university – Sustainable Lens

Fracking…hydraulic fracturing… but the term now encompasses the whole debate about the use of fossil fuels in the modern world.

Samuel Mann with Richard Davies [ 56:47 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Professor Richard Davies on how fracking has been such a game changer for the petroleum industry, what are its costs and benefits, and why it has become such a flashpoint for sustainability.

Professor Davies took up the post of Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Engagement & Internationalisation) at Newcastle University. He is a petroleum geologist, with a particular focus on hydraulic fracturing used to exploit shale gas and oil. Richard is an advisor to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Unconventional Oil and Gas. He tells us that he is agnostic about the issue of shale gas and oil exploitation but very outspoken about his commitment to expanding the evidence base in the European fracking debate. He is Project Lead of ReFINE.

We ask Prof Davies if fracking is inherently damaging – either in its own right or for its implications for climate change, and why it has become a poster child for unsustainability. But first, we ask him about his own voyage of discovery, and what led him to train as a petroleum geologist.

Talking points

My job in the petroleum industry was where to put the next well…but I found I was more interested in fundamental questions about geoscience

Fracking is an example of how technology has improved and allowed us to access oil and gas that no one thought we could get

The reason we stop getting oil and gas will because it is so damaging or because it becomes so expensive to get hold of it that no one would pay for it.

It may be that oil becomes a precious substance – no one would dream of burning it – that would be crazy…it would just be used for a select group of products or processes for which there is no alternative.

Technology may unlock more oil reserves in the future, but the key question is do we really need to burn it? Perhaps we shouldn’t be burning it and using it for something else.

Peak oil was turned upside down by fracking

Oil and gas companies are answerable to shareholders, and their shareholders are you and I.

A cup of oil contains a huge amount of energy, and it is difficult to replicate that and produce the same amount of profit from renewable energy…so unfortunately it’s an unequal battle

(Comparison of coal to renewable energy) I don’t believe a Russian man…in Russia mining some coal, putting it on a train to a boat, the boat coming to the UK, putting the coal on another train, to a power station, and thus burning it and then capturing the C0₂ at that point – because we haven’t captured all the C0₂ along the way

In a cradle to grave carbon footprint, that coal has come a long way…

Energy storage is so important for renewables

If we put the R&D spend in the oil and gas industry into other things such as energy storage…wow.

Fracking…hydraulic fracturing… but the term now encompasses the whole debate about the use of fossil fuels in the modern world.

The whole fracking process has a lot more intensity to it than drilling a normal well because of the need for fracking fluid, and the chemicals required, and the disposal of that

We come from an agnostic, neutral perspective – we’re not for or against fracking – and therefore we’re unpopular with both sides of the debate…we’ve positioned ourselves just right, we’re neutral, we’re academics.

The long term impact will be in looking after the bore holes…in 50 years time.

Every extractive industry has downsides…this isn’t rocket science, we need to understand the risks and manage them

This is a fossil fuel, that won’t do climate change any good. You can reduce it…but we haven’t got a replacement right now

Some of the reasons people don’t like fracking is because it is an extractive industry, it won’t help climate change and there is a level of risk

There’s a huge debate about renewables versus fossil fuels and fracking is right in the centre of that debate.

There’s the technical stuff and the social stuff, the two are very linked and it ain’t all about the science

We have a handle on the science…but not enough…lots of good questions we don’t have the answers to

In a way, industry has made this all happen, but the questions haven’t been solved at the same rate the industry has been deployed.

The questions have reached a bit of a crescendo, coming from all quarters, we have a handle on it, but we don’t know everything.

I’ve learned a lot in the last four years…firstly admitting we don’t have all the answers, listening to people, I’ve never thought “that’s not a good question”. Of course its a good question, I’ve huge respect for people who get involved and ask questions. That’s forced us scientists to look at things, it’s forced industry to look as well, and I don’t think industry knew the answers to some of the questions members of the public were asking.

Companies have got better at taking the public questions seriously, to research them and to provide good answers.

