongly believe if we change the system, we don't need to change people's land, and we don't need to embark on rhetoric that everybody will be a good person for the future of humanity, because a utopia will not work.

We’ve seen several parties gather support on an anti-climate change ticket throughout the West and this messaging has resonated well among the poorest in society, who are often those most at risk of climate related impacts. So how do you win the argument that tackling climate change can improve your life?

I think that's a very good question. And in fact, this is perhaps the most important question of our next couple of years. So, I think in the era of conflict, political, societal polarisation, and so on,  I don't think we can bank on any government or any political corporate group pretending to place climate change, highest or even very high on the agenda. Some people will care, but most of the people will never really care. However, how do we persuade them? I think this is why we need solutions which speak to their other desires.To get to the solutions, we should pivot back to Smith’s concept of self-interest and focus on human wellbeing.  We should get people into the solutions by asking ‘Do you want to better work life balance?’ ‘Do you want more livable cities?’ ‘Do you want to be stuck less in traffic?’ ‘Do you want to have better value for your home?’ ‘Do you want to pay less for almost nothing or zero for your utility bills?’

  SUGGESTED READING We still don't understand climate change By Tim Palmer

I think we should rather work directly with the solutions and the base. Political agendas keep putting fees at the forefront and not even mentioning either environmental climate change. I think we can get much further because I don't think there is almost anyone who wants a not so liveable city or who wants less time for their family or whatever their hobby and so on. So, I think these are the things that we should put at the front and that's how we can get it done.

What will be difficult is simply whenever you have major political forces, who are very interested in keeping business as usual. That is not bringing the world forward but backwards. Somehow, we do need to change power structures and that's the only thing which I think will be very difficult. We don’t need to change ordinary people’s beliefs; rather focus on how climate solutions lead to their wellbeing. Additionally, we need to mitigate the effects of big corporate interests that are arguably the greatest bottleneck we have for climate action today.