Professor Susan Krumdieck, a leading figure in Energy Transition Engineering, has made significant contributions to the field through her research and teaching at Canterbury University in New Zealand since 2000. Her work focuses on adapting to reduced fossil fuel production and consumption, innovating in transportation activity systems, renewable energy development, and urban regeneration. She is known for her GIS-based data and modeling methods that integrate various aspects of urban systems, aiming to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
In 2020, Dr. Krumdieck was appointed Chair in Energy Transition Engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, leading the Islands Centre for Net Zero. As a pioneer in Transition Engineering, she co-founded the Global Association for Transition Engineering (GATE) and promotes change projects that align with COP21 targets while offering multiple benefits.
Dr. Krumdieck has been involved in numerous initiatives and has received several awards for her work. She contributed to the RSNZ Energy Panel, was an IET prestige lecturer, and received the CU Gold Sustainability Award for organizing the first national no-travel conference. Her book, “Transition Engineering, Building a Sustainable Future,” published in 2020, highlights her expertise and was recognized with the UC Sustainability Award. She was also honored with the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Her global influence is evident through fellowships and guest roles at various universities, including Grenoble INP, University of Duisburg-Essen, Bristol University, and Munich University of Applied Sciences. She was awarded the Engineering New Zealand national education award in 2021 for her contributions to Transition Engineering education.
Professor Krumdieck’s academic achievements include over 160 peer-reviewed publications, supervising 29 PhD students, and securing over US$18M in research grants. She has a top-ranking PBRF rating in New Zealand and serves on the editorial boards of multiple journals. Additionally, she has been an active participant in various forums and working groups related to transport and energy strategies.
Renowned for her public engagement, she has given numerous keynote addresses, research seminars, workshops, and public lectures on Transition Engineering, emphasizing the need for sustainable solutions in the face of global energy challenges.
Links :
https://linktr.ee/SusanKrumdieck
Film Appearances
Living the Change, Jordan Osmond and Antoinette Wilson, Happen Films 2018, featured interview. https://happenfilms.com/living-the-change
Sky Whisperers Ranginui, Kathleen Gallagher, Director, WickCandle Films 2012, featured interview. http://www.wickcandle.co.nz/index.html
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[Music] hi welcome Back to Future fast and uh once again we have Professor Susan with us and for those of you who are here for the first time I urge you to go back and listen to the first part of the conversation because that’s where she shares her journey and uh I think it really helps you if you have an understanding of where she come from and uh you’ll be able to catch on to it because we uh will be discussing primarily about her book in this uh part of the podcast and uh for you to get where she comes from will be there in the first part so please please listen to that first and then come back and uh then you’ll be able to appreciate it fully so with that uh once again Professor Susan thank you so much for making time to be here with us on future PA well thanks good to be here so uh well uh to be uh fair I’m I’ve obviously not been able to pick up things completely out of the book because uh uh because we we it just needs so much more time and uh I’ve only taken perhaps half of the book from a point of uh what we can discuss today so uh for the listeners and audience uh once you hear this conversation I’m sure you will be motivated to go and pick up the book but uh even otherwise uh it’s not a complete Justice from that context so I want to uh place that on record with you Professor so that uh uh you know it’s just from a point of making good of the time and also for the listeners it’s really important that you uh go to the book because one it’s a very easy read and two it’s loaded with uh lot of statistics and infographics which makes it very easy to understand the whole thing so uh so I think you will find why you should pick up after this conversation but so with that let’s just jump into the conversation I I want to start with this uh uh you propose this as a uh the challenging the idea of sustainable growth in the book so so I want to start with what is your idea behind challenging that idea of sustainable growth right um again if if you agree with the premise which the the the introduction story to the book um is a thought experiment about how we perceive the definition of a problem or a quandry and how if we can flip the perspective over if we can if we can get down to what’s actually making something work then we can find a surprising and often simple Next Step that that that changes the future um and so that uh sort of came out of um a conversation I had with my son when he was a a young boy where he was worried about climate change they they’d watched um the Inconvenient Truth in his school um you know he was he was quite concerned and he wanted to know that the sustainable energy stuff that I was working on you know Renewables and and sustainability and stuff like that that that that was going to fix it right that that the future was going to be okay and that was the narrative and intention as well to be fair yeah yeah yeah and I I I think I was probably in one of those bubbles where you know you’re just heads down working away on the technical aspects of something um and to have your son you know a little boy ask you well is that going to make it okay Mom and then I had to really think well is it right is this good enough will this save my son right and that Honesty that no sustainable growth will will actually make it worse and so I I sort of had to admit that um this you know this this pursuit of sustainability and sustainable growth that it it wasn’t changing the thing that was putting the future at risk so I had to tell him no it probably won’t if me and everybody else like me are successful we keep doing what we’re doing really it’s um which I think has been borne out by the last 20 years that that um more of the same gives you more of the same and so my son being a bright lad didn’t leave it at that he said well mom then you have to figure out what to do and and so that that kind of a challenge you just you know there was no government agency putting out funding for people to figure out well what do we what we actually do then you know if we question this this belief this you know communal belief that we all have in in this these few words sustainable growth and we look objectively at how our systems work and what they’re actually doing and how you would change them so that we can all survive this journey then um then what you know what what would that even be that we’re doing and and so um my son would keep asking me every couple months mom what are you doing have you figured it out yet and so I thought well we have to apply the rigor the science the math we have to apply the fundamentals the philosophy of engineering which is that you you go from the point of knowledge observable knowledge um and and let’s let’s do that but let’s apply it to the question of how do we change the incumbent systems that we already have and let’s just believe that we can and then we’ll see how we could do it and so that um challenging sustainable growth was way more about challenging the philosophy of of that that it that it somehow exists when in fact it is the problem so throughout transition engineering what we’re going to see is that same thing where imagine you have a piece of paper and you’re looking at it and you can see what’s on it and it