 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcasts. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities. And in this podcast, we interview researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities and how to reduce their environmental impacts in a socially just and context-specific way. On this episode, I'm very excited to speak with Julia, Julia Sandberger, who is Professor of Societal Challenges of Climate Change at the Université de Lausanne. After earning her PhD in MIT on ultra-cold hydrogen, which I tried to have a look on the pieces, but I didn't understand much, she came back to Lausanne and then Zurich to do some post-doc fellowships before joining the Institutes of Social Ecology in Vienna in 2007. In 2011, Julia became Associate Professor of Ecological Economics at the University of Leeds. And since then, I think it was in August of this year, she returned in Lausanne as a full professor. So Julia, researchers on the relationships, or you're gonna discuss this with us, on the relationship between human needs, but also societal needs and human well-being on the one side and their associated resource and pollution requirements. More notably, you are a lead author of the IPCC, but also leading the project, which I'm very interested in living well within limits. So perhaps before ending the introduction, I think it's also fair to say that apart from research, you're also a very seasoned activist on topics from the environmental realm or the societal realm. So as I said, I'm very excited to chat with you Julia and also because I think it's been 10 years I wanted to meet with you back in the day in Vienna. I think it was in 2011. I was there for just a small semester and I was doing my Master's thesis on Urban Metabolism and you were part of the European Projects Summe or some or I don't remember how it was called, but it was right when you left for Leeds. So it's a great moment to actually meet you and thanks so much Julia for being part of the podcast. Thanks for having me and now I realize that we're actually almost co-located. The only thing standing between us actually sitting down and having a coffee together is a pandemic. So what could possibly go wrong? Well, let's hope the pandemic is soon gonna finish, but Julia, perhaps first of all, welcome back to Switzerland, which seems to be your second home now. So many back and forths. I think you also did your some school years here back in the day. Just perhaps, could you introduce yourself briefly? How or how do you generally introduce yourself? That's always difficult, but you did a great job before. So maybe that's enough. In terms of my location, I guess I'm Swiss, but my parents are American. But so I was born in Geneva, but American parents and that sort of partly explains moving around. I guess the other thing is that I'm a physicist by training as you said, but I consider myself to be, then an industrial ecologist, ecological economist. And now I would say I'm probably also a heterodox economist or even a political economist. So I do have no economics training, no formal economics training at all. But in some cases, it turns out that's not a bad thing. It's not necessarily required to be able to see that the economy does not work, I guess. Yeah, and it's, yeah. So I've been moving around a lot, but I think it's also the sign that this community of industrial ecology, I guess, which is one of the ways you situate yourself is a very open one that, you know, when you had one of your episodes with Marina Fischer-Kowalski, so, but colleagues like Seren Erkman and Claudia Binder in Switzerland, and I showed up and they just gave me a chance. They gave me a chance to do something and I'm ever grateful to those people because in other fields, it's not always like that. You can show up and people don't give you a chance and that is too bad. So explain to me, how did you go from ultra-cold atoms to industrial ecology? Okay, so the thing with, I don't recommend this, by the way. I don't recommend what I did. So if anybody has a choice- It turned out well, so I don't think you shouldn't, but- I took the long way around. The thing is, I did my PhD in the knowledge that it was not the thing I was the most excited in. And in fact, in my PhD, I switched. I started out with anomalous X-ray pulsars, which are like astrophysical objects that are actually really super interesting, but, and I couldn't deal with it emotionally. They were too distant. So after two years, like it was really fun. I discovered some things like, it was actually really interesting. Then I left that and I went to more concrete stuff, but I knew that the PhD was not my passion. And I do not recommend that. I think that before somebody goes and does a PhD, they might wanna figure out what they're actually really interested in. However, during the PhD, I discovered something that was much more passionate about and much more interested in. And the way I discovered that was through a film series. So an activist group, like you mentioned, so it was part of the MIT Social Justice Cooperative. We made our mission to make life difficult for various important people there. And we succeeded and we did all kinds of great things. So it was a really great group of people. And, but one of the things we did is we ran this documentary film series and that was something that I ran and it was called Whose World Economy. And basically we were able to screen things on globalization, on structural adjustment programs, on the links between colonization and resource extraction, on inequality. And it seemed to, that taught me very much that that's what I wanted to look at in a systemic way. And if you want to look at this interrelation between economic inequality and resource flows and land grabs and all of that stuff, you would better be using a systematic approach which is what the kind of things that industrial ecology and ecological economics do. So that's what brought me there. Well, so I can imagine that, because I think it was, even in your PhDs, when I tried to read some introductory beats, you already mentioned this activism bits and I can imagine this was, I guess, what... Oh, you bet I put that front and center to the supervisors, you bet I did. I was that kind of PhD student, yes. You said that you were doing, you were giving a hard time to the administration of the MIT and I could recognize that. But that was, I guess, also during the, after 2001 moments where I guess, well, I guess in activism, there was something to actually be vocal and political about, but yeah. Yeah, that was, I mean, it was a really horrifying time, actually, and it was very interesting because we, MIT is a great campus and one of the things that's great about it is that it's open and it gave a lot of space to students. So if you were a student group, which consisted like three people, it was a student group, you could get all, you could book auditoriums in the evening, like any space that wasn't booked, you could book it, you could have events, we would have Chomsky speaking at our events or other people and we just, that time, we happened to have a space for a banner to come down from one of the main entrance halls, like the three would have these banners that would go down three floors of stairs. And so we had a banner that basically said, don't bomb. It wasn't clear who we were gonna bomb back then. So I don't know if we listed some countries hypothetically, but we had this banner basically saying that we shouldn't react with a warfare. And people were like, we ended up like, I had friends who ended up sleeping next to the banner