Cabot Institute for the Environment experts Professor Dale Southerton and Professor Valeska Ting discuss “a whole systems approach to net zero”.
Engineer Dr Valeska Ting and social scientist Professor Dale Southerton are two academics from completely different disciplines, both working on net zero. In this episode they meet each other for the first time to discuss their net zero research problems and learn quite quickly the benefits of interdisciplinary working and how they can work together to solve them.
Transcript:
00:00:07 Cabot Institute
Welcome to Cabot conversations produced by the Cabot Institute for the Environment at the University of Bristol.
00:00:13 Cabot Institute
We are a diverse community of 600 experts united by a common cause protecting our environment and identifying ways of living better with our changing planet.
00:00:23 Cabot Institute
This podcast series brings together our experts and collaborators to discuss complex environmental challenges and solutions to climate change. In this episode, Professor Valeska Ting and Professor Dale Southerton discuss a whole systems approach to net zero.
00:00:38 Cabot Institute
You can find out more about the Cabot Institute for the environment at bristol.ac.uk/cabot.
00:00:51 Prof Dale Southerton
Yeah, I’m Dale Southerton. I’m a professor of consumption studies in the School of Management at the University of Bristol. And my research over the last 20 years has focused on in broad terms.
00:01:06 Prof Dale Southerton
How societies change, particularly focusing on the way that people live their day-to-day lives, their patterns of consumption.
00:01:15 Prof Dale Southerton
And the resource intensity of those patterns of consumption. So I’m really interested in the way we live our lives, the way we organise things from our kitchens, our laundry, the energy consumption embedded in those practices, how they escalate over a period of time and how they get locked into our.
00:01:35 Prof Dale Southerton
Everyday practices and lots of my work is focused on on that.
00:01:40 Prof Dale Southerton
And tell me a bit about what you you do.
00:01:43 Prof Valeska Ting
Well, first of all, I’m I’m I’m glad you explained consumption because I I thought it was like a medical term. Yeah, I’m a professor of consumption. No. Well, so my name is Valeska Ting. I’m a professor of smart nanomaterials in mechanical engineering at Bristol. And my interest is in.
00:02:03 Prof Valeska Ting
Looking at materials for energy storage. So for applications like like using hydrogen instead of instead of fossil fuels for for low carbon transportation and and looking at ways that we can we can store energy for later use so that we can.
00:02:23 Prof Valeska Ting
Increase the the use of sustainable resources like solar and wind power. Yeah, but it it it so. So it seems like we’re we’re coming from net 0 from 2 quite different perspectives.
00:02:37 Prof Dale Southerton
I mean, I was gonna ask, I mean, what are the So what in I mean nano materials, I mean that sounds really.
00:02:45 Prof Valeska Ting
So all it all it means is really small materials.
00:02:53 Prof Dale Southerton
But what? So what are the really big things then in nanomaterials in terms of solutions or capability?
00:02:59 Prof Valeska Ting
Well, the the neat thing is that so the the point about nanomaterials is that when you shrink something down to to those sorts of nanometer or angstrom sizes. So. So we’re talking about, you know, thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Then the properties of the materials really.
00:03:19 Prof Valeska Ting
Start to change and so so the stuff that I’m interested in. You’re you’re looking at materials that have nanoscale pores in them. So imagine a kitchen sponge, but shrunk down thousands of times. But but because they’ve got these tiny pores.
00:03:34 Prof Valeska Ting
They instead of sucking in water like a sponge, would they? They can suck in molecules like hydrogen and so. So you get these materials and they’ve they’ve got huge surface areas. So 11 teaspoon of these materials can have the same surface area as a football pitch and and so. So these these materials can suck in huge amounts of hydrogen.
00:03:57 Prof Valeska Ting
And so you can carry around.
00:04:00 Prof Valeska Ting
This this gaseous fuel really safely in a small volume and and it’s it’s all because of these tiny, tiny pores. So we’re we’re developing materials with new pores so that they can store more hydrogen. And you can you can drive your cars further because.
00:04:16 Prof Dale Southerton
- It’s it’s, I mean always finds the the technical amazing. I mean it’s kind of mind boggling and so on but so, so are you developing those kinds of nano hydrogen, hydrogen storage pores or particularly with transporting?
00:04:35 Prof Dale Southerton
And.
00:04:36 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah. Well, because I I I think it’s one of the biggest problems at the moment. If if you’re looking at at carbon dioxide emissions or any sort of emissions. So transport is is a huge proportion of of that. And it also if you’re looking at at just general air quality as well.
00:04:57 Prof Valeska Ting
So if if if we can take fossil fuels out of the equation, then suddenly we’re we’re looking at at more sustainable transportation, you’re not contributing to.
00:05:09 Prof Dale Southerton
Do.
00:05:10 Prof Valeska Ting
You know bad air quality or or or global warming to the same extent, but I I I suppose that, you know you can you can develop a technology but you can’t you can’t just have that technology in isolation, right. It’s it’s part of a bigger system.
00:05:27 Prof Dale Southerton
No, I was going to ask it if.
00:05:30 Prof Dale Southerton
So from from a social science, from my perspective, from a social science perspective, you know, the technological capabilities are wonderful. They’re great and amazing, but they my.
00:05:42 Prof Dale Southerton
Fear is that they start with an assumption that the way we live our lives now is the way we should live our lives in the future, and therefore we lock in.
00:05:50 Prof Dale Southerton
Problematic behaviours.
00:05:53 Prof Dale Southerton
By developing the technologies to lock ourselves into those behaviours. So.
00:06:00 Prof Dale Southerton
That the hydrogen solution to cars.
00:06:03 Prof Dale Southerton
Is only a solution to making our existing patterns of mobility less energy consuming or or less polluting?
00:06:14 Prof Dale Southerton
Which is fine, but it doesn’t. It sort of depends on us continuing to drive cars around as individuals and so on. Whereas from a, I suppose from a social science perspective, you might start with a question of, well, why do we drive around like we do? I mean, if if I was an alien looking into our societies, I would think it was crazy.
00:06:34 Prof Dale Southerton
That we have these things which cost a huge amount of our disposable income that hardly ever move.
00:06:43 Prof Dale Southerton
So I don’t know. You know, cars spend most of their time not moving, just parked somewhere.
00:06:50 Prof Dale Southerton
Are often not quite fit for the purpose, cause you know most of the I’ve got a reasonably big car because I’ve got three adult kids, but most of the time it’s just me in it.
