Systems thinking approach to solve Climate crisis

Finally I made a decent video with nice slides in it to explain the origin of the unique idea to solve issues we face today. Also, after talking about how the idea emerged, I also try to explain how the idea can work to bring the intended change.

Here’s the transcript of the video :

Hi I’m Nikhil and welcome to my presentation on “Attacking the root cause”. Let’s look at the problems in the world today:

we have climate change and of course there are a lot of other issues. CO2 emissions, which are directly causing the climate change, the rising sea levels, which are displacing a lot of people in the coastal areas. The plastic waste in the oceans, which gets into our foods. Soil degradation, because of the way we do agriculture. Biodiversity loss, because of the way we do business, over fishing, clearing the amazon forest, etc. Inflation and economic inequality — these are very economic system related problems which a lot of people have a lot of theories on why they exist.

Solutions to treat the symptoms. The problems that we saw are the symptoms of something which is deeper, a deeper cause but before we figure out the deeper cause we need to treat the symptoms and hence I call the following solutions as symptom treatments :

Plant more trees because they absorb carbon dioxide.
Let’s build more renewable energy plants because it helps reducing emissions.
Plastic removal technology — some innovative stuff to remove plastic from the oceans.
Use sustainable packaging, maybe packaging made of some fungi which is biodegradable.
Regenerative organic agriculture because pesticides are harmful and robbing our topsoil of the organic content but when we do regenerative organic agriculture it helps a lot with carbon absorption and our food also becomes more nutritious.
Follow a more plant-based diet because eating animals is not really sustainable and contributes a lot to greenhouse gas emissions.
Wealth redistribution to solve the issues related to the economic system

Now, let’s dig a bit deeper — Why did it happen ? What is the cause of all these issues ?

We see a lot of people also coming to this conclusion that we have an economic system that is designed for unsustainable growth and profit maximization is its mantra. So companies keep doing whatever they want because they want to increase their profit — corporate greed it’s called. So every every company every business wants to grow and keep growing and there are no limits to it and therefore we keep clearing forests or keep fishing or yeah we keep extracting or exploiting earth to maximize profits which has no upper limit. There’s no limit for how much money one can make. So a lot of people have come to this conclusion as well and the solutions offered in this level are something like a Degrowth movement advocating for for lesser growth through policies or something like.

I think we need to dig deeper and then digging deeper we find that profit maximization is a direct result of the design of money. Money is so attractive that everyone wants more of it there’s no limit to it. Money can buy you everything and anything right (except happiness etc :P ). And it is so attractive for everybody that we all want more of it and there’s practically no limit on it.

Based on this understanding let’s look at what are the solutions people came up at this level. We can modify the way money works so new forms of money with upper limit are introduced as ideas to the government. In this new form of money a person cannot hold more than a certain amount of it and anything excess goes to the government and government can use it to fund the universal basic income scheme for example, which ensures that each person gets a basic income. So these are some ways that we want to modify how money works so as to modify the system.

The other idea is to reject the idea of money because it is not working for us. So there are people who are building off-the-grid sustainable communities and they want to have a gift economy in this community and gift economy is something which is not transaction based. People give things freely to others because they know that they will also get something freely by someone else and not necessarily the same person. So a gift economy is a different concept which doesn’t use the idea of money for flow of goods and services among people.

As you see in the presentation each level we dig deeper into there are new ideas proposed. We’ll dig more deeper now. Why are we digging deeper ? What exactly are we looking for ? We are looking for a simple practical leverage point to change the entire system. We will stop only when we reach that level.

All of these other ideas at each level have to be tried and I’m in no way suggesting that planting more trees is not the way to solve the crisis, no, we need it we need more trees to absorb the carbon dioxide to give us more time to figure out the root cause and implement solutions to fix the root causes. All of the ideas to solve the symptoms we discussed before are definitely necessary they will help us stall catastrophic events and give us more time to deploy long term solutions.