it’s all very clear and everything and we’re all good but we’re going to flip that paper over and we’re going to see what’s on the other side and just because we can it’s it’s it’s a step it’s a thing we’re gonna do and um questioning not yeah questioning questioning sounds like like radicalism or something but it’s more the counterfactual which if you want to feel more comfortable in business we know that the counterfactual is a very important part of of business management that okay here’s uh you can talk yourself into stuff really easily so you should always examine the counteracts well what if that isn’t true what if that doesn’t happen you know yeah so um so that’s but uh unfortunately there is so much of this popular worldview and narrative U which is also built in this cancel culture right so if you’re questioning you’re cancelled if you are questioning these are established fundamentals and if you’re questioning then you are unscientific and they decide so how do you how do you handle that have you come across such arguments um I think because transition engineering isn’t a movement per se or or um you know a protest movement or anything it’s a engineering approach and and that means it’s a it’s a discipline and that discipline simply requires the factual um crash testing of our assumptions so we call it crash testing because um society’s glad that we crash test things right we failure test things so that so that we know how strong materials are and and how fast you should go around that corner right we we we look for those things and so if we don’t crash test our our our um assumptions in other areas then we’re we’re just negligent so we we just do it how do you I mean listening to you I think it just be so appropriate as much as the social studies are so important right for every branch of uh education to have an opening to that I think somewhere this kind of a thinking is also equally necessary no matter what you study right so that way people don’t get swayed by what is the popular narrative and try to uh approach it a little more scientifically or in the way you put it uh as an engineer would do right well uh here’s the thing um I if you if you agree with this um premise that we are on a runaway train right it it we’ve built the tracks really well we’ve built the train really well but somebody has decided that that train should go faster every year and when we start to wonder there are enough theories for it right which which drives every every well it’s better to go fast so let’s go faster all the time no but some of these flag bearers are great engineering Minds these are inventors who built it this was not economists who gave the theories in fact there were engineers who gave the theories MLA and and so forth right so uh yeah maybe I was just going to say when when we start to perceive that maybe this journey we’re on is is is going too fast that maybe it’s it’s not you know things are starting to come apart be careful because there will be a clown coming down the aisle selling fun balloons um to distract us from from this fear so that’s the journey we’re on so uh another thing which is uh really caught my interest and I while I I could get the context since I was reading but I would like you to share your perspective on that about uh help people understand your reference to 2 de Centigrades of failure limit uh so right well again I’m I’m kind of old enough to remember the Kyoto Protocol and um you know the um all of these cops we’re up to 28 now right the the meetings about climate change and the earnestness with with which people really thought well this is it this is the one that’s going to do the trick and um in 2000 after the Kyoto Protocol countries were struggling with the politicians were struggling with well okay we have agreed to reduce our emissions to below 1990 level by 2012 we all agreed to this I mean this was what we agreed um and so they were struggling with well how do we do that and so their choices were carbon tax or carbon trading those were the two things they never once turned around to look at at the engineers in the room and say okay how would what does this look like when when we’re reducing ourem missions and the engineers would go okay I see emissions emissions emissions emissions emissions and I’ll tell you what that’s actually fuel fuel Fu fuel fuel fuel so it’s kind of obvious we need to make our our economy much more efficient much more organized um we need to roll back the just in time shipping because while it was great it doubled our fuel use so yeah uh we’ll just do that we’ll just get on to that so we could have done that 23 years ago 25 years ago but no we just kept saying emissions emissions emissions emissions emissions and carbon tax anybody have a carbon tax not really uh we did have a carbon tax in 2008 we had a doubling of the price of oil well incident fix well incidentally there are new Arguments for that now of course you can just keep repeating it what I’m saying is we had a natural experiment in 2008 the price of oil went to $140 a barrel so we have an experiment there where we can see what the effect of a very massive carbon Ta on oil would be um and what we see is that it it it possibly flattened the demand for oil but it it certainly didn’t reduce emissions it didn’t you know whatever the fundamental changes within within our systems were that should have been rejigged at that point they they weren’t so yeah I I I think if you’re if you’re looking from the top down you know from the um from the the car on this runaway train where all the politicians are sitting you see a lot of sort of cycle Babble we’re going around and around and around um when actually there’s there’s an engine room up front where the fuel is going into the engine faster and faster and faster that’s what’s making it run away and there are brakes and there are instruments and there’s a few people on this train who could actually slow it down only a couple one or two that could save us all but they’re the ones who are in the engine room the you know the the politicians and and the media people and and you know the economists and whatever um they will figure out how in the world we will survive on a train that’s not going to wreck it’ll be fine they’ll be able to figure it out can you give some perspective on peak oil ah peak oil oh you you did actually ask about the the two degrees failure limit all right good so we need to backtrack there because this is important so we agreed that we’ve had these these cops these agreements these treaties these um you know National commitments we we keep having these things and think about the word that is used for these things like two degrees C 1.5 degrees C 350 parts per million remember that one that was that was one of these the um uh below 1990 by 2012 we have these things what are they called they’re called targets right a Target is a thing you aim for and and and go towards you want to hit it right all right well this two degrees thing if you look at the science behind it the the loading up of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide higher and higher and higher which is loading up the ocean with more and more carbon dioxide which is acidifying it you know if you if you look at this loading and you look at what the what the science is saying the modeling of those systems when you get to 2 degrees C you have essentially just such broad failures across the system or a 60% chance of such broad failures across the the multiple systems that you have you have catastrophic global warming you have you’ve reached tipping points things have been overloaded and in engineering we call that the failure limit right so imagine a um a a elevator and it has it has a plaque on it that says what the safe load limit is Right 1,000 kilograms okay is that a Target should we try to load up to 1,000 kilograms before we use it no no no no don’t do that there’s a there’s a chance of something bad happening and in the design of that elevator there will be