00:06:58 Prof Dale Southerton
So I’ve got a car.
00:07:00 Prof Dale Southerton
For capacity to take my kids to and from the university, which I do two or three times a year is silly. It’s crazy. So why do I own that car? Why does it take up such an amount of my income? Why is why is 50% of urban space?
00:07:17 Prof Dale Southerton
Taken up by car storage, car parking and so on.
00:07:21 Prof Dale Southerton
Well, it seems crazy. Whereas you could have a a slightly, you know actually a completely different system where we don’t know cars at all.
00:07:29 Prof Dale Southerton
And we rent cars or lease cars. I mean, these systems are out there in in Oslo, Rome. They’ve got great systems for, you know, you don’t own nobody, don’t. Well, actually, people do own a car, but people who are part of these schemes.
00:07:43 Prof Dale Southerton
Don’t own a car. They use different technologies, so they’ll go up to the windscreen window screen with their phone, tap it on the phone that logs them in. They drive the car that fits the size of the car that they wanna.
00:07:54 Prof Valeska Ting
Drive. So is it like the electric scooters that we’ve got around Bristol, like the tap and?
00:07:58 Prof Dale Southerton
Go exactly like the electric scooters that we’ve got in Bristol only for.
00:08:03 Prof Dale Southerton
Awesome.
00:08:04 Prof Valeska Ting
That is so cool. I didn’t. I didn’t even.
00:08:06 Prof Valeska Ting
Know you could.
00:08:06 Prof Dale Southerton
Do that so that you know they’re just. That’s not to say that I don’t think that the kinds of alternative fuel solutions are not important because they’re really, really important because, you know, we are going to have cars and we will need them. So, but we could.
00:08:21 Prof Dale Southerton
Also think about.
00:08:23 Prof Dale Southerton
Sort of from my perspective.
00:08:24 Prof Dale Southerton
Want to be thinking about? Well, let’s.
00:08:27 Prof Dale Southerton
Disincentivize private ownership of cars and instead have collaborative forms of ownership of cars, so I can walk out my house, pick the size of car that I need for the journey that I’m doing, and pay for the mileage.
00:08:41 Prof Dale Southerton
Of that journey and then somebody else is responsible for maintaining the car.
00:08:46 Prof Dale Southerton
Somebody else is responsible for the churn rate of cars, so we don’t have so many old cars on the road and so on and so on. It’s just a different system for delivering in my language, travel practices or mobility practices.
00:09:00 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah, I do wonder whether we’re just too tied to the Convention of of having a private car like so. So, yeah, engineering. You’re you’re, you’re so close to the industrial side and industry is is, you know, inherently like when, when, when you’re looking at at, say, development of a plane, it’ll take them 30 years.
00:09:21 Prof Valeska Ting
To to design a new plane and get it in the air, and then it’s got a a 30 year a like cycle where yeah. Lifespan.
00:09:29 Prof Valeska Ting
And so so you, I I I guess industry is a bit more risk averse and so just having a drop in solution or or or something where the the person driving the car doesn’t even know that it’s a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle or a battery electric vehicle. It’s just you know they get in press go.
00:09:50 Prof Valeska Ting
And they go.
00:09:51 Prof Valeska Ting
Like that. So yeah, that that seems like a lazy way now.
00:09:55 Prof Dale Southerton
Of that logic of those of markets like that, the technology has to substitute for what we’ve currently got.
00:10:01 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah, yeah.
00:10:02 Prof Dale Southerton
So you have to try and make your electric car or your hydrogen car mimic as much as possible.
00:10:08 Prof Dale Southerton
The cars we’ve got used to.
00:10:11 Prof Dale Southerton
Because it’s the only way to sell them, cause you’re sending them in a private market. Whereas if you think of the types of systems I was talking about.
00:10:18 Prof Dale Southerton
You’ve got companies then would be buying on mass. It’s not the consumer’s responsibility to maintain the car. It doesn’t matter to the consumer.
00:10:26 Prof Dale Southerton
That the car costs three times.
00:10:30 Prof Dale Southerton
The cost of a a normal petrol car, so the rate of diffusion can be far faster.
00:10:35 Prof Valeska Ting
But but what do you think about? Because I I guess this has been on people’s minds because of the pandemic, right? And we haven’t been. We haven’t been flying. We haven’t been driving. So you, you think people’s perspectives on you know what? What sort of transportation we need or whether we need it?
00:10:54 Prof Valeska Ting
At all, do you think?
00:10:55
That will change.
00:10:59 Prof Dale Southerton
Who knows? We all want it. We all want to get out. We could just drive our cars for the sake of it. Just to.
00:11:04 Prof Dale Southerton
Just all our times that we’re living in, I don’t think I’ve left my tank.
00:11:10 Prof Dale Southerton
Many, many months, I think the what the pandemic does is show very.
00:11:16 Prof Dale Southerton
Tangibly, that the way we live our lives can change quite quickly and.
00:11:20 Prof Dale Southerton
Quite radically so from.
00:11:21 Prof Dale Southerton
My my frustration is always that there is a tendency, particularly in some parts of policy.
00:11:28 Prof Dale Southerton
To think of human behaviour as essentially consent.
00:11:32 Prof Dale Southerton
That’s it.
00:11:33 Prof Dale Southerton
And slow to change and I don’t think that’s true. I think you know, it depends where you’re looking, but.
00:11:39 Prof Dale Southerton
Human behavior change can change quite rapidly, and we’ve seen that with with the pandemic, and that’s because there’s all sorts of constraints on our.
00:11:47 Prof Dale Southerton
On our lives. But what will happen is anyone’s guess, but.
00:11:52 Prof Dale Southerton
You know, we have in a sense turbocharged our capacity to have meetings like we’re having now.
00:11:58 Prof Dale Southerton
Online only a few months before, well, a few weeks before the lockdown last year, I’m on the University Sustainability Council.
00:12:08 Prof Dale Southerton
And we were talking about a policy for more online meetings so that staff could reduce their travel to.
00:12:15 Prof Dale Southerton
Work.
00:12:17 Prof Dale Southerton
And it was seen just as was actually just before lockdown. It was seen as too difficult to achieve.
00:12:26 Prof Dale Southerton
That people are not familiar with the technology, with the etiquette of how to speak to one another on an online meeting and then out of necessity, we’ve learned all of those skills.
00:12:36 Prof Dale Southerton
It’s, you know, my my parents who are.