To dig deeper we now ask “What is the most important and most basic thing that we do using money ?” and it’s buying food. So the solution at this level is to change the way money works at this level and that can cause changes throughout the system.

This is the last level, but why ? Why not go further ? The question to dig deeper would be “ How can we not be dependent on food ?” and that enters into a realm of biology and asks how humans can become independent of food and then if we do that then of course we wouldn’t need to worry about survival and stuff, yeah that that is entering a different field but since we want to change the economic system and money related design of the system we have to stop at this as the last level.

So, we see that the most important and most basic thing that we use money for is to buy food for our survival and here is where we can change things which can cause a system level change.

Let’s see what is the solution that comes up because of this system level analysis. Summarizing our understanding of the system we see following levels:

Level 1 : Unsustainable practices are happening (We see that oh emissions are increasing, over fishing is happening, plastic is in the oceans, soil degradation is happening, stuff like this)

Level 2 : Why is this happening it’s because we prioritize profit over people and environment

Level 3 : Why do we do that ? Because money is an extremely attractive concept which we created and this promotes that behavior.

Level 4 : What’s the basic usage of money ? Buying food.

Reached last level. End of levels in this system. We reached the interface point between our artificial system (Money) and natural system (Food). We found our leverage point and we should do something here to bring change and to cause system level change.

Let’s look at what solution comes out of based on the system level understanding. So, what is the simple thing we can do in the food sector? We can start a simple basic food business. Cool.

Next, since money is so attractive and it promotes profit maximization behavior, we should change this and do the opposite. Our business should treat money as unattractive but of course it is necessary to run the business. So whenever our business makes more money than is necessary we return it. So if our business makes a profit, it just gives it back to the customers. Cool.

We have to be a non-profit business because we don’t prioritize profit over people.

Last but not the least we must procure food from organic and sustainable sources because that’s what we understood from our first level analysis.

So, yeah, this summarizes what kind of starting point we need for system change. But will it even work ? and How can a non-profit organic food business be a solution to all our problems caused by this complex gigantic economic system ? Somehow it doesn’t make sense because it’s not obvious to see right. We need to analyze this solution just like we analyzed the problem. So we did a level by level digging and deeper analysis to reach the root cause and that gave us a solution and now that solution is not really obvious like how can system change happen with that, so let’s go from the solution seed we have and grow it with our imagination and see what kind of a tree grouws out of it, lets see what kind of changes can happen.

Let’s imagine we started it ! A small normal looking grocery store in the neighborhood let’s call it store Z and this is special because each month the store returns profits to its customers. The store has low prices as profit minimization is the goal and the minimum is 0 to run the store sustainably. Z for zero profit and hence the name store Z. The obvious result of such a store is that an attempt is made to provide sustainably grown healthy food at lower prices. At first glance this is what the result will expect to achieve by opening such a store not a bad step right ?

It looks good let’s grow this business and let’s keep our thought experiment going. Now, as there’s no profit made the only way for this store to grow is through donations. Donations can be received in two ways :

a) when customers refuse the returns that they get after profit calculations every month then that money is donation for growth.

b) Like any non-profit organizations it can accept a direct donation from people who think that the store is doing good.

So, let’s assume donations come in and growth happens in two ways lateral and vertical. Before we see what that is in the next step, I would like to highlight that people would donate to our business because it is providing trying to provide healthy food at low costs by being a non-profit therefore people find it a worthy cause and donate for it and not every customer takes the small returns that they get like maybe one euro one dollar or something every month and maybe they would say “Hey, you know what, you can keep it as a donation”, so yeah those are two sources of donations that can practically come in and help to grow.

So what is a lateral and vertical growth. We start with one store in some neighborhood and using donations we open another store in a nearby neighborhood and then you open two more and your popularity grows and more donations come in and then you open three more so this is what I call lateral growth — More customer facing stores are opened.

