 Well let me kick things off. Hello and welcome to this Purdue Engineering Distinguished Panel and Lecture. My name is John Sutherland. I am the Phasenfeld Head of Purdue's Environmental and Ecological Engineering Department, or as we say, EEEE. Welcome to what I expect will be an exciting and thought-provoking panel involving our distinguished lecturer, Professor Julian Allwood, who comes to us from Cambridge University. Following today's panel session, we will have Professor Allwood's lecture. So we're doing things a little bit different today, first the panel, then the lecture. For both the panel and the lecture, if you have questions, please feel free to enter them into the chat. To kick off this panel session, let me introduce Miriam Stevens, who will serve as the moderator for the panel. Ms. Stevens is a fourth year PhD student in EEEE. Her research is focused on the extent to which the U.S. can circularize its critical material supply chains. She primarily works on forecasting the expected availability of reusable battery materials. She is advised by Professor Shweta Singh. Miriam, please take it away. Thanks, Professor Sutherland. Yeah, so hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today to think about this topic. So I'm going to introduce the panelists, and then we'll get started. We're very fortunate to have these four researchers and designers of solutions here with us who are willing to show their perspective on the theme. So our panelists are Dr. Julian Allwood, who's a professor of engineering in the environment at Cambridge University. Dr. Goche Asandaran, who is an associate professor of management at Purdue University. Dr. Howarder, John Howarder, associate professor of materials engineering and of environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue. And also Dr. Miriam Vele-Lizancos, who is an assistant professor of civil engineering at Purdue. So the format of the panel will be as follows. I'll ask each of our panelists to introduce themselves and their work briefly, and any introductory thoughts on the topic. And then after introductions, we'll have a discussion guided by some questions that I'll ask. And then for the last 15 minutes, starting at about 10 after, we'll open it up to the audience for questions. So as Dr. Sutherland said, if you have questions at any point, feel free to put them into the chat, and we will come back to them at the end. At which point, I think we'll also allow you to digitally raise your hand and unmute yourself and ask your question yourself. Yeah. So to get us started, to each of our panelists, would you please take a minute or so to introduce your work and how it relates to the theme and share any initial thoughts you have on what is the role of engineering in delivering decarbonization at speed and scale. And so that is our theme, but also keep in mind that I think we should expand it to include not only engineers or including in what we are referring to as engineers as people who are designers of business models and markets. So yeah, and I'll propose that we start with Dr. Allwood, and then have Dr. Valialisankos go, followed by Dr. Sandron, and then Professor Howarder. Brilliant. Thanks, Miriam. In one minute then, you'd like me to summarize my career to date and everything I'm going to say in the one hour lecture coming up after this. So that's no difficulty at all. My title is Professor of Engineering in the Environment, and I mucked around in my career trying to find something to do until about 20 years ago. I spotted that everybody talking about climate mitigation was trying to reshape the problem to fit their current expertise. And you can see why, because that's the tradition of what we do in universities. But it was coming up with a very incoherent response. So I decided to take the step of abandoning any idea of having any expertise, but to focus on the problem and to grip it with my teeth and not let go. And that's revealed a whole series of opportunities for research and innovation that I think were largely hidden. Initially, that was all about material efficiency. So in 2011, we published a book saying that there were no means to produce the bulk materials, steel, cement, paper, plastic, and aluminium at the scale we want them with a more efficient or lower emitting process. So we would have to use less materials. So I rebranded my research group as the use less group, which is a little bit of British humour that even Germans seem to understand. And since then, we have been promoting using less as a core element of climate mitigation. Over the last five years, we've expanded it way beyond the material system. And to try and cover calling card to politicians who aren't used to saying either use less or demand reduction, we're setting up spin out companies as fast as we can to try and promote the idea that there is growth in businesses that reduce the total national demand for energy and materials. Is that enough? I could keep going because I'm a professor. I can go on for any amount of time. That wasn't enough for now. We will see you. Thanks. Thank you. Yeah, so I think it's my turn. So my name is Miriam Belay-Lithankos and I am an Assistant Professor at Purdue University in Civil Engineering. And my research was initially focused on suit to capture or suit to reduction with valorization, but then I also came to the realization that that's not enough. So then we were starting to do other things. Well, first of all, of course, durability, because if something is more durable, you don't have to rebuild it over and over. And also optimization to use less material. But lately what we are doing is try to make concrete and other materials proactive in a way that it will help to reduce pollution. Far from try to do net zero or something, just have a system with this very large amount that we use and also with this very large surface that is occupying and try to make it work for us. So that's one of my primary focus right now, proactive materials, materials that can help to clean the area in different ways and we can go for more details later on. Thank you. And thank you so much for that. Thank you. I think it's my turn now. My name is Gokce Sanduran. I'm an Assistant Professor at the School of Business. And I started working on remanufacturing as a master's student. And my background is in industrial engineering at the time. I was a little concerned about everything we do. It was just focusing on maximizing profits for the companies. And when I came across the idea of remanufacturing, year for wishing at the time, I was really excited to think about this possibility for firms that they can do something relatively good for the environment while still maximizing their profits. At the time, the concept of circular economy at least, the terminology was not there. But I kept working on remanufacturing year for wishing, circular economy