because people were tearing it down and stuff. And it was, and people were really aggressive and really taking it personally that that was the right thing to do. And we had an event, we had very quickly, like within the, you know, we were just there on the spot. So we had an event which was a teach out where we asked a whole bunch of professors that we were friends with to come and speak about this moment and what it meant and so on. And, you know, and they were happy to do it. So we had a whole bunch of these nice professors, who were friends with us, and they came and spoke at this teach out against the war. And at that point within a week, it was clear that it was gonna be Afghanistan. So against the war in Afghanistan. And they were put, those professors were all instantaneously put on a White House blacklist. Okay. They were blacklisted by Dick Cheney's wife as like these like interior enemies of America. And we were really afraid for them, you know? I mean, like we was like, we didn't realize what we were doing when we asked them to speak that we were actually putting them at the front of something that could might have been dangerous for them. And so we actually went and apologized. We were like, oh my God. We realized that everybody we asked to be to the teach out is on this blacklist. And oh my, you know, what's gonna happen now? And they were like, oh no, thank you because you were so organized and you organized this event so fast. I'm on this cool blacklist now and all my friends are really like jealous. And, you know, so in the end it all worked out. But except for Iraq and Afghanistan which obviously are really suffering still. Yeah, so that was an interesting time. And it was also interesting how, and if maybe it was a lesson in how you can be right about, you know, not having weapons of mass destruction you can be right about the analysis of the problem. You know, we read the Patriot Act. I don't know if you know about American politics but immediately in the aftermath of 9-11 they passed the Patriot Act which was this huge anti-democratic piece of legislation. And we actually were staying up late looking at this thing and we realized that it was for instance it was very anti-environmentalist. It was the size of a phone book almost. You know, you can download the PDF of it. It was just hundreds of pages. And so it was obviously this thing where they'd stapled in all the anti-democratic oppressive stuff that they'd always wanted that big business has always wanted that these corrupt politicians had always wanted and they'd taken a big old stapler called the Patriot Act. Wars are good moments to actually, you know pass these things under the rug and so you had like these huge like prison penalties for like attacking an SUV dealership. Like certain industries were protected like large cars were protected like GMO crops were protected. You know, it had nothing to do with terrorism except that it made people who were doing democratic protest terrorists. So that was, yeah, that was an interesting time. Okay. Well, I wasn't expecting that the Patriot Act was also an anti-environmental act. So we get to do that, yeah. Yeah, and they started dealing people under it. I mean, that's what the, that was the purpose. It was a purpose of you get you, you name another enemy and then you use that big stick to beat up the other enemies that you really fear. And in the US, the, yeah, there's certain industries that really fear protest. They really fear popular discontent, including the agribusiness and the automotive industry and stuff like that. It's quite interesting. I think we're gonna get back to this via the window or let's say, or from another angle later on because I'm curious of course in this duality between being an activist and being a scientist, being objective and subjective or whatever the terms are later on. But I think I want to enter this later on because there is something that, well, if I understand, well, your whole, well, your research after physics was about this relationship between well-being and well, flows, let's say, flows and their consequences. Why was this the, or was it very soon that you understood that this is like the relationship to figure out? So it actually goes back even to MIT days. There's a story of a graph and it's a Pasternak, I think was the guy who did it. He made this pretty plot of electricity per capita. So in kilowatt hours versus the human development index, as it was measured at the time. And he's got like the different countries of the world and different colors, very pretty. And it was shown to us, like I went to this presentation by this guy who was a nuclear scientist at MIT, like from the nuclear industry, but he was a professor on campus. And he was like, this graph shows us that we need more electricity to get human development. And so this graph shows that we need more nuclear energy. And I was like, actually it shows saturation, dude. So, you know, it shows, like, there's a little part with flow, but then it like, you know, flattens out real quick. And he was like, you know, for him, it was like, he'd been reading it to justify his story. And I was like, this doesn't stack up. So then... Did you mention that back in the day? I mean, did you have this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he didn't quite know what to say. He was sort of looking at it, like he hadn't really looked at it before. And of course he didn't have a curve fit or anything like that. But then when I started doing research, I came across this curve again. And there's actually... Who was running this at the time? There was this world, it was a global energy report, but it was a global energy and development report. And I forget the exact acronym, but there were two or three of them. They were the precursors to the global energy assessment of YASA. Okay, yeah, yeah. There was a couple of them that came before. And there was somebody who basically showed these two curves at two different points in time and said, look, it's changing. Okay. I only remember his first name, Carlos. He didn't publish, like it was just in this chapter, he didn't publish it. And I was like, but that's really interesting. And then I wanted to show that to, I was sharing some of those documents with my students and I was like, I want to understand this better. So I remember like staying up like several nights before my lecture, like I need to figure this out. And that became one of my first papers because indeed you see this very, very steady change that basically has to do with the fact that life expectancy is making steady progress regardless of resource use pretty much. And so you see this decoupling. And what I've been doing in my research is I've been looking for decoupling between GDP and energy and material flows and emissions because that would be nice. I mean, I didn't start being a de-grocer, but I became- That's someone do, yeah. Well, I mean, I was like, let's look for this green growth, you know? Let's look for this decoupling. And I really convinced myself after a few papers that it was not there. But the interesting thing is because the GDP data comes from these databases where you also have these human development indicators, I was able to see the decoupling that is happening. And that's what to do with actual like things like human health and education and things that are not actually that related to GDP at all. And so that's, this is what I decided to start studying partly because nobody else was doing it. And honestly, at the beginning it was even hard to... It was hard to do because everybody was