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Sustainability is the defining issue of the 21st century. While it has taken us some time to understand the implications of this, in 2022 the world is now witnessing a historic time, as at the end of the day, this is all about humanity.
Arun Majumdar, Dean of Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and former Under Secretary of Energy was speaking on the Future of Sustainability and the Defining Issues of 21st Century, at IIT Bay Area Leadership Conference 2022.
The IIT Bay Area Leadership Conference is the largest IIT alumni networking event on the West Coast. The conference is open to ALL Tech Professionals. IIT Bay Area draws together industry veterans, company founders, visionary investors, and trailblazers to share their inspiring stories and vision. While the Indian Institutes of Technology are shaping the future of the world with their technical forte, entrepreneurship, and leadership skills. World-class leaders took part at the IIT Bay Area Alumni Association’s leadership conference.
Majumdar, while referring to the world population said “The Earth has never seen anything like this before. It took a million years for the human population to increase to one-third of a billion but now it takes just 13 years to add 1 billion. This is a super-exponential growth and the implications of this are profound not just for humanity but the world around us.”
The population is expected to grow by 2050, “I don’t know how many of us will be alive but our children and grandchildren will be alive, is expected to reach 10 billion and by 2100 it is expected to reach 11 billion with an uncertainty of 1 billion,” he added. “That’s the world we are entering right now and this is mostly the population growth that has happened with a few bumps due to pandemics, the plague, etc in the past.”
Calling this growth, the human tsunami Majumdar said that the implications of this are bound to be profound.
“In addition to this, there is a human consumption tsunami. We have married the success of companies and nations to a concept called GDP. This concept was introduced right after the Great Depression by an economist at MIT, Simon Kuznets when he was asked by Congress to give a metric of economic success because we are just coming out of a depression. So, he created the concept of GDP, and he got the Nobel prize in economics.”
But Kuznets had also warned that GDP should not be used as a measure of human welfare, “and yet we do that”. “It’s not just GDP, the GDP per capita has also gone up and if you multiply the GDP per capita with the population you get a super-exponential. This is human consumption because when you produce something which is GDP, someone is consuming, and that is why you are producing it. This is a human consumption tsunami,” Majumdar added.
“To fuel and power all this we need energy. Whether it is computing, manufacturing, or transportation we need energy. Now we have a much narrower view of energy and this is what I call the energy consumption tsunami.”
“The energy we consume comes from fossils, as we know it drives our economy. The consequence of that consumption is the carbon dioxide tsunami. And, this is a symptom of a problem that is there’s waste, you can do the same thing for plastics, for other commodities that we use, our cellphones, and electronic goods waste. This is the world we have inherited and we are offering to our children and grandchildren. This one-way traffic has consequences.”
The whole paradigm right now is can we change this? Can we change the paradigm of the 20th century because we did not think at that time of the unintended consequences and we are living in the world of the unintended consequences of the 20th century? How do we change this?
Referring to some data gathered by NASA, Majumdar said that heat waves are happening more often and more intensely. This is a major issue and this is going in one direction.
“The next decade will be the most consequential and people have now felt the urgency of this. The emissions come from electricity production at 25%, agriculture at 24%, methane emissions from cows and rice are a big deal, industries like cement, steel, and petrochemicals at 21%, and also transportation at 14%. We have to change this scenario now. To curb the temperature rise we have to reduce emissions significantly,” Majumdar added.
He pointed out that energy consumption around the world is skyrocketing and the biggest challenge for electronics and semiconductors now is power, energy efficient computing. “People have realized that this is a major problem, bigger than anything that we have faced before – almost like World War II but this could be bigger.”
The last time Earth faced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3 to 5 million years ago when the temperature was 2 to 3 degrees warmer, and the sea level was 10 to 20 meters higher than now. “That could be one of the worlds that our children could inherit. This is not just an energy issue, this is water, energy, agriculture, food, and biotechnology, everything is connected,” he stressed.
The sustainability that we are talking about now is really an existential challenge. In COP 26 countries made commitments. China, the biggest emitter today with 29-30% of CO2, wants to be a net zero emissions economy by 2060. “The US too made a commitment for 2050 and India by 2070. But, no one really knows how to get there. The US has passed two major bills on infrastructure and climate. More than 50% of the Fortune 500 companies have made climate commitments and their average revenue is about $20 trillion. And, this number is increasing. They too don’t really know how to get there. This is the opportunity,” Majumdar said.
Majumdar also coached the audience on what we can do. He said that if you eat 1 kg of beef you emit 60 kg that’s like driving a car for 100 miles. “And, it’s the same with lamb, mutton, and cheese. If you reduce red meat consumption it is good for your health and has a major sustainability impact. If people take personal action, we can be really powerful. At the end of the day, it is all about people and what we do like reusing old clothes, as the textile industry is also a major contributor,” he added.
Majumdar also briefly listed out the positive news like wind and solar are the cheapest ways to produce energy anywhere in the world. He also spoke about the Electronic Vehicle revolution and pointed out that the cost of batteries has dramatically come down. He predicted that in the next couple of years, an electric vehicle will be competitive in range and cost with a gasoline car without a subsidy – a tectonic shift in the automobile industry.
He then shifted focus to the Stanford University. He said all the existing schools in the university have been set up before 1948. “For the last 74 years, we haven’t created a school. Because we didn’t feel the topic was important enough. This year, we launched the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.”
Stanford’s first new school in more than 70 years is named the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability in recognition of a historic gift from Ann and John Doerr. “Their commitment, together with gifts from other generous lead donors, will extend the university’s scholarship and dramatically amplify its impact in tackling the urgent climate and sustainability challenges facing all people,” said Majumdar. “We are deeply grateful to John and Ann for partnering with us to realize the school’s mission, as well as to the other generous lead donors who are leveraging their resources to help us create a more livable future,” Stanford President, Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
Majumdar said: “We are blessed to have the largest gift that Stanford has ever received – 1.1 billion dollars – from Ann and John Doerr. But this problem that is facing the world cannot be solved by a single university or any organization on its own. We are hoping that organizations around the world receive these kinds of assistance because we collectively need to do this. We are forming this global network of organizations. We need to get educated on issues around the world, including India to co-create solutions.”