a failure limit like 3,000 kilograms right by the time you get to 3,000 kilograms in that elevator there’s a 60% chance that something will fail in that and and you could have loss of life you could you could have catastrophic failure and so if you look at the mathematics of what the the climate science is saying that two degrees is an ultimate failure limit and if we keep pumping fossil carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air we will hit that failure limit and you know we can’t tell us what will fail first or how how the failure will will occur it’s like well what does it look like when our elevator fails you know maybe it gets stuck halfway down and we don’t all die but it’s still really bad it doesn’t work anymore the way it was supposed to we can’t take it up and down the building anymore so so yeah um I think that that we need well at least for engineers we recast those targets into limits because we understand safety limits and failure limits and that they’re they’re hard stops they’re just no we don’t do that that’s what the climate scientists mean by that and the story behind that is that I was at a meeting with um one of the top people in the ipcc and he was just so depressed by the fourth assessment report models that were showing you know how bad it already is we’ve already passed this 350 parts per million where we told the world that the climate would change if we went above 350 parts per million how can we make people understand he said you know why are they not hearing us we just keep like ah and I said well you know it sounds like a safety limit to me the 350 parts per million that if you exceed that safety limit something about the system will change in a way that that doesn’t fit the safe operation anymore and people shouldn’t expect that you could tell them exactly what that is you’ve just just put this system into an unsafe operating mode um and then yeah the the he he was talking about then the budget the carbon budget um and I said well to me that sounds like a a failure limit like a load to failure and so maybe we should talk about that so in the book I use a cartoon that I sketched up with him over the course of an afternoon just thinking about how you would communicate this differently and at that point I was thinking that that if the 2% of people who work in Engineering in in making our engineered systems work had this new philosophy had this this way of of questioning and looking and saying okay well there’s a failure limit I’m going to work on on backing away from that then the future would be a different place so that’s that’s where that came from recasting is a failure limit uh which sounds pretty scary but but from from from talking with the climate scientist it it’s extremely scary actually right and is the other side of it right so peo is the other side of it that when we have a finite resource and um it’s consumed so so a a reservoir of oil there’s a production curve that all reservoirs follow it you know goes up you invest more you you set up the wells you pump them and then it produces for for some amount of time and starts to drop off so that’s that’s a known thing and in the early 2000s late 1990s some petroleum geologists started looking at the world’s oil resources and saying well you know this this happens this is this is a thing and it sounded scary and I think it sounded scarier than it was because it was actually the solution to the climate problem is this peing of the amount of fossil fuels we use and than the decline of them and so I think lucky for me I started working on okay well what would that look like if we did it in a way that wasn’t um you know a panic or just a you know like like in the 70s when there was a a decline in oil supply what would our systems have to be like in order to actually engineer that um that decline in the amount of fuel that we need and so I started doing calculations and getting data about um how much oil we were using what we were spending on the systems that use oil and I found actually this huge Treasure Trove of spending that we are doing just to get from point A to point B not not to not to cure cancer not to educate children not to restore a um a a mangrove swamp you know not to actually do anything and it’s it’s like a third of our budget and I thought wait a minute there’s there’s this huge wasted resource here this idea of um peing our our oil consumption and bringing it down is actually a huge opportunity to to to take that money that now is just thrown out of our economy at the Middle East here you guys take that money and and build what you know what would work and and how how we would make things work in our own country which is going to take a lot of engineering but it’s all doable stuff so so peak oil um for those of you who remember it was a a scary idea um but it’s a scarier idea to not have it right well we’ll talk about what were the solutions that they pursued thereafter but uh want to just pick your uh thoughts on uh uh on a population energy demand and consumption and how do you see these three interacting with each other in the future right um all right just to put it in the context for the audience and listeners there are separate chapters in the book on each of these things but I’m just trying to get her to talk briefly but I really urge you to go and read the book please right um well depending on where you in the world your population your demographic looks quite different yeah um depending on what generation you’re you’re in um one of the exercises I have my students do is to map out their family going back four generations um and look at the number of children in each family um and you’ll you’ll see that that changes dramatically over time sometimes it it well it’s been quite High when there when there isn’t um well shall I say frankly when women have no other choice then babies just come right um and then when women have other things to do then the number of children gets to be around two to to 1.7 per woman and and that is a a rather sustainable um population rate if you have low infant mortality now for a lot of human history infant mortality wasn’t low so you needed maximum fertility just to keep the population stable um so so population is a a kind of thing that we worry a lot about because we had this boom of it when our infant mortality went down um and our the life life expectancy does sort of pile up people but we they do die eventually so so you have this this period of just a population boom all right and that uh depending on how you look at it seems kind of scary and then you say well okay well all those people want to demand energy in the way that say Americans have and therefore we’re sunk right the the future’s hopeless and so putting those things together with consumption behavior of different people in different places um the population Dynamic I think what people tend to want to do is just go to a different place just just sort of like I don’t want to think about this because it it sounds really bad it sounds like an untenable situation but here’s here’s the key um Americans and Europeans have way overshot the benefit derived from the amount of energy and consumption that they do so they’ve pushed from from uh you know a a good life into an obese life into a a a um an over subscribed life a no time for fun life right so so they can come back um they’re very low birth rates and very low fertility rates basically they’re uh like Japan you know there’s a lot of countries that are on a downward population um um trajectory and then the places where the population is booming and there’s maybe not not really enough energy or food or materials for everyone we we really need to look at those places and um yeah those are those are really big challenges there but I think agency from the ground up is probably the way to go there’s there’s no magic solution coming from above and definitely trying to think about overshooting as a solution is is not like reframe that you know um figure out what