like, that's cute, but why are you doing it? Well, seriously, that was the reaction. That was honestly the reaction of like, don't you have a real job? Well, I can imagine also that it depends on the crowd and the audience doing this. I can imagine that the industrial ecologists would say that perhaps ecological economists are a bit less or it might be different, I don't know. It's really interesting because all these communities, I mean, I remember like I submitted an abstract to the first on the basis of this paper, the one that shows decoupling of human development and energy use and emissions. I submitted it to the first degrowth conference and the abstract got rejected. They were like, no, we won't only care about GDP going down. This other stuff is completely irrelevant. I'm like, okay, so that's changed. That is no longer the reaction. But I also submitted it to the, there's a big energy efficiency summer school. Like I'm gonna tell you all about my rejections. I've been rejected a lot. But I also submitted it. Yeah, while this paper got rejected like six times, I think, maybe not quite as much over a period of two and a half years. But anyway, so I submitted this abstract to the European, whatever it is, there's ECEE on energy efficiency. There's a European summer school and conference on energy efficiency. I said, no, that's not energy efficiency. Like we're looking at efficient light bulbs. Yeah, exactly, insulation. Yeah, you know, and now like the fruit, I mean, so I still haven't gone, but now that the first topic of their conference is energy and wellbeing. So it's like, okay, you took 10 years to catch up. That's fine. I'm not gonna be bitter about it. Well, it is hard because I mean, you dealt with, let's, even it's funny. I think Marina was discussing this beforehand. And she also had, I think, this wellbeing, what drives wellbeing back in the day. And I think she said, well, in the US, it's money and the relationship is clear and we should not fund any studies anymore on this. I think she was working for, was it DOECD at the beginning? And I think that in many, in many fields, there are either some taboos or some preconceptions. Like this equals that and we do not discuss it anymore. Until you just turn the rock and you find out, well, if we look at it through, you know, that lens or the other lens or the other lens, whether there is like a, you know, like a disco ball with many small facets around it that it's only when you put them together that it makes sense. And I really liked, well, the paper on the downscaling the planetary boundaries, for instance, which is one way to look at this as well. And over there, I mean, I think it's many, many studies exist on, let's say greenhouse gases and GDP or greenhouse gases or material footprint and GDP per countries and having these graphs. But now you have several dimensions with several dimensions and this is where it gets interesting, I think. It's that it's not one versus one. It's all versus all. And how do we manage this equilibrium? And I think it was also this, the rationale behind your project, the living well within limits or how did you... Except that we actually didn't make it all dimensions. We had to sort of narrow it down to make it feasible. So I agree that that is a very interesting aspect and maybe just to stay on that before we go into the living well within limits where we were more focused. So this was a paper that was led by Dan O'Neill. And he, oops, sorry, that was my phone. He and Andrew Fanning made the database to a large extent and then Will Lam and myself helped with also with the analysis and like we each had, anyway. So, but the thing that was, one of the things that was interesting is we basically did this crisscrossing analysis between international biophysical boundaries and exceedance, but we looked at the relationships and social thresholds. And what was really interesting, one of the things that was super interesting is that there was always one country in each of these intertwined couples. There was always one country that was doing okay. It wasn't the same country. There was always at least one that had a social threshold and was okay on a planetary boundary. And that's one of the ideas that we're taking now in the work of a PhD student in the living well within the MES project who's actually co-supervised with Dan as well is like this idea of a Frankenstein, which is if you understand what are the underlying factors that allow countries to do this, can you then make at least not in reality because in reality, we know it doesn't exist. But in theory, if we analyze the data, can we make a Frankenstein? Can we make a beautiful creation like a hypothetical creation of a country that would do things right, could they be okay? And it turns out that they could certainly do a lot better. So that's one of the things that we're actually making progress on. And I've learned to take it as a good sign when there's a certain amount of resistance against a paper. So the reason this paper has not been published yet is because it's encountering a certain amount of resistance, which I think means it's probably really good. Great. Which is funny because I don't remember in which paper it was. It was one of the papers where you said that actually the word is more unjust as a whole than per country. And so I was wondering, therefore, if you made your Frankenstein baby, would that be better or worse if we tried to make it at a global scale? Or does such thing exist, of course, if we can make it at a global scale or not? It's actually really interesting because I think both of these things, these patterns that we're looking for are international anyway. So in fact, if we see anything that's sort of working at a global scale, or at least within the international data. So that's one thing. So the other thing is we can do this modeling. So we modeled a bottom-up model of energy demand for decent living standards. And that turns out to look just fine. Actually, it looks great. It looks a lot lower than what we're using now. And the other thing is when we look within countries, which is the work of the PhD of Marta Balthushevitz, she's looking within countries and looking at well-being outcomes versus really granular household data energy footprints. And she's finding that well-being outcomes are often achieved at lower energy use than average, even in quite poor countries with quite low levels of energy use on average. So that's really super interesting as well. So I would say that I think the odds are that there's... You never want to promise something that you haven't checked completely. But I would say that the odds are that there are patterns of doing things right, that we can learn from. Yeah, because I think there was a fantastic... Well, unfortunately, I have to admit that in this paper on the living... Sorry, I always forget the title, but... Red Life with Infinity. Yeah, exactly. For all within planetary boundaries. I saw that Greece was the worst country because it transgressed all of the biophysical boundaries for the least amount of social boundaries. So I was like, okay, that's some... I don't know why, but yeah, I'll have a look at the data. It was funny to see that. I don't think that's... Is that true? So it seems... So if you go to the column of all of the transgressed biophysical boundaries, so the worst in the environmental realm, and then you look at which one has the least amount of social thresholds achieved, then you arrive to the... But there are countries that are well below Greece in terms of social outcomes as well. Yeah, yeah, of course. And