Written by Samir Shaikh and the CSRC team.
When we talk about achieving a net-zero future, our minds tend to jump straight to the visible pillars of clean energy: fields of wind turbines, glistening solar arrays, and highways humming with electric vehicles. But behind every single one of those technologies lies a reality: the energy transition is fundamentally a materials transition.
To unpack the complex social, technical, and political weight embedded in our physical world, the Climate Solutions Research Collective recently hosted an event titled Climate Conversation: Materials in the Sustainability Transition. Held outside the AERL building, the discussion brought together three distinct voices operating at the cutting edge of engineering, policy, and infrastructure studies: Alex Tavasoli (Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering), Karthik Akkiraju (Assistant Professor of Materials Engineering), and Deb Chachra (Visiting Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering, and author of How Infrastructure Works, and Visiting Professor at UBC).
Supply vs. Demand: Moving Beyond Source-Swapping
In examining how we traditionally frame climate solutions, Karthik Akkiraju challenged the prevailing focus of modern environmental strategy. Historically, institutional efforts lean heavily on supply-side interventions, like building nuclear reactors or massive battery storage installations. The underlying assumption here is that societal demand for energy will naturally keep growing, and our sole job is to swap out the energy source.
Akkiraju warned that this approach has a critical blind spot because it assumes demand is uniform. By simply swapping the source without addressing who actually benefits from that energy, we end up propagating existing power structure inequities.
Instead, his work points toward demand-side interventions, which look at changing behaviour to reduce demand overall. This approach can empower people by giving them more agency over their own energy production. Because quality of life and happiness are deeply subjective, Akkiraju’s research focuses on estimating how much material and energy people actually need to be comfortable. By taking those concrete numbers back to engineers as a demand target, the goal is to secure human wellbeing while keeping overall consumption within safe planetary limits.
Energy is Abundant, But Matter is Finite
Deb Chachra brought her perspective as a long-time infrastructure educator to dismantle a common climate myth: that the world is facing an energy shortage. In reality, incident solar radiation is effectively unlimited, meaning we have all the energy we need. We just weren’t able to access renewable energy effectively and at scale until very recently, so we’ve been relying on fossil-fuel combustion.. While older environmental frameworks insisted that sustainability means using less energy, the newer understanding is that global energy use will actually increase as we electrify. The implications of decoupling energy from combustion and pollution require a profound mindset shift.
Because energy is what lets us do things in the world, Chachra frames energy as human agency, powering everything from mobility to habitable living spaces to communications. However, she paired this optimism with a sobering material reality: While energy is abundant and ever-renewing, the Earth is a closed system for materials. Matter is finite. Every atom has to go somewhere, and pollution is what happens when it ends up in the wrong place.
Chachra, whose background is in materials science and engineering, used the history of aluminum to illustrate what happens when we get cheap, abundant energy without a plan. In the past, cheap hydropower led to a massive increase in aluminum production, which society quickly channeled into high throughput and disposable consumer goods. This time around, Chachra argues we must use abundant renewable energy to do the opposite: close material loops. With cheap clean electricity, recycling materials like steel and glass becomes much cheaper, and new technologies like recycling plastics or recovering lithium from batteries become economically feasible. But this requires us to focus on what happens before and after we use a product.
The Economic Paradox of Sustainable Materials
While the technical blueprints for a circular economy are viable, implementing them within our current economic landscape remains an uphill battle. Alex Tavasoli shared her perspective after arriving at UBC, noting that the economic forces enabling technological change often seem fundamentally opposed to sustainability.
Without supportive policy, sustainable versions of existing materials infrastructure simply cannot compete economically with the deeply entrenched, status-quo plant designs we use today. To make matters worse, policy support is notoriously fragile and can vanish when political administrations change.
Because capital-intensive systems take a long time to build and require stability, Tavasoli has focused on community-based, bottom-up financing and construction models. She highlighted recent research looking at what scale of sustainable infrastructure different social financing models can realistically support, as well as low-tech production methods that can be started at a community level. While massive, complex technological systems have delivered real wellbeing and freed people from historical drudgery, finding the right balance between centralized master systems and community control remains an unresolved tension.
Framing the Real Challenge: Scale, Systems, and "Enough"
During the open discussion led by facilitator Leslie Dampier, the room gravitated toward a shared truth: the most difficult hurdles of the materials transition are social and cultural.
The discussion collectively pushed back against the individual guilt-trip approach to climate behaviour, favouring structural mechanisms like a carbon tax instead. Ultimately, as the conversation turned to the Canadian context and the reality of stranded fossil fuel assets, the panellists emphasized that our financial and engineering systems need to shift away from simply maximizing efficiency toward long-term material responsibility.
See full speaker biographies the event page here.