We’re often training someone to be highly specialised, but we also need more cross disciplinary people who can see energy from across the spectrum

We need a new breed of technical people who can see the world in a slightly different way.

We need people to be open and frank and aware of more than their own little postage stamp piece of the puzzle.

(Superpower) Think of the long term, not just the next five years.

(Success) changing the law in the UK so companies not allowed to frack with 1km or the surface, therefore protecting people’s water supplies.

(Activist) No. For me that is a personal question, personally about me living on my farm with solar panels, my two kids and my wife. I’m a scientist I come in to do this as neutral person. I don’t want to mix my personal views – my personal setting, my personal history, my background, with the science that I do – I thinks that’s an incorrect mixture

(Motivation) Discovery

(Challenge) Make the project more international, we’ve been a bit Europe-centric…continue the job we’ve done successfully but on an international stage

(Miracle) Long term independent funding, we’ve fought hard to be independent,

(Advice) Keep asking good questions.

Keeping the light shone on the fossil fuel industry will make for a better world.

This was conversation was recorded at Newcastle University in September 2015. The Framing Fracking paper mentioned is here.

The role of the scholar, the engaged scientist and the engaged citizen are compatible, complementary, and in fact necessary.

Abby Reyes [ 1:01:47 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Director of the Sustainability Initiative at the University of California Irvine, Abby Reyes on creating opportunities for community engaged sustainability scholarship.

Talking points

We work to make community engaged sustainability scholarship integral to UC Irvine’s excellence as a research, teaching and service campus. We do that so our students, faculty and staff have the tools, training and resources they need to take bigger roles in addressing the critical sustainability challenges in our region and across the globe.

We’re doing that because the University of California of which we are part has a drive, a purpose, to accelerate the shifts we need to see to decarbonise the university and accelerate the shifts in other areas of our lives to reorganise how we relate to the planet and each other.

Re-imagining economy and tackling the big questions we face.

Sustainability leadership training…new set of skills that we belive the rising generation of sustainability leaders need to be able to be the knowledge brokers…the interpersonal skills and mastery to work together across traditional divides on these cross-cutting issues where what can make or break progress is how well people relate to each other and how outside of our own positions we can move to get to our underlying interests which are more often than not common about what kind of future we want to see for our families and our extended communities and our planet.

The approach we use is strategic questioning – a form of inquiry to enable young people to lead change processes in their community, from focussing on what’s concerning us most, through what do we want to see instead, through to what needs to change to get there, and then designing action for change.

We’re living on the front lines of a changing climate.

My mother raised us with an ethic of service and conservation.

Service is the path to freedom, to liberation in the spiritual sense, closer one’s self.

What we’re doing is offered in a gesture of creativity and joy and not a lot of attachment to the outcome. Very focussed on getting to our desired outcomes, but also not attached.

Inside the classroom students are definitely understanding the scale and pace of the deterioration of our critical life support systems in the planet. Outside the classroom we build community, then we draw upon tools to express fear, emptiness, sorrow and anger about the state of the world, we allow that some airtime, because they’re not getting that in the classroom and because our way of relating with these issues through social media is online and solitary endeavour even though it has the illusion of being connected with others it is often ill-processed or partially processed at best.

So we give that airtime, then help students see that the energy of anger is the same energy that drives passion.
The same energy that drives emptiness is the energy that enables us to work with equanimity and the letting go. The same energy that drives fear, the flip side of it is hope.

We help students go through that transition, then we get into what are you going to do about it?

I developed the analysis that carries me today – the inextricable relationship between environmental and human rights.

If we are working for protecting the earth, we also have to be working for protecting people.

Scholars and communities together, enabling the shifts that we need.

Working with solidarity and integrity with indigenous communities

When we talk about creating circumstances for young people to be the knowledge brokers, I’m thinking “what does it take to unleash the capacity of more young people to go out into the world and stand with the truth?”.

To stand in our knowledge of what it will take, right now, to transform our current systems and cultures of our industrial growth society into new systems and cultures of a life sustaining society. That is an unprecedented agenda, and it is one that is squarely on the shoulders of young people.

