About Schalk

I am a research scientist dedicated to the great 21st century sustainability challenge: how to quadruple the size of the global economy while bringing CO2 emissions below zero. My main occupation deals with technological solutions to this challenge in the form of novel clean energy conversion concepts. On the side, I also work on human solutions, i.e. sustainable living and deriving happiness from creation instead of consumption. I also have a mild obsession with healthy living to ensure that my research career lasts as long as possible and that I get to see how the story of the 21st century unfolds.

Posts by Schalk Cloete:

Schalk
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How Evolved are You?

The second Supermorning chapter talked a lot about the primitive emotions that make it so hard to consistently do the things we know are good and healthy. If we’re serious about building a sustainable and equitable global society, we really need to get ourselves to the next level. 

Realizing the grand importance of this personal evolutionary journey makes it a lot easier to make the required mental upgrade. 

Let’s see how this works. 

Our basic primitive emotions

Thanks to the incredible technological and social progress over the last 0.1% of human history, we’re all cavemen stuck in the future. 

Most of our natural emotional responses are well equipped for keeping us alive on the savanna, but less so for keeping us happy and healthy in our amazing modern world of material abundance. 

This is the fundamental driver behind all the most pressing problems the world faces today. 

The first step: Forward-thinking emotions

Most of our primitive emotions drive us towards instant pleasure and away from instant pain. This worked fine for 99.9% of our evolutionary history but falls well short today. 

What we need for individual success in today’s world are emotions that drive us towards long-term pleasure and away from long-term pain. 

Such emotions would ensure perfect healthy eating and exercise habits, financial responsibility, and high productivity. All these things bring bucketloads of long-term pleasure and greatly reduce the chances of experiencing long-term pain. We all know this. But, thanks to our primitive emotions, we just cannot get ourselves to follow through. 

This blog has talked a lot about creating environments where healthy actions happen automatically. In reality, this is just a smart way to trick our primitive short-term emotions into prioritizing our longer-term health, security, and happiness. 

And the very cool thing is that, once you start experiencing the benefits of long-term thinking, you get emotionally involved.

At this point, your emotions start to naturally gravitate towards these long-term benefits. This is the point where your life can really start taking off. It’s also a big reason why there is the 1% and the 99%.  

The second step: Global-thinking emotions

But there is another step. In today’s complex and interconnected world, we not only need to think about our own long-term future but also about that of society. 

A happy, healthy, and productive society makes everyone’s lives better. But there are far too many ways in which we can harm society by pursuing individual gain. 

Climate change and other environmental issues epitomize this point. Those causing the damage are often very different from those feeling it. In the short-term, this does not impact those of us with environmentally destructive lifestyles. But, sooner or later, we’ll pay a very high price. 

This crucial next step of our evolution gets much easier when we understand that a sustainable lifestyle can be synonymous with happiness, health, wealth, and productivity. 

Once you really get into this, your primitive emotions also catch on. Doing good for society then becomes a strong emotional driving force behind the intelligent design of a happy, healthy, wealthy, and productive life. 

When you reach this point, you’ve arrived at the next stage of human evolution 🙂 The future of our planet depends on how quickly the majority of us can reach this point. 

Schalk
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Transforming Society through Life Efficiency

Yesterday’s post used the Kaya identity to explain how life efficiency can greatly improve global sustainability. Today, we’ll discuss what this might look like in practice. 

Going viral

The best thing about life efficiency as a sustainability lever is that it just requires a mindset shift. All other measures require lots of technology development, demonstration, and deployment.

Since life efficiency is only an idea, it can go viral. As such, it has the potential to reduce emissions and other environmental impacts at a speed that can never be matched by other options. 

Status symbol

Conspicuous consumption is still cool in some parts of the world. But the tide is turning. In many places, such consumption now has the exact opposite effect. 

Life efficiency is unquestionably cool. Deriving tremendous happiness and health from a lifestyle that leaves enough resources for everyone else to do the same is good in every way imaginable. 

