Interview with Prof. Dr. Thomas Sterr
Interviewer: Katharina Krohm
Interviewee: Prof. Dr. Thomas Sterr
Background
Doctor Thomas Sterr studied PhD economics and did his masters in geography. He was graduated teaching assistant at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg from 1993 to 1996. Over the years he was managing director and project leader for different projects and moreover scientific director at the Institut für Umweltwirtschaftsanalysen Heidelberg e.V. and part of DCAD, INSPIRE and lecturer at different universities. Since 2017, he works at the SRH university and is head of the studies Climate Change Management and Engineering. This special course was implemented in 2020 and is working on the combination of natural sciences and economy.
“We try to match economic questions, with social questions and environmental questions. This combination is absolutely necessary, if we want to tackle climate change issues in a comprehensive way.” – Thomas Sterr
Q: What does sustainability mean to you on a personal level?
Oh, personal level… I could go for the official definition of sustainability but for myself it means that I have to behave in a way that does allow to be in line with the needs of my people that work with me, not only on a regional or local level, but on a global level. And it also means that I care about future needs of future generations. And so, for me in personal idea, I try to minimize for instance flights, because they are very resource intensive and harm the environment very much. Also regarding food, I should try to decrease my consumption of meat and base my food more on regional and seasonal food, in order to get the most ecological friendly way on how to feed myself.
Q: In your opinion, how can sustainability be made more accessible and relevant to the public?
That´s a complex question. The key is education. What is really relevant with education is, that I do not only educate or teach people who study CCME (Climate Change Management and Engineering), because they are already convinced. Also some of my friends are for example convinced members of the green parties, thus they put a lot of emphasis on environmental questions too. So it is most important that we do not only discuss these questions in scientific or political community. We should discuss these issues much more openly towards the public thoughts, the masses, and we should make our knowledge more accessible to them, which also means that we should not only use the scientific language but also to distribute knowledge, which is relevant for those people in oder to pave a walkable pathway for them and behave in a more eco-friendly way. Also we should not be too theoretical, but try to communicate with examples that they understand and relate to in their sphere and daily life.
Q: What do you think about current trends, such as circular economy?
What we know from nature is that it works in cycles, so every waste of one subject might get food for another subject. And so based on that idea, we as a society can only live on the long run on Earth, when we work with it and cope with the challenge of living with limited resources. We should try to copy the nature wherever it is possible. But on the other hand, we cannot just copy nature, because nature is always working in an internal process of building up structures and destroying. For instance, if you look at operation items in hospitals, it would be horrible when those items deteriorate over time. This would be the same for machines, in which we travel at a high speed. Moreover, we can also say that the “big success” in science in the 19th century, was when chemistry production has led to substances that nature did not know. And so, nature did not provide any instruments or tools to decompose these products. If we think about plastic for instance, it stays forever and we have to care about the decomposition. We have to be aware of the fact, if we relate our modern life to plastic only and change all nature resources to plastic, maybe future species will discover the age of the humans by a plastic layer. But thinking about the differences in weight and transport between plastics and substitutes of plastics, it might be very heavy transporting those alternatives and we should keep in mind that transportation is closely related to energy and resource productivity.
We should go for natural cycles, wherever possible, but still there is the question of weight and not to forget the of hygiene.
Another aspect is an usage security. First we should recycle the substances on the level of modules, before going down to the substance itself or before going down to the energy level. Overall we should close the recycling loop at the highest complexity possible. And so, when regarding several economy, we should maximize the length of the usage phase before going to a second cycle. This means, the first thing is that I should go for cleaning the notes, should go for a repairing, then I should look for a secondary market for the old products, then the modular recycling, the raw material recycling and at the end I should go for energy recycling.
Q: How can we connect the trend of zero waste to the circular economy?
Zero waste is very much related to circular economy. I should go for zero waste but I should keep in mind that recycling is also resource consuming. And I should take into account that maybe for instance, if I want to dismantle mobile phone with very small pieces, the energy consumption, that is needed to dismantle it, might be higher than going for the production of a new one.
We should go for zero waste strategy, try to decrease environmental impacts as much as possible and substitute artificial substances by natural substances, so it goes into the direction of zero waste. But we should always think about: what are the real costs of circularity? Zero waste is a goal, but I should always keep the economic and ecological costs of such a recycle process in mind.
Q: In what way would you combine the matter of energy transmission and climate change?