00:12:41 Prof Dale Southerton
Old now do zoom meetings with my kids and stuff all the time so so we’ve learned very quickly how to use those technologies to keep. Thing will be what happens when we come out of lockdown and whether or not we’re.
00:12:56 Prof Dale Southerton
In a sense, forced back into the old rhythms of our day-to-day lives.
00:13:01 Prof Dale Southerton
So if we have more, more homework in.
00:13:05 Prof Dale Southerton
If the University of Bristol decides we don’t need to build loads of new buildings and instead we could have.
00:13:11 Prof Dale Southerton
Work from home policies and more shared offices. So when you and I come in, rather than have our own, I’m sure you’ve got your own office in the universities.
00:13:20 Prof Valeska Ting
I haven’t seen it in.
00:13:21 Prof Valeska Ting
Months, but yeah.
00:13:22 Prof Dale Southerton
No, there for a professor not to have a have their own office. But you know we you walk around any university building and there’s lots of offices and not many people in them because lots of academics work from home and work in different places and so on. That’s another crazy thing to.
00:13:39 Prof Dale Southerton
Have.
00:13:40 Prof Dale Southerton
You know, across all universities, as far as I can tell, in the UK, there’s all of these.
00:13:45 Prof Dale Southerton
Occupied offices with nobody in them, so you could have much more effective use of our space, much more effective use of our at the amount of times we do travel in and out.
00:13:55 Prof Dale Southerton
Of Bristol to go to work and that’s across all sorts of organizations. I know insurance companies who.
00:14:01 Prof Dale Southerton
Are working on strategies to give up their their offices and instead have one central point which staff can go in and use when they need to, so it won’t be the end of face.
00:14:12 Prof Dale Southerton
To.
00:14:12 Prof Dale Southerton
Face meetings. So these are shifts in the way we’ve organized. We’re organizing our work life that could significantly reduce our need to travel.
00:14:21 Prof Valeska Ting
Well, the this idea of of of changing mindsets, I I think it’s is so interesting because I’m thinking back now like well so when when I first started.
00:14:31 Prof Valeska Ting
And working in the UK, I I was at the University of Southampton but but I lived in Bristol and and so I used to. I used to take the train every day and it was it was ridiculous. It was like 3 1/2 hours there and and four hours back when once you factor in the buses and the trains and it was just this idea that.
00:14:51 Prof Valeska Ting
If you work in a place you you have to be physically in that.
00:14:55 Prof Valeska Ting
Police to to carry out your.
00:14:57 Prof Valeska Ting
Work where whereas we’ve.
00:14:59 Prof Valeska Ting
Shown now, like we, we were just talking. I I haven’t been in my office for for months. But the the communications and the and the the thinking and the collaboration that can still all go on without people having to travel for hours a day.
00:15:16 Prof Valeska Ting
Miles a day.
00:15:17 Prof Dale Southerton
In many ways, it can be more effective, but then you end up with.
00:15:22 Prof Dale Southerton
And we all also missing our work colleagues and those conversations in the corridor. But you know, one of the outcomes could be that you start to see the the regeneration of local.
00:15:33 Prof Dale Southerton
Local communities, local high streets, local businesses.
00:15:37 Prof Dale Southerton
I mean, you’ll see some death of coffee shops in city centres, but you may well start to see more.
00:15:44 Prof Dale Southerton
More local activities, which is also quite good for net zero if we are more engaged in our local communities, we feel more connected to our local communities.
00:15:55 Prof Dale Southerton
Then that’s also potentially positive for the way in which from me we go about our consumption, so less travelling into cities and more walking into your High Street to do your consumption is is another reduction of the energy use.
00:16:15
Yeah.
00:16:15 Prof Dale Southerton
Added in our day-to-day practices.
00:16:18 Prof Valeska Ting
So I’m I’m I’m thinking now because they’re we’re we’re talking about two sides like so one of them is I I guess taking a view where you can you can do a behind the scenes swap of of of of carbon intense fossil fuels for for more sustainable or or lower carbon fuels.
00:16:40 Prof Valeska Ting
And and and basically by. By doing that, people don’t realize that that they’re that they’re using less carbon and and they don’t have to change their.
00:16:51 Prof Valeska Ting
Maybe years, but then you can couple that with with getting people to be conscious that if if they if they turn the heating down or or don’t don’t fly as much, then they’re they’re also contributing. It’ll be interesting to find out what what sort of ratio that’s at. Sorry that’s an engineering me.
00:17:11 Prof Valeska Ting
Like which one contributes more?
00:17:12 Prof Dale Southerton
I think it’s a really important question and I and.
00:17:14 Prof Dale Southerton
00:17:15 Prof Dale Southerton
Was gonna, you know, I’m interested to know.
00:17:18 Prof Dale Southerton
How engineers think about?
00:17:21 Prof Dale Southerton
Some of these questions about behavior change and so on because.
00:17:25 Prof Dale Southerton
You know that that you know you need the more resource efficient technologies. That’s really, really important. But what we’ve seen over the last 30-40 years is.
00:17:36 Prof Dale Southerton
We are we have more efficiency per unit of consumption because of technological innovation.
00:17:42 Prof Dale Southerton
And more consumption and the more consumption outstrips the efficiency. So the net effect to the environment is still getting worse.
00:17:50 Prof Dale Southerton
Though we can’t just rely on essentially technological efficiencies.
00:17:56 Prof Dale Southerton
Some technological innovations open up the possibility of significant behaviour change, so the digital digital platforms and the car sharing type schemes. I mean it’s the digital platforms that enable these, these things to happen. If you look at digital.
00:18:14 Prof Dale Southerton
Digital technologies in terms of our entertainment and communication, that’s we think increased the resource intensity of the of consumer music, for example.
00:18:25 Prof Dale Southerton
And we don’t buy CD’s.
00:18:26 Prof Dale Southerton
Anymore.
00:18:27 Prof Dale Southerton
We buy less books and there’s less material resources embedded in that that consumption when there are server costs and so on. So technological innovation can invent new practices or invent new behaviors, and that’s.
00:18:40 Prof Dale Southerton
So that’s really quite important, but I generally think based on the sort of empirical evidence that.
00:18:49 Prof Dale Southerton
There is not so much a task out there to persuade people to change their behaviour.
00:18:56 Prof Dale Southerton
Surveys for a very long time have shown that the vast majority of people really, really care about the environment and really want to be pro environmental and actually do lots of.
00:19:06 Prof Dale Southerton
What we might think of as relatively small task, so you think of recycling.
00:19:11 Prof Dale Southerton
The reduction of.
