Division researcher Katarina Larsen has published a new article together with her co-authors Hampus Berg Mårtensson and Mattias Höjer, both from the Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering (SEED) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The text with the title “Investigating potential effects of mobility and accessibility services using the avoid-shift-improve framework” is published in Sustainable Cities and Society, Volume 96. It is already available online, and will be published in a physical format in September this year.
Mobility services and accessibility services could contribute to reduced car-dependency and a more sustainable transport system. However, uncertainty remains regarding what the effects will be and further research is needed.
In this paper we examine potential effects on passenger car-travel in an urban context. To do so, we actuate the Avoid-Shift-Improve (ASI) framework using a System Dynamics approach and develop thematic Causal Loop Diagrams. We draw on the findings from a literature study and workshops engaging actors involved in creating visions and planning for the future of mobility and accessibility services in Stockholm, Sweden. The effects discovered are categorized as direct, enabling and structural/systemic, using a retrofitted version of the Three-Levels Model.
Contributions include the mapping of mechanisms through which the services can have positive and negative effects in relation to ASI, demonstrating a high degree of interconnectedness. This includes potential synergetic and competitive relations between the services. In addition, the approach gives insight to potential cumulative impact of the services, relatable to Mobility as a Service, including ‘user near’ effects regarding, e.g., commuting and leisure travel, as well as systemic and structural level effects. A discussion is conducted on the implications for actors and policy-makers.
Keywords
Mobility service; Accessibility service; Mobility as a service; Sustainable urban mobility; Avoid-shift-improve; Car travel; Climate change; Environmental sustainability; System dynamics; Three-levels model of effects
Division professor in history of technology Nina Wormbs has written the very interesting essay “I Still Do a Lot of Good” for the Rachel Carson Center Review on 23 May 2023.
In this piece, Nina discusses the frequently occurring instances of cognitive dissonance that emerge once one does critically engage with the climate crisis we are in right now. How do we justify the things we do and which we know will further harm the environment? How do we relate towards flying in academia? How large is the influence of economic thought in our own evaluations of these instances?
Later this year, Janet Martin-Nielsen‘s new book, “A Few Acres of Ice: Environment, Sovereignty, and Grandeur in the French Antarctic” will be published by Cornell University Press. This book stems from the GRETPOL project which took place at KTH Stockholm and the University of Stavanger over the past three years.
Janet Martin-Nielsen
A Few Acres of Ice is an in-depth study of France’s complex relationship with the Antarctic, from the search for Terra australis by French navigators in the sixteenth century to France’s role today as one of seven states laying claim to part of the white continent. Martin-Nielsen focuses on environment, sovereignty, and science to reveal not only the political, commercial, and religious challenges of exploration, but also the interaction between environmental concerns in polar regions and the geopolitical realities of the twenty-first century. She details how France has worked (and, at times, not worked) to perform sovereignty in Terre Adeìlie, from the territory’s integration into France’s colonial empire to France’s integral role in making the environment matter in Antarctic politics. As a result, A Few Acres of Ice sheds light on how Terre Adeìlie has altered human perceptions and been constructed by human agency since (and even before) its discovery.
Building on insights from ecological economics and philosophy of technology, this book offers a novel, interdisciplinary approach to understand the contradictory nature of Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is rapidly emerging as a cost-effective option in the world economy. However, reports about miserable working conditions, environmentally deleterious mineral extraction and toxic waste dumps corrode the image of a problem-free future based on solar power. Against this backdrop, Andreas Roos explores whether ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ – an asymmetric transfer of labour time and natural resources – is a necessary condition for solar PV development. He demonstrates how the massive increase in solar PV installation over recent years would not have been possible without significant wage/price differences in the world economy – notably between Europe/North America and Asia- and concludes that solar PV development is currently contingent on environmental injustices in the world economy. As a solution, Roos argues that solar technology is best coupled with strategies for degrowth, which allow for a transition away from fossil fuels and towards a socially just and ecologically sustainable future.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of solar power, philosophy of technology, and environmental justice.
About the Author
Andreas Roos is an interdisciplinary scholar with a doctoral degree in the field of human ecology. His work draws from ecological economics, environmental history and philosophy of technology to understand the contentious relation between technology and ecology. Roos’s most recent work focuses on assessing the potential of renewable energy technologies to transform modern human-environmental relations. Publishing in top ranking journals, Roos’s other contributions include ecological perspectives on the digital economy and the possibilities for commons-based energy technology.