Energy transition is very much related to climate change, because we have to think about: What are the reasons for climate change? This is very much due to the greenhouse gases that we emit, mostly related to CO2 (Carbondioxide), but also to CH4 (Methane) and there, energy transmission takes a very big proportion. Fossil fuels, where we have coal, gas and oil, have a high impact on the release on CO2, so when you burn carbons or you oxidize carbon, you release CO2 and it leads to global warming. Our energy provision is still mostly based on fossil fuels, thus we should change to renewable energy, such as using PV, geothermal energy and wind-based energy.
Q: How do you view Germany's decision to abandon nuclear power plants in both terms of global warming and human safety?
The usage of atomic power doesn't affect our global warming potential, as it is more or less carbon neutral - you will also have to take this into account. But the big problem with atomic power is security. So, if you work with radioactive materials, you do not completely use it. So the question is, what are you going to do with it? And this question is still unsolved, even in Germany. We try to deposit it in the salt mines, as the salt is very flexible and it can embed the radioactive material very safely. But the safety is endangered if you have an intrusion of water in the mines, because then the embedding salt gets dissolved, so the liquidized solution will follow the water stream and pollute a huge area of undergrounds with radioactivity.
Another problem in security is the mindset - here in the western world, we thought such an accident like Tschernobyl could not happen to us - until there was Fukushima. The Japanese are very well known for being perfect, having highest engineering skills, but even in Japan, they had a radioactive fallout due to an accident. So, atomic power is very much related to our responsibility towards future generations.
Q: How would you assess Germany's progress in developing sustainable systems and renewable energy?
In Germany, we have, I'd say the advantage, that we do not possess so much oil and gas as the US has. So for us, we depend very much on energies from abroad. We have coal but we know very well, if we produce our energy based on coal, we will harvest smog. If you want to prevent that, we should use other energies. The US has a lot of oil, they have a lot of gas, they also do fracking, no problem because the country is large and so also the consequences of bad behaviors are not so much felt by the population because population is at other places than where the fracking takes place for instance.
Germany is very densely populated and equally populated. So the probability is high that you get the direct consequences of bad behavior. This prohibits you to a certain extend to go for bad behavior because you will suffer from that personally. If you can externalize the suffering then, maybe you'll go for a bad behavior or you don't care so much about that. But if your family is affected by your bad behavior, for instance if you own a company and you emit a lot of harmful substances and your family will suffer or other people around you, they will accuse you for being responsible and not stopping it. And so a company in Germany has to go for a more complex understanding of their system, because action and reaction is very closely connected.
Q: How would you compare Germany´s sustainability efforts to those of China and the USA?
I have a European perspective, so I'm proud of the European approaches if I compare them with the Chinese and the American ones. In Germany, at least from an inside perspective, we think social dimension of sustainability plays an important role and responsibility for our generations and for our neighbors.
In China the social component of sustainability is not so much reflected by the individual thoughts, wishes and desires. It's more or less reflected by the social dimensions, represented by the state. The idea of the communist state is that the state knows exactly what needs are desired by the population - or at least they should know. Whereas, we in Germany, we say there's interests of the state, but there's also individual needs which might not be in line with those of the state. So from European perspective, the social dimension is much better represented.
In the U.S. ecological questions are very closely related to economic questions, like price building. For instance, Trump is not against decreasing the global warming potential - if it pays off. So he agrees with the strategy of promoting electric vehicles, but only if the Americans build them or have a competitive advantage of building electric cars. America is discussing problems of climate change as well, suffers from it and takes them for serious, but the consequences taken are much more oriented towards the realization of a new business opportunity related to it. To a certain extent this is also true for China, as China has severe environmental problems, for example the expansion of using hardcoal or when you think about smoke and smog. On the other hand, China is the biggest producer of wind power and solar power plants worldwide.
Q: Could you share your thoughts on the SustAInability project, which combines sustainability challenges with artificial intelligence?
I s>till do not know so much about the project, but it's a project related to a lot of unsolved questions. What I really expect is, that if you want to tackle environmental issues, you have to tackle a lot of variables at the same time and also interrelations between different variables. For our minds, this is too complex, so you need a lot of data. Even with the traditional models, we cannot really get to a final result, because we have to limit our variables, as we would need extremely large capacities to match the interrelations between different dimensions. Artificial intelligence can help us processing and relating a lot of different information.
I remember when, for instance, the people in microbiology started to use Artificial intelligence and they needed years to go for the first 5% of solving a problem, therafter they solved the rest of it in 1/10 of the time by the aid of AI. So artificial intelligence is about a learning system. You have processes that are defined by physics, but at the end the question is what happens if these results interrelate with the processes of life which might change their behavior?
Q: Could you provide some examples of how AI can be used to process data and generate new solutions in sustainability?