type of models. And again, initially, I didn't think about the carbonization benefit of such activities, but they are becoming more important as we focus on the carbonization. And I also have some work on carbon offsets, which are not perfect instruments by any means, but I try to understand how we can make them better. Thank you. Great. So I think I'll round out these introductions. My name is John Howarder. I'm an Associate Professor in Materials Engineering, which is where all my degrees are in. And then I'm also an Associate Professor in Environmental and Ecological Engineering. And John Sutherland, our first introducer, is my department head there. So a little bit of my background, I started work as a materials technologist and I used as a way of confession a lot of really nasty chemicals, chemicals that eventually got banned by the EPA. And that was maybe my moment of realization that if I'm going to continue making new materials, I need to get a little bit smarter about this. And this was around 2010. And when I took this position at Purdue, my research began to transition more and more rapidly into a more generally circular material mindset. So at first it was how do I make a cleaner material? And now we work in how we recycle material, how we recover material, and how we make cleaner materials to begin with. But as it relates to the theme, I would say that as time has gone on, all of my project sponsors care about some sort of bottom line that's more than just money now. And decarbonization is often the inspiration for why they want to embark on whatever project we're doing towards that circularity mindset. So with that, I'll pass the mic back to Miriam and we can dive into your questions. Okay. I might go with a different one next. So what do each of you see as the biggest challenges to decarbonizing the global and or your own national economies? We're going to stick to the same order Miriam, or are you going to change the order? So if at any point anyone has really pressing thoughts, feel free to just go ahead. But if there's like a lull, I'll call on you. Maybe Dr. Allwood, if he'll start us off this time, and then we can switch it up. I'll start and pick up also on what you asked last time, which I didn't answer very well. I think the biggest challenge is that politicians would like to find a solution that nobody notices. So it would be great if we could find what I would call magic beans fertilized by unicorns blood that come along and deliver exactly the same economy, but with no emissions. And at the moment, they've latched onto two phrases, which maybe three phrases that appear to allow that. And those are carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and negative emissions technologies. And the fact that politicians believe that those three three things are near to market and can scale rapidly is stopping them from talking about anything else. But actually, those things cannot scale rapidly. It doesn't matter how much we'd like them to happen. They cannot grow rapidly because they're all dependent on a large system change. So I think engineers have been unhelpful in giving politicians license to that because they're of course a source of innovation funding and that our traditional role has been as the inventors of profitable technologies that we chuck over the wall into the world of business and they turn it into profit. What I think we need to do is to be part of a political dialogue about the whole system of change, which embraces the reality of living differently, as well as all the opportunities to make new technologies grow. So if you like to bring about not just the skills we have in innovation, but the skills we have in whole systems thinking and project delivery, which I think are let it get being forgotten in the excitement that new magic beans might take the problem away without anybody noticing. I'll just follow up and I think related to the political mindset, I think there's also a timescale mismatch of people's expectations. So I mentioned my grants, my funding agencies, they're thinking on a short-term timescale like the politicians because often the money originates from their decisions. Yet we have this target that's inspiring this discussion about a net zero 2050 goal. And so I think setting those expectations and then the expectations of time to market. So you mentioned, hey, these technologies aren't going to come online in some certain time. And if that's not the pleasing answer to someone, well, sometimes that shuts down the conversation a little bit prematurely. So if I could wave a wand before the unicorn blood and say, if we could just have a broader base of education on this, so it's not just the engineers. So it's whoever the engineer, and I'm thinking about myself as an engineer, but whoever I'm talking to across the table has maybe a higher baseline of understanding of these problems, whether politician or not. Yeah. And I think another big problem is that the perspective in different regions and different areas is different. So convincing everyone with the same argument will be very difficult to just try to work all together in the same direction. The consequences, we will deal all with them no matter if we want or not, but the thing is we are living in the full world. And that's, I think, a big challenge because different regions are in different states of development. It's very difficult to find just one solution. I think whoever it is, this is just the solution. It cannot be. There might be many solutions and all of them might work together. And of course, it will take time. And the problem is that politician has four-year term or whatever term and then this is what they want. They want to see something in this time. And that's a very challenging part. But society in general, how we transmit the urgency to the society and the importance, I think it's something that, I mean, I don't think engineers are well trained for that and we have to improve on that. It's not only the knowledge and also it's how to transmit this to the society. And it's very challenging. I completely agree with you, Miriam. And I don't know, I think in the US, you have a broader undergraduate degree because you have the idea of a minor. We don't have that over here. So our engineers graduate having had no exposure to the idea of an argument. Unfortunately, we teach them that all answers or all problems have a right or wrong answer that you can check. And the only times that they come across doubt is when they do a design exercise where there is choice. But the idea of playing a role in a political discussion is alien and completely untrained. And I wish we could bring that in as a normal part of engineering education for exactly the reason that you've just said. You know, maybe related to that, I think regulators also need to understand the business dynamics better. Even