00:19:12 Prof Dale Southerton
Food waste in UK households is huge, which is massive, made some really big big shifts. If you look at the way that supermarkets deliver food and their distribution and we made some massive gains over the over the the last 1520 years. But the problem is.
00:19:29 Prof Dale Southerton
Still.
00:19:30 Prof Dale Southerton
Still there. So I think there is a.
00:19:32 Prof Dale Southerton
Real emphasis needed on governments to create the conditions.
00:19:36 Prof Dale Southerton
In which you can.
00:19:37 Prof Dale Southerton
Both have their.
00:19:38 Prof Dale Southerton
Technological substitution effects that we talked about use new technologies to create new ways of organizing our day-to-day lives.
00:19:48 Prof Dale Southerton
And and.
00:19:50 Prof Dale Southerton
Actually create, you know leading by creating new sets of constraints on people’s behavior.
00:19:56 Prof Dale Southerton
So the London congestion charge.
00:19:58 Prof Dale Southerton
You know, I think someone will have to go and look at the actual statistics, but you know, the day before the London congestion charge, the vast majority of Londoners were against it. And two weeks after they were for it, they they two it’s wrong to I think it’s wrong to think that you have to persuade.
00:20:17 Prof Dale Southerton
People’s attitudes before you seek to change their behavior. Usually, attitudes, in my view.
00:20:23 Prof Dale Southerton
Attitudes follow behaviour, not not trigger behavior. So if you seek to change people’s behavior and they see it works and it’s good and it’s better for their lives, then they’ll have a positive attitude towards it.
00:20:34 Prof Valeska Ting
So I’m thinking about, you know what, what you were saying about recycling and and and how how people will will have these interventions to to try and lead a more sustainable life, but again.
00:20:49 Prof Valeska Ting
Just just thinking because one of the reasons I went into material science and research in the 1st place was because I I was thinking is is this enough like like don’t we have to?
00:21:00 Prof Valeska Ting
Change the the.
00:21:01 Prof Valeska Ting
Whole of the way that we manufacture things and and I think the scale of the problem is something that is quite hard to wrap your head around.
00:21:10 Prof Dale Southerton
Yeah. No, I completely agree with that behaviour change on its own. It’s not going to be is nowhere near.
00:21:15 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah, but at this at the same time, I think it’s an important piece of the puzzle because like so if I think about the the interventions that we’re working on in engineering, you’re looking at things like using using digital prototyping or VR to so that you, you can speed up the manufacturing process.
00:21:35 Prof Valeska Ting
And and use less material and and so there’s less material waste you make the manufacturing process.
00:21:42 Prof Valeska Ting
Faster, cheaper, better, more efficient, lower carbon. But if you’re pumping out twice as many sets of sneakers, it it it’s not really like low low carbon.
00:21:54 Prof Valeska Ting
Or sustainable, right?
00:21:55 Prof Dale Southerton
Yeah, yeah, it’s completely. And I I think.
00:21:58 Prof Dale Southerton
Yeah, there was a period about 10 or 15 years ago in particular, where there was a sort of strong narrative from, from policy, from governments and so on that if only we could change people’s behaviour, everything else will follow.
00:22:12 Prof Dale Southerton
And it was never going to. It’s never going to be enough to just.
00:22:15 Prof Dale Southerton
Change people’s behaviour.
00:22:16 Prof Dale Southerton
We need to we need to.
00:22:18 Prof Dale Southerton
Invest in the technological innovation to do exactly the things that you’re talking about. But we can’t just go for technology fixes. We also have to do behavior. So it’d be really nice to have core, more coordinated policy that that things across these 3 dimensions of change rather than I mean.
00:22:38 Prof Dale Southerton
It seems to.
00:22:39 Prof Dale Southerton
Flip Flop one way or the other and place more emphasis.
00:22:42 Prof Dale Southerton
On on one one sets of solutions than any other, so some sort of coordinated vision of what futures might look like.
00:22:51 Prof Valeska Ting
We’re getting to to that systems thinking now, aren’t we? Like bringing all of this together?
00:22:57 Prof Dale Southerton
What would it look? What? What’s the? What’s the future of mobility? Does it look? What? What’s the mix between hydrogen and electric vehicles? And I mean one one thing for me is that social scientists are particularly poor as, as is obvious from this conversation, understanding the technological.
00:23:16 Prof Dale Southerton
Possibilities.
00:23:19 Prof Dale Southerton
So I think you know that’s a problem for for social science in particular.
00:23:25 Prof Valeska Ting
Not not necessarily. Because like again, if you have like the the ideal would be if you if you had drop in solutions and and then people wouldn’t even notice that you’re you’re using different technologies but so, so just to explain a bit though, so.
00:23:43 Prof Valeska Ting
The the solution I guess is complicated because you’ve got different energy sources and and and different solutions for different forms of transportation for different occasions. So like for, for example, if you were just pottering around in a city, Bristol then then a battery electric vehicle.
00:24:03 Prof Valeska Ting
Is is perfectly fine. I am it’s it’s zero emissions as long as your electricity comes from, say, wind or solar.
00:24:13 Prof Valeska Ting
It’s really efficient, but the the difficulties there are when you start to go longer range. So if you want to drive from from here to Aberdeen then then you’re you’re going to have to drive stop when your battery is discharged, wait till it charges up and.
00:24:32 Prof Valeska Ting
And that that charge discharge time lag is something that consumers aren’t used to. So that’s when you use something like hydrogen and the and the same for intercontinental flight like. So if you if you wanted to do short haul flights then you can use batteries. If you wanna go from here to Australia.
00:24:49 Prof Valeska Ting
There, there’s no way you could carry that weight of batteries, so that’s why industry is looking at at things like hydrogen, which is a really light but not energy dense fuel in terms of weight. So. So you’re looking at different solutions for different applications.
00:25:05 Prof Dale Southerton
So but would that then mean you have an A car that’s that runs on electric battery when you’re doing local trips, but when you want to drive to Aberdeen, it switches to hydrogen mode?
00:25:16
And.
00:25:17 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah, you could you.
00:25:18 Prof Valeska Ting
You could have a hybrid system. Yeah, yeah.
00:25:22 Prof Valeska Ting
I do think like because I I I like your model where where you have you. You might have two different vehicles and. And as you say if you wanna drop your your kids off at university three times a year. And if it’s far away then you just opt in for the the hydrogen vehicle and and use it over those long distances.