People are realizing this. And a whole culture is developing around the idea with names like the post-growth economy, downshifting, voluntary simplicity, and FIRE. 

This trend is irreversible. In years to come, a happy, healthy, and relaxed appearance coupled with a sustainable lifestyle will gain you much more respect than a big house with fancy cars in the driveway. 

Economic restructuring

Our mission of constructing a sustainable society in the 21st century will need a tremendous amount of surplus productive capacity.

We need to lift billions out of poverty by constructing housing, roads, schools, factories, hospitals, etc. We also need to completely redesign and rebuild our energy system, our transportation fleet, and our industrial sector. 

Life efficiency can step up to this great challenge. It’s the art of producing much more than you consume and having a great time doing so – exactly what we need to complete this great global mission. 

In this process, life efficiency will cause great economic restructuring. A lot of economic effort currently being wasted on the production of useless consumer goods and various symbols of excess will be redirected towards the construction of a sustainable society. 

This will be uncomfortable for many, but it is absolutely necessary. 

Prepare yourself

Anyone who can prepare beforehand for a great economic shift stands to benefit strongly. Building a truly efficient lifestyle is the best way to prepare for the coming decades.

  1. The future pricing of environmental costs (e.g., a CO2 tax) will cause a clear wealth redistribution from those with high ecological footprints to those with low ecological footprints. 
  2. Improved financial resilience from high life efficiency will give you greater flexibility in the uncertain times ahead.
  3. Those who derive most of their joy from creation instead of consumption are probably working in areas that will do well in a sustainable economy. Anything that requires a lot of creativity and fairly little natural resources will do well.

For these reasons, those with high life efficiency can welcome the future with open arms 🙂

Schalk
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Redefining Human Progress

Ever since science and fossil fuels combined to ignite the industrial revolution, societal progress has been measured by one thing: gross domestic product (GDP) growth. 

And for good reason. In those early days, almost all people experienced serious material lack. The ability to produce more goods and services genuinely improved billions of lives. 

For the large portion of the population not lucky enough to be born into affluence, this is still the case today. Further growth can avoid a tremendous amount of global suffering. 

But GDP growth is no longer universally good. Here’s why…

Limits to growth

In the early days of the industrial revolution, natural resources were essentially limitless and the planet could easily absorb our pollution. 

Not any more. Today, we’re faced with a wide array of environmental problems caused by too much resource extraction and waste production. See the earlier post on this topic. 

Climate change offers the best example. It’s a great global threat, but luckily, we have several tools for warding off the worst effects. These tools can be identified very elegantly as illustrated below. 

The Kaya identity

Here it is in all its glory:

Don’t be intimidated by the equation 🙂 It really is very simple. 

Our global emissions obviously depend on how many people there are on the planet. But the Kaya identity shows us there are three other ratios that influence emissions:

  1. How much goods and services each of those people consume (GDP/person).
  2. The energy required to generate those goods and services (Energy/GDP).
  3. The emissions intensity of the energy (Emissions/Energy). 

To date, the first ratio in this list was the key indicator of human progress. The more goods and services each person can consume, the better. 

Hence, GDP/person must always increase, while the global population also continues increasing. Thus, if we want to reduce our environmental impact, we need big reductions in the second and third ratios. 

We can reduce the second ratio by using energy more efficiently. More efficient cars, better home insulation, and a preference for buying services rather than material goods all help. 

The third ratio can be reduced by using cleaner energy sources such as renewable energy, nuclear, and CO2 capture. 

But there is another lever – the one that this blog is all about:

Life efficiency

In reality, we don’t want more goods and services, we want the happiness and longevity we believe those goods and services can give us.

This is best expressed as something called “happy life years” – a combination of a subjective wellbeing score and life expectancy. 