regulations that are imposed with good intentions in hard may sometimes backfire. For example, if you impose recycling targets without really understanding how it is going to affect the dynamics in the market, the competition in the market, it may lead to, you know, reduction in re-manufacturing or refurbishing, which is not something you may want to do at the end. So I think from regulators, post-makers perspective, it's important for them to understand the business dynamics and how the requirements they impose on the market would eventually play out. Great. Thank you all. You've already hit on several points leading up to this next question that I was going to address. But so we sort of acknowledge that technological solutions are not going to save us. They can't be scaled in time. And even if they could, if we keep carrying on as we do, eventually we'll just continue to surpass the carrying capacity of the earth and collapse eventually anyway. So with all of that in mind, how should we prioritize investment in different decarbonization technologies, both leading up to 2050, so until we reach climate goals and then after that? I'm happy to keep going first, but I don't, I'm equally happy for somebody else to take over if you'd like to. It's a really tough question, isn't it? But I think what's happening at the moment is that the only thing is getting investment are supply-side technologies. And if you look at the statements of John Kerry, for example, he made the utterly ridiculous statement that half the technologies that will be required to deliver net zero by 2050 haven't yet been invented. Well, I'm afraid that's complete rubbish because we cannot scale them fast enough. And looking at the breakthrough foundation I was talking to with one of your faculty earlier on, they have a predilection for new technologies that have very large scale impact. And so they're focusing on things like negative emissions technologies, which are almost certain not going to be able to deliver because they require so much energy and we won't have the energy to power them. So I think a really valid question is how we work with investors to create a slightly different class of assets, which is the assets that are in the world of resource efficiency, which deliver with more certainty, maybe have lower capital requirements, and maybe have less exciting growth, but are nevertheless profitable and worth backing. I think I'm not the person in the business school. So somebody else is going to be able to articulate that much better than I can. But we aren't prioritizing demand-side activities in the way I think we could. Professor Asandra, and I'm curious maybe what your thoughts are on his answer and then also how you would, I don't know, recommend prioritizing. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I think customer needs and wants drive the market, so if we can find ways for customers to want those products or those solutions that require decarbonization firms will be more willing to invest on those. So this I completely agree with that. And maybe in terms of prioritizing different solutions, I could, because I do some research on carbon offsets, I can also add my view on that. So firms invest in technology, so they have their targets, emission reduction targets, they invest in some technologies and wherever they can not do more than they start buying carbon offsets to meet those goals they set. So I think there is a lot needs to be done there as well in terms of regulating those carbon offset markets so that firms cannot rely on those so much in order to meet the targets they set and that way they will have to look into their own operations and their own supply chain more to find internal solutions and lead to absolute emission reductions. Miriam, may I come back in? I think it's time we had some controversy and I just want to respond to the word of carbon offsets that have come up twice. In Europe in the 1500s the Catholic church used to sell something called indulgences and these were a way of buying yourself out of having committed a sin and in some cases you could buy them before you committed the sin. Now the experimental evidence isn't in yet because we haven't had time to get to heaven and count up who got in and who didn't. But the overall evaluation from churches since then is that selling indulgences wasn't in fact a pathway to heaven. So I would like to put in a word for saying that there are no offsets that work. It's an entirely fake industry that's giving you the illusion that you can keep emitting and feel okay about it. But if you think about it your emitting activity occurs now so the only plausible offset is one that negates emissions now to the same effect and nobody has yet invented one that does that. So in the nicest possible way but with a sort of hint of wanting a little bit of controversy I think we should knock the offsets idea on the head. No, I completely agree. I mean I think there are currently broken mechanisms but my understanding is they are not going away. It would be nice if they maybe somehow completely like you said get fixed or disappear but they are not going away. So that's why we I think need to figure out ways to either make them more efficient or regulate them so that they become a little more effective than they are right now. But I completely agree that it's a broken mechanism and it's definitely not the solution. So if I could ask if it's a broken mechanism, if it's not a solution why is it so enticing? Why is it what we have? Because when I hear this what I hear is we've got bad legislation kicking around and we just have to tolerate it and I run into this a little bit in the recycling end because there are regulations that prevent the valorization of certain kinds of waste and it's like well that's in some ways that's impeding a sustainable progress but everyone says well it's just it's a regulation what can we do? So why do we have bad offset thinking to begin with? One thing is I think price is too cheap and that's why it is appealing for companies. So the real price of carbon should be much higher than the current market price and that's a problem and that's why companies find it attractive so they can easily offset their emissions because it's much cheaper than trying to achieve absolute reductions. So this burst of global inflation has not inflated the carbon market too? If you're telling me the price is too low? Not enough I think. But actually I think John's raised a really important point there that the driver of change in recycling hasn't been pricing but regulation and the reason is that we think of it as a health and safety problem. So we didn't get rid of asbestos because of pricing we got rid of it because we became afraid of it and actually everything that we're doing at the moment I think is on the journey to seeing climate change as a health and safety