you have to work with and rework from the local community um upward to gain agency and autonomy and um you know sort of the um the oldr view of Economics where what the local area needs to do for its own sustainability comes first that’s the primary thing export earn earning selling our labor selling off our stuff that no we have a choice not to do that um and then people who are in true poverty I think I’m lucky I’ve I’ve been able to do research with um remote communities off you know um um in South America and the Pacific and um uh Maldives and what I’ve seen is that there’s a there’s a giant difference between poverty and and impoverished and and the the physical poverty you have to let those people Define it for themselves that if they have what they want and what they need and they’re doing things their way then you have to honor that and when I see that people can’t meet their needs it’s usually because somebody’s coming to to impose their economy on them it’s it’s a a sort of a colonial um situation so again the answer is local autonomy agency and building of the economy that you want from the ground up and that’s uh transition engineering is actually there to help with that because that economy is going to have infrastructure and um uh you know energy use and that needs to be done for those people not according to the World Bank or according to anybody else um for whatever they want to do deep stuff but I think and energy consumption only continues to increase right because we’ll find newer devices newer Gadget earlier what was uh uh Vehicles run with fuel which is um uh of course hydrocarbons but now uh electric vehicle but they need consume more energy they need more mining so more processing so uh it never goes down and does it do you do you really think uh it will go down all right on this side of the page there’s the word need need need need need need need right and that word we might want to question because there’s lots of well-off white men saying they need electric cars therefore we need to build the grid to fuel their electric car and we need to put in charging points wherever they want their electric car to be parked and need need need need all right let’s turn it over and see what the other side of need looks like and again let’s not let those people completely run the conversation let’s turn it over and look at where you are in in your place and have a conversation about what need really is how do you change this conversation uh you know just uh a day before I think a friend uh shared with me about a a news report on how electric vehicle is so sustainable and all that and uh there was a comparison of electric vehicle and and a hybrid vehicle so and he was asking what do you think it was in a group and I was trying to tell them that see I think in my opinion the conversation is completely wrong here what is required is that what are we doing about moving more number of people or public transport how is it I mean we are creating more roads for individual cars to drive but we are not building enough public transportation where a group of people can move right absolutely narrative is taken away by electric vehicle for individuals versus that whole public is lost so how do you change this a uh again I think that that is the work that we’re doing here in um our Research Center and what we want to set up a a network of transition engineering labs around the world where we can have these logical conversations because again on one side of the paper is car car car car car car car car car car car and on the other side is access I I we need to to get to our job we need to get to school we need to inter interact with the market we need to get to a park to enjoy some fresh air so so there’s there’s the access to our activities and if we design the world for the mobility of a few with cars then we’re cutting off the access of everybody else so it’s a it’s a design decision that there’s there’s no body else who designs and builds that system than civil engineers oh I must find your cities civil engineering department and say you all need to get trained as transition Engineers because you need to flip the page over you know you’re taking us down a road that we can see where it leads good pun huh um you know look at an American city we don’t want to go there oh uh India has today highest number of RADS I believe we just over took China more treble roads and uh I think we have possibly the highest amount of a toll road so if you go to most of the toll road it essentially keeps uh people who can’t afford much out of the road because they are dependent on public transport you want something you can’t get you want faster access you have to drive your own car and you pay the toll and you drive on the highway or the speedway or Expressway or whatever it’s called but it just keeps so biggest of infrastructures are built in the country to cat to very small percentage of population so right uh so this is called sustainable development again right and those are political decisions right because they’re big money spends so they’re they’re from the top down they’re about uh the political decisions talking ourselves into that if we build this road we’re going to have economic growth you know uh yeah and so the only counterfactual to that that I’ve found is is that they can’t build it themselves they actually need the civil engineers and just like a politician can’t demand that a chemical Factory be built in a way that will will kill 10 workers a day because they think it’s a good idea right or whatever uh because the chemical Engineers who run the factory won’t do it so the civil engineers learning transition engineering learning how to look at things as a whole system designed for the actual need which is the access to activities of all and that is leading to a different future I understand how we got the one we’ve got now I understand that this you know the the public money the um suiting the elite that you know spending that money for the convenience of the elite I understand it but there is an antidote to it and that is social responsibility of the people who actually do the designing and buap perhaps you should open up your programs for policy makers and bureaucrats because I think they need to understand this see we have a system where uh people are into town planning department doesn’t understand that congestion on road is directly proportional to the congestion of population in a locality when they give permission for 100 tall buildings and then they say the roads are small it is logical that it is bound to be small for the population you have allowed to be located there so so they are not connecting that if you give permission for this many tall build buildings to come up here it is bound to contribute to the traffic tomorrow so what we need is people who are able to look at everything so maybe you need to take your program and offer it to policy makers because they need to understand they need to understand that if there are more people going to live there that means that more people are going to use the road so more people are going to use the road you you need to have better planning for Road s and not planning roads for cars but roads of commuting I think uh well you were just talking about you were just talking about that there’s a lot of a lot of the engineers in India are going into software correct um one of the research projects that that I’m doing here is actually modeling of human access activities so so that you can design cities or or take what you’ve got and re-engineer them so that they they just work um because you have to start with what you’ve already built because what else are you GNA do and that is is some really interesting modeling that isn’t really done and it connects up those things like you say the the where you go at night where you go during the day and what’s in between and um you you just see that that that whole idea of the personal Auto mobile being the way that that works uh is mad it’s