00:25:42 Prof Valeska Ting
And for the rest of the time that you use a battery electric vehicle around around the city, and so so because the The thing is, if you have all vehicles with with these dual power systems like with the batteries plus the hydrogen, that’s twice as much infrastructure that you have to manufacture and put in the car. And so if you.
00:26:02 Prof Valeska Ting
And again, looking at changing people’s behaviors or their expectations so that they only use the vehicle that they need for that particular purpose.
00:26:11 Prof Dale Southerton
Yeah, because the transition to if, if those kinds of vehicles are really expensive and you know the transition we’ve got building the infrastructure, so it’s going to be very slow and or you know it’s going to take 10/15/20 years whereas.
00:26:27 Prof Dale Southerton
You know, if you switch the expectations around?
00:26:32 Prof Dale Southerton
Not only in cars.
00:26:34 Prof Dale Southerton
To that kind of model, you could happen quite quickly. You would need to invest in the infrastructure so governments could facilitate and incentivize those whole systems type approaches.
00:26:45 Prof Dale Southerton
To encourage is to invest, I mean because we actually it’s a bit like home ownership, you know not many.
00:26:51 Prof Dale Southerton
People.
00:26:52 Prof Dale Southerton
You know the number of people who don’t own their car.
00:26:55 Prof Dale Southerton
Is really high.
00:26:57 Prof Dale Southerton
Most people have a loan, a finance arrangement or a lease hire arrangement to their car ownerships. They actually own the car anyway. They’re essentially renting a car.
00:27:07 Prof Dale Southerton
So you know, it’s not that big.
00:27:09 Prof Dale Southerton
A leap from.
00:27:09 Prof Dale Southerton
Where current consumer behaviour is around cars.
00:27:13 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah, I I think.
00:27:15 Prof Valeska Ting
A lot of it is. Is. Yeah. Again, the perspective or the the expectation. So if you, if you see your car as a.
00:27:22 Prof Valeska Ting
Status symbol then.
00:27:24 Prof Valeska Ting
It’s like, well, it’s my car.
00:27:26 Prof Dale Southerton
So involves marketing and all cause marketing has worked. On that basis. You know you are associated with your car and as part of your identity, but even better for you if you can pick the car for whichever form of status you want at any particular time, so you know.
00:27:44 Prof Dale Southerton
If you’re trying to impress her.
00:27:47 Prof Dale Southerton
A boss or, you know, a new partner. You could you could pay.
00:27:50 Prof Dale Southerton
That little bit extra and turn up.
00:27:52 Prof Dale Southerton
In a whatever sports car.
00:27:55 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah, I can see the ad for the ride sharing scheme right now, it’s.
00:27:59
Right.
00:28:04 Prof Valeska Ting
The other side of what what we were talking about though was like, do you, do you think people will still need to drive as much or fly as much now that they know, you know you you you can contact people easily over zoom you can work wherever.
00:28:18 Prof Valeska Ting
You want live wherever you want.
00:28:20 Prof Dale Southerton
I think that’s, you know, that’s part of what’s interesting about the pandemic and and all of that. I think if nothing is done.
00:28:27 Prof Dale Southerton
And in fact.
00:28:29 Prof Dale Southerton
I think that the constraints on people’s behavior will push them back to driving in and out of Bristol to go to work again, because they’ll be expectations that they should be in the office. There’s a car that’s sat on their drive that’s not been driven for a year. So the, you know, the slippage back into.
00:28:47 Prof Dale Southerton
Normal.
00:28:50 Prof Dale Southerton
Is all the old normal is likely to be.
00:28:54 Prof Dale Southerton
Be quite strong I think, but you know it is. So I think it’s an opportunity at this moment to think about the way in which we organize our day-to-day lives to make them better and more equitable. I don’t think working from home is the answer because it’s different for different people and we don’t have a domestic, a home infrastructure.
00:29:13 Prof Dale Southerton
That’s, you know, really designed for working from home.
00:29:17 Prof Valeska Ting
Well, that, yeah, that was gonna be my question to you. Like what, what so because it’s so depressing to think that people will have to go back to commuting in to their jobs and and and what could we do to to I guess shift that that expectation.
00:29:33 Prof Dale Southerton
Yeah. I mean, I think people, I mean, I don’t know what everybody thinks. I know it’s very mixed.
00:29:38 Prof Dale Southerton
Views for lots of different social groups. But we’re rich, professional middle class people like us. We can often choose to go in to work.
00:29:46 Prof Dale Southerton
At 7:00 in the morning or 10:00 in the morning, we often we’ve got more resources, so we can choose different modes of travel much easier, but there’s a lot of people who have to be in work by 9:00, have to queue down the M32, probably in an old car because there isn’t many other public transport.
00:30:07 Prof Dale Southerton
Opportunities available to them and then pay a lot.
00:30:09 Prof Dale Southerton
Of money to.
00:30:10 Prof Dale Southerton
Sit in and put that car in a car park all day.
00:30:12 Prof Dale Southerton
So you know, there are real opportunities to reduce the amount of travel we do. I’m not sure about flying. I think that’s a different thing altogether. I don’t think flying and car driving and the same practice at all.
00:30:27 Prof Dale Southerton
If you look at who flies and how frequently they fly, there’s a a significant difference between the the small minority of largely white middle class professional people who do a hell of a lot of flying.
00:30:41 Prof Dale Southerton
And the rest of the.
00:30:42 Prof Dale Southerton
Population.
00:30:44 Prof Dale Southerton
You may may go on. Go on a plane once a year.
00:30:49 Prof Valeska Ting
So are you saying that the big the big change has to be like a, say Rd. transport and flying like we we just need to get people out of the mindset that they that we’ll, we’ll we’ll get them thinking that that flying is a luxury that you should only do once a year or something like that, make it special instead of a run-of-the-mill thing.
00:31:11 Prof Dale Southerton
I I would.
00:31:12 Prof Dale Southerton
I I saw disk, I think I.
00:31:15 Prof Dale Southerton
I mean this just a conversation. I I I would disconnect the two as my my gut feeling I think day-to-day travel to get your food.
00:31:24 Prof Dale Southerton
To go to work and so on. We can do that in many different ways and ways, which are probably less time consuming, not necessarily more expensive and.
00:31:34 Prof Dale Southerton
Potentially less expensive and possibly more equitable across across the population. That sort of day-to-day everyday activities like driving and transport, that’s what I think of fly in as not a day-to-day activity.
00:31:51 Prof Dale Southerton
Certainly not for the vast majority of people. So I think it’s very difficult to say don’t fly.
