Diana Urge-Vorsatz, part of a Nobel Prize-winning team for her work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is an influential voice in advocating for visionary solutions to problems of energy waste. She focuses much of her attention on waste attributed to the CEE region's existing building stock, especially in her native Hungary. A scholar and professor at Budapest's Central European University, Urge-Vorsatz spoke at her home with Green Horizon editor Nathan Johnson.
Diana Urge-Vorsatz: I'm originally a physicist, and then I studied astrophysics. Then came the changes in 1989, and I decided that I wanted to do something more down to earth, that I didn't want to spent all my time 'in the clouds', so to speak. So I changed my subject and went on to study environmental physics. Then I came to study at CEU [Central European University, in Budapest] to do a summer programme, then went on to do a PhD at UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] before transferring to finish the degree at Cal [University of California at Berkeley].
It was during my time at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that I was influenced more or less by a whole school of thought geared toward identifying solutions that could save the world. There was almost a kind of missionary devotion to the work being carried out there that made a lasting impression on me.
As for individuals, I could name Amory Lovins [author and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute], who shows how we regularly waste so much energy in really silly ways, and that we could be using a fraction of what we use today. He has some shortcomings as well, but I do think he's truly visionary in terms of seeking energy solutions. I've learned a lot from him. Then there are my supervisors both at UCLA and Berkeley. The US definitely has been a big influence on my thinking.
GH: Where did you grow up?
DUV: I was born in Berlin, but came to Hungary shortly afterwards and was raised here. Before university I spent quite a bit of time in London.
GH: You were part of a team that won a Nobel Prize. What was that about, and who did you work with?
DUV: One of the big moments of my professional life was when I was selected to work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was in 2001 or 2002. I was selected to lead the IPCC group on buildings, together with Mike Levine, who was at Lawrence Berkeley when I wrote my dissertation and was actually head of the whole division where I was working. So that was a real honour and fantastic experience.
Basically, for the Fourth Assessment Report we elaborated different options for mitigating climate change by energy efficiency. We were very fortunate that in 2007 the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. It was really the leadership, or those at the highest scientific levels who were recognised. And so we have this certificate on the wall.
Concerning the number of people involved, in addition to management level and co-chairs, there were three working groups with six people, and under them were the coordinating lead authors - with two people responsible for each topic. The IPCC has been around for about 20 years, and with an assessment report every seven years or so -- this was the fourth one -- then you're looking about 400 or so people involved. But you're really talking about a thousand or more people who are involved in some way.
GH: The term 'sustainable development' can be manipulated to serve either environmental or commercial interests. How can we envision 'development' in ways that are consistent with long-term sustainability?
DUV: Well, this is a very difficult concept, and I'm not sure we can move very far if we get trapped inside it. I think the problem is that it's something of a moving target. I'm not even sure that sustainable development, strictly speaking, even exists. The present problem is the whole economic system, which is unsustainable. As long as the big engine moving our economy is consumption, un-sustainability will persist. Some consumption is sustainable, but to just consume more and more and more clearly is not. And this just can't continue because we have limited resources.
Concerning the economic crisis -- I know this sounds a bit cruel to say, but in some ways I almost regret that the crisis wasn't deeper. Things were originally shaken up, but in the end we've managed to rescue the things that are really bad, and in most respects we've returned to business as usual. And I think this is sad, because this was a really good opportunity to rebuild society -- a society much less based on artificially growing consumption and more based on a green economy. And many countries did start these things, and there were rescue packages initially along such lines.
GH: There are analysts, however, who say that we remain in a long-term economic downturn, and that the worst is still to come.
DUV: Well, I think that if we are going to really change the fundamentals of our economy, then it can only come as a result of a big shake-up, a big earthquake. It would be nice if we were capable of changing during times of plenty, but things don't seem to work that way.
But to return to your question about sustainable development, I think we can work with the concept as a goal or a moving target. I don't know if we can ever arrive there. Maybe we can, but I don't see that we have an economic arrangement or structure in place that can really result in sustainable development as we currently define it.
GH: You spoke recently at the Build Green CEE conference in Budapest. Broadly speaking, there are two types of 'green building': the first involves new construction projects that are designed for maximum energy efficiency, while the second involves improving the energy efficiency of existing buildings -- that is, the built environment. Your talk focused on the latter, and specifically on such things like 'energy poverty', the so-called 'lock-in effect' and access to EU structural funds? Can you describe some of the general social, physical and financial challenges to carrying out wide-scale retrofitting of built urban environments?