More people now get to know about your business and these and we get more donations and after a certain lateral growth it’s time to grow vertically. What does that mean ? It means growing backward into the supply chain. Maybe we lease a truck and this helps to build our zero profit logistics network now and then maybe more donations are flowing in because we cut down a bit of logistics cost and food becomes a bit more cheaper and people find it really valuable what we’re doing and they are donating and maybe we buy more trucks and now our logistics fleet is building up and maybe we lease a warehouse now where we store stuff instead of using third-party services and it cuts our cost further which is passed on again to customers and they are more happy and they keep donating more and then maybe we also lease a ship. Over time let’s say your entire supply chain is being made zero profit or not for profit and then what are the obvious results ?

Lowest prices Z stores for organic sustainably grown foods compared to any other profit making store. This hurts the competition real bad and they start shutting down as no one can compete when you do not want to make profits and in fact we are doing a profit minimization this no company would want to compete on that and then since we’re doing a lot of good to the community health indexing improves as many people get to eat nutritious food.

Let’s see what’s the economics of the store say. Let’s ask some questions.

As demand rises because of the low cost of food what should happen to the price of goods ?

Economists say, refer to the demand supply curve, so as demand rises prices should increase assuming supply is not varying. Prices should increase because how will you distribute the goods, right ?

But hey, what will actually happen due to the fundamental design of Z store does a Z store increase prices because increase in prices would mean that it will start making profits which it will have to eventually give back and it makes no sense as it doesn’t want to make profits and so the prices just remain as they are and new boards appear beside price tags requesting/asking people to limit the consumption “Please take one per head”, “2 per person only”, etc. Just like it is happening today due to pandemic or war crisis which causes supply issues and same thing would happen.

Food shortage will be seen as we have just discussed and this time it’s not due to pandemic or war but it’s due to making good food affordable to all. Wow! just digest that fact. Food for all — Not a criminal motive or a bad event and we see food shortage. So there was something fundamentally flawed in the old system and what was it ? We realize that our old system let one section of people starving and malnourished while providing the best of foods to the rich. So the poor were always like malnourished in the system and that’s how things worked out due to the price mechanism. We priced things higher so that they don’t buy it so that and they starve, live malnourished lives. This is the flaw of the system it never first ensured that everybody is well fed that is the basic need, basic criteria any system should first fulfill — food for all and by just avoiding this stuff we were just managing it somehow and now once we try to provide food for all we see that there’s a food shortage and now this food shortage will affect everyone, Why ? Because that’s how Z stores work ! Even if someone brings in a lot of cash, there’s no way they can get more food than others. The food is always cheap in Z stores because it’s a non-profit store and it’s a profit minimizing business. The food the prices will always stay low and the boards will decide the availability — take one or two per person. So even if you earn a million a month, What use of it if this money isn’t powerful to do the most important and basic thing in life — buy food !

so, we are left with no option but to reorganize. How would the world change ?

people will leave jobs realizing the limited power of money.

Work will gladly be taken up in farms as food gets guaranteed there in those jobs — You know be close to the farm get the food.

Food automation becomes priority because people want to be free and this automation additionally further lowers the cost of the food that we eat.

Jobs don’t become a necessity to survive because food became cheaper and cheaper. Deflation of food made people feel richer.

Mad race for profit stops for what uses the money.

System changes , our world changes !

This is just our thought experiment with this idea. It’s a simple food business with a different business model and and look at the effect it has and this is the power of a system level thinking and the solution though it is not obvious that this could be the solution but this is what emerges once we dig deeper and deeper.

I would like to encourage people to start such an experiment, start a local food store and try to run the business as a zero profit and see like how it inspires people, how people become curious about why are you doing it and why am I getting money back ? And you say because I made profit and I don’t want to make profit and you will see people pleasantly surprised and curious and people will ask questions and then you can say hey its because this is how our the whole system works and it’s not working for anybody, the system is always trying to maximize prioritizing profit over people but hey I want to be different and then if you want to help me scale maybe you can donate and then see how how your business grows.

We can start thinking on these lines and start these businesses or encourage these businesses or buy from these businesses because initially food won’t be cheap from these businesses of course right because they are starting and they need our help.