00:31:56 Prof Dale Southerton
Because it’s terrible for the environment to everybody. Because actually the problem is just a very small group of people who fly a hell of a lot and fly.
00:32:06 Prof Dale Southerton
On multiple holidays as well as multiple business trips that double up as holidays and so on.
00:32:11 Prof Dale Southerton
So I think that’s that’s.
00:32:13 Prof Dale Southerton
So I think there’s a difference between.
00:32:14 Prof Valeska Ting
The two this is really interesting for me because like I’m I’m I’m trying to think of where we can target our our effort in, in, in terms of making the biggest impact and reducing carbon.
00:32:26 Prof Valeska Ting
And I’m thinking, OK, alright, if we if we sort out the the issue.
00:32:30 Prof Valeska Ting
Swapping over the fuels in in long haul flights like from from kerosene to to hydrogen, then then people can fly and that’s fine. And and then we look at the behavior change on the day-to-day.
00:32:44 Prof Dale Southerton
One of the the great things about being in Bristol and and the you know the cabin institute and so on is that it does create a space.
00:32:50 Prof Dale Southerton
And opportunity for.
00:32:52 Prof Dale Southerton
Other conversation, you know, these are reasonably typical conversations that that colleagues have the members of the Cabinet Institute. I think that’s really, really important because.
00:33:02 Prof Dale Southerton
You can then start to think about how.
00:33:05 Prof Dale Southerton
Behavior change. Different ways of organizing life and the technological innovations that are available, how you can bring them together to create sort of whole system solutions. I mean that’s really, really important and you know my bugbear and I, you know, I’ll let I won’t speak to you is.
00:33:24 Prof Dale Southerton
That I just don’t think policy is coordinated in that way. I don’t think policy brings things together in in those kinds of ways. I think it tends to be very, very narrowly focused on particular sectors or particular technologies. Sometimes you see.
00:33:40 Prof Dale Southerton
An over emphasis on behaviour change. Sometimes you see an over emphasis on market LED solutions. Sometimes you see an over emphasis on technological fixes and it would be great if.
00:33:52 Prof Dale Southerton
In terms of developing policy, you could develop more coordinated approaches and bring together these insights in the way that we we’re sort of talking about at this at the moment. But I don’t know what your experience is with.
00:34:06 Prof Dale Southerton
Policy sort of LED solutions. Do you have frustrations?
00:34:10 Prof Valeska Ting
Well, I I suppose the the interactions I’ve had have always been on the technological side like so getting getting through to politicians, but because take the you know the argument of of battery electric vehicles or.
00:34:30 Prof Valeska Ting
Like, yeah, so, so you know how we were talking about infrastructure. You need the infrastructure, the charging infrastructure.
00:34:35 Prof Valeska Ting
To to enable people to use the cars when they buy them, they won’t put the infrastructure in until enough people have bought cars and people won’t buy cars until you’ve got the infrastructure. It’s really chicken and egg, and so you you need you need policy makers to make a commitment to to prompt that behavioral change. And so I guess we’ve always been.
00:34:55 Prof Valeska Ting
Been discussing this idea that you need. You need lots of different technologies for for different applications. It’s really got to be a mix of of different solutions.
00:35:06 Prof Valeska Ting
And so I’ve always approached it from a technology angle, but but now I’m wondering like is, is there something that we can do to like as as as scientists as engineers to to to influence the way that policymakers think?
00:35:21 Prof Dale Southerton
About that, the point you made about.
00:35:24 Prof Dale Southerton
Mix of solutions is is absolutely critical.
00:35:27 Prof Dale Southerton
I think it’s really, really critical, I think.
00:35:30 Prof Dale Southerton
I don’t know enough about the the kinds of policy debates around.
00:35:35 Prof Dale Southerton
The infrastructural chicken and egg problem that you you just.
00:35:40 Prof Dale Southerton
You just raised, but I think the problem as I understand, is that for politician, it’s kind of if you bet on technology hacks and build the infrastructure for technology X and you get it wrong.
00:35:52 Prof Dale Southerton
So they’ve got to be absolutely certain that technology X is the technology and that creates all sorts of delays and slowness and so on rather than thinking.
00:36:03 Prof Dale Southerton
Technology X.
00:36:05 Prof Dale Southerton
If it’s accompanied by organizational shifts of the type we’ve been talking about behavioral shifts, and actually this is the direction of travel anyway. People are already not buying cars and spending more money on renting and leasing, and that’s happening in.
00:36:20 Prof Dale Southerton
Other sectors as well and around entertainment and communications, you know we we pay for lots of service packages rather than owning things nowadays. So they see that as a general trend. Then you can build together a policy which means you can get on and invest.
00:36:36 Prof Dale Southerton
In technology X and you can have more confidence than technology X.
00:36:41 Prof Dale Southerton
Is a key part of an overall package of solutions.
00:36:44
So I think.
00:36:45 Prof Dale Southerton
We could do with more of that kind of conversation. I know that Bristol has got the one city plan which cabin institute and many of our colleagues have been heavily involved in, and this is for the Bristol City and that does try to offer a mechanism for coordinating mixed solutions to some of the major problems that.
00:37:07 Prof Dale Southerton
That the city basis and that’s a I mean I’ll describe it as an experiment because it’s quite new, but it would be really interesting to see.
00:37:15 Prof Dale Southerton
What happens with crystals? Already pretty much at the forefront I think of.
00:37:19 Prof Dale Southerton
Finding environmental solutions and equitable solutions to the issues that the city faces so be quite interested to see how that goes.
00:37:28 Prof Valeska Ting
Well, like I, I guess you’re you’re thinking the same as me. Like if like these sorts of experiments because the?
00:37:35 Prof Valeska Ting
The problems are so complex and all of the solutions are so interwoven that that that that leads to that uncertainty and the uncertainty paralysis for government investment. So if you, if you can demonstrate that on a smaller scale and say yes, this, this will work as long as we we consider these these.
00:37:56 Prof Valeska Ting
I guess the intersection of of different solutions or or consider this issue that we we didn’t know were.
00:38:04 Prof Valeska Ting
Arise like that, taking, taking that sort of uncertainty out and being able to to model that complex system and then extrapolate out to what it would be like on a.
00:38:14 Prof Dale Southerton
National level. Yeah. And there’s lots of leaks that modelling complex systems which wouldn’t, which shouldn’t come from both the sort of more qualitative social science.
00:38:25 Prof Dale Southerton
Crude to, you know, really high.
