Martin R. Stuchtey—We Need Systemic Change
The energy transition alone will not be enough to avert climate disaster. Martin R. Stuchtey, co-founder of SYSTEMIQ, provides consulting and support services for global companies, industries, governments and NGOs that help them to tackle the root causes of problems.
Photos by Sigrid Reinichs
Words by Silke Bender
Our current economic system is dragging us inexorably towards collapse, warns economist and geologist Martin R. Stuchtey. The approaches that were so effective in Germany’s post-war economic miracle in the 1960s and 1970s are too much for the earth today. Our planet is being destroyed by the burden of resource-intensive growth in the richer countries and population growth in the poorer nations. In Stuchtey’s view, We are growing ourselves poor! The solution proposed by the founder and managing partner of SYSTEMIQ Ltd. is nothing less than a fundamental and systemic change, replacing linear growth and embracing a circular economy based on the example nature holds up to us: regenerative, circular, resilient. And abandoning a product-based economy in favour of one based on services.
53-year-old Stuchtey spent almost 20 years as a management consultant at McKinsey, finally holding the position of Director of the Center for Business and Environment. In 2016 he founded SYSTEMIQ, a firm specialising in solving system-level challenges. Stuchtey is Professor of Resource Strategies and Management at the University of Innsbruck; the initiator of large-scale projects including the 2030 Water Resources Group, New Plastic Economy and Project STOP; a veteran strategic advisor to the World Economic Forum; and the author of “A Good Disruption–Redefining Growth in the Twenty-First Century”. He also runs Kollreider Hof, an organic farm in Tyrol, Austria, as a holiday let and a location for symposia and seminars.
A Certified B Corporation, SYSTEMIQ today has 300 employees divided among its offices in Munich, London, Amsterdam, Paris, São Paulo and Jakarta. Our interview with Martin R. Stuchtey was conducted via Zoom from his Munich offices.
Good morning, Prof. Stuchtey! How’s your climate footprint this morning?
M R
S
Well, I haven’t eaten anything yet, but I made myself coffee at home using green electricity, cycled along Starnberg Lake on my e-bike to the train station and took the train to my office in Munich.
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No takeaway coffee en route?
M R
S
No, but if I want some I always have a reusable cup with me.
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What was your last eco-sin?
M R
S
The most recent sin was when I was harvesting the hay on my organic farm in the Tyrolean Alps. I can only do it with an all-terrain tractor—known there as a Muli—and they’re only available as diesel-powered models. Apart from that, I’ve probably committed almost every environmental sin that humans living in a modern industrial society are capable of.
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What’s your greatest personal effort to support climate protection?
M R
S
Founding SYSTEMIQ. And halving my personal CO2 emissions annually over the post five years, so that by now I’ve reached an asymptotic state. As an ex-McKinsey consultant, it was very easy for me at the start. All that business travel was one vast cultural misunderstanding. We’d hop onto a plane and fly to Singapore for the morning for no better reason than to show our respect for our business partners. But the climate community was doing the same, busily jetting all over the world to attend conferences. COVID-19 finally opened our eyes to the madness and pointed out that there is a different way. Today I only fly if it’s absolutely necessary, and I plan longer stays to fit in multiple meetings abroad. I arrange a Vienna week, a Zurich week, an Oslo week.
How do you see our society’s awareness of the problem of climate change?
M R
S
Well, as a positive aspect, the age of carelessness is over. Many people have grasped the problem, even if we fail to act consistently in line with our realisations. But until we’ve reorganised the system from the bottom up, there are some contradictions that simply cannot be solved. We’re trapped in the prisoner’s dilemma, but on a grand scale. In the dilemma, there are two prisoners in jail, both facing the prospect of a shorter sentence if they both keep quiet. But if one spills the beans and implicates the other, he will be set free and the other will serve a longer sentence. In the end both of them implicate each other and both serve a long sentence. Where climate change is concerned, nobody seems to see any good reason to take action as an individual.