I don't... Yeah. I mean, you know, it's not... That means nothing, of course. I mean, you know, it is what it is, but it's funny. I think that everybody is interested when you look at comparisons because you try to see yourself, you try to understand what happens there. And I had one question before we move on to the living well within limits, which was... So you had this very interesting graph in this paper as well, which was you said what is the minimum resource use... No, yeah, the minimum resource use for the planetary boundaries or for the CO2 emissions and all of that based on the achieving, satisfying the social needs. And for most of them, it's, you know, you could go below the planetary boundary, except one which was democratic quality. And that's always went up. Is there a reason for that particular reason, do you think? Well, that's the thing. I mean, that's one of the issues with this kind of work is that if you see these relationships, you don't always know what's lying under them. And for democratic quality, you have to think about what's hiding behind that indicator. So you have to see how that indicator is measured. I mean, we only chose indicators. Like, I'm not going to remember each one of them now. We only chose indicators that we thought were good and actually measured something. But in some cases, they'll be measuring, depending on how it's measured exactly, it might be reflecting some things or another. And the other thing is you also have things that are an accident of history. Like, there might be an accident of history that says that all the countries with democratic quality happen to be post-colonial Western powers and that everybody else by definition has lower democratic quality. And then you're starting to see the fact that you're talking in terms of the world system about the extractive core that is extremely resource intensive because we are the core. We take all the resources to us. That's what we do. So it might be that kind of thing that's going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. As a guess, the other one that was interesting to me was we had to choose which education indicator to choose. And which level, like tertiary or secondary? And Dan was like, let's go for tertiary because that's a more, that's like better than secondary. Secondary is a low bar. And it turned out that tertiary education, achieving tertiary education was also associated with quite high resource use on average. And it's not because universities are resources. Well, perhaps scientists fly a lot or are used to fly a lot. That's not going to make enough of a difference, sadly. But I think, but I would say that it probably has to do more with the industrial structure of a country where tertiary education is dominant. Because it doesn't extract anymore, yeah. Or that people are then employed as engineers or they're employed as this or that. It's like by the time your economy is depending on people with tertiary education, you're going to be doing things differently in terms of that. So it's not a direct thing. You're sort of looking at a historical association. OK, let's talk about your project, the living well within limits. So what was the rationale behind it? Of course, I can imagine if you look at the relationship between living well, human well-being, and then the resource use. I can imagine that you try to find a balance between the two. And can we achieve both? Was that something you had in mind? Yes, I really wanted to pursue further this where I'd basically uncovered, which is this decoupling of human development indicators that are linked to well-being. And resource use. And I thought that it was something that was understudied. There's very few other people studying it. The main groups were at the time Tom Dietz, Jean Rosa, who sadly passed away, and I miss him a lot, and Richard York, and Andrew Jorgensen, also in the US. And Timmons Roberts, who's also my colleague. So that was sort of like a few people in the US. There was Narasimha Rao, who got an ERC grant on Decent Living Energy, and we collaborate with him. He's at Yale now. And that's it. And then us, that's it. So very, very few people looking at this. And so I wanted to be able to pursue it further and really look in across scales and across time. So I wanted to be able to look for associations within countries, to compare countries, to look at trends over time, and to look at trends across countries. And I wanted to be able to look at inequality as well. I wanted to have an aspect of it that was where we actually go and talk to communities that's run into a bit of trouble with COVID, as you can imagine. But we've done some of that. And also to look at the political economy. And that's something where it turned out the project actually did a lot more than I almost expected, which is to look at, when you look at the political economy, the question is, if it's possible. I mean, and that was the question that confused me when people first asked it. They were saying, well, because one of the things we did in the first paper on human development and energy use is we showed these curves that you can achieve universal human development at the level of energy we're using now or lower. And then people were like, OK, well, that's it then. And we're going to reduce our energy use because of that. Like, as though the world economy is trying to maximize human development. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. That's just a sweet, sweet illusion that is. That is not true. And I was like, no, that's not how it works. And so I think it became very important in the Living Well Within Limits project to explain why we're not living well, not within limits. So to basically try to understand the mechanism, if it's possible, then why the heck aren't we doing it? What's standing in the way? And the thing that's standing in the way is our economic systems that are based on profit, that are based on what Jason Moore calls the four cheap resources, labor, land, and energy. So that kind of thing. So yeah, so we wanted to study that. And that's been very interesting. So we've looked at car dependency, we've looked at privatization, Miqlush Antel, led a fantastic paper, which I really adore. He wrote it with Image and Rattle and Giulio Mattioli on unsustainable transitions. Everybody's trying to study sustainable transitions, which are not happening in reality. We need to study reality, which is where unsustainable transitions are happening. So trying to understand what lies behind the fact that our cars are just getting worse over time and that's driving emissions in the Western world. It's SUVs. It's not because we and we don't need that. Nobody wants that. Well, yeah, it doesn't add to human media. So nobody's studying the unsustainable transition. So we were able to at least write a paper saying, you guys are really missing the story. So for me, that was a very important part of the project. And within the project also, I think you start exploring. Well, of course, so I can imagine there are things such as sufficiency. What is the right amount? I think it was in your other paper where you discussed about what would be the, if we consider the minimum amount of energy we would need, we would go back to levels of 1960s or something like that. So it is possible. It's not that our needs could be met. And then you said, what is keeping us from it is perhaps the economic system. You also have in another paper on the discourses of climate delay, why people are not changing. And I'm wondering, in your opinion, is there something that you see as a tiny sliver of