00:38:27 Prof Dale Southerton
What quantitative metric based engineering? I mean, I’m charactering 22. Huge difference in that, but there there are a whole range of systems level tools that can be used for thinking about the technological shifts that are needed, the infrastructural.
00:38:48 Prof Dale Southerton
Shifts that are needed.
00:38:50 Prof Dale Southerton
The human organizational shifts and so on, and this so the tools are all out there, but I just don’t know if they’re really used that much. I mean, there is some evidence that.
00:39:00 Prof Dale Southerton
It’s the research councils are funding whole systems approaches.
00:39:05 Prof Dale Southerton
You know, in terms of research grants more that’s become quite popular in recent years, so food systems and so on that be.
00:39:13 Prof Dale Southerton
So that’s a good sign. That’s a good sign.
00:39:15 Prof Valeska Ting
Like, well, I’m. I’m. I’m just thinking of something else you said about the the social element. Because I I think we we often forget.
00:39:25 Prof Valeska Ting
That the things that we make and and the systems.
00:39:28 Prof Valeska Ting
That we put.
00:39:28 Prof Valeska Ting
Out there have to be used by actual people and if, if if it’s something that’s so difficult or unusable or or like if people hate it, then then it’ll never get traction. It’ll it’ll cause more problems than it solves and so that.
00:39:45 Prof Valeska Ting
That real world testing to to see how how people are going to interact with their technology.
00:39:50 Prof Valeska Ting
That’s something that we always forget as engineers. Or sorry, I’m speaking for myself. Other engineers are probably way better.
00:39:57 Prof Valeska Ting
At it than me.
00:39:59 Prof Dale Southerton
You and that’s always the guy. close. I think you. I think you’re probably very good at it. Better than better than most engineers but.
00:40:06 Prof Dale Southerton
Perhaps, perhaps cast aspersions on people, but there there is also, I think, though, on on in the spirit of that, I mean the Cabin Institute is fantastic for bringing together people, but.
00:40:20 Prof Dale Southerton
You know, we all know we’re all constrained by, you know, our day jobs. In a sense, we were we were. And so it would be really good if the if the UK Government invested some money in developing capacity for more interaction between.
00:40:37 Prof Dale Southerton
Different disciplinary expertise. So because it’s very much focused on particular projects or particular research grants at the moment, but just more space for these kinds of conversations. So the.
00:40:49 Prof Dale Southerton
Social scientists can understand better where engineers are coming from, what engineers are talking about and vice versa, and not just social science and engineering, which is.
00:41:00 Prof Dale Southerton
You know, and actually engineering is a.
00:41:03 Prof Dale Southerton
Big catch all category for a whole range of disciplines in the sub fields, as is social science, so there could be much more done. I think around having a sort of national interdisciplinary centre of excellence on environmental solutions or something like that. I mean, Cabot does that for.
00:41:21 Prof Dale Southerton
The University of Bristol but no policy makers give us no more money, so we can do so we can solve solve the problems.
00:41:31 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah. Well, I I I do think like in, in, in terms of of cabin like it it is a a really nice example of of I I I guess.
00:41:41 Prof Valeska Ting
Drawing on the the expertise in Bristol because.
00:41:44 Prof Valeska Ting
We’re we’re really lucky we’ve got this broad interdisciplinary base of of fundamental research and and and science and and people are doing so many different things and looking at problems from from so many different viewpoints and then being able to to bring that together and to to use other people as a sounding board.
00:42:06 Prof Valeska Ting
As well.
00:42:07 Prof Dale Southerton
These kinds of safe, neutral spaces that are created, and there’s a lot of work goes into doing that.
00:42:13 Prof Dale Southerton
I mean, I think that’s really, really important when it comes to finding these kind of mixed solutions.
00:42:19 Prof Dale Southerton
Bringing the evidence to bear to help inform policymakers and for us.
00:42:23 Prof Dale Southerton
To be able.
00:42:23 Prof Dale Southerton
To as academics, as as scholars be able to talk more consistently and coherently.
00:42:31 Prof Dale Southerton
When we’re engaging with policymakers and businesses and strategies, I think that’s really, really important and there’s not enough investment in the UK research infrastructure to enable those kinds of safe spaces.
00:42:44 Prof Dale Southerton
To happen, in my opinion.
00:42:46 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I think you’re absolutely right. Because the more practice that that we get at being able to explain what’s what’s important and and valuable in in our own research areas to people outside, outside of those research areas, if we can do that.
00:43:04 Prof Valeska Ting
An engaging, simple way than than that makes it so much easier to explain it to someone who’s making policy.
00:43:11 Prof Dale Southerton
Or really really, does it really does cause you?
00:43:13 Prof Dale Southerton
Know.
00:43:14 Prof Dale Southerton
You know what?
00:43:15 Prof Dale Southerton
Academics are like we can have really wonderful, great, long, detailed conversations with the other ten people who are experts in our.
00:43:22 Prof Dale Southerton
Field I will try to explain it to our mum or our partners or our friend down the pub.
00:43:30 Prof Dale Southerton
They’re dozing off within seconds. And so, yeah, we do need to find ways to be able to.
00:43:35 Prof Dale Southerton
To communicate and explore different ideas.
00:43:39 Prof Dale Southerton
More coherent, I think, yeah.
00:43:41 Prof Valeska Ting
So if you’re having a just a general conversation, then the the the more you can, you can get people thinking about these ideas and and getting them thinking about behavior change and and the impacts it can make, like it can only be a positive.
00:43:56 Prof Dale Southerton
Thing, right? Yeah. And that’s one of my concerns about the whole.
00:43:59 Prof Dale Southerton
At zero thing is that.
00:44:02 Prof Dale Southerton
It seemed more of a target than a strategy and.
00:44:06 Prof Dale Southerton
You know a strap. You know, you it’s it’s a fine target. Nothing wrong with it as a target. But you know what? What’s the strategy for achieving it? That that involves developing understanding and connections and collaborations and find creating opportunities for.
00:44:21 Prof Dale Southerton
Different groups to find solutions, so we’ve got lots of it’s top down at the moment. Well, so it’s kind of big, big energy infrastructure technologies. But you know there’s lots of scope for you know was the transitions movement in the UK over the last 15 years, which is just an encouragement of.
00:44:39 Prof Dale Southerton
Innovation, technological and social innovation in local towns and you could become a transition town and you had, you know, local and wind power generated energy, you know, because community members of communities got together and and develop them, that those sorts of things are as important.