problem because then you regulate and then you reshape the economy within the rules that you've now regulated things that are harmful to human health. So I think there's a really good template there and oddly in Europe the legislation that's been most important about climate is the banning of combustion engine cars so from 2030 roughly in Europe you won't be allowed to sell a car with a combustion engine and that came about not because of climate but because the public became concerned about pollution in particular about particulates. Obviously the public don't know what particulates are but it was sold in the media as being bad and everybody bought into it being bad and then very rapidly the government passed or the European Union passed legislation to ban combustion engines which is fantastic. So it would be great if we could color carbon dioxide pink so that everybody could see it and feel the harm of having it around but I feel that's going to be too difficult but I think the recycling example is terrific for showing us the right direction for the policy we want to end up with. Yeah that's an interesting point about the combustion engine too because that's a lever that right now in the US people say well look to Europe that's what's coming next and that combustion engine change you know I don't know that there's a legislation in the United States has done that but there's many companies in the US that have basically said we're done making this at least this model this platform on combustion and so I think one little point of optimism that I have is that there are these kind of sea change moments that have been sometimes for as you mentioned almost trivial reasons right but um yeah very interesting stuff. So while I yeah I think this I think our panel might diverge away a little bit from like specific technologies themselves before we do that since we're already on the subject of net negative emissions and offsets I did want to ask about cement and concrete and get like your general thoughts on that but especially Dr. Allwood and Dr. Villelizanco's thoughts so so what are the challenges and opportunities you see related to concrete in the decarbonization of human activity is its potential for sequestration the potential to increase energy efficiency in its production and options for cement substitution are those things enough to offset the emissions intensive nature of its production and then do you think the sequestration potential of it could be realized in time for like the continued use of concrete which seems like I don't know we're not going to stop using concrete or that's a big ask but all this is a huge ask yeah can can we fix concrete in time for it to be a net sink instead of a net source I don't know if professor Allwood wants to start or do you want me to start I want you to start okay I would say there's a not right answer but this short one will be no the concrete itself cannot just be fixed in a minute and it cannot be a carbon sink itself I can tell you a little bit about very quick about you know my own journey on how how I approach it first when I started to work on concrete I was thinking there's a lot of waste also let's do waste valorization and we did waste valorization and we study how recycle aggregate can be used in concrete they're natural aggregate that was great for abiotic depletion of natural resources reduction of waste but it was not great for when you do the full holistic life cycle assessment you will see that in many cases it's not the best case because you will need more cement to achieve the same performance therefore it's not an optimization so then this is when I say okay this might be good for some applications but for other ones not because you'll buy more cement cement production of cement it just produce CO2 so that's not the best option for some cases then the next thing that I was thinking was okay so let's do more durable materials that's something that that works in the sense that you have something more durable then it stays more time you're not you don't need to produce it again then you really need you really can do a big impact the next thing was okay concrete capture CO2 naturally right because of carbonation everyone knows but it's very slow can we accelerate it and then we went and we did the research and we find a way to accelerate it is that enough no first because the maximum you can get it's a 40 percent of the CO2 that you emitted initially and even if you do it fast it's not enough there are other ways there are many ways you say you know using supplementary cementitious materials other things all of these things we try to combine together and try to see how much we can save and stay and still it's better to have an accelerated carbonation than not especially if you do not if you do not affect durability the responses yes that's why we started to develop a dynamic life cycle assessment meaning it's not the same if you capture the CO2 slowly that if you do it faster because at the end of the day you know it's like if you pay your debt very fast or slow it's different so that's something that we did and then we realized we need to do something more and we need to do it in a way that also it can be scalable you know there's all these things and then it has to be economically you know feasible I mean it's not possible to have everything together but we are doing progress on that sense and what we are doing now is especially surface treatments and coatings that has photocatalytic activities or other activities that will react with the environment and it will start to decompose for example CO2 into less harmful compounds still I mean we are in the process it's not something that you know every time that we have a press release or something like that I have to really you know make a big effort in a way that it's clear and it's not over promising because what media wants is to say hey we solve the problem and we see the problem solved every day in the media and it's the problem first it's not solvable this was one solution and second it's a problem that you know we need to combine many solutions and do it in an effective way and then again before I get that you just one thing and I will stop because I think I'm going too fast and then not too fast but too long this is that you know at the beginning I was I do research basically I don't want is to deal with you know companies and this is a different thing that now I realize how important it is to not only do the research not only to you know find solutions even if not just solution that fits every fit of course but then also make sure that this is translated into technology that is usable and it makes sense and you know it's a lot so it takes me up at night in a way that I was thinking about all of these things at the same time and you know so this is kind of the the realistic thing you know I'm same this