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Are you referring to those blind spots that every individual, every consumer has? Demonstrating against coal-fired power stations, but also against wind turbines; voting for the Greens, eating vegan and organic food, but jetting off to Portugal for a weekend of practising yoga.
M R
S
I think the rise in conscious eating is a hugely important step towards climate-neutrality and improved health. It’s a market that is changing more radically than virtually any other at the moment, seeing growth towards sustainable alternatives—and all solely driven by consumer pressure. I live in hope that in ten years’ time we’ll be shaking our heads in disbelief at the way we used to pour petroleum into our cars and keep animals in massive industrial feedlots to kill and eat them.
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Why do we often behave in such contradictory ways?
M R
S
That takes us into the realms of cognitive psychology and the availability heuristic described by Daniel Kahneman. Events that are familiar to us appear to be more likely to occur than events we are not capable of imagining. This clouds our judgement and causes us to make wrong decisions. Humanity as a species and the earth that is our home are currently in a situation the like of which has never been seen before: this year the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reached record levels of over 420 parts per million (ppm)—a value that probably last occurred on the earth about five million years ago. Our civilisation evolved during the Holocene era, in one of the most stable climate phases the earth had ever experienced. And it would have stayed that way if we hadn’t progressed at such a prodigious and unprecedented speed. We’re now in the Anthropocene epoch, in which human impact–not volcanic or sunspot activity–is the strongest effect on the planet. This issue is so huge that it completely overwhelms our imaginative powers and renders us incapable of behaving in any consistent fashion. We simply can’t grasp that just because there’s a plane going to our yoga retreat is not a good reason for us to fly there.
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Looking at the bigger picture, do you believe that the new German government, with the Greens and the FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei, the Liberal Democrats) will bring change?
M R
S
I’m certainly intrigued by the new political line-up because it was so clearly elected by the younger generation with a mandate for the future. But the most important course was already set back in March by the judgement of the German Federal Constitutional Court on the Climate Protection Act. The court ruled that the 1.5-degree limit set by the Paris Agreement was binding, thus forcing policymakers to speed up their efforts. It slung a philosophical bridge between the various positions, warning that any refusal or failure to give up our rights to freedom now will restrict those rights for the generation to come.
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Do the worlds of business and finance really need to be forced to act differently by politicians?
M R
S
In my job, I met many CEOs of major global companies. Most of them are very sensible people in personal conversation. Larry Fink, the Blackrock CEO, was convinced to see reason by his daughter, and the result was the open letter he wrote to CEOs this year. These people are just as much prisoners of a system as you are as a consumer when you go shopping. The human race has collectively set a trap for itself that forces us to destroy what is most important to us. We all have to pluck up the courage to break out of it–right now.
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Is it wrong to have the feeling that there is too little action to put a stop to climate change?
M R
S
No, that feeling is absolutely right. The earth is already 1.2 degrees warmer than it was in the pre-industrial age. We can already see the fires burning in the Mediterranean, in Australia, in California, even in the tundra, and see the floods raging, like Ahrtal in Germany. But despite the Paris Agreement, we’re currently marching towards not 1.5 degrees, but 2.7 degrees. 1.5 degrees is already critical. If we want to dig ourselves out of this hole, we need to head down the rapid decarbonisation route straight away. We have to halve our greenhouse gas emissions every ten years. And even if we manage to achieve the impossible, we’re still not there yet, because we have to find a technological or economic solution for our negative emissions. We’ve been wasting too much time for at least 30 years, so we now have to pour absolutely all our efforts into achieving this. As David Attenborough said, it’s too late to be pessimistic.
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Is there anything that fires your optimism?
M R
S
That every sector of industry is beset by the fear of becoming a stranded asset, of being no longer in demand by society if it fails to come up with ecological or social answers to the questions of the future. Market capitalisation by energy companies or by many banks has declined. Things are starting to move among consumers and the world of politics; they’re applying pressure. The 2019 European Green Deal was a huge leap forward, the pledge that Europe will become the first climate-neutral continent, bring its greenhouse gas emissions down to net zero by 2050, break the link between growth and use of resources, and take the path towards a circular economy.