The Division’s PhD-Candidate Erik Isberg wrote an essay for Sveriges Radio P1 (Radio Sweden), about the question why throughout history, it was so difficult to realise potential technologies that fostered utopian promises – at least in theory. Below you find an English translation of his text that was originally published here on Sverigesradio’s website today on 20 February 2023 at 6am. You can also download the text as .mp3 under the same link!
Erik Isberg, historian
A misconception continues throughout the history of online doctors
Technology has utopian potential, but why is it so difficult to realise it? Erik Isberg is looking for an answer in the history of technological remote care.
One afternoon in Boston in 1876, physician Clarence John Blake saw a telephone for the first time. I imagine him gently picking up the phone and holding it to his heart, whereupon his friend Alexander Graham Bell, who had been showing his new invention, looked at him questioningly. Why didn’t he hold the phone to his ear, as was intended? They began to discuss what kind of device they had in front of them. Their notions of the phone differed. Where Graham Bell saw a means of communication, Blake saw a kind of electronic distance stethoscope. The possibilities, Blake said, were enormous. Around Boston, people would hold the phone to their chests and let their heartbeats travel through the newly drawn-out telephone lines, finally landing in a liaison center where Blake and his colleagues sat ready to listen and diagnose.
A couple of years later, Blake was forced to state that despite diligent attempts, he was “nowhere near” to get a good enough sound quality. There would never be a liaison centre. The patients pressed their phones to their chests, but Blake only heard noise.
The dreams of practicing care remotely, despite Blake’s failure, have hardly disappeared. Today, the collection of health data constitutes a billion-dollar industry, app companies offer doctor’s visits via video calls, where crackly telephone lines have been replaced with high-resolution front cameras. In 2016, the then government and Sweden’s municipalities and regions decided that Sweden will be the world’s best country when it comes to digital care. Communication technology has never, the agreement wrote, offered such great opportunities.
On TikTok, a large amount of followers can take part in KaisTheSurgeon’s attempts to perform surgeries remotely. With the expansion of the 5G network, the idea is that remotely controlled scalpels will be able to carry out operations with the patient in one country, and the surgeon in another. While waiting for human patients, KaisTheSurgeon is allowed to hold on to fruit. In his almost hypnotic clips, he elegantly dissects grapes, bananas and oranges without being in the room himself.
When KaisTheSurgeon fillets an orange that is in the room next door, the future seems for a while both bright and high-tech. But while utopian promises of technological revolutions are succeeding each other, many of healthcare’s central problems don’t seem to be going away at all; It concerns accessibility, equality, staff density. Why is it so difficult to realize the utopian potential of technology?
The physician and medical historian Jeremy A. Greene argues in his book The Doctor Who Wasn’t There. History, Technology and the Limits of Telehealth that one reason why those who have made grand promises of technological innovations often found it difficult to realize them is a one-eyed focus on technology itself. Just because a technology exists and works, it is not obvious that you know how it will be used, or who will benefit from it.
In the late 1800’s, it wasn’t just Blake who experimented with the telephone. Exactly what one would use it for was unclear. It was used for live broadcasts of concerts as well as for private conversations. Gradually, it became clear that the phone had created a new kind of room: where you could be physically apart but still close. The voice could be disconnected from the body. But the telephone also became a symbol of modernity’s anonymous and lonely existence, where thin telephone lines were the only thing that bound the isolated individuals together. In Franz Kafka’s The Castle, the telephone is the tool of faceless bureaucracy. Protagonist K watches in despair as the bureaucrats make their calls, but what is actually being said and who it is that says it, remains unclear.
In healthcare, during the first decades of the 1900s, the telephone came to have an opposite symbolism. Rather than marking distance, it became an expression of a modern and alert medical profession that was constantly present. A doctor who didn’t answer the phone was not only archaic, but also bad at his job. In the United States, the new doctor role was summed up with a slogan: The doctor is on call.
Over time, other communication technologies came into the picture. But while they often worked excellently, Greene shows how this still wasn’t enough for them to be long-term successful. He finds one such example in a pilot project in Harlem, New York, in the early 1970s. In poor areas of America’s major cities, it was not uncommon at this time for an area to share a television antenna, which was then connected by telephone cables to the households around it. A group of doctors in Harlem realized that these local cable networks could be used to organize video meetings, thus reaching a group of patients who were used to a racist care system and were reluctant to seek care.
A local telemedicine system began to take shape: film cameras were rigged up in assembly halls around Harlem and nurses who themselves lived in the area were on hand to assist. The cable network was owned by the residents themselves. Although the project was not perfect, it showed a way forward for a democratically anchored remote care, which put the needs of the most vulnerable at the center. But this was not enough. In 1977, the project was discontinued. State money was running out and local cable networks had begun to be bought up by major telecom companies, with the aim of creating a national television market. Economics, not technology, decided the outcome.