hope that this is what changes already? Is something that you really see that goes fast and does change amongst all of these, well, not very helpful or hopeful circumstances that we're living in? I don't have a lot. I'm actually in, well, I mean, we're little human creatures faced with a huge cataclysm that's coming our way. So I don't generally feel hopeful, but sometimes we have little ups and downs that don't necessarily relate to the reality of things. But I think in the reality of things, we're being the people who have the information on how systematically bad things are and how much geared they are against us. Like these discourses of delay, they're not random. They're systematic. They've got a logic to them, and they are always trotted out. And people fall for it. And that's one of the things that we see in the UK. And around the world, you have constantly on television sets, on radio programs, people who are basically apologists for the industry going on and saying, oh, we just found this cute new technology for clean, plain fuel. Don't worry. And of course, if you're just Joe Shmo and you don't realize that they're absolutely full of it and that they're just saying this with the express purpose of putting people back to sleep and that none of these technologies have a chance in heck of doing anything anytime soon, that puts you back to sleep. That's like all people want to hear is don't worry. You do not have to worry about this. Nobody wants to hear the message of, you have to keep worrying about this. It's so much worse than you think. The people you think are there to help you are not helping you. The people you think are there to inform you are hiding stuff. Nobody wants to hear that. Nobody wants to get that distressed. So people just love to hear those messages. They're like soothing lullabies and you go back to sleep. And that's what's out there. And the message is not getting through how much trouble we're in and the message is not getting through that we can still change it. I mean, even when the communication is given, oh, things are quite bad, it's very often in the context of, well, that was it for humanity. Or there's just this sense of inevitability, like we're doomed. And so that's not actually technically true. And that's the surrender part, let's say. Yeah, this is the surrender part. But so people go from the not hearing about it to the like, okay, you can hear about it, but you can still forget about it. And nobody actually does the grown-up thing of sitting down and being like, we have a real problem and we have real work to do. That is completely missing from the world around us. And that does not make me hopeful or happy. I think there's just a real shortfall in communication and in the real communication that people need to hear. And so we're just, I don't know. I don't know how to change that. I think scientists, we have a real problem because we're taught not to take part in these debates in some ways. So mainstream economists didn't get the memo. The mainstream economists and the people who are working on like cosmetic techno fixes that won't actually work, they did not get the memo that they're not supposed to go on TV and spat bullshit, the rest of us did. So I think that that's a real problem. And behind that problem is a lot of bad things are gonna be are happening now and are going to get worse. But you are a physicist. You should be excited about techno fixes, no? Yeah, I am. No, it's true. It's actually true. I'm excited about techno fixes. I'm extremely excited about housing retrofit. Okay, is that a really sexy one? It's a bit less sexy than the sequestration of CO2 or terraforming Mars and all of that. Yeah, I would, you know. But that's the thing is like, no, the technology is there. It's just, it so happens that it's technology that nobody can, you know, that people can't get themselves to dream about. But honestly, these things are the dream because they're these, those technologies you're in deficiency and sufficiency are the ones that allow you to live well and not destroy the planet. Like, you know, that's- And they're there, right? I mean, it's funny because in your, in the other paper on the warning of scientists warning on affluence. So when I read this paper, before reading this paper, I thought it was just gonna be on the iPad formula. So impact equals population times affluence times technology. And in general, we talk about technology and population. Like there is, you know, the Malthusians that are saying population is what's driving everything. And then there is the techno people that would say, well, technology is gonna help us get away from the trouble we're within. And I thought this paper is just gonna, you know, take the last bit of the equation and talk about affluence. Well, it was a bit wrong because it went much further than the formula. And it went, well, it got very real, very fast talking about radical approaches, eco-anarchism, eco-socialism, deconstructing capitalism. So it was a, I wasn't expecting that when reading the paper. And now you learned me some expressions such as eco-anarchism, I had never heard that before. So how did you, I think you had fun while writing this paper with your co-authors. Could you perhaps describe a bit of these meta approaches about radical approaches, but also reformist approaches and of course the green growth approach. Like what are they? So I'm gonna point you to your next guest if you haven't had them yet. I don't know who all you've had, but I'm the last author on that paper. So yes, I did have fun with it, but also I was invited along for the ride. I did not write most of it. I thought it was, you know, that you're the last author when you do the least work. So that was definitely me on that paper. I didn't do some things, I mean, I didn't deserve to be there. But I have to say that, you know, the people who really started it, so Tommy Veidman and Manfred Lenson, who are obviously giants in the field of input-output analysis, both of them absolutely fantastic scientists who I adore. And they, so they were really collecting this whole body of empirical evidence around inequality and who was using what and showing, you know, that actually the richest people across the world and within countries have this hot, really outsized impact. So that was sort of the basis of it, which wasn't, you know, that goes beyond iPad, it's really because you're looking at the distribution as well. But then Lorenz Keiser, who is a student at Leeds, and I think he's a genius. He was doing his bachelor's. I didn't even realize that. Anyway, he happened to be down in Australia working with them and he's Lorenz, so he went by boat. Ah, that's the Lorenz. Okay, I know the story. Oh yeah, that is the Lorenz, this Lorenz. He is a man of principle and... And share will, yes, indeed. Yep, got lots of... And also, and so he was like, you know what, you know what, there's something missing here. We need to talk about these other aspects of affluence. And it goes further than that. And so that he was actually, he was the one who had the idea of inviting me along because he had known me in Leeds. And he was like, you know what, so let's put these other pieces on. So I brought the sort of affluent classes have to do with capitalism, have to do with ownership, have to do with, you know, have an interest in this profit accumulation. So making the link to Thomas Piketty's work on the fact that we actually have two different economies, well, at least two different economies going at the same time, one for everybody else and the one that actually is accumulating. And