Incorporating happy life years (HLY) into the Kaya identity looks like this:

This is the same as the original Kaya identity, aside from splitting the first ratio (GDP/Person) discussed above into two parts:

  1. The number of happy life years enjoyed by the average person (HLY/Person).
  2. How much goods and services are required for building a long and happy life (GDP/HLY). 

In this case, we clearly extract the thing we must keep increasing at any cost: HLY/Person. 

However, the ratio of GDP/HLY now gives us a lovely additional lever we can pull to reduce our environmental impact. And this ratio is nothing more than the inverse of that precious intangible asset called life efficiency. 

Global implications of higher life efficiency

Reducing the GDP/HLY ratio requires nothing more than a mindset shift. On the contrary, the other two ratios (Energy/GDP and Emissions/Energy) require lots of new technology to be developed and deployed. 

And the degree to which it can be reduced is just incredible. My current life efficiency is about 4x higher than the developed world average. Sure, this is an extreme case, but even just a 2x improvement can have a tremendously positive influence on the world.

Tomorrow, we’ll dissect this potential in more detail. 

Schalk
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Recap: Your Ecological Footprint

This week’s posts were about understanding where our ecological footprints come from. To get started, I strongly encourage everyone to take this quick and simple test to see where you stand. 

The checklist

  1. Food
    • Animal products are the major source of ecological destruction and a plant-dominated diet is highly recommended. 
    • Other influential factors include the amount of food you buy, the distance your food needs to travel to you, the amount of packaging it needs, and its impact on your health. 
  2. Home
    • The size and type of your home is the main factor, with smaller apartments being much greener than large homes.
    • In most countries, heating and cooling offer the greatest potential for cutting your home footprint.
  3.  Transportation
    • The daily commute from a large home in the suburbs has a very large footprint, particularly if done in a big SUV or truck with only one or two occupants. Your air travel footprint also quickly adds up.
    • Public transport (particularly trains) is better, while virtual mobility and walking/cycling are by far the best options. 
  4. Stuff
    • Our high stuff turnover rate resulting from planned and perceived obsolescence creates great ecological damage. 
    • Solutions include, in order of usefulness, embracing creativity, simplifying life, and committing to always purchasing high quality. 

The ecological footprint of individuals is a central moral issue in our society. The reason for this is that those suffering the most are not those causing the damage. And the main factor determining whether you are causing the damage or experiencing it is the lottery of birth. 

Do the only morally correct thing. Shrink your ecological footprint. 

Schalk
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The Footprints of our Stuff

The final quadrant of our environmental impact is all the stuff we consume – goods and services of all shapes and sizes. 

A lot of our stuff is genuinely useful. Others less so. But all of our stuff impacts the environment. Let’s take a closer look. 

Turnover

The key factor influencing the environmental impact of our stuff is the turnover rate. Electronics present the most relevant example. With a 2-year life cycle, all that e-waste is creating huge problems. So is the mining of all the rare-earth minerals in these products. 

Clothing offers another fitting example, where a high turnover rate has ballooned the impact of the fashion industry. Home appliances and furniture are similarly affected by high turnover rates. 

The perverse incentive behind all this waste is that higher turnover rates are more profitable for companies selling these products. Hence, the concepts of planned and perceived obsolescence have wreaked tremendous destruction on the planet and its inhabitants over the years.

Quality

One of the best ways to shrink your stuff footprint is to commit to purchasing quality over quantity. A quality product will generally last longer (and stay cool for longer) than a shoddy alternative. It’s higher price tag also demands more consideration for each purchase.  

From an environmental perspective, high quality means that most of the value was added by human creativity, while low quality means that most value comes from ecological destruction. 

Minimalism

An even better way to shrink your stuff footprint is simply to have less stuff. Minimalism is becoming quite fashionable nowadays as people wake up to the fact that a lot of their stuff brings more complexity than happiness.

We’ve touched on this topic before when discussing the industrial revolution that spawned all our stuff. Please take a look at this article and evaluate how frequently the stuff in your home gets used. 

