Tatiana Schlossberg

To Narasimha Rao, a professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies specializing in energy systems analysis, that is a false choice, one that sacrifices justice on the altar of economic growth.

So far, the global economy has not been able to fully decouple growth in GDP from growth in greenhouse gas emissions. That relationship portends doom for a planet trying to keep emissions in check in order to avoid global catastrophe and also for emerging economies — mainly in the global south — working to lift millions out of poverty, and to achieve the levels of growth and success that the United States and much of the West have experienced.

But through his research, Rao, who also has appointments at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment in India, has found that we don’t need to choose. Instead, he has developed the Decent Living Energy Project, an assessment of both the energy needs in select emerging economies and the climate impacts of providing everyone in those same economies with a basic living standard. This standard would largely be defined by access to adequate nutrition, safe homes with sanitation and basic amenities such as refrigeration, mobility, education and basic health care.

His research shows that reducing inequality — within countries and between them — would improve our ability to mitigate some of the worst effects of climate change, and provide for a more stable climate future. Fundamentally, for Rao, climate change, at its most essential, is a justice issue.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Q: How have your views about climate change, mitigation strategies and different levels of global responsibility changed over time?

A: I started out with a more technical background. I was an engineer, and I was drawn to some of the, in my mind, unresolved justice issues about sharing the burden of climate change. Going back to when I didn’t have a good appreciation for what the energy transition entails, it came to me that emerging economies have a particularly difficult dilemma that often doesn’t resolve very well in academic discourse.

They have what appear to be conflicting demands — growing, increasing energy use, raising living standards that could, at the same time, lead to calamitous contributions to climate change if we keep going along the same lines. How do you deal with mitigating climate and ensuring international justice as well as justice within these countries?

There is a big disconnect between global scenarios of mitigation and international discourse. There are idealized assumptions about what needs to happen while little on the ground reflects those directions of change.

Q: What are the major cultural shifts that need to happen to enable those changes?

A: If we are to really get to the level of mitigation that the Paris agreement calls for, it can only happen with increased attention to equity. We are not going to pursue these completely transformative changes without thinking about sharing efforts, and I see that requiring changes in the international sphere.

We need to look more rigorously at the basic requirements of human well-being and human progress. We know what they are in economics and social policy, but we don’t know how to align those requirements with climate change and energy use. The dominant discourse in climate change and energy transitions equates well-being to GDP, and we need to move beyond that.

Q: What are the obstacles in getting people to understand those changes?

A: The models presume that welfare is driven by GDP growth, for example, and that’s an important principle that’s embedded within them. They rarely model distributions or heterogeneity of populations, so you’re looking at aggregate outcomes and ignoring inequalities in society, and that ignores a lot of the problem.

We think about India and the U.S. as big emitters without thinking that India has to invest in advanced low-carbon technologies with a fraction of the income of the U.S. and to serve several hundred million in poverty.

Q: What inspired you to go into your field?

A: Besides addressing what I thought was an unanswered justice question, Steve Schneider was a real inspiration to me. He was at Stanford, and was a climate scientist who was a really good communicator, who understand not only the science but also the ethics and morality of the science.

There was also a team of energy researchers from four continents who started to think about energy needs and technology leapfrogging, after the oil crises triggered concerns of energy scarcity and limits to growth. That work influenced me a lot.

And I was inspired a lot by Amartya Sen’s philosophy, in terms of thinking about well-being, but in general I am very much motivated by the need for interdisciplinary thinking about this problem which involves science, ethics, sociology and economics all together, and I think there are very few people who can cross those boundaries.

Q: What did you want to be when you were a kid?

A: I grew up in Mumbai in India, for my first 16 years, and I grew up in a middle-class family, but I was exposed to poverty around me. Being an Indian, if you do well at school, you focus on science and engineering. But I was always drawn to the social sciences because that’s where I thought a lot of our problems and solutions lay.

From the age of 14, I was struck by poverty, and I wanted to do something to get rid of it. What I wanted to be was — I don’t know how to define it, but somebody who would work to eradicate poverty. I thought it was through education at the time, but that was just a 14-year-old’s thinking.

Q: Where do you find sources of creativity?