just yeah but a lovely city that’s that that that works is what’s out there for us to pursue so so let’s let’s do that and to do that the politicians um you know the their understanding of of these complex issues is is very narrow they’re getting lobbied by people who want to build a tall building right I want to build a tall building I want to make a lot of money they’re getting lobbied by construction firms that build roads yeah yeah we’ll build a road it’ll be fine we’ll build a road and what’s complex is how people actually live and move through that City and nobody’s advocating for that who’s going to sell that to the politicians so that’s why I’m saying let’s put that in the discipline bucket where the people um who design those systems have to do it right let’s get that research done quickly let’s let’s get right in there and get that so a a um Urban transition engineering center for India might be indicated at the moment America needs some too wonderful I think there are few people working on it but maybe I’ll be happy to connect them with you as well and hopefully a lot of them are like urban planners where they’re saying this doesn’t work this doesn’t work this doesn’t work okay let’s flip that over and say okay what are the tools that we need to design what would work so connecting things up yeah correct so I I just want to uh step back uh from the earlier conversation where you talking about U uh uh oil Peak and uh so that’s where we needed a a solution so how much of biofuel in your perspective is relevant and sustainable right well um that you can find um some Engineers to do some calculations for you we had that uh you know the fuel price run up the the peak oil um situation and a lot of governments reacted to that by saying biofuels is our answer that’s our solution uh apparently without ever asking well didn’t we do this in the 70s we already did that right no they didn’t ask that which we had so we already knew but then um without ever asking someone to do some basic calculations so I was in New Zealand then and so we sat down and we looked at all of the agricultural land What It produced um the the efficiency of converting those um products into biofuel then looking at if they’re processed in New Zealand or if there’s a waste Stream New Zealand had good statistics um on on the the tons of different kinds of you know kiwi fruit skins because the the juice was actually made here so we took those and looked at the efficiency of putable um um gas conversion or ethanol conversion and we just calculated for the economy of New Zealand if we converted all all of the um biogenic waste streams into fuel what percentage of our bio of our fuel could we replace with biofuel if we converted all of our sweet potato potato um corn and um wheat crops into fuel instead of food what what could we um produce and then if we um if we converted our land to rape seed which the biologists tell me that once you plant rape seeds somewhere so that’s the canola that it cross-pollinate with things and so it it’ll destroy the ability to produce seeds from from anything that’s within you many kilometers of the rape seed so that’s why yeah I guess where you grow where you grow the canola is special areas so if we give up our status as a as a rape free place where where seeds are actually grown for the rest of the world um then how much biodiesel could we produce and so using the facts and figures for New Zealand we did those calculations and um we published that in a paper in the journal energy policy and you see that New Zealand could not get above eight% of its current fuel use um with all you know having no more food basically and not not you know the amount that that farmers now get for export they’d have to get a very small a very tiny amount of that for fuel because the the value of the fuel is much lower than the value of the food and so it’s it’s an absolutely mad idea like like why did you think this was a good idea to pursue there going to be any farmers who are going to do this hopefully we’ll we’ll stop the rape planting before it gets out of hand and I presented that paper um at a National Conference in New Zealand and right before me was the government um spokesperson who gave this you know oh the government’s going to do biofuel and we could run our economy on our own biofuel and she’s just like spouting this stuff that had no basis in reality and then I got up and went through the numbers and basically said she’s full of it but yeah have they changed it what about biofuels yeah well it went away didn’t it I mean it didn’t make any sense so it was never going to make sense it could be the government policy and then definitely you can find a a picture of Helen Clark opening up a um Fort where one of the fuel companies was selling some biofuel in at this for court and it was just it was just performative governance it wasn’t a real thing and so they put a mandate on for a while that New Zealand was going to have to mix biofuel in and then they figured out they couldn’t actually make it because none of the farmers wanted to do it because they would lose money and so oh well we’ll import Palm kernel oil from Indonesia oh where they’re wiping out rainforest to plant palm kernel and that’s sort of where yeah it just sort of quietly went away way as a as a policy um so yeah good at least that it went away but it is very much in practice still here in fact there oh it come back it’s come back in New Zealand um it’ll it’ll keep coming back even though there’s these it’s very easy to do the numbers and that food or fuel that is just a that’s a hard stop that we have very careful this is I just want to recall my first question about uh uh why do you want to question the sustainable growth because this is the context in fact uh unfortunately biofuel is PED as one of the means for sustainable growth so that is what you meant to question the sustainable growth so I just wanted to put the complete the circle here in the context when he started that’s the thing we call a crash test you you just find somebody go you know go to your local University find somebody who who can you know do some numbers and put the numbers to it and see if it if it matches the story because it’s very easy to create a story and get some graphics and get some talking points for the politicians and especially to give subsidies to companies to build a ethanol plant or something that you know the United States did that they took all this Surplus it’s done here in India yeah so so a methodical way to question the story and then um I guess wind that down you’ve built an ethanol plant and who is that actually benefiting you know probably the food prices are going up because there’s some stream of food that’s now going into that the other thing is those things use a lot of water so I don’t know if you’ve got lots of surplus water see there are many people who write about it but one of the things I found very good about your book is that you actually address every aspect of it including water consumption in fact many people have actually left it out from my observation yep and then how hard you’re working the land and and if you just make that connection which I think I put in the book The Cal the calculation of corn ethanol that’s the best resource for ethanol some some some have captured the land use from a renewable energy point of view but uh what is missing in my observation is the water usage so I think uh so that’s another reason why uh to the listeners and audience you should look at up there’s lot of Statistics data and also infographics right so there’s a lot of things in our uh sustainable growth economy that we have to stop doing because they weren’t good ideas is so the only way to tell if something wasn’t a good idea is honesty so a thing that we transition Engineers agree to be honest um and then um don’t do any more of it if it doesn’t make sense let’s let’s let’s try again and see what else we can come up with oh uh one more thing I wanted to ask you uh