that has to do with affluence. And Lorenz Keiser is the one who brought this beautiful table on eco-anarchism and eco-socialism and the more green growth reformist approaches. And so, yeah, I think you should talk to him because he's great, he reads everything and he knows everything. So he's fantastic. And he's in Zurich, so we could actually have a meetup of the... Nice, he came back in. Yeah, area research people would be great fun. But so I think that that became quite important to include in there, to really make it clear how the different approaches view the problem and what kind of solutions are proposed. And because if you have this sort of more systemic political economy, you know, Marxian political economy approach of saying who is benefiting from the system? Who is driving the system? You know, not because they want to but because that's what the economy, you know, that's what a capitalist economy creates is it creates a class of people that are very interested in keeping the capitalist economy going. And it doesn't hold on one of them. If you can't convince Elon Musk, you know, to stop being Elon Musk, then somebody else will probably become Elon Musk again. So you have to understand it as a system. And if you do, you realize that reformist approaches are not gonna work, basically. Like if you have that analysis of the system as driven by capitalist dynamics you will not be a reformist anymore. That's, I think, the conclusion. Well, it's funny because when I talked about this with Yorgo Scalis on de-gross and how he arrived from also environmental engineering, let's say, to then de-gross later on with a small, you know, going from the roundabout of political ecology, let's say, I kind of said, okay, would any engineer doing your pathway should arrive to the same conclusions as you arrive to de-gross? And, you know, you talk about Elon Musk, he's a physicist, I think, right? So I think so. Well, anyhow, or an engineer, well, you know, a technical person, let's say, but how come he is so well thinking about systems but not seeing that system? So I think in a way, in the book The Case for De-gross, one of his authors mentioned the common sense and it's actually not one common sense but many common senses and they coexist simultaneously. And so that is a bit what I don't know how to deal with. How do we deal with convincing, changing common senses into one common sense is that even possible? Because, well, on our mind, I mean, it's obvious, the solutions are obvious, let's say, but how do you convince the people who are not yet convinced or what is the, is it with one graph that you'll show them and that will be that, okay, I lost, sorry, you won. I'm convinced now, or how would you, have you seen any convincing elements over the years? Well, it's quite interesting because one of the things we're trying to do, and I, so myself and two colleagues, Elke Perkmayer and William Lamb, we're trying to write this book and we've been trying for like a year and a half now, which we just need to do it, but that's one of the things it's about. It's about the different stories we tell ourselves and why ideas matter. And as a physicist, if you told me ideas matter and ideas can change the world, I would have laughed at you because I just didn't see things that way. It was just like there's reality and you throw things at reality and you understand reality and that's what there is, but actually how you choose to see reality matters because we're actually very good as human beings, we're actually very good at telling us stories. The way we make sense of things is we simplify things through stories and through those stories, either we see parts of reality that agree with them or we just were capable of ignoring or explaining other things that don't quite fit in very weird ways. And one of the things that we're thinking about in this book is we're basically saying, okay, what are the alternative stories we can tell people to open their eyes in such a way that they're capable of decoding reality differently, that we give them the tools to see what we believe to be a better explanation of reality than what they have. And it comes down to, a lot of it comes down to, I don't know if you've read Les's more by Jason Hickel, but it comes down to part of it. Yeah, that he explains this history, that we come from a history of inequality, a history of appropriation and colonization, but to us it's presented as a history of progress. And if you look at the economy, we're taught that the economy is market and it's the rules and if you follow the rules and everybody is selfish in the market, then we get social welfare, that we get good things for all of us if everybody is selfish in the market. And it's like none of that actually remotely makes any kind of sense. But that's the story. And then it gives us reasons to excuse why there's poor people, the poor people are not deserving in various ways. It gives us reasons as to why there's rich people. So we have this sort of mythology that excuses the crimes we see around us and tells us that they're not crimes when they are. And so that's what we're trying to do. So I think it's less about a graph and especially the graph is hilarious because that was one of the things I learned coming from physics. I was like, look at this beautiful graph that you have not to be insulting, but like really intelligent people in different fields in social sciences or whatever who just are like, I don't know what that shows. And I'm like. But you see, don't you see it? Y axis, X axis, that's it. I've never seen anything so clear in my life. And they're just like, no, you need to tell me what I'm looking at. And so there's an element of that is we need to tell people what they're looking at but not in an infantilizing way. And if I had to think about what has helped me make more sense of things, I think that a book like Jason Hickles is really good. For instance, he goes through a lot of the scholarship in terms of explaining the economic history and reality of where things are coming from. I think other things that have been really important for me are things like Guggy Watyongo who's a Kenyan writer who wrote Decolonizing the Mind, which is an excellent book talking about different ways of knowing things and the importance of colonial modes of thought and controlling the way people do things. So there's sort of like this patchwork of different thinkers. Obviously, the people within ecological economics like Tim Jackson and Kate Rayworth and George Oscalis, I mean, all of these people are really important. I think if somebody reads Prosperity Without Growth or somebody reads Doughnut Economics, they don't come out of it looking at the world the same way. But I'm afraid that there's not just, I wish there was one thing in some ways but in another way we just have this struggle. I think one of the things that's positive is that I think younger people are much less likely to believe the fairy tale stories because they're not really living a fairy tale anymore. Like I think it's, you know, by generation people could still be like, it's working for me. So it's the fairy tale is true. But I think anybody who basically came of age after 2008 that wasn't really possible anymore because there was this financial crisis, which was a crime. You know, just because it's an economic crime, it's still a crime. Like it was bad things happen to real people, you know? And of course, the ones responsible did not go to jail as pro, but yeah. Yeah. And I mean, if you're from Greece, you know that that's a real crime. I know, yeah. And after all, they