thing all the time that someone interview me but then when the right place are different brilliant so Miriam knows far more than I do about reabsorption and I have learned a lot from that but the key answer is that it doesn't work very effectively and it takes a very long time and I had a really great meeting an hour ago with your colleague Luna Lou who had a very nice way of expressing the strategies that exist at the moment about dealing with emissions so as we stand there are no means to produce cement with no emissions but there are a lot of snake oil salesmen claiming that they can do it they can't so the three strategies available to us are to use less clinker when we make cement and primarily that's about using supplementary cementitious materials that has been largely granulated blast furnace slag and fly ash so far but they're both the products of highly combusting emitting industries so that's a short one that's going to close the more exciting one is calcined clay then you can think about using less cement by blending the concrete accurately most concretes use more cement than they should do and that's wasteful so we know that we can do better but I think the really fun engineering one is using less concrete if you think about it the only really efficient use of concrete is a dam so a dam has roughly the same aspect ratio of an egg shell and it's because the water transfers pressure to load in the concrete through a perfectly compressive system so you can design a dam that uses concrete optimally in contrast if you ever use concrete to make a bending element then half the concrete is wasted because concrete has no strength in tension it's only strong in compression but it's worse than that because only the very top element of the concrete is being loaded properly so there is an opportunity to rethink construction completely based on shell elements that look like dams as opposed to beam elements which we know are wasteful and I think there is a huge opportunity there however what Luna started from was using less clinker but she was assuming that the clinker was going to come from a conventional cement kiln but in the spirit of Netflix I can tell you that in part two of this series the lecture I should be giving in an hour towards the end of the lecture I shall tell you about the world's first means for making clinker with no emissions whatsoever but I'm not going to tell you now yeah I will want to add just one thing I mean it's always you know tempted to say just substitute concrete directly don't use concrete we should will be great but the thing is the alternatives are not less carbon intensive if we for example build the bridge with steel that we can the CO2 emissions are not lower and then not only that also the durability side is very important if we build something in a way that it will stay and if we want to stay the game we don't want to do something very durable if it's temporary but I really I am really about advocate to do things to last I mean if if not it just doesn't work but what I would say is you know we have to find alternatives that it will indeed have a better environmental impact and also and not only during the production side that we have to do holistically and do the math over the service life that's very important and there are some applications that come concrete doesn't make any sense but there are other ones that we cannot get rid of and again I mean it's I don't think it will go away but there are many ways to to do it better and then as I said no matter if it's concrete or any other construction material we have huge opportunities not only to just focus on production side and how to reduce that but also how to make them work and make you know materials that can we have with environment in different ways and again that's that's difficult that it is important to develop technologies to scale it up in a reasonable way but it is possible everything is possible not today but it is possible okay so yes if we if we can't fix the process we should try and use less of it but how do we how do we make that happen so to everyone so to what degree and how should we try and engineer markets to deliver decarbonization and maybe in what instances are market driven strategies to bring about decarbonization more effective than regulations what does the focus on either have on the speed at which we can accomplish things so Mary I'll just make a short comment that relates to the discussion we just had and it's also a short comment because I don't have a long thought for this one um but I will just say that there's a lot of industries like concrete where it's something we absolutely have to have nobody wants to give it up and there's no clear path out of it right and and I think you know I think professor Alwood has outlined it in his work already you know aviation aviation is the big one that scares me because I've liked to fly right and it's like to say wait I have to turn this off no no no I I don't want to do less with that right um semiconductors is an area that I work in a lot and it uses a lot of nasty stuff that has a lot of global warming potential but we don't want to give up our computers right and it's like the alternative to the flight is hey we're on zoom right we're doing all this stuff that we have we feel like we have to do right and so the thing I like about market based solutions is that they cross cut all these sectors it's not a regulatory capture of one industry that says oh here's this and the thing that I'm most afraid of is that sectors actually advocate for them to be accepted oh no no we're too important to have to you know make progress in these areas right and so and so the short comment is just that I think I think the market based solutions are are a big lead out of it but um I'm not the expert in that area so I will mute myself um and and hear what my colleagues have to say it's an impossibly difficult question this one isn't it for 30 years economists who have a really broad diversity of opinions have all told us that you need a carbon price and that will solve everything um and there's two problems about that one is that 30 years as experience has told us that we aren't going to have a carbon price because we don't have a global police force to enforce it you can't have one locally if you don't have one across the borders and we have no mechanism for enforcing it worldwide but the second thing is that a carbon price only works if it if it causes pain and the people to whom it's going to cause pain are the poorest people so politically it's actually not a great mechanism because the people with the least option to buy their way out of it are going to suffer the most pain but carbon emissions is fundamentally about the rich I'll show you a graph on wealth inequality later on um but roughly your emissions are proportional to your income and it is therefore