I think you also make this a point in terms of depletion of natural resources and and uh even from the Hydro power plants right the the top soil erosion which is uh uh which actually takes away a lot of mineral value out of water also so not just the energy consumption side right while from an energy standpoint hydrop power plants are observed as one of the sustainable ones right from a sustainability standpoint but what is ignored otherwise is that it actually erods lot of Minal value out of it so that is another thing which Remains The Challenge one one definitely has to look at it so are there any uh uh effort you research you have looked at the research data you come across on that front um yeah there’s there’s been papers done about um when a hydro Reservoir is built um how important it is to clear all the vegetation out of the reservoir before it’s filled because the the methane produced by the rotting vegetation essentially makes that absolutely not a uh a low carbon electricity source so so there’s that and then of course like you said you you stop the siltation the the nutrients from from coming down the river and and fertilizing the the flood planes um there’s a lot of things that we do know and and we can now observe in retrospect like especially the Nile the damning of the Nile and and um in America the the salmon runs being wiped out by the by the dams and it it seems like there’s a bigger picture here that when we look at it we should learn is it possible that the anthropologists are right that every time humanity has faced a new challenge and a lot of times that challenge comes from a new technology um or from climate change like the the um the glaciers the the ice ages would would would force humans to change what they were doing and therefore adapt and come up with new things new tools um fire these sorts of things that that when we have a new um challenge we actually evolve a new capability and this challenge we’ve got now is our own ability to run ahead of what is safe and sustainable um that we can talk ourselves into oh this is economic growth oh this is yeah yeah this is a great thing we can just jump forward and do it and so right now can we evolve a way to to sort of hold on to these great ideas until we’ve tested them out in a systematic way at a sort of corrective Loop in our development decisions um I think I see those corrective Loops in um traditional economies that that ability to just wait to not rush into things to to make choices yeah that looks great but I don’t think we’re gonna do it no that the risks are too high and and and traditional people have a hard time explaining why they don’t want to do a thing to people who want them to do do it but but that ability to sort of manage our expectations and manage our our forward run um that is what I hope transition engineering can start it’s a whole system discussion um but let’s you know if we can get together and start that process we’re we’re going to need it for the long haul it’s not it’s you know it’s a because of our capabilities now we’re going to need this ability to to to sense check and to systems check and to Future check what we think is a great idea right now before it before it runs away and that is Step seven of the transition engineering approach right I just want to have two more conversations on the energy side so uh the last but one would be on the renewable energy so that is another uh a flag bearer for the sustainable development and an alternate to the carbon fuel right so how how uh how do you want to present it I would urge obviously audience and listeners to look up the book but maybe a quick uh perspective right renewable energy we’re saved right uh and there’s a lot of podcasts on that that you know wind is getting cheap and it’s growing super fast and solar’s cheap as chips and it’s growing super fast and batteries are even getting cheaper so we’re done we’re saved right um I again let’s check that let’s let’s do the numbers and let’s look forward let’s let’s build a simple model where we we um you know put on what growth rates or or whatever and let’s let’s make sure we keep track of how many mines that’s going to require and how many Fab facilities and and how much um input output it’s going to need like you know to build a solar panel you need this much um aluminum and yeah uh can you produce aluminum from solar so so let’s let’s look at this whole system and let’s let’s run forward at least a hundred years with that system and see see where it takes us and essentially what what I’m GNA say is that renewable energy works renewable energy has always been what humanity is used um you know the Sun the water the wind we’ve always always used it so of course it sure we can run a civilization on renewable energy it’s that page full of the word need that we need to have a look at because that world run on renewable energy right now it’s looking to me like we’re talking ourselves into another runaway train where we’re just going to throw renewable energy up and throw batteries up and it’s going to separate the Lively or the the prospect ects of people even more you know there’s going to be the elites who have access to that and all the others who have access to going and getting jobs in Minds you know it’s it’s going to yeah this runaway train effect I think is is in very much danger of getting getting going in the Renewables area it’s it’s it’s not good no matter no matter where it’s happening there’s no inherently good technology the good technology what beats me is why is that people don’t look at a life cycle analysis Vie to these things the researchers who Advocate this why don’t they look at it because I remember time well they do and then they compare it to fossil fuel right the life cycle analysis of a solar panel uh the energy return on energy invested we can look at that we can look at the materials used we can look at that we hope it’ll be recyclable but that’s not really what we’re looking at at the moment um and so yeah we we just talk ourselves into boarding this runaway train and that part of that talking ourselves into it is well we compare it to um fossil fuel right compare it to Coal it has lower emissions well lower is it what we need right now we need a downshift of emissions so do the calculations and see if what you’re talking about gets us there and there is no set of calculations on the planet that shows that we can get to uh the the um backing away from the um from the failure limit by just increasing Renewables there’s a there’s a massive downshift in fossil fuel needed which brings down the total energy so that world where we’ve reorganized ourselves to not need energy that we can’t afford and that the future can’t afford um that that’s actually the project and that that’s a pretty simple project statement actually so um maybe I need to work on how we tuck ourselves into that well uh uh in fact uh uh the significant part of the Europe already it is quite divided in the nuclear argument right so UK included uh is uh more for renewable and less on nuclear and Germany has been leading this argument for some time so what’s your take on nuclear in this Contex right again nuclear power is a thing we were talking about earlier that that the things that are the biggest threat to our future our children our grandchildren our great-grandchildren are things that we have no control over we didn’t build them we didn’t design them um you know and nuclear power is the epitome of that how many of us actually have one bit of say about nuclear power they they necess nuclear engineering nuclear um development is necessarily a completely top down um activity the French are now finding out that 50 years in you can lose your capability to do this that the end of life of those plants means end of life when you know end of life means end of life and that you can’t just keep them going and so that long-term VI um where we were going to have ways to deal with the waste uh the other thing is look where is the fuel