We train the workforce, and the more they have a sensibility of their place in the larger scheme of things, the more likely they are to place themselves in their organisations to step up and make transformational shifts.

We create circumstances to light the light about the roles people take.

We’re teaching people to look for windows of opportunity.

Academic freedom for faculty, but all students in both curriculum and co-curriculum.

Rolling this out 250,000 students is new, and people are excited by it, taking it to scale.

We find with young people, even the ones who are not yet activated, when we ask the right questions, the introspection and reflection is there – the awareness is there. It doesn’t take that much to get it to come to the surface in a students own words – in his or her own community and family’s relationship to the complex global

What does it take to awaken that conversation for all 29,000 students on our campus?

Campus as a living laboratory

What I’m finding now, is the under-current is not so far under we’re at a tipping point of conceptions of ourselves

(Sustainability at UCI…) has a long legacy…scientists here found the ozone hole, and went beyond their science to make sure it was addressed.

Our purpose…community engaged sustainability scholarship integral to UC Irvine’s excellence as a research, teaching and service campus…what this means to us is engages our students, faculty and staff in the understanding that the role of the scholar, the engaged scientist and the engaged citizen are compatible, complementary, and in fact necessary.

Resilience…is not an effort of bouncing back, but bouncing forward. The key elements are not only mitigation and adaptation, but also deep democracy.

The story we tell is simple: eco means home; ecosystems are relationships of home; ecology is our study of home, our knowledge of our relationships of home; economy is our management of home; our economy our way of managing should reflect our knowledge of our relationships of home; our fundamental relationships of home are interdependence; it is time for our economy to reflect our interdependence; it is time for us to do the work of releaving humanity back into the web of life; that means a lot of creative work to create new systems and cultures of a life sustaining society.

The American Dream is being constantly redefined. The version with the white picket fence and every man has his castle didn’t turn out to work for many people at all. The coyote trickster beauty of this moment of ecological transition is that we are talking about distributed power, we’re talking about people coming together to figure out their waste management and their food production, and their water gathering and energy storage, and when communities need to reorganise in this way then they need to know each other, they need to talk with each other, get in each others’ business and this is where the personal mastery comes in.

It needs a spectrum of strengths: people work to change the systems and cultures of industrialised growth society through actions like service, resistance, governance and reform, and people also dedicate themselves to create new cultures of life sustaining society. Transformation happens over time, and the most effective communities I have seen have people working all parts of the spectrum of strengths and knowing their location on that spectrum and that of other…so people aren’t working in isolation.

It is not my place to answer if what we are doing is radical enough, we do the training to set up young people to know how to ask the questions.

(Success?) We’re in the middle of the process, successes are around conversations. Some high points of success, Obama speaking about sustainability and climate change at UCI, the Dalai Lama.

(Activist?) I’m a life-long activist.

There are ways to walk in the world, characterised by action, without a stickiness around the outcome. Doing this work from a place of joy and integrity so that we can be here for the long-haul no matter what the long-haul brings. Our understanding is that if we do this work right now, we are developing the strengths of relationships and of inter-being that we will need to call on later if and when systems move towards collapse.

(Motivation?) I am here on this planet, I am alive, I am lucky enough not to have had my life taken already, there are plenty of people who are similarly motivated whose lives have been taken – if I’m still here the only work worth doing is work that enables people to have the space to life in freedom and live in the right relationships with each other and the earth.

(Challenge?) (UCI has set…) aggressive targets with lots of moving parts. But if we do it right it could be the blueprint for how to do it nationally and internationally. How to integrate South and North. Deepening students’ understanding of interdependence.

(Miracle?) Authentic engaged dialogue with communities. The shift I’m most interested in is what happens when we do the hard work to build communities right where we are to accelerate the shifts we need to see.

(Advice?) The perspective I would invite listeners to entertain is how would your life be different if you truly believed you belonged in the web of life, and how would your actions be different if you saw you had a critical role in the web of life to weave humanity back in.

This Sustainable Lens is from a series of conversations at University California Irvine. Sam’s visit was supported by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society, and coincided with Limits 2015.