Creativity

But the best way to shrink your stuff footprint is to transition from a consumerist lifestyle to a creative one. This shift brings many benefits, one of which is a smaller ecological footprint.  

Transferring time and energy from consumption to creation not only reduces environmental impact but also creates solutions for building a better society – a double win. 

To sum up

There is no doubt that we need to reduce our unsustainable consumption of stuff. The three best ways of doing this are, in order of usefulness: nurturing your creativity, simplifying your life, and committing to quality. 

These simple guidelines will give you a much more enjoyable life that can save many lives around the world. 

Schalk
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Cars, Planes, and Ecological Strains

Our third quadrant of the individual ecological footprint comes from personal transportation: mainly cars, planes, buses, and trains. Let’s get straight into it. 

Cars

A car can greatly increase the ecological impact of a large home in the suburbs described yesterday. Driving a 2 ton SUV in and out of town every day will always be unsustainable. 

Yes, technology does allow us to drive much more efficiently nowadays. A modern hybrid can halve fuel consumption. Electric cars offer even more improvements in regions with clean electricity. 

However, electric cars are nowhere near as green as the advertisements claim. In most of the world, a 50 MPG hybrid will still emit less CO2, especially in China and India where a lot of electricity comes from coal. Batteries also have a substantial CO2 footprint and battery materials come with all sorts of environmental, health, and social justice issues. 

Size also matters with the trend to SUVs and trucks currently canceling out much of the progress made with more efficient drivetrains.  

Planes

In the years B.C. (Before Corona), air travel was growing uncomfortably quickly, mainly due to developing Asia. 

When expressed per passenger kilometer, air travel is similarly efficient to a car. But there are many other impacts related to the operation of airports and the travel to and from airports. In addition, planes emit high in the atmosphere which doubles their climate impact.  ‘

All told, it’s easy for someone accumulating plenty of frequent flyer miles to have as large an ecological footprint as our SUV commuter from the previous section. 

Buses and trains

According to EU data, public transportation by bus is much more efficient than a single-person-in-car commute. However, when compared to a car that is fully occupied, emissions are similar.

Commuting by train is always an environmental winner though.

Walking and cycling

And now we come to my favorite transportation mode 🙂

Positioning your home in an ideal location where walking and cycling is viable for most or even all of your travel needs is one of the smartest moves you can ever make. 

It dramatically shrinks your transportation footprint (and costs), while simultaneously boosting your health and body-image. 

Virtual mobility

The ongoing epidemic has also brought this extremely environmentally and economically efficient transportation option into the spotlight.

Working from home via online meetings eliminates the large costs and emissions related to the daily commute. This is a particularly attractive option for people living in the suburbs.

In summary

Walking and cycling are undoubtedly the best options for your planet, society, wallet, and health. Virtual mobility follows closely behind. Public transport is also OK, especially when using a train. 

Cars and planes should only be used when there is no other option (which, unfortunately, is still the case in most places). If a car is a must, please choose a fuel-efficient one and ride-share as often as possible.

The regular single-person-in-heavy-truck-or-SUV commute or shopping run remains one of the most environmentally destructive habits out there.

Schalk
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Building a Sustainable Home

After dealing with food in yesterday’s post, we can move on to the next major component of our individual ecological footprints: our homes.

There are many aspects to your home’s ecological impact. But, as always, there are some elements that are much more important than others. So, let’s try to identify the top priorities. 

Utilities

Your utility bill is generally a good indication of the environmental impact of your home. If you consume a lot of electricity (or gas in some places), your home is probably highly unsustainable. 

Luckily there are many ways to reduce the environmental impact of your home. Here are the most important ones:

Size and type

In general, a smaller apartment is much more environmentally friendly than a larger free-standing home. Apartments are cheaper to heat or cool and less environmentally destructive to build. 