the highest income people who are the people that um can buy their way out of a carbon tax but who are the ones that we need to be able to control so I don't think that works and what we've been looking at is whether a different financial mechanism would be to give better information to markets so they can value share prices better so John has made a very good point about flying and maybe I should make the comment now I'm very grateful to you all for allowing me to talk in this format I think that's one of the great things we learned from lockdown but 10 years ago once I looked at my own carbon footprint it was completely dominated by flying that's true for almost all academics and I realized I couldn't continue to fly if I was going to work on this topic with integrity it's a bit like doing structural mechanics and pretending that hoax law doesn't exist so I stopped flying it took me three years to work off the commitments I'd made um but then I haven't taken any new commitments since then and life hasn't ended it's changed but I love zoom because we can make friends uh in new places what we spotted with the pledges of the uh aviation industry which are all complete hot air is that they are all depending on three resources that they themselves are not proposing to deliver so all climate policy depends fundamentally on either emissions free electricity or on carbon storage or on biomass and there are no other fundamental resources so we call those three the three zero emissions resources and what we tried to work on and we worked on this with Mark Carney's finance team ahead of COP26 was a finance mechanism to price those so that companies could buy futures in them so that then if you looked at the balance sheet of uh an airline if they said they had a plan to get zero emissions by some date you could say have they bought the procurement agreements that give them access to those three resources to produce whatever form of synthetic fuel it is they claim they're going to use and if they have great I believe them and therefore I maintain the value of the shares and if they haven't and absolutely none of them have then their price should go down so if you have shares in an airline you should sell them they are talking complete hot air about climate mitigation sadly as John says there are no options for flying a scale with zero emissions by 2050 and I think that's a personal journey we've all got to go on we've simply got to face that truth for me it was a relatively easy one at the stage of career I was at and my family are all within Europe so I could do everything by train and I was wealthy enough to be able to travel by train instead of plane it's a different journey for all of us but we can't face can't avoid the basic truth that flying dominates your footprint if you use a lot of it and therefore it's something that we have to phase out yeah I think some other controversial things as well if you like just to start off no but but you know you're coming about it being you know there's a personal decision that that goes into it it's like it's like to me that's the thing that says okay you know having having that market-based solution is part of it you know and and again that's that's out of my realm but but it's the part where the technology engineering me says okay it's not just engineering that is part of it it is part of a social culture that sort of change right that that has to come along with it yeah I completely agree I mean no matter what we do if there's no mindset in this society to either implement or to give up or some of the privilege we have it's it's just not possible I mean it's you know it's with everything it's also with waste it's with everything I mean we can choose to to use a reusable cup or not reusable cup and I think it it will just depend on you know whatever people feel it's just not only engineering we we just need to to be able to you know find a way that society agrees that this this cannot go on I agree but we've got such an important role that we're not playing within that discussion because as a community or as a profession we are selling the idea that technology will solve the problem that's on aggregate the message that our profession is giving and from what you've just said Miriam I think we have a huge responsibility to get involved in political discussion precisely to say that there isn't a magic technology that's going to take the problem away in the time available so let's think about living in a different way and part of that I think is also to prioritize different ways of assessing welfare we've been conned by the neoclassical economics consensus that GDP growth is the sole measure of welfare everybody in the world knows that that's not true but we allow it to continue as the main driver of policy so I think that's an role that we could be part of we clearly don't have a very strong voice in that but just to keep reiterating that welfare is not measured by income and celebrating all the other things that we enjoy and reminding them that can grow while we move towards a slightly restrained acceptable lifestyle yeah I always do this parallelism that you know we can do the technologies and the technologies can't help but we are just cleaning the mess right but if you're in the lab and you just only focus on finding a way to clean the mess that will not be enough what you have to do is make sure that to be doing with we are not making a mess in the lab so this is kind of the thing it's not only cleaning we have to clean a lot anyway even if we stop now there's a lot of clean so waste valorization is fine everything is fine but in addition to that we have to to find ways to do not make such a mess in in the war I think that's the main thing but it's difficult because again society is the one who drives that thank you all for your oh professor sundry I'm just gonna add to what Miriam said it I completely agree that we need a change in mindset in society and it is though a little difficult for example when I look at in my neighborhood everyone has a lawn mower has a leaf blower like we don't need that not everybody has the own one the whole neighborhood needs only one maybe but in the whole neighborhood we have like 25 30 of them so if we can get into this mindset of really sharing I think we can use less and therefore less production and less use of resources but the change of the mindset especially in the US seems to be at the time being at least a bit difficult because people feel entitled to you know this feeling of ownership and just consumption and buying more I think that's true at a national level but a local level it's incredible how influential individuals can be because if you work with people in your street and suggest something actually people are surprisingly willing and once they've touched it and they've got the feeling that sharing the leaf blower was all