now have admitted, I don't know if it was the Central European Bank or the IMF that said, oh, austerity doesn't really work. Well, thanks. I mean, people just suicide, you know, I don't know how many people committed suicide and how many families were ruined over 10 years, but now we agree that perhaps it wasn't a good idea. Great. And the UK did it to itself. You know that Greece is part of the, like part of the big reason for Brexit? I didn't mention it at all. Because the UK imposed austerity on its own in 2011, right when I came, came right at the end of reasonable life in the UK, basically. And life expectancy, by the way, was going normally in normal life, every year, life expectancy goes up by three months and a half. Okay. Shoot. So life expectancy just keeps trekking up and the UK, it's gone like this. It's like flatlining or going slightly down now. Since austerity. In 2011, it just went like, because they cut all the social services and social services are what keep us alive. Anyway, so the UK goes through austerity, like already five years of it, and then they vote for Brexit. And then it turns out that that was one of the things they thought, they thought that austerity. So somehow the Tories who imposed austerity managed to convince their voters that austerity was the fault of the EU, like in Greece. So they... Yeah, just beautiful. I mean, it's... Anyway, yeah. But that's actually one of the things that's interesting in terms of what we see in the Living Well Within Limits project is these underlying conditions that allow people to live well with less have to do with good public services. They don't necessarily have to do with economic flows or energy flows or material flows or anything like that. They have to do with the efficient... The existence of efficient, accessible, affordable networks of public services around transport, around electricity, sanitation and water, healthcare, education. Like it's that stuff. The ones you call the provisioning systems, right? And you get that stuff and then it's okay. People can be okay. If you give that stuff, people can be okay. But I think this is very powerful messages. And I really like your recent papers because they quantify some of these elements and they're very reassuring as well. Even if things do not go in the right direction, at least we know that it's possible. I always had the fear that it's done. We're done. It is... Well... Yeah, no, I think it is entirely possible to do things completely differently. Yeah, and still be... And people will be fine because the fact is what people need is they need protection. Like you need enough, you need sufficiency and you need protection, you need safety, you need stability. You need to know that if you get sick, somebody's gonna take care of you. You have this sort of basic safety net. And that safety net exists in your physical environment as well. I need to know that if I break my leg, there's a bus that's not too far where I can go with my crutches. This is very real to me because I'm on my third knee operation of the last year. So I know about the importance of good public transportation because I haven't been able to get on my bike as much. Let's just put it that way. And healthcare system as well, but yeah. Yeah, and the healthcare system and like, you know, so all of these things are just super important because the fact is that life is full of accidents. Like a normal human life is full of accidents. It's full of little... You know, this idea that I don't know if you've read Anne Rand books, probably not. Doesn't really get that. That's a poisonous idea. So Atlas, she basically is the romantic novelist of neoliberalism. Okay. She's horrible. She influenced like the U.S. Federal Reserve. There's this whole bunch of people in the U.S. but also in Europe who really love her stuff and like it's really mind-poisoned, for teenage boys to be honest. But she wrote so Atlas drugged or the fountain or whatever. She has this ideal of the self-sufficient entrepreneurial individual who hates altruism because it's a sign of weakness. And it's like, that is not real life. Real life is something where from time to time you're able to do stuff and from time to time you need some help. And so we really need to be in this web of protection. And the problem is if that web of protection is gone people fall through the cracks really fast and you see that show up in the data. You see it show up in life expectancy going down. You see it show up in basically things falling apart. And that's what we have to do is we have, especially given the fact that we're coming into the century of crises, you know? That mutual protection has to be the real focus of what we do. Well, and we're not gonna have sufficient resources if we continue like that. So there's gonna be, without cooperation, just people are gonna die. So it's, I mean, it's very real. Okay, I want to ask you before asking you the last question so that we usually ask. I want to ask you a main question, which is, well, this podcast focus on cities. And you worked back in the day on this sustainable urban metabolism projects, which was actually, I think the first European project working on urban metabolism. And I think it was in 2010 with Helga Weiss, you also wrote the paper on reducing energy and material flows within cities. But back in the day, you discussed about, you know, the urban form that has an impact on transportation energy. You discussed about life cycle energy and materials of buildings. You also discussed about reducing household consumption. You know, now 10 years later with all of your experience, if now that you have moved, let's say, and you recently saw, I think, also the climate plan of Lausanne, if you were to design such a plan, for instance, what would be your strong points to put forward? Especially that it's a city, right? So it's in a middle of, I guess, a consumption node rather than anything else. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that the things are not, oh, I'm going to spill some beans. So the things are not, none of this is rocket science and so one of the things that's great here is we're in the region where Surah and Erkman started doing industrial ecology. So people started caring about the material flows and he did one of the first reports on Geneva was part of his team. They did an industrial metabolism of Geneva and then I came along and I did some more things on Geneva. That was sort of how I got into it. And they were not allowed to publish their main finding on what they, what could be done. Nice. The city of Geneva was like, uh-uh. And it was stop eating meat. The first thing that anybody in it, like the first most impactful action that people in the city can do is actually change their diets. And that was not allowed to be said because Swiss agriculture is for animals. So we grow, we grow crops, but we grow them for fodder. So that was just not allowed to say. But I think the main domain stayed the main domains. It's always transport, housing, and food. And then you have consumables. And food, you know, let's grow food for ourselves. Let's not go through these more inefficient organisms despite the fact that they're cute. So massively reducing meat and dairy consumption, that needs to happen. I mean, you know, and it's a real shock by the way, coming from the UK where there's a huge amount, like you can go to restaurants and there's like just huge amounts of vegan food all over the place and it's really good. And here there's nothing and it's pathetic. And- There's also Indian cuisine, I can imagine, in the UK that has a