My spontaneous is a bit offside from climate change but about food waste; For instance, if you have a bakery and you don't sell your products today or tomorrow, it goes to waste. Most bakeries are unsure about calculations of specific demands of the day. I remember this project with a company who was working with artificial intelligence, where they matched all the data from what different branches of the bakery sold, related to day of the week, day in a month, holidays, the weather with the climate humidity, insolation and so on. They instructed the baking machine with AI, so that the machine decided, based on all the information that it got, what kind and how much to bake. Due to this new strategy, the bakery saved 20% of their input materials – For me, this was really convincible.
Q: As you have a lot of experience in Asia, does AI have a larger role or impact in countries like China?
For China AI is very important because by AI China might also be able to compensate time of experience based learning. If information is accessible and AI matches all the information that is available worldwide, China can take very much profit of this information. And China has a competitive advantage for instance with respect to natural resources it posesses and so it could very well match AI with its resource base. For instance, regarding rare earth, you might need for new technologies and combine it with new information base. Due to this combination, China can go for natural resource based or physical resources and match it with its increasing intellect resources, which is why I am very much convinced that China will have a competitive advantage.
Q: For our project, we have partner universities in Cambodia and Kyrgyzstan. Do you have any experience or knowledge about these countries, particularly in terms of sustainability and engineering?
In brief, I never visited them, but Cambodia is a subtropical country and Kyrgyzstan has a very continental climate, with very low temperatures in winter and very high temperatures in summer. And this is also relevant, for instance with respect to energy consumption, as there might be more and more air conditioning in summer and in winter they will need a lot of energy to warm up. And if the living standard goes up, much more energy will be needed for both sides. And based on that, the key question is where to take the energy from. Do we provide this energy based on fossil fuels or renewables? So it's very much required that these countries change their energy production on renewable basis as fast as possible.
Q: Do you think artificial intelligence has potential in addressing climate change issues? If so, in what ways can we use artificial intelligence?
We can use artificial intelligence to get a more clear picture about our future energy needs. When do we need those and to what behaviors are these needs related to? In general, artificial intelligence provides a multiplication of information, that we can use for our models. In my opinion, we could get much more precise information on what would be the middle and long term consequences of decisions. Artificial intelligence might also allow us to go for a testing phase with more information. If you want to test something, you needed to go for a prototype and test the outcomes of every prototype. So this had to be done at different places, with different products and so on. But if we can match all the information, that you get from these testing faces and I'm taking this input for of an AI based decision, this might lead to better results at lower resource costs.
Q: What are the opportunities and challenges of using AI in climate change and have you already worked with AI?
To be honest, I did not ever work with artificial intelligence. But I believe in efficiency gains, so that we do not have to go on testing all those machines and go through all those testing phases, that are resource consuming. Let's say you can store all the world information in one box, on the one hand you might get better results at much lower resource costs. But on the other hand, it is also challenging for the owner, because the artificial intelligence has a very great power. So we'll have the question who can have access to all these data, who can have access to the systems that are run by artificial intelligence? It will change the competitivity of enterprises in extreme way, because a lot of enterprises make money now due to the fact that they do not fully provide information, which is related to their production. So they might lose competitive advantages, by providing their data to an artificial intelligence system. And this might also lead to a shift of production to other areas. So maybe there might be a shift from Germany or the US, to China or other countries, who then can have access to the full information. The question is, what will be the effect on the national markets?
All in all we will get to a very big advantage with respect to resource productivity, but the question is what does this mean with respect to the shift of jobs between different regions of the world.
Q: Reflecting on past projects; Do you think they would have been easier by using artificial intelligence?
Yes, absolutely. When I think, for instance about the project I was coordinating in Central Asia, which was related on climate change effects in Central Asia and a model for potential changes that we will face. Let's say, not only in Northwest China, where we implemented that project, but also in other countries in Central Asia, we would have been able to model much more precisely, due to a much broader access to information. And we would also have been able to extend the amount of variables that we used in our models to other barriers and they would have been much more precise with predictions.
Lastly, do you have some ideas or example of how we can use the artificial intelligence to generate new solutions in sustainability?
I'm sure that there will be a lot of new opportunities that derive from artificial intelligence, by using this information and all data basis that can be provided from artificial intelligence. For product developments and also for new services. In medicine, I can also imagine that we get very very big advantages from artificial intelligence, because let's say a lot of information can get detected from our body and with these data, the interrelation between different actions can be specified much better than right now. And this gives a perfect way on how to treat this and that in our body. In general I can imagine considerable progress in the understanding of human-environment interaction: what causes what with what consequence? And how can we be more effective with the measures we take due to the fact that we live in a world of limited resources?