A: Music on a more personal level encourages the mental peace that brings creative ideas, but for me it’s operating in the space between disciplines. I borrow a phrase from Schneider that operating at the margins of disciplines and looking at the bridges between them — that’s my source of creativity.

Q: How does technology interact with your profession?

A: My view is that technology is essential, but not the primary barrier to the energy transition. We need the right incentives to guide its development with a sense of purpose, and that purpose needs to be the public good. A lot of technological developments are driven by developers without regard to their long-term consequences for society.

Q: Discussions of climate change have often focused on sacrifice and loss as opposed to the benefits of a lower-carbon lifestyle. Is it possible to shift that way of thinking?

A: In some ways, the costs of reducing climate change are overstated. We haven’t really explored enough the benefits to our well-being of a low-carbon lifestyle, and this is one of the biases I see in the research: that risky technologies are the only ways to address climate change.

If you think about more public transit, more sustainable diets, more high-tech communities with perhaps more modest homes, these are things that can benefit people in the future, and likewise, I think in developing countries it will also require a shift away from present trends.

Q: What are some of the more positive developments that you’ve seen in the climate movement recently?

A: It’s really the groundswell of public movement all over the world, most recently in the last few weeks. To me that’s the kind of pressure we need on politicians. We’ve been talking about this until now in a normative and academic sense, but climate action is largely a political problem.

This article originally appeared in

Taking a Different Approach to Fighting Climate Change

When policymakers, financiers and scientists describe the world decades from now, in the throes of climatic changes that we now only model, they emphasize what might be lost. They discuss the threats to gross domestic product, the havoc wrought by natural disasters or the runaway greenhouse gas emissions released by emerging national economies.

The issue has gained some acceptance, whether in the form of plastic straw bans or anxiety about e-commerce-related cardboard piling up.

But experts say these aren’t necessarily the biggest problems. Reducing the damage from waste might require expanding the traditional definition of waste — not just as old-fashioned garbage, but as a result of wild inefficiency in all kinds of systems, which often results in emissions of greenhouse gases, among other problems.

Companies and organizations around the world are taking on the challenge. Some are using materials traditionally considered waste and making them into something entirely new — and often unrelated — to their original purpose.

Others are avoiding the creation of waste through greater efficiency and new technologies. Here are three examples of efforts underway:

— Entocycle

A British company trying to revolutionize the animal feed industry

When Keiran Whitaker was working as a scuba diving instructor, witnessing the destruction of tropical rainforests, often because of industrial food production, he decided he needed to put his environmental design degree to good use.

“We’re obliterating our natural ecosystems predominantly to produce monocrops that go into the industrial food web, and what’s bad on land is even worse underwater,” he said, referring to the destruction of rainforests and the bleaching of coral reefs.

According to a 2013 study from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, just under 40 percent of global crop calories are used to feed animals, most of them from corn and soybeans grown at an industrial scale. It’s a particularly inefficient way to feed people: It takes about 100 calories of grain to produce just 3 calories’ worth of beef, or 12 of chicken.

So he is trying to fix the system, mostly by changing the food our food eats. The result is Entocycle, Whitaker’s startup based in London, which takes pre-consumer local food waste — created in the manufacturing of food products — and feeds it to Black Soldier fly larvae, which eat the waste and convert it to protein.

He said about 97% of the insects are then ground into a flour high in amino acids, which, combined with other ingredients, can be made into feed pellets for animals. The flies’ excrement, known as frass, can be used as crop fertilizer. Eventually, the insect flour could be directly consumed by people. (While that might make some people cringe, Whitaker said he’s not “grossed out” by the insects.)

Timothy G. Benton, a professor at the University of Leeds, who is focused on food security and sustainability, said he doubted that a company like Entocycle could do enough to transform the food system.

But Whitaker, the chief executive, is more hopeful. If his model takes off (it currently is not producing at scale), more land could be used to feed people, and fewer forests would be razed for cropland or pasture; fertilizer production, responsible for 1% to 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report from the Australian government, would be avoided, as would the nutrient pollution created from runoff. Enormous quantities of wild fish are also used to make animal feed, so this could also help ease global overfishing.

“How do you produce enough food to feed the world, and how do you produce a safe environment for us to live in?” Whitaker said. “They seem to be mutually exclusive, but they have to be fundamentally tied together.”