right then it becomes something they can be a bit proud of and that might then start effect the way that they take other decisions and the way that they behave at work so I think there's a really powerful effect there that can be activated by any of us who take a constructive and positive action just because people like to join in with something which they know to be the right thing it's rather hard to lead so that's another role that we can all be playing when we sort of buy into the agenda Yeah and I will add also another thing is regulations in terms of warranty and durability of the things I think I think now Europe is three years before it was two years warranty for you know whatever you know for example a washing machine here I think is one year that makes a big difference I can tell you it will fail in one year and one month in many cases I mean and then what you will do they will tell you it's the same to fix it you have to pay the same amount of what what the washing machine costs this this thing happens I can tell you but I mean in many cases I would say no I want to fix it I just I just see all this material all the things I don't want to to just put it in the trash it's not only because the money is because of what it means you know before you have a you know any appliances and it lasts 20 years it's not that we don't know how to do the appliances in the same way we still we all want to have a washing machine right but we can have a washing machine that lasts 20 years it is possible it happened before I know because my mother has one my father has one but right now things are building the way that they do not last and that's an important thing and I think regulations will be the only way to go and to stop it so I really want to continue to like hear your thoughts on how how we reduce consumption essentially and it sounds like yeah at the individual level and community level people are very willing to do that I mean we don't we know that we don't need more stuff just to have it and so continuing like on that topic is definitely something I would like to continue with but we're reaching the end or the start of the open Q&A session but there is in addition to like continuing to talk about this one more question that I did want to make sure it gets asked in some way and so I'm going to ask that and then we'll open it up to Q&A so how should securing social permission or societal permission for deploying mitigation and adaptation strategies be balanced with the urgent need to deploy them? I think it's absolutely brilliant question Miriam and I've been working on an answer to that over the last year with the brainiest bloke I've ever met who is has PhDs in chemistry and theology is a professor of theology here and a vicar and has a brain the size of a planet so from all of my work then it's fundamental that restraint is going to be an element of climate mitigation and if you think about it all the world's major religions embrace restraint as a normal part of their activity everybody promotes that so with Andrew we have a book under review with Cambridge University Press on restraint as a component of climate mitigation and I think that's an area that's been missed because it's not politically attractive but the idea of activating local communities whether through faith groups or through civic groups other communities where people share a set of values I think has been missed when I look at the literature of climate mitigation in the sociology social psychology area it's very largely focused on individual behavior and we haven't tried to activate the idea of communities with shared values so for me that's become a priority and I'm trying to raise funding at the moment to do more in that area because we work well in groups we're a social being and I think if we can try and find realistic pathways to support each other in taking good actions there's a huge lever there that we haven't yet started to play so there's my starter for ten on your very good last question yeah very interesting and I think I'll definitely look into that the idea of restraint in that book that's a personal interest to me just to clarify I am I think mainly or maybe more so asking about how to get permission for deploying technologies when people are hesitant to like have them in their backyard or it'll potentially affect their environment ma'am I'll make a brief comment on that I think I think that you know professor all would mentioned a few minutes ago with the leaf blower example but there's this network effect there's a there's a community effect right and and I think you know we as the technologists and the engineers say there's an urgent need to deploy it because look at this chemical equation look at this model look at all of the the facts of the chemistry and physics of it and and we have a model for the rates of that we don't necessarily or at least I don't have a model for the rate of how minds change because of community network effects but there's a huge urgency for that and so at the beginning and I made some comment about how I wish people on the other side of the table were as at least basically informed about these things and I think there's an urgent need for us the creators of the information to disseminate that as broadly as we can so that that those minds change yeah and I think another problem is the short term mentality I mean I think it's even I don't want to say the full society but the important part has this short term mentality and that's something that it would be very difficult to battle I mean you can say you know in five I don't know five years that they might care but if they say something will happen in 50 years may they might not care even so that's a problem because then they will say no I just want to keep driving my car I want to do everything in the same way and there's not if I don't face the consequences I don't care and that's a big problem I don't think all the societies like that thankfully and I think you know we time people will realize but at the end of the day you know it's human nature to try to to live in the best way they can and is it kind of a problem or I don't know if it's a problem but I think it's you know it's it's not only on us it's not only on engineers we we are not the only ones in this equation and I don't think even if we unless we we do magic that we don't I don't think there's a way that we can solve the problem alone yeah in terms of okay I didn't realize if I was muted or I'm so in in terms of educating people I teach a course on sustainable operations and every time I teach it the first week I think oh is this material too basic I'm maybe not telling them anything that they don't know and you know just introduction first class and second class we play a simulation game just based on the tragedy of the commons and to me the outcome of the simulation game is just so