Will Technology Save Us?
On System, Self, and The Power of Choice
About this piece: I spent years working at the International Energy Agency, a key player shaping global energy and climate policy behind the scenes. Responsible for quantifying the role of individual behaviour in creating a liveable future, I explored the limits of technology and institutional change - a journey that ultimately took me to the hidden question at the core of our crisis: how do we change a system that made us? In this first piece on my new Substack, I want to share with you what I learned.
Immense, unpredictable, and overwhelming - this is how the climate crisis feels at times. As individuals, we drift along like in a storm not of our own making. We feel powerless, and so we cast our hopes toward distant shores - our governments, our leaders, someone will step up to turn this ship around. Not knowing where to start, we start nowhere - and look towards the dazzling beacon of technology to come to our rescue. Tech-optimism seems to be today’s version of hope, telling a story of how comfort, progress and growth can continue into a “green” future. Because if technology won’t change our system, then we must.
What’s happening to our planet is bigger than all of us, and yet, we feel responsible. As humans, there seems to be barely a step we can take without causing further damage, and campaigns like that of the “carbon footprint” somehow seem to tell us that, although we can’t fix this alone, we must. It’s the perfect paradox: must the system change, or must the self?
Both professionally and personally, I’ve explored this question in depth. First, modeling the role of behavior change in the climate transition, I’ve explored it on a quantitative level. Then, as a young woman trying to find her way through climate anxiety and ecological grief, I’ve explored it on a level of self. In this first article of my Substack, I want to share with you what I learned.
The Limits of Technology
I spent years working in the energy and climate transition at the International Energy Agency’s “World Energy Outlook” team, a key player shaping global energy and climate policy behind the scenes. The IEA provides spot-on analysis to governments on how to bring about a sustainable future through technology shifts. Solar PV trends, electric vehicle adoption rates, the latest shipping fuels, and now the rapid efficiency improvements enabled by AI - technology is always on the move, fast and unpredictable, and this is what we bet our future on. Technology will save us.
This belief is not unfounded: most of the emissions reductions we’ve seen until today have happened thanks to technology changes that proved cost-effective, sometimes due to enlightened policy-choices. But the reliance on technology can easily turn into a convenient distraction from the deeper reasons underlying the state of our world. And during my time at the IEA, this emerged in the data.
Based on real-world consumption data from pretty much every country in the world, the IEA is able to take stock of past and present and turn them into future. The different scenarios model global future consumption and, translating contrasting pathways into emissions and temperature rise, a peek into the climate consequences for all life on earth. I was privileged to partake in the first time a climate friendly scenario (called “Net Zero by 2050”, the only scenario aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century), was modeled. Faced with the need for much starker emissions reductions, an uncomfortable truth emerged on our screens:
technology alone won’t be enough.
This is particularly true for the industrialized nations of the world, where consumption doesn’t cover existential needs, but is dwindling higher and higher often to satisfy excess and luxury (think of long-distance vacations, pools, or SUVs). We introduced “Behaviour and sustainable consumption” into our models, and for the first time, individual choices became an essential part of the world’s climate-friendly pathway. The IEA is not alone in this conclusion: the IPCC, for example, concludes in its latest Assessment Report that up to 70% of emissions reductions required rely on “demand-side” actions, i.e. actions that involve us.
Clean Tech Takes Time to Build - Time We Don’t Have
From a quantitative perspective, the reasons are simple: decarbonizing housing, transport, and production, all while populations and the hunger for energy keep growing, must happen rapidly. Waiting for “markets” to replace all our dirty infrastructure with shiny, clean technology simply isn’t fast enough. Especially when the economic forces underlying these markets aren’t designed to prioritize the common good. All those dirty fossil cars on our roads, those dirty heaters in our basements, those dirty planes in our skies -we can reduce their damage now, simply by using them less.
Moreover, there are certain technologies in our system that, even if we wanted to, we have no viable replacement for. Planes are the best example. Here, low-emissions solutions are either impossible, undeveloped, or too costly at the massive scale of our current global hunger for flights. Reducing unnecessary flights is the only solution for this sector to avoid blowing our climate goals. And lastly, reducing our consumption is needed to keep the expansion of cleaner energy sources within sustainable limits.
Our stubborn reliance on technology becomes even more precarious when charting the way ahead: having officially crossed the crucial 1.5 degrees threshold for the first time in 2025, we now begin to rely increasingly on “negative emissions technologies” to help us suck the carbon back out of the air at some point in the future. We’re playing a very risky game - all in order not to have to change ourselves.
Banish the Guilt
The numbers seemed clear - some change will come from the system, some change from us. We even put shares on it. Yet something about this “us vs. system”-distinction never felt quite right to me. The choices we have available are largely determined by our context. How should I skip the plane if no train connection exists? How should I consume consciously if the only jacket I can afford comes shipped from China? Huge global forces and our entire societal upbringing are geared towards making us do the opposite of what’s good for our future.