If everything had instead been just about the performance of the technology, the story would have been different. Then all it took was for Blake’s liaison center to work is a good enough sound quality and the video calls in Harlem had continued as long as there were patients. Our delight in spectacular technical solutions obscures the view, all that other stuff – money, people, knowledge – crowds into the background.
The path from Clarence John Blake’s heartbeat liaison center to KaisTheSurgeon’s viral fruit surgeries may not be as long as it might seem. They both represent a utopian view of technology, which captures the potential of new technology but at the same time misses everything that is around and that is necessary for the technology to work. After all, it doesn’t really matter if the phone can perceive one’s heartbeat if there is no doctor to call. The opposite of presence, recalls technology historian Hannah Zeavin, is not distance, but absence. In KaisTheSurgeon’s comments section, one of his followers writes laconically: “That orange probably gets better health care than me”.
—
Literature:
John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air. A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Jeremy A. Greene, The Doctor Who Wasn’t There. History, Technology and the Limits of Telehealth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure. A History of Teletherapy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).
Alicia Gutting is a PhD candidate in the ERC-project Nuclearwaters at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment. In her thesis „The Nuclear Rhine“ Alicia is researching transnational nuclear risk perception in Austria, Switzerland, France and Germany from the 1960s to 2018. In January Alicia was published in Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy with the article What is good drinking water?: 41 Years of risk perception on water quality in the vicinity of the Nuclear Research Centre Karlsruhe, 1956–1997. Follow the link below for open access!
In: Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, ISSN 1944-4079, E-ISSN 1944-4079, p. 1-23Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
This article traces the historical evolution of risk perception around the Nuclear Research Centre Karlsruhe, Germany, from 1956 to 1997. It does so by targeting the evolution of water-related risks. Federal hopes in the postwar era that the Nuclear Research Centre would bring progress and prosperity clashed with local values and local perception of nuclear engineering as dangerous to health and the environment. Various conflicts arose and opponents made use of their past lived-knowledge to foster their arguments against future decision-making, mobilizing stories from the past to shape the future. The conflict culminated in the 1990s, when the municipality decided to lease the Centre’s waterworks for future drinking water supply. The main argument of the article is that even though the public discourse shifted over the years from water pollution toward greater risks such as nuclear meltdowns, the local risk perception stayed with the water-related risks. The article shows how the locals perceived and narrated their risk perception against the decision-making of authorities as well as against the reasoning of scientists and experts.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Hoboken: Wiley , 2023. p. 1-23
Keywords [en]
drinking water, Rhine river, risk narratives, risk perception, water quality
We are happy to announce that Marco Armiero, director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, has been awarded the Mediterranean Culture Award 2022 in the section for Human Sciences with the book Wasteocene – Stories from the global dump. He recieved the award at a price ceremony in Cosenza, Italy, on the 13th of October.
This year it was the XVI edition of the Mediterranean Culture Award founded by the Carcial Foundation. The foundation represents the historical continuation of the Cassa di Risparmio di Calabria, established in Cosenza in 1861. Marco Armiero was nominated in the Human Sciences section together with emeritus professor of economy, Joan Martínez Alier and political scienteist Gille Kepel. His book Wasteocene – Stories from the global dump was published in 2021.
Summary of the book
Humans may live in the Anthropocene, but this does not affect all in the same way. How would the Anthropocene look if, instead of searching its traces in the geosphere, researchers would look for them in the organosphere, in the ecologies of humans in their entanglements with the environment? Looking at this embodied stratigraphy of power and toxicity, more than the Anthropocene, we will discover the Wasteocene. The imposition of wasting relationships on subaltern human and more-than-human communities implies the construction of toxic ecologies made of contaminating substances and narratives. While official accounts have systematically erased any trace of those wasting relationships, another kind of narrative has been written in flesh, blood, and cells. Traveling between Naples (Italy) and Agbogbloshie (Ghana), science fiction and epidemic outbreaks, this element will take the readers into the bowels of the Wasteocene, but it will also indicate the commoning practices which are dismantling it.
Sverker Sörlin (KTH Professor of Environmental History and member of the Swedish Climate Council 2018-2022), Maria Wolrath Söderberg (docent in rhetorics with a specialisation in climate adaptation, Södertörns högskola) and Nina Wormbs (KTH Professor of History of Technology) have published a highly commentated opinion piece in Dagens Nyheter on 25 September 2022. Following Sweden’s close parliamentary election results, which find the left and the right block head to head with a slight advantage for the right, the three authors try to situate necessary climate policy within a potential future right-wing government. In the following we post our English translation of the article.