Type of electricity

If most of your electricity comes from renewable sources, your footprint shrinks. But this is highly location-specific and is not always as green as promised. 

If you live in a hot and sunny country that requires plenty of air conditioning in summer, home solar panels can help shrink your footprint. Try to run your air conditioner for a few hours around noon when your solar panels are generating lots of power. For those in cooler climates, however, home solar is not the best solution.

Heating and cooling

Thermal management is generally the largest energy consumer in a home. There are at least six ways to approach this issue.

  1. Better insulation. Modern homes generally keep their temperature for longer. Insulation retrofits are also possible with better windows and attic insulation being low-hanging fruits. 
  2. Use efficient heat pump or boiler technology. The challenge is that more efficient systems cost more and the payback time depends strongly on location. 
  3. A smart thermostat can save some electricity by heating or cooling only at the right times. This brings some security concerns though. 
  4. For cooling in hot and sunny countries, solar panels offer a good solution as discussed above. 
  5. Improve the heat management of your home by learning to control ventilation. 
  6. Tolerate a wider temperature range.

Personally, I’m a big fan of the last two options. As an engineer, option 6 appeals to me because it’s just so much more efficient to heat and cool yourself than to heat and cool your whole house. Besides, it’s lovely to work under a cozy duvet on a cold winter’s day 🙂

Recently, I also capitalized on my nerdiness by purchasing an indoor air quality monitor to fully capitalize on option 5. Thanks to these two measures alone, my electricity consumption is literally 4x lower than normal.  

Appliances

Large appliances like washing machines and fridges use a significant amount of energy. As always, more efficient appliances will cost more, so there’s a trade-off. 

If you live in a hot country, efficient appliances will pay back faster than in a cold country. This is because the electricity consumed by these appliances gets released as heat in your home, which imposes extra air conditioning load in hot countries but saves heating costs in cold countries. An efficient fridge and freezer are particularly important in hot countries.

An 80/20 approach

When applying Pareto’s principle to home ecological footprint, the best solution is to live in a large apartment building, preferably one with good insulation. 

Optimization of heating and cooling is the next step. If your town regularly gets hot or cold, applying some smarts here can easily slash your utility bill in half. 

Efficient appliances come next, carrying greater importance in hot countries.

Be sure to concentrate your initiative in the most influential areas to do the most planet-saving for the least effort and cost. 

Schalk
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Studying Your Foodprint

Last week’s posts explained how we can all save the world on the fascinating road to optimal health, financial freedom, and self-actualization. 

This week, we’ll be getting a bit more practical. The focus will be on the best ways each of us can cut our ecological footprint. 

Let’s start with a big one: food. 

Plants > Fish, Eggs, Dairy > Meat

This figure from last week’s post tells the whole story. If you want to help save the world, a plant-dominated diet is a must. 

Going completely vegetarian is not required, but animal products, especially meat, must be limited.

Personally, I stick to 5% meat (mainly pork) and an additional 10% fish, eggs, and dairy. The slightly increased ecological impact of these small amounts of animal products is worth it for two reasons:

  1. A healthy plant-dominated diet becomes much more pleasurable, making sure it will last.  
  2. Convenient access to high-quality proteins and other nutrients required for optimal health. 

If you’re too big on the animal products, try limiting your consumption to the following: meat as a vegetable dressing, dairy as a delicious binder for nuts, seeds and berries, and fish and eggs as a super-convenient dinner option.   

Other factors

After the type of food you buy, the quantity is the next most important factor.

If the health, mobility, and body-image benefits of eating less are not enough, add saving the world to your list of motivators. A focus on reducing food waste also helps reduce your footprint.  

The locality and degree of packaging of your food are two more important factors, although not nearly as important as the type of food you eat. Support the local farmers’ market if possible. 

Lastly, a healthy diet can save the world by minimizing your consumption of medical services.