DUV: All of these things tie together. Many of today's problems, whether they're environmental, social or economic, have to do with the fact that too many people are paying way too much for their basic energy needs. There is a tendency to not distinguish energy poverty from poverty in general -- that is 'if you can't afford bread, how could you afford electricity'? But it's different in this region [Central Europe] because there are many people here who are not poor in terms of relative income, but poor because they're locked in to poor infrastructure. And that's mostly because of inefficient, obsolete housing. And this is a legacy of the Soviet era's highly subsidised energy price framework. In this sense, the socialist or communist model was no better than the one we have now because there were no standards for efficiency. And there were no incentives to become more fuel-efficient.
And as there are some two million people [in the region] who lack access to energy, there are many who think the best thing to do is to offer subsidised or free energy. I don't know what the solution is, but it seems clear to me that this approach will merely lock these same people into longer-term energy poverty. As things stand now, obsolete housing and bad district heating systems already force people to pay much more than they should. In fact, about 80 percent of Hungary's population lives in energy poverty if we define it the same way as it's defined in the UK, which is if you pay more than 10 percent of disposable income on energy bills. This is really quite shocking. We have estimated that inability to afford basic energy leads to between 2,000 and 2,500 deaths each year in Hungary alone. It's not so much that people literally freeze to death, but that people catch cold and flu and other illnesses much more easily when homes aren't heated adequately. The WHO [World Health Organizaiton] recommends that living rooms should kept at around 21 degrees [Celsius] and other rooms should be around 18 degrees. There are other factors that are more difficult to measure, such as school days missed or poor school performance because of illness.
So basically, energy poverty is a very important issue in Eastern Europe. We just don't talk about it much or understand it adequately.
GH: Do you happen to know off-hand the average annual percentage of disposable income that Hungarians pay in energy costs?
DUV: As of 2007 the figure was 10.8 percent, but I would suspect that it's higher now. In fact, my recent research shows that Hungary has one of the worst fixed building stocks [as far as energy consumption is concerned] in the world. We knew it was bad before -- something like 280 or so kilowatt hours a year per square metre, when it's possible to go as low as 15 kilowatts hours per year -- but my colleagues are now telling me that actual amount is now close to 400! There's no building stock in the whole world that's this bad.
GH: Is the bad building stock spread pretty evenly throughout the country?
DUV: Yes. There's very little difference between the typical buildings that went up in the '70s and '80s all over Hungary. Unfortunately, the buildings being built right now aren't any better, either because people are ignoring building codes or there's lots of heat loss through glass or poor insulation.
Simply addressing the issue of building stock would solve so many problems. A good building today doesn't even need a heating system. A properly retrofitted building needs maybe just a fireplace or small, portable radiator. Many people could escape energy poverty and would only have to pay for electricity and gas for cooking, and so forth.
In terms of energy security, we calculated that new building stock can save us up to 40 percent annually on natural gas imports. This will make Hungary less vulnerable to possible interruptions of flow from Russia or Ukraine, especially during winter, when this supply is much more urgently needed. Where climate change is concerned we could also significantly lower our emissions, as 50 percent comes from existing building stock alone. The EU average is 40 percent. The industrial sector has improved in terms of energy consumption, but the transport sector will continue to grow, which is a big challenge.
But, of course, making big changes requires big initial investment. At the same time, so much subsidy money goes into the energy sector. The total of all these subsidies over the past few years could easily have fixed the country's building stock. This is significant now that EU structural funds are available, and the EU is really keen that Hungary spends structural fund monies on retrofitting buildings, rather than on new roads and more of the same. It wasn't possible to do this before, but we can now use up to 4 percent of available structural funds for retrofitting. The EU's big concern, in fact, is that we won't spend the money this way. There are even various climate funds that are available, such as the Green Investment Scheme.
It's important to note that retrofitting is the most economically efficient step, but it's not necessarily the cheapest up front. It's not the lowest-hanging fruit. Deep retrofits are not cheap initially. But if we keep picking the low-hanging fruit we're locking ourselves into a very large climate footprint future.
Taking an individual building as an example, we might decide to replace a door here, or some windows there, but once such little steps are taken, it gets too expensive by the time you talk about changing the insulation or the heating system itself. If you carry out a deep retrofit, you might not need to install a heating system, but you do need to make sure that the windows and such are absolutely airtight. The job has to be done properly from the very beginning. It's systemic thinking. You will have savings at the end, but you can't keep going in piecemeal fashion. You need to take a holistic approach toward a building, because a building is a system, not merely a sum of components.
GH: But there's often strong opposition from individual component suppliers, isn't there? The whole nature of the supply chain keeps the dysfunctional system in place. And then there are, of course, the fuel conglomerates themselves who want to sell as much of their product as possible.