obvious every time we play the simulation game I freak out that you know they will beat the game and they won't observe the tragedy of the commons because I I think they will know what's gonna happen they will react accordingly but it never happened so I've been teaching this course more for more than 10 years now and there was no one single time for example students taught about finding a way to elevate the outcome and avoid the tragedy of the commons every time they play the game they will go bankrupt because they consume the resources and they always say oh it is so eye-opening and things like that so even what I'm trying to say is even even simple things even things that we as you know people who have been working and thinking on this issue a lot for us it may be obvious but for people who don't work on the topic even simple things like that a very simple simulation game can be really eye-opening in their alerts all right so in the chat we have two questions so far they're both from the same person so maybe I'll deal with the last one or I'll ask the last one first which is okay so Jay Gore says somehow the conversations seem to be pessimistic to the point of being grim are there any silver linings that the panelists and professor all would can share really adding that what's which is I think the last question I was hoping to ask you all which is what is an example of a policy technology or other action that you think shows promise or that excites you or that it makes you hopeful you've mentioned some of them yeah so I think the combustion engine regulation is the best regulation that I've seen yet that reduces emissions and that's terrific in the talk I'll be giving then I'm going to mention two startups that we've created which are growing really well for the purpose and they're both great technologies or ideas but the reason we're doing them is to say to government look there is hope here there's opportunity and the reason I am optimistic is that I think we have to be honest about the fact that the supply side magic bullet don't work they aren't going to scale fast enough to do the miracle that's expected of them but by focusing on them we haven't looked in the entire space of demand side innovation it is under human right that everybody should be allowed to drive a car that weighs 20 times more than the people in it but that's the average in America in Europe we're much much better because we drive cars to only 12 and a half times the weight of the people inside them but the people are way a bit less as well actually so there's kind of trade off there so we know that there are a whole range of actions that we haven't even started to think about and in the course that I teach for undergrads and taught master's students on climate mitigation it's growing year on year and it's all about exploring that demand side space and my feeling is that the students leave full of passion to go out and find those missing opportunities which I think are rich and fun and interesting and much more effective than dreaming of magic bullets. Yeah I want to add that I don't think it's pessimistic at all I think it's optimistic but it's also realistic I mean if someone tells you that they can solve the problem this huge problem with just one thing and it just solved the problem most likely it's not true or it's not completely true it's half have true all this technology all these advancements we do it work and it helps but it's not enough I think that's kind of the bottom line it's not something that we can solve just doing it in one way so I think it's optimistic we are making progress but if we say that with one thing we are solving everything I think that will be great but I don't think it's true I mean just I'm not saying people lie but they think it's maybe it's over promising I think like that is just one thing will not solve all the problems and we have to be you know sincere of that this is I think this is the truth and you know in terms of optimistic you know things or things that might help us to have more hope as I said I mean we did a lot of progress there's a lot of things we are doing for example in our area but now you know productivity of the materials photo catalysis other things we really help to solve the problem all of these things are up you know if each of them just just reduce it one percent have and they are synergistic then we can have a hundred of these things and then we have a hundred percent right that's I think that's kind of what I wanted to say I mean yes you know we do something it works it helps to accelerate something or to improve something but saying that one thing it will solve all the problems and it will be applicable for all the solution for all the applications and for all the things it's it's just not realistic I think but it's optimistic I mean we are doing a lot it not was the point of you know committing all our lives of advancing on this well I gave my answer in the chat because I didn't know if we'd had have time to address the question but but on the contrary I have a very optimistic view I mean my my office that our dean's office in the college engineering sits in the Neil Armstrong building which is a monument to us going to the moon however many years ago 50 something years ago right and that didn't happen because you know a small cadre of engineers said hey we're going to go to the moon that was something that it was a whole society engagement from politicians to engineers you know and and there was buy-in to get it done right and it happened in in about a decade of time or something like that right everything that we've talked about today has has been a system has been a network has been something where what the message that I've heard again and again is it can't just be an engineer in their lab or in their own little corner solving the all the problems right and and so I think there's a lot of optimism I think where the pessimism comes through is that we're saying hey there's a smart person there's a powerful person over here and they're not doing it exactly the right way and and that's an that's an education opportunity that's a chance for us to say wait a minute here's here's how how to make it a little bit better right and and I think I think the network effect is what is gonna in my opinion get us through this get us to the other side great well so we've reached the end of our time but um professor Sondra and you want to um end our panel with no I I agree with all the points and I am also um relatively optimistic um and um I I think the result of work being done and uh people are getting more aware of the um and cognizant of the severity of the situation so yeah I I agree with all the comments let me jump in here and and before we lose people let's thank all the panelists thank you Miriam for doing a wonderful job thank you all the panelists it was thought provoking