— Spinnova

A company in Finland that produces clothing fiber from plants.

According to its government, Finland’s forests have about 10 trees for every person in the world. It is perhaps not surprising then that a company aiming to reinvent the way we make clothing from wood is Finnish.

The second and third most common textile fibers are already made from plants — cotton and viscose rayon.

Most viscose rayon is made from wood pulp, but the process of making it typically uses so many chemicals in such vast quantities that some experts said it shouldn’t really count as a natural plant fiber.

Additionally, traditional rayon production has been linked to harmful forestry practices. The Rainforest Action Network has found that about 120 million trees from existing forests are cut down for textiles every year.

Enter Spinnova, a Finnish textile fiber company founded by two former physicists, Janne Poranen and Juha Salmela, who used to work in pulp and paper development and research at Finland’s national research center.

After learning how spiders make silk, Salmela wondered if it might be possible to spin plant fiber in the same way.

It is. Spinnova uses a mechanical method to produce fiber, currently in a pilot stage. Their process uses about 99% less water than cotton production (one study showed that it takes about 2,900 gallons of water to make a pair of jeans), without any harmful chemicals.

They use wood pulp harvested from Brazilian wood, in partnership with Suzano, one of the world’s largest paper pulp producers and one of Spinnova’s shareholders. The forestry practices and the wood pulp produced are certified as sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council. This has a climate benefit as well because forests (especially well-managed ones) absorb much of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Spinnova plans to eventually use agricultural waste material and discarded clothing to produce fibers.

Lenzing, a manufacturer of wood-based textile fibers that uses a closed-loop chemical production process, is one of Spinnova’s shareholders. Spinnova has also received support from Marimekko, a Finnish retailer.

“Sustainability is our main driver,” Poranen said. “For me, it has been extremely important that you don’t have to think why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s totally new and totally sustainable for the whole globe.”

—Tokyo 2020

The Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo.

Although Japan has a relatively sophisticated recycling system, like other countries it has a problem with electronic waste, or e-waste.

It’s the result of the disposal of vast — and growing — amounts of appliances and gadgetry, including cellphones, computers and TVs, which can leak dangerous chemicals into the environment.

The Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games thought it could bring attention to the problem by making the medals for next year’s games — about 500 — from metals retrieved from donated e-waste.

At sites in more than 1,500 of Japan’s municipalities and about 2,400 NTT Docomo electronics stores, over 47,000 tons of discarded electronics were collected, including more than 5 million cellphones, according to Masa Takaya, a spokesman for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

By June 2018, the organizers had already collected enough bronze; by October, they had more than 93% of the gold and 85% of the silver, he said, adding that the organizing committee anticipates it will be able to make all the medals from the donated items.

Recovering these metals also avoids additional mining, which is environmentally destructive and energy intensive.

The recycling industry, in which people break apart devices and remove copper, gold and other materials, has negative health consequences, according to the Lancet, and toxic chemicals from improper disposal can also get into the environment, causing pollution. And the problem could get worse. About a third of the global population was expected to have an internet-connected phone by 2017, according to a report from eMarketer. In the United States, the typical home has 65 electronic appliances, according to a study from Natural Resources Defense Council.

This initiative will not solve the e-waste crisis — that will likely come from governments and electronic companies, said Vanessa Gray, an official at the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency specializing in information and communications technology. But she said attention to the issue is important, because many people don’t know even what e-waste is and why it matters.

“Just for that, the Olympics story is really good,” she said. “In the end, it shows that the way we do things at the moment has terrible consequences for society, in terms of the negative health impacts and obviously impacts to climate change.

“It’s time for a system update.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="75e1183c-064f-342c-a5b3-9f7ed019970e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/climate/waste-not-if-you-want-to-help-secure-the-future-of-the-planet.html">The New York Times</a>.

Waste Not -- if You Want to Help Secure the Future of the Planet

If there’s one vital, but underappreciated, subject in the conversation about climate change, it’s waste: how to define it, how to create less of it, how to deal with it without adding more pollution to the planet or the atmosphere.

Waste not -- if you want to help secure the future of the planet

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Tatiana Schlossberg

Articles written by the author

Taking a Different Approach to Fighting Climate Change

Waste not -- if you want to help secure the future of the planet