The world spends an enormous 10% of GDP on healthcare, mostly on self-inflicted lifestyle diseases. We can massively reduce this tragic waste by refusing to pay for empty calories and choosing healthier snacks instead, and by committing to home-made meals using whole foods. 

Zero-compromise diet

A healthy and sustainable diet does not need to be a compromise. Nope, if you’re smart, it can still be deeply enjoyable, practical, and affordable. 

You just need to put in the curiosity and experimentation required to design yours. Once you do, it will last you a lifetime – surely one of the best investments you can ever make! 

A detailed outline of such a lifelong healthy diet can be found here. 

Schalk
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Recap: Saving the World

Sustainability is the core motivation behind this blog. Over a decade ago, I started playing with a simple idea: a sustainable life can also be a happy, healthy, wealthy, and productive one. 

Today, I consider this idea to be 100% proven. Indeed, we can all save the world by building better lives.  

This week’s posts explained this big claim in a bit more detail.

The checklist

  • Why you should care about the environment. 
    • Nature delivers twice as much value to our lives as all human activity combined. 
    • Our continued destruction of nature threatens to cut off or even reverse these free services, making our lives deeply uncomfortable. 
  • Save the world by looking after yourself. 
    • Food production is the single largest impact on our environment. It’s also one of the core ways in which we destroy our own health. 
    • Displacing the typical excessive meat-rich diet with a moderate plant-rich diet is a great way to help yourself and your planet. 
  • Save the world by building wealth.
    • Consumption can only directly address basic human needs like food, shelter, and security. 
    • Satisfying higher human needs like love, esteem, and self-actualization is much better achieved by saving and investing than by spending. 
  •  Save the world by embracing your creativity.
    • A creative life automatically crowds out consumerism and offers a direct route to esteem and self-actualization. 
    • Both consumption and creation tend to develop self-strengthening feedback loops.

So, there you have it. A sustainable life is not some painful sacrifice we must make to save the planet. It’s a proven pathway to happiness, health, wealth, and self-actualization. 

In my view, spreading this simple message is the single most promising pathway to a sustainable and just society. 

Schalk
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Save the World by Embracing Your Creativity

Monday’s post outlined how environmental destruction could disrupt the valuable ecological services we currently get for free from Mother Nature. If Nature goes on strike, our lives will suddenly get very uncomfortable. 

Less consumption is the single best way to address this problem. And luckily, a sustainable lifestyle offers much more health, wealth, and productivity than the consumerist norm. 

Health and wealth were covered over the past two days, so we’ll explore the link between sustainability and productivity today. 

The double benefit of a more creative life

The pursuit of happiness can be broadly split into two classes: consumption and creation.

  • Consumption typically offers plenty of short-term pleasure and serious long-term problems.
  • Creation is much more effective in creating lasting life satisfaction and can also be surprisingly pleasurable in the moment. 

From an environmental point of view, the consumption pathway contributes to the problem, while the creative pathway often contributes to creating solutions. 

Thus, while a creative pursuit of happiness will certainly reduce your environmental footprint, you can further increase the benefit by creating sustainable solutions for society. 

Sustainability and productivity

Both consumption and creation require time and energy. The more we create, the less time and energy we have left for consumption. 

In addition, both a creative and consumptive lifestyle tends to reinforce itself. Consumerism typically traps people in the vicious cycle of debt, work and consumption shown below. 

The creative alternative to this cycle is shown below. The only danger with this virtuous cycle is that you can become so caught up in your creative work that it affects your health and relationships. But this is issue fairly easy to identify and manage. 

Sustainability, contribution, and happiness

Creators simply have less time and less drive for environmentally destructive consumption, automatically making their lives more sustainable. They also continuously contribute to society, which makes them happy, both in the short term (flow) and the long term (esteem and self-actualization). 

So, just like health and wealth, productivity contributes strongly both to sustainability and life satisfaction. Go on, embrace your creativity. It might just save the world 🙂  

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