delicious, yeah. I'm going to be crying for this one so much. Well, yeah, except potatoes and cheese, I don't know what the- No, well, yeah, no, but the thing is we have lentils, we grow lentils, we grow soy, we grow all these great things that we can eat. I mean, there's no, that's not the problem. I guess the problem is that people aren't, anyway, but the point is the food can change into a change. So that's one thing. On, you know, I mean, none of these are magical. On housing, we need to do massive area-based retrofit. We can't do retrofit when building at a time. We need to do it one street at a time, one neighborhood at a time, where you just do it like a machine. And that needs to be, because that's when you get scale and cost to come down. That's where it makes sense to do it in a city. It has to be publicly funded and subsidized. You're going to have to do cost recovery another way than getting it through renters. You know, maybe, yeah, you just have to think of another way because otherwise people are not going to accept it. But that needs to happen. So area-based retrofit, so diet change, area-based retrofit. And then the other thing is you need to get the cars out. So, you know, you keep, you keep electromobility for public transportation and for people who need it for their work or who need it because they're disabled or old or whatever. And then everybody else, sorry, no car. And that will be fine because you can get like all these other ways they're getting around now, which are really fun and safe and healthy as long as there's not too many other cars around. So that's the key thing. You know, then you get this effect of scale where like once it's safe and everybody's doing it, everybody's doing it and thinks it's normal. That doesn't solve the problem of mobility outside of cities, which is generally worse anyway, and I can imagine the last one, which is consumption, which is of course the indirect things that happen because of cities. Yeah, the consumption bit is because people are richer in cities generally, right? So because people have more disposable income and then they're sort of buying more. And I think that that's also something where we have to, you know, the move to a post-consumer society is an economy-wide issue. And the fact that wealthier people tend to spend money on useless wasteful stuff is also something that it's a culture that we have to change a bit. And I'm hoping that maybe the pandemic has helped a little bit with that, although maybe I'm completely wrong and people want to go out and shopping sprees afterwards. But like, you know. Just want to get a coffee or, you know, a glass of wine or a glass of beer, that would be already fine. And I think one of the things that, I don't know if you've had Marlene Sahakian on your show yet. Not yet. Yeah, she's great. But she's done this great experiment where they basically brought people kits. It was a challenge. It wasn't like your bad people stop consuming. It was like, it's like, it's like, vegan-era, I don't know if you've ever done vegan-era just for a month, try being a vegan just for a month. And so they did this challenge like, wear at the gene for the 30 days challenge without washing it or turn your thermostat down challenge. And they gave them like sweaters and like, they made it like this fun sort of game thing. and they had a lot more success because they were giving people a goal and it was playful and they had the tools to troubleshoot it. They had different strategies to think about it. So that was very important as well. So if you want people to consume less, one of the things you can do is you can actually like help them with that kind of sort of very specific approach that helps them make sense of their life in a different way. And I think that that's really a great marriage of sociology and industrial ecology that Marlene's done there. So I think that's really great research. Okay, before you go to small questions that we generally ask, what's, well, you already mentioned some of the bits, but what do you want to work on on 2021? What is your kind of your exciting smallest thing that you're working on except the book you mentioned? Oh God, I said yes to things. So there's a couple of papers on energy sufficiency which I'm really excited about because it turns out we wanted, there's a bunch of us who are in the IPCC who wanted to get energy sufficiency in there. And I probably shouldn't be saying this but I'm sort of past caring but because we're not supposed to divulge internal discussions but basically we couldn't do it because it turns out there's not a single definition of sufficiency and it's not in the literature enough. So basically we have to write these two papers on sufficiency and then maybe people will know what we're talking about. So that's one thing. So we've got that. There's another, I actually want to do some quantitative analysis but I'm not going to talk about that but it's basically just building on new and better data and more indicators and that's, I think that's fun. At what scale? I'm sorry? At what scale? Internationally, but it's, yeah, it's, yeah. Ask me about it in six months and then I'll tell you. But and there's another paper that's really important which is we're going to try to bring together all the findings of the Living Well Within Limits Project into one paper because I have been asked several times what is the one paper I should cite about your project and I'm like, wow, there are so many and you should read all of them and you should care about all of them. People are like, no. No one. Just the one. So we're going to try to write the one with all our findings and so that's really exciting as well. And the last question. So I generally ask what books, articles or videos would you recommend us to read or to go through? So you mentioned Les is more from Jason Hicko. You mentioned decolonizing the mind. Yeah. Anything else? Yes, I think that one of the things I've been doing during the pandemic is my hobby is sewing. So I sewed masks and whatever. If people, so I've been doing more listening to lectures than reading books. But I really recommend David Harvey's series on reading capital. So if you have the time to spend an hour with a really nice man saying really interesting intelligent things for a few evenings, you will not regret it. I think that's really important. And David Graber also has some great, sadly died last year. Said there's some really great videos of him explaining his work and explaining his book debt and so on. And I think that those are so great because they both, well, David Graber especially has this idea of imagination, that we really need to do, the world is something that we can create a new, that we can change. He's really the last thing then deterministic. He says, it's up to us humans. This is a human creation. We can think about this completely differently. And I think that that's a really wonderful gift to have because so much of our science and knowledge is like, this is the trend. And he's like, eh, who cares about that? Let's think about it differently, you know? Which is lovely. And he's also, I mean, all of these people they're just, it's nice to see the human behind the book or the human behind the thinking, just to see these really intelligent, warm, interested people. That's really nice as well. Thanks so much again, Julia for taking all of your time this evening. Thanks everyone as well to listening until the end. And yeah, I hope we're gonna meet soon to discuss all over this over coffee or something like that. Definitely. Thanks so much. And yeah, talk to you soon.