DUV: Yes. It will be a very interesting to see what happens now. The incoming Fidesz government [elected in April by a huge margin] has expressed an interest in carrying out a retrofitting scheme, and I think they understand the concept, though maybe not in the way I do. But then the district heating lobby steps in, which is very powerful, because they know that they would be a big loser from such a development. There's no way around it, and I just think that they might need to find another business for themselves, because district heating is just not viable with highly energy-efficient housing.
Even if certain sectors suffered job losses as a result of radical shifts in energy consumption, I think many other opportunities would open up. For at least 40 years or so, the shift would be very human intensive and would put a lot of people to work.
GH: And there would be quite high demand for skilled building-related labour.
DUV: Absolutely. It wouldn't be just a question of stuffing insulation into the roof or walls, but of really careful work and making everything completely airtight. It's very hard to do. So, anyway, there's a lot of new business to be made here. Obviously, some industries would need to shift, but it's not something that will happen abruptly from one year to the next. If they thought ahead, they could start now by preparing to make a permanent, long-term transition.
GH: Presuming a long-term retrofitting scheme does get implemented in Hungary, how does one go about prioritising what gets retrofitted and in what order?
DUV: That's a difficult question, but a massive programme can still be carried out that would in any case double the present rate of renovation. Each year in Hungary there about 60,000 renovations -- that is, individual units, whether houses or flats. Bearing in mind that this number could be doubled, we could at least start with ongoing retrofit efforts. Payment for a good retrofit could be taken out in the form of a loan that would be paid back immediately once the energy savings kick in. What I'm talking about here is possible without subsidies, but there are lots of good reasons to subsidise this sort of activity -- from climate change- and energy security angles, certainly.
GH: Are there significant differences between existing building stocks in CEE countries? If so, where is the most progress being made?
DUV: Unfortunately, comparative research in this area is extremely difficult to come by, but Poland's development is interesting. In terms of residential energy consumption in the region, nearly every country in the region has improved by about 1 percent per year on average. But Poland has improved by something like 20 percent over five years. It's very dramatic improvement. On the other hand, Hungary was the only country in which energy consumption actually grew -- in all of Europe!
GH: Do you attribute Poland's success to proactive government policy?
DUV: My Polish colleagues say that it's because the country has put a lot of money into thermo-modernisation, so they are retrofitting a lot. And maybe the reason why this money has been allocated in such a way is because Poland had a strong NGO movement even under socialism, so there was already a lot of momentum for this in the early 1990s and they just kept on going, regardless of changes of government. I can't claim to be an expert on Poland, but the data pretty clearly shows the country as a positive regional example.
GH: The former Yugoslavia was something of the 'odd man out' during the Cold War era. Did this influence the kind of building stock found today in its now-separate entities?
DUV: That's a good question. Unfortunately, data like this is so hard to get. Even in Hungary it's very difficult to acquire this kind of information. To conduct, say, a house-by-house or even district-by-district type of analysis would be really expensive. The UNDP [United Nations Development Program] did carry out a study of public buildings for auditing purposes, which gives us a little bit to go on. As for private building stock, we've projected estimates based instead on discussions with individual architects and builders. So, yes, it's really difficult data to acquire in Hungary, but I should mention that it's not adequately measured anywhere in the world, except perhaps in the US, where there is nationwide data on both commercial and residential building energy consumption. This data has maybe been collected since the 1970s. I know that when I was there in the '90s they were already able to draw from at least two decades' worth of very detailed data.
GH: You attended COP-15 in Copenhagen. Do you have any thoughts on the likelihood of success for multi-party, multinational discussions such as these where energy and the environment are concerned?
DUV: I really believe that local, municipal and national-level discussions about these issues are essential, but I don't think these alone can ever get us to where we need to go because the problem is that no one will start by themselves to begin to make the kind of reductions that need to be made. We have now various countries willing to be part of something, but how many of them would be willing to act alone? Maybe there would be a domino effect if someone took the lead, but I don't think so, as there seem to be only a handful of countries with a deep commitment to solving these problems and willingness to make major sacrifices. But to put things another way, if countries made a collective sacrifice, the individual burden on countries would be far less. In any case there is a huge difference between doing a little and doing a lot -- that is, achieving 80 or 90-percent emissions reduction worldwide, which won't happen strictly from the bottom-up -- at least I don't think it will.
It's important to distinguish between transformational change and incremental change, and my conviction -- and that of my colleagues -- is that you cannot achieve transformational change via an aggregate of incremental changes. So in this respect, some sort of global agreement is needed.