Photo: Unsplash
Translation:
DN Debatt. “It is patriotic to protect the climate”
It looks like that we are getting a government with low ambitions and bad premises to achieve the climate goal. But all is not lost. The person who searches through the parties’ fundamental ideological values can actually find something to build on – in all four parties. A smart leader does best when listening. To the person’s own conscience, to science and to the electorate – write three researchers.
In the past it was difficult for Sweden to live up to its reputation as a pioneering country for environmental policy. Just one out of 16 environmental goals set by the Riksdag/Parliament were met. Every year since 2018 the Swedish Climate Council has stated, that decided policies were inconclusive, and that Sweden belongs to the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, with an emission per citizen twice as high as the global average.
Emissions need to shrink with more than 10% per year, thus most in the next few years, for Sweden to have a chance to keep within the national emissions-budget specified in the Paris Climate Agreement. Before the pandemic hit, the rhythm of reduction was 1-2%. Nearly 2000 researchers recently have demanded that climate policy should be drastically sharpened.
This difficult situation has been drastically exacerbated by the election of the Swedish parliament. It looks like we are getting a government with parties which, according to several studies, have the lowest ambitions and the worst premises for reaching the climate goal.
The Moderates (M), Christian Democrats (KD) and Liberals (L) have put all their political weight into the electrifying campaign and they show no signs to reevaluate, even though we are witnessing skyrocketing prices. They do not want to offer adjustments to Swedish way of life, even though science is unified in saying that personal and societal transformations are necessary.
But isn’t there nevertheless a possibility for a powerful climate policy with the new government? We do not ask this question of changing the reasoning of a government without being unsettled by the possibility that climate politically invaluable years could be lost. This gives us the moral right, independently of the parties forming the government, to push that Sweden takes responsibility.
Big and durable political changes cannot happen during a conflict between the parties’ fundamental ideological values. Therefore we have evaluated those under the question whether they can be used – by smart and responsible leaders – to form the parties towards work on reforms. This is an urgent task.
We presume that the governing parties are not hypocritical, but that M, KD, and L actually want to achieve the climate goals they themselves have been involved in deciding. Hence it would be smart from the Moderates to link up to their conservative heritage and underscore that nature is not only a resource for the industry, but also has spiritual and national value. The conservative tradition highlights personal responsibility over the generations and that there are higher things other than material gains.
Even those who usually focus on ownership and entrepreneurship have something to pick up here. The business community is already criticising the right-wing parties for their unwillingness to see Sweden take the lead, most recently in the petition of 227 Swedish companies ahead of the election.
The Christian Democrat’s climate policy so far was messy and inconsistent. Agriculture is highlighted as already climate-smart (a puzzling exaggeration). Transition work is supposed to happen in other countries. They see a rising electricity usage unavoidable in Sweden.
But Christian values have a lot to offer. Christian Democratic parties on the continent like to emphasise the idea of solidarity: that you cannot unilaterally take advantage of the limited resources of the atmosphere just because you are a rich country. The creation should be managed for the good of all. Older generations need to think about younger ones. Christian values show special consideration with the people suffering and weak. Ideological conditions for being cautious thus exist.
A key point in liberalism is that one’s freedom should not inflict upon the freedom of others. The liberals’ climate policy is more ambitious than those proposed by the Moderates and Christian Democrats. L takes the climate crisis serious, but their hopes into techno-fixes, bio-fuel and CO2-captureing are unrealistic. Many of their favourite technologies take decades to materialise and it is not probable that they can be scaled up to the degree necessary.
To join freedom with responsibility is part of liberalism’s understanding of freedom, for example by living modestly. John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt have warned against the barbaric circumstances, which lurk around the corner if we do not manage to create a sustainable society, which in turn can only achieve legitimacy if it can be combined with justice, as the Paris Climate Agreement presumes. But in our time, liberalism’s understanding of freedom has been pushed into the direction that one’s freedom is to choose what one wants. Such a position does not at all guarantee that the planet could be preserved.
Within the government base, the Sweden Democrats stand out. They deny climate science and claim that “Sweden has no climate crisis”. They want to shift responsibility for the large Swedish emissions to other countries where it is envisaged that corresponding emission reductions can be made at a lower cost. The Sweden Democrats want to reduce electricity prices and prices for fossil fuels, remove the reduction obligation and the aviation tax, the very driving forces that the progressive business community wants to maintain and strengthen in order to speed up the transition.
Support can thus be found in the values that once bestowed on us conservative and liberal parties: solidarity, care for the neighbour, love of creation, freedom for all not to suffer from the freedom of choice of others.