Creating a guilty conscience has been a beloved strategy of fossil fuel companies to deflect responsibility to the individual. “We must do this or else…”-narratives try to frighten us into change. But neither guilt nor fear are very effective motivators. Maybe this is why “behavior change”, or change in ourselves, remains a niche idea in discussions around climate solutions. We’re missing the crucial element to make it work: inherent motivation.
Because as long as we demonstrate a need for change, but give people neither the tools nor a reason to, all warnings will be without consequence. We seem to believe that all reasons available to us are inherently selfish: fear (change because the alternative is bad), compliance (change or you break the law), convenience (change because it’s easier), or financial gain (change because it’s cheaper). For the sake of comfort and the known, our collective capacity for embracing deeper change for a greater good is underestimated. We are sold short in our willingness to evolve. But there’s another, infinitely more effective why: being part of something greater.
Find Your “Why”
It wasn’t my career that opened me to this. It was my personal journey through despair. As I saw emissions-projections inch higher and higher on my screen every year, as I preached about the need for change using numbers and charts that felt ultimately empty, I lost all sense of self-efficacy. A tireless sense of urgency combined with a complete lack of meaning spiralled me into a burnout at 29. The escalating suffering on the news made me cut myself off from joy, and my mind, professionally trained to project to 2050, made me lose all excitement for life. My own behaviour became more damaging to me and the planet than it had ever been. Because why bother?
Until one experience changed everything, an experience of reconnection. My rock bottom had brought me to this place, pushing me out of my funk. Behind the despair, I discovered a curiosity about why I’m really here, what all this running is good for, and so I started inquiring. Through everything from traditional psychotherapy to all kinds of untraditional alternatives - meditation, breathwork, or psychedelic medicines - I suddenly found myself here. In the present, for the first time, freed from all anxieties around self-preservation, and through this deeply connected the other lives I share this planet with.
I remembered what makes this life worth living and the simplest joys this earth offers worth saving. Instead of a daunting predicament, in which I “must” curtail and cut down in order to survive, change took on a whole new colour: the possibility for a better society, the joy of being part of something good. What a beautiful opportunity we have, creating on the ruins of exploitation a life based on the principle of interconnection. Because it is connection that makes us happy, not consumption.
To find such imagination in the midst of hustle and doom is no easy task, but it’s possible. We’ve all had them, those fleeting moments where, despite it all, life seems to make sense, and what really matters is put into perspective. But it takes an active cultivation of this state to nurture it into the base of our actions. If we allow ourselves to be driven by nothing but fear, convenience, or gain, we naturally won’t see other options for shaping a society. The solutions we know are the solutions we proliferate.
But a lived experience of interconnection was enough to show me: my choices are deeply interdependent with those of all others. I am insignificant, didn’t write this story I am part of alone, and for this exact reason, my immediate actions are my only place of impact. Because “the system” - that is us.
The System is Us
Climate change is a planetary-scale threat and, as such, requires planetary-scale reforms implemented at the world’s highest levels. But these highest levels, these “governments” and “corporations” - they are ultimately people, influenced by their context and their culture.
We matter in our individual choices, not because of how much CO2 we save here and there, but because of how we affect the system - that’s the people - around us. What kind of lifestyle we model, what kind of profession or purpose we choose to invest ourselves in, what processes we do or do not make ourselves complicit with, what kind of conversations we dare to have, and what vision of fulfillment, compassion and hope we radiate to those around us - all this matters to a degree impossible to quantify by models. We all have a ripple effect much beyond our ordinary comprehension.
Change, therefore, is not about counting emissions for a small reduction in greenhouse gases. This interpretation of responsibility is bound to make us feel disheartened. Rather, change is about exercising our own capacity to move in a different direction, to reclaim agency over the system we make ourselves part of, and be the change we want to see. This is what will heal ourselves, and as a consequence, will heal the planet.
When I was calculating the impacts by “technology” vs “behaviour” in % shares, when I knew the emissions savings for each flight avoided in tons of CO2 by heart, I was going around righteously calling people out. But apart from quickly becoming unlikeable the problem was that afterwards, I would go home and order imported salmon sushi delivered in heaps of plastic. Then, to counteract my own identity crisis, I’d repeat it all again. I changed when convenient, out of fear first, then out of ego. Only when I saw my place in the web of life, and reconnected to my love for it, did I change for good, and my own will. We and the system are not separate, and the only thing that can save us is this recognition. In a predicament as wickedly stuck as ours, the best place to start is always right where we are.
New Stories for a World Off Course
With the climate catastrophe gaining full swing, solutions that are primarily convenient within a system of growth and exploitation are undeniably showing their limitations. But if change is merely meant to fill a gap in what technology can’t do, it is designed to keep this very system in place. It is merely trying to buy time. Such “behaviour changes” are no changes at all. What really needs changing for our society to rediscover its balance is not a numerical understanding of where most emissions are caused, but a pervading, cultural understanding of agency, long-term thinking, and connectedness.
We might feel stuck in a system, but the moment each of us ceases to keep it alive through our compliance, it ceases to exist. The deeper reasons for our predicament are mind-made, and so our solutions must be too. There’s a world out there - in here - that’s striving and deserving of our awe. Our job now is to rediscover it. This is why I am starting this Substack.