My motivation letter

After finishing my PhD, I was eager to get my hands on messy real world problems. Back then the waste management sector seemed to have the highest ratio of GHG emissions to the amount of attention the sector was getting. And since working on landfills didn’t sound like a glamorous career choice, I decided this was exactly the area where I could make the most impact.

Through hundreds of conversations with relevant stakeholders, I established that everyone knew what the problems were and everyone had ideas about what should be done; and yet the World Bank’s 2018 report showed no improvement on 2012. Thinking of waste flows as Sankey diagrams, it made sense for me to work on improving a waste management system as a whole, instead of focussing on a particular node, like collecting recyclable plastic or removing waste from the ocean. I imagined creating a system accelerator - a framework in which capacities of different stakeholders could be combined in new ways to create a functional system (a waste management system in this particular case) to achieve goals that are not aligned with economic incentives, such as reduction of GHG emissions.

I started by working with different types of stakeholders (waste management companies, recycling startups, non-profits, city governments, national governments, UN agencies and universities) to understand their capacities and limitations. This was an exciting journey. I learned a lot about politics, business models and behavioural science, as well as about polymer chemistry and myself. But working independently, I could not achieve the momentum required to run the system accelerator I imagined. I had to build a team, but I lacked the skills to do that. I took a career break to focus on personal goals.

Now I am looking to join a team to work on something that requires more momentum than a single person can generate. I am open to ideas. Including ones that sound a bit crazy, as well as those that sound very boring and those that tackle invisible problems. I believe I could make the most impact by applying my STEM skills and ways of thinking to problems that are typically thought of as requiring non-STEM skills.

The two questions are: what do I want to work on and with whom. If I choose to work on something exciting but unrelated to climate, that would imply an assumption that either a climate disaster is not likely or that somebody else will avert it. If I’m being honest with myself, I can’t afford these assumptions. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021) book by Bill Gates convinced me that working on reducing GHG emissions, from the waste management sector or any other sector, is futile. If all the restrictions imposed by the covid-19 pandemic resulted in 4.5% reduction of GHG emissions, it is unimaginable that we could achieve a 100% reduction through some combination of policy, business models and voluntary action. In contrast, accelerating adoption of clean energy sources and developing new energy sources is a plausible strategy.

My goal is to maintain a liveable planet, which is not the same as improving human lives. From a human-centric perspective, working on air pollution (it kills more people than the rising temperatures) and healthcare (a child won’t enjoy a liveable planet if it is dead) is as important as reducing atmospheric concentration of GHGs. From my perspective, averting a climate disaster is a prerequisite for everything else. It is a hard problem, so we need people who focus exclusively on climate, without being distracted by other goals or arguments like “these actions would hurt the very people you are trying to help”. I am looking to join people who are attacking climate problems with the ferocity of a greedy businessman chasing profits, not with loving care of a charity worker. People who are ruthlessly focused exclusively on climate goals, and are driven by facts not emotions.

All previous transitions - the agricultural, industrial and digital revolutions - created winners and losers; none of them can be described as just. The transition required to avert a climate disaster would be the first ever transition not driven by economic forces, that is why this is such a hard problem. The idea of not letting a good crisis go to waste is a tempting one; but I think it is unrealistic to aim for a transition that not only goes against current economic forces and fast, but is also a just transition. I do not have a hidden justice agenda - I don’t hate rich people, big companies, men or capitalism. I’m looking for people who, like me, don’t hate anyone. People who have the audacity to develop new economic incentives inside the current economic system, instead of hiding behind slogans like “abolish capitalism” and “just stop oil”. People who accept that any transition will create both winners and losers.

Working on implementing the first ever transition that is not driven by economic forces creates cognitive dissonance. It has to make sense in the current economic system, but it also has to achieve goals that are tangential, orthogonal or sometimes outright contradictory to economic incentives. It is tempting to talk about win-win solutions and then cherry pick the facts to support these claims. But if we let the complexity of the problem preclude an honest conversation, we stop trusting each other. I am looking for people who honestly acknowledge the tensions between climate goals and economic incentives and find ways to navigate those tensions. People who embrace complexity instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.