going to come from for these these nuclear power plants but the the raw materials in use is very small the waste is also significantly small compared to any other resource right right and that’s not how risk works you have um you have uh probability and impact so the fact that the volume of waste is small doesn’t preclude the fact that the impact over a particular amount of over an infinite amount of time is massive so I I don’t know it’s like nuclear it’s a symptom of our inability to manage our own sustainability it it it it really is it’s one of those things that um uh it is what it is like the the nuclear system that that’s already in place the nuclear power plants that exist the tailings piles that exist from from the the original Mining and Milling the uranium hexafluoride gas that’s sitting around um the contaminated sites that exist the piles of spent fuel that exist all of these things that already exist are some of the biggest challenges we have to manage going forward so building more of those what problem was it we were trying to solve is it a way to to manage those risks we’ve already made um yeah it’s just yeah I I know the um people want to know that there’s a solution right I just want a simple solution and I want to I want to have a political position on that that I just believe it and I don’t want to talk about it anymore because it’s all complex but nuclear is one of those things that you’ll you’ll just get yourself into a um a round and round spiral of not actually having any impact anyway so move on to what you actually can do well so what’s the best energy ARA in your perspective ah um okay energy return on energy invested is is a a concept that is coming out of Bio um biophysical economics which just says okay there’s the economics that’s in the human thought space of you know value of time and money and and consumption and stuff interest rates whatnot which is all human constructed right and then there’s the physical world where if you’re G to grow food you have to plant and you know Harvest and you have to actually do actual work with actual soils the X number of process it consumes y amount of energy yeah so if we think about the world in that context of of the actual physical um tradeoffs then the amount of energy that we have to take from the economy in order to build an energy system that provides energy to the economy that’s like an investment right so we invest energy that we could have used for something else into a system that gives us energy that we can use for something else so we need a return on that we need we need a a an energy profit so so to speak and what I’m pretty sure of from from uh digging into the numbers is that hunter gatherer societies have an extremely high ERI the amount of energy so food and um and and labor that they put into the systems that return energy to them like fire and food is very positive maybe 80 to 100 to one right so so they if you look at what anthropologists have found about the amount of time that Hunter gather societies spend working um on those sorts of things it’s it’s actually not very big so we think of them as eaing out a survival but it’s actually a a cushier life than than a factory worker or something all right so then you get to um now now the next one is farming so if you’re going to now try and make land work for you depends on what land depends on where it is depends on what you’re farming um you have to have inputs to that but that is a also a very huge return on investment food um and uh wood you know if you’re raising if you’re if you have a wood lot and you have to keep that Forest going because that’s where your Wood’s coming from the work that you put in to keeping the forest going is kind of management and then some chopping and moving it’s it’s a really good return on investment when what you need is energy for cooking and and and for heating and for materials processing well once you get to an industrial society um that gobbles up all your wood so it it makes an end to the renewable resource and uh you you know use use all of your Hydro power and that’s limited so you get to to that state and then you have to go to coal and so that that return on investment of using coal for industrial purposes is again really quite high it’s just a lot of very intensive free energy sitting there you go get it and and put it in and it works now when we get to something like oil that has a quite a high energy return on invest energy return on investment the question is what are we investing in right so so we we tend to waste a lot more of that than than we did with the coal in in industrial um you know materials processing making cement we’re actually making stuff that we then use but Oil we’re sort of just just burning it and having a good time uh and then you get to gas which we do use for heat and for for um manufacturing and when you get then you want to come back and you want to run an industrial World on biofuels what you see is that that that mismatch is is completely wrong we also have petroleum products right plastic and whole lot of other things which are including that draw and the cup well usually thrown away that’s right you’re making an amazing material just to throw it away that’s yeah this this sort of Mad World application goes everywhere right clothing to medicines the medicines to packaging to pretty much everything so well if you think about that mineral resource the the hydrocarbons um that exist as a mineral resource um for things we need and you start working out okay how much of that stuff that we make is actually in the need category you start to see that a downshifted production of those mineral resources to fit a society that you know just just isn’t mad that that is sustainable that that’s the project so not how do we feed this overshot overinflated runaway train of a technological enterprise-based Society um with you know what’s what’s left of the remnants of biology on the planet let’s throw that in but more like downshift that to a survivable um and survi like let’s make if you imagine energy and materials being the Servants of a good life um it it just is a different philosophy a different way of applying the same knowledge and that space to have that space to to design those different systems and the transition to them that keeps me actually hopeful I have to say right well uh uh in fact there are lot more things but uh as a last question in this section I want to ask you how do you propose to address the popular narrative versus reality I think you you spent a lot of time in trying to put that together in the book so maybe uh uh and also uh the the aspects of it influencing in the policy making right and and this is top of mind because we all expect our policy makers to work for us to make good decisions to to take action right um and I don’t think that my approach to that and the transition engineering approach to that comes from a defeatist or um cynical way of looking at it I think it comes from a realistic way of looking at it um the first story in the book is the story of the Titanic it’s a thought experiment um if we had a time machine and I put you onto the deck of the Titanic 24 hours before it hits an iceberg could you save the Titanic what Would You Do What actions are are in your in your repertoire could it be the the information that you have about the future would that change would that sa the Titanic would that change things and I think that’s the Quant that the climate scientists find themselves in is that they have information about the future that comes from pretty reliable and tested and you know modeling and they’re trying to show us the catastrophe coming and it’s not changing anything it might get some of the passengers worried but it’s not it’s not really it’s not doing what what they thought it would do and then we all expect the captain to just you know look at that information and just slow down the ship the ship’s going full speed into this iceberg and the the other ships in the area actually