00:45:00 Prof Dale Southerton
I think as some of the major big investments in offshore wind power, which are also really, really important, even though they operate at different scales in terms of the impact is in terms of moving us in a direction towards what could be seen as net zero. Those are really those are really important parts of the strategy, so.
00:45:20 Prof Dale Southerton
I do worry that sometimes net zero is only fault about.
00:45:24 Prof Dale Southerton
Or is dominated as a target rather than as a strategy for developing. You know, the way that our societies are going to.
00:45:31 Prof Dale Southerton
Going.
00:45:32 Prof Dale Southerton
To change because they will change whatever we do.
00:45:33
Yeah.
00:45:35 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah, I I.
00:45:37 Prof Valeska Ting
I think well and one thing I haven’t, I haven’t got clear in my mind yet is. So if you’ve got all of these, say these businesses or these sectors or these, these even regions and invested in this idea of net.
00:45:52 Prof Valeska Ting
Zero. We’re we’re all interconnected globally, right? And so, so where does your boundary of of your 0 emissions sit? And and and are you just displacing the the problem somewhere else along the supply chain?
00:46:08 Prof Dale Southerton
Problem and do you count those emissions based on consumption activities or?
00:46:12 Prof Dale Southerton
Production activities. So we’ll get if we don’t, if we measure our emissions in terms of our productive production productive output, we’ll get to that zero a lot quicker than if we measure it by our consumption.
00:46:26
The.
00:46:27 Prof Dale Southerton
Emissions for my for my consumption, your consumption is counted in China.
00:46:34 Prof Dale Southerton
Where the the way that we.
00:46:35 Prof Valeska Ting
Buy so it it it really has to be. It’s going back to this coordination idea that that you had that like this, this thinking of that policymakers have to collaborate across across governments. Yeah, we all have to be moving in the same direction.
00:46:54 Prof Dale Southerton
There’s not a singular answer or singular way of measuring.
00:46:58 Prof Dale Southerton
Or counting financial. And I think you know, many of our colleagues would be very nervous about focusing so explicitly on net zero because there are many other issues out there, like ecological emergencies.
00:47:15 Prof Dale Southerton
Impacts on our oceans and so on that are.
00:47:19 Prof Dale Southerton
Are as problematic as simply.
00:47:22 Prof Dale Southerton
The question of a net zero of carbon.
00:47:26 Prof Valeska Ting
Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. And then then thinking about the the impacts on on different parts of society and in different parts of the world as well. So yeah, is is getting to net zero at the expense of of, of people’s livelihoods or lifestyles.
00:47:43 Prof Valeska Ting
Like, yeah, but I’m. I’m guessing that if we can consider these things like as as a whole system more holistically from the beginning, hopefully we’ll we’ll head off a lot of these problems.
00:47:56 Prof Dale Southerton
That’s why I think it’s so important that we open up the the different forms of dialogue and conversation.
00:48:01 Prof Dale Southerton
Both in in terms of interdisciplinarity and have the safe spaces to have those kinds of conversations, which I’m not sure we always do, particularly not in sort of policy type circles where there’s such a rush to get to the answer.
00:48:14 Prof Dale Southerton
How do we?
00:48:15 Prof Dale Southerton
Question is how? How can we how can we transition?
00:48:20 Prof Dale Southerton
The whole sets of systems indirections that will make us more sustainable and more equitable and what would that future look like? That’s the conversation that needs to be had, I think, and we don’t have that conversation we don’t have.
00:48:34 Prof Dale Southerton
That I’m aware of conversations about what will life look like in 2013 in the UK? Will it be more travel, less travel? Will it be hydrogen electric? Will it be people owning cars or not owning cars? We don’t have that conversation.
00:48:48 Prof Dale Southerton
And the idea that these things we can’t have.
00:48:50 Prof Dale Southerton
Those conversations because.
00:48:52 Prof Dale Southerton
These things will just happen because markets.
00:48:56 Prof Dale Southerton
Markets follow patterns of demand and supply and demand, I think is not not true. I think you know, we do have some.
00:49:04 Prof Dale Southerton
Capacity to direct our future direct ourselves in terms of the types of future we want and therefore.
00:49:13 Prof Dale Southerton
What the future should be should be part of a public debate.
00:49:17 Prof Dale Southerton
So the climate assemblies were good for that purpose. So I liked the climate assembly, approached colleagues from Bristol. We’re involved in that, which was really, really good from Bristol. I probably a very high representation of the of the people involved in Bristol University in terms of experts and so on. But I think that’s a really good way of opening up and bringing in different voices.
00:49:38 Prof Dale Southerton
To have a conversation about OK, here’s the challenges. What sorts of future society do we want not.
00:49:44 Prof Dale Southerton
You or I want or. I mean, we’d probably have similar views, but you know.
00:49:51 Prof Dale Southerton
The old lady down the road who, you know, she had different values and different different opinions, different different groups based on.
00:49:59 Prof Dale Southerton
You know, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation. So on all of these voices need to be included in these conversations, I think, but very much with where do we want to get to, not just let’s have a chat about all the problems in the world.
00:50:13 Prof Dale Southerton
So if you add more message for policymakers, what would? What would it be?
00:50:18 Prof Valeska Ting
So my message would probably be that there’s not one single solution, so we we have to investigate a range of diverse solutions for different applications and those solutions all need investment.
00:50:33 Prof Valeska Ting
What? What would you tell them?
00:50:36 Prof Dale Southerton
Mine saw twofold. One is in the sense to stop reinventing the wheel. So I think that over then, I mean, I’ve been in this working in this field for sort of 20 years and we have trends and things come come and go and you know at one point this behaviour changed. Then it’s really focused on technology fixes.
00:50:54 Prof Dale Southerton
And then you go back to behavior change and the lessons learned from the last round of behavior change initiatives seem to have been lost. And that’s partly to do with the change of people in government or in in policy. So there needs to be, you know, we need to build on existing knowledge, not continually reinvent and go back to existing knowledge.
00:51:14 Prof Dale Southerton
And I think we need to be much more open to.
00:51:19 Prof Dale Southerton
Debates about what sort of future society.
00:51:23 Prof Dale Southerton
Can we have not to be one? But can we have including the technological capabilities and options?
00:51:30 Prof Dale Southerton
Including the way we might organize our day-to-day lives and so on. So I think we should have that public public debate.
00:51:43 Cabot Institute
You can find out more about the Cabot Institute for the environment at bristol.ac.uk/cabot.
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