SD draws from two irreconcilable myths: that Sweden is the best and that this is a pity for us. None are true. For a responsible right-wing government it would be easiest to completely isolate SD in questions of climate policy. But if SD demands influence on the basis of its de facto position of power, the governing parties should appeal to the natural ideology that SD’s sister parties in eastern and southern Europe run, where their own “national nature” is nurtured as a unifying primordial force. Successful climate work would also reduce the risk of large climate migration, which SD wants to prevent.
In order to achieve that the Swedish climate policy does not fully lose contact with its goal, we have to think about the becoming government parties as open for development. They have so far more or less ignored research and facts. At the same time, nine out of ten Swedes think the climate is an important question which influences them. There are also many in M, KD, and L who really want to see a sustainable future.
Regarding the climate question it is not the people that deceive, but politicians who deceive the people. Therefore, they should listen to their consciousness and take responsibility in regard to this fateful question. There is also support to be found in the value that once gave us conservative and liberal parties: solidarity, care for your neighbour, love towards creation, freedom for all to avoid suffering from the freedom of choice of others. The argument is not only that we all deserve that the climate goal can be reached and promises been kept (like with the saying “pacta sunt servanda”, pacts should be kept). The parties should also be positively surprised, to get sympathy and to be able to develop a long-lasting greener right-wing policy. The parallel is of course the Reinfeld-government’s wise triangulation of welfare policy. The new Moderates took over their opponents’ best policy, safety for everyone, and called it their own.
This is just the beginning. After that it should be clarified that Sweden listens to science (which is patriotic) and that we shape policies in accordance to research. Then Sweden does not need to be embarrassed amongst climate-progressive Europe.
Nina Wormbs, professor in history of technology at the division, has published a chapter together with Elina Eriksson (KTH Skolan för elektroteknik och datavetenskap) and Maria Wolrath Söderberg (Södertörn) about the debate on flying in academia. This chapter with the title “Exceptionalism and Evasion: How Scholars Reason About Air Travel” is part of the edited volume “Academic Flying and the Means of Communication” by Kristian Bjørkdahl and Adrian Santiago Franco Duharte (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).
Abstract:
Understanding how scholars reason about their own flying habits is important when dealing with the problems of large emissions from academic air travel. This study is based on a travel habits survey with scholars at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. KTH has relatively high emissions from air travel, but at the same time, it has a high profile in matters of sustainability and a lot of research related to this theme. One can therefore assume a high degree of knowledge about the climate crisis and the climate impact of various actions. It is also plausible that KTH scholars meet special expectations to be role models and that practices in conflict with their teaching can have consequences for the public confidence in the university. In this study, we look at how scholars reason about how emissions from their flying could be reduced. Their responses display a spectrum of varying attitudes, from climate scepticism to a commitment to radical transformation, with the majority in between, either suggesting different types of concrete changes or invoking arguments to justify the status quo. The proposed interventions, several of which are ingenious and wise, can guide university managements to strategies that have support from employees. The more reluctant arguments point to cultural and discursive habits that must be understood and met in an empathetic way.
Andreas Roos, researcher at the Division and the EHL, active in the Harnessing the heat below our feets project, newly published an open access article together with Rozanne C. Spijkerboera, Ethemcan Turhana, Marco Billi, SofiaVargas-Payera, Jose Opazo and Marco Armiero in the paper Energy Research & Social Science. Read the abstarct below and follow the link for full text.
The potential of geothermal energy for energy transition is increasingly recognized by governments around the world. Whether geothermal energy is a sustainable source of heat and/or electricity depends on how it is deployed in specific contexts. Therefore, it is striking that there is only limited attention to geothermal energy from a social science and humanities (SSH) perspective. Geothermal energy is largely conceptualized as a technological and/or geological issue in both science and practice. This perspective article aims to go beyond such conceptualizations by positioning social science research as an important lens to explore the promises and pitfalls of geothermal energy. We first provide an overview of the current state of geothermal energy as a decarbonization strategy. Second, we move on to review the existing literature. This review shows that studies that do address geothermal energy from an SSH perspective tend to be of a descriptive nature and lack analytical diversity. Third, we discuss three complementary theoretical approaches that are used in the social sciences to observe and address other forms of energy and energy transition. We believe that socio-technical assemblages, systems, and imaginaries can provide fruitful analytical lenses to study the promises, pitfalls and spatialization of geothermal energy. We conclude the paper with a research agenda and call for further engagement with this topic in SSH research, with attention to specificities of global South and North contexts.
What is good drinking water?: 41 Years of risk perception on water quality in the vicinity of the Nuclear Research Centre Karlsruhe, 1956–1997