radioed the location of that Iceberg to to the Titanic hours before it hit it so should we expect our political leaders to to take the pertinent information and take the appropriate action and I think that’s where we see the breakdown of that expectation that even if you and me are on the deck of the Titanic and we’ve got eight hours to go and we know exactly what’s ha happening number one I don’t like our chances of finding the captain to try and talk him into slowing the ship down do you oh yeah could we go talk to our respective Prime Ministers I’ll go talk to sunak here and we’ll we’ll talk to him about a little hopeless doesn’t it they’re driving this ship the way that you know all of their information says to drive it and they’re very proud of it it’s a brand you know it’s a the latest technology yada yada and they’re having dinner with the first class passengers in the first class lounge and you and me ain’t getting in there so so that expectation that it’s that it’s the political leaders or even the owner of the ship who you know they’re going to lose their investment if they keep keep this course going but we can’t like what are the odds that we’ll be able to convince them to to tell the captain to slow down because their whole you know they’re they’re just in their own bubble up in the first class Lounge having dinner and dancing and and having a good time so could we could we get the you know all of the third class passengers who are just working people having to give up their homes because they they can’t live in in in Europe anymore and they’re trying to get to America to get to factory jobs and they’re just trying to survive this 4-day journey they’ve spent everything they have on it can we get them to protest go up to the bridge and and you know occupy the deck or something to to you know can we get them to take action because what action do they have they can’t Captain the the the ship um they definitely can’t go talk to the first class people um what action can they take well they can protest if we can wake them up I mean I don’t know so is their protest going to change this journey I wish it did I I wish that that was an obvious yes but I’m not sure I would bet my life on it and so my story of where transition engineering sits in all this is that we’ve got you know 3,000 people on this ship and 50 of them are making the ship go so fast that it’s going to sink when it hits the iceberg and those 50 are down in the bottom shoveling coal and all we need is for for them to reduce the amount of coal they’re shoveling and the lookout will see the iceberg the captain will will call for a you know full Full Throttle change to the right the passengers will go whoa so so for me the 2% of the population that are driving the actual thing that understand that this system is not um immune to catastrophe and that the catastrophe as explained is possible and that the only action possible is to slow it down and change direction that that possibility that the engineers in who make it run away could actually save the day has a much higher probability to me than that our political leaders will somehow I mean I don’t I don’t think they’re getting better gotta say that their understanding they might say sustainability more and they might but it it just seems to be just driving us harder in the direction that that we’re already going um right well what do you think what would you do would you be able to go reach the captain uh no I really don’t think so I mean if I could if if I could right now today um get a you know get a meeting Rishi we sit down have a chat and I’d explain to him look you know here’s here’s how how this all works and I know it seems like it works the way that you think it does but the shift to where the UK is doing fine and everything it it requires a national effort you know kind of like a a re-engineering of everything but that’s okay we can actually do that you just you just give the you know give the impetus and he’ll say well we’re doing hydrogen yeah I know that we’re spending three billion on hydrogen yeah and that that’s the thing let me let me show you some numbers on that right so so so far me getting to have a chat with reishi doesn’t look great me being able to make the argument that there’s a different way to look at this let’s flip that over possibly he’s a smart guy he understands counterfactuals but then the political positioning that politicians have that the announcement we’ve already made is correct right I’m I’m not going to back down on that I might quietly go over here to a different announcement but I’m not going to resend an announced policy that’s just not going to happen so I don’t like my chances that much right the plan we have is what I’ve announced it I’m the captain that’s what we’re doing it has to be right because I said it so yeah so like I said I right now with the time I’ve got if I can teach a new thing to engineers and that can spread the way that safety engineering has spread the way security engineering has spread um then um what we’ll see is that businesses and governments will start demanding that because they’ll see that it works they’ll they’ll see that they’ll see that new safe direction that we’re going and they’ll start announcing that uh that’s what we’re going to do and that’ll be fine wonderful well uh people don’t listen to your podcast do they I I don’t know if political people will listen but hopefully uh we we we we’ve had uh some interesting conversation on uh hydrogen as well and our Minister for Road Transport had made U uh a commitment on investing in hydrogen so I did tag that podcast to his him I didn’t hear from his office or him either so I don’t know I don’t know if they’re getting to listen to it I don’t know if it is getting filtered out by his office what I’ve just told you I think is a fundamental property of political uh environment which is that once we’ve announced something we aren’t going to talk about it anymore we’re not going to question it so don’t try that so you you can possibly introduce a better thing uh and get get them to announce on that but yeah right now well I don’t know see this man this uh Minister for Road Transport who announced it he’s also an entrepreneur I I primarily believe that entrepreneurs are not our to stepping back on a decision made because you know we entrepreneurs understand we make mistakes and most important thing is that that I understand it soon enough and correct it so if I don’t agree with that I have made a mistake then I I I won’t make it far so I I but only thing is it should reach him I don’t know if if it gets filtered out so the same things what you mentioned so but yes we uh it’s interesting times and uh uh uh that’s where I I also keep making a lot of arguments and I also write about uh this particular thing I did write some blogs on popular narrative versus reality I also talk about life cycle analyses so so every opportunity I try to talk about it pleas get people to start thinking in that approach everything fromone El a point of view so that uh don’t just get swayed by whatever the talk uh before it gets to your table how much of energy has it consumed right so there is lot more has consumed and if it is done more than 10 years even before it gets to your hand then you think is it really sustainable so uh but yes we we we surely need this and uh to the audience and listeners uh whatever you heard the book has lot of Graphics lot of Statistics research references and infographics and interpers lot of interesting stories like she just mentioned about thought experiments yep the thought experiment uh with Titanic so uh you will find it interesting and do share this conversation and also look up the link below this PARTA and uh come back soon because we’re going to talk to her also about her perspective on future and uh until then if you’re not subscribed subscribe to future f and once again Professor suan thank you so much for doing what you’re doing and being here with us as well [Music]