Can The West Lead Us To A Better Place?

An interesting article from Stanford Magazine, if slightly Stanford-centric, on the demographic changes that have shaped the American West in the past 140 years from Stanford professor David M. Kennedy, whose classroom lectures I would occasionally sneak into, not being a history major. The key themes of the article, briefly summarized: since the symbolic act of completing the Union-Pacific railroad, and more strongly pronounced since the onset of World War II the American West has undergone profound growth and demographic changes that act as both a model for an increasingly heterogeneous world and fundamentally relocate the centers of influence and power within the United States. A couple of minor notes:

- Kennedy suggests the immigrant mix of the American West as a potential model for other parts of the world (Sweden, Ireland) unaccustomed to the challenges of diversity. But is the American West, with an abundance of available land and a lack of centuries-old and strong cultural traditions, really a good model for the challenges of Europe and other nations trying to integrate new populations?

- Kennedy notes that in 1960, the last time an American president was elected from somewhere other than the South and the West, California had 32 electoral votes to New York's 45. Currently, California commands 55 votes, with New York's share having diminished to 31 -- and further, states that lie west of the 100th meridian cast 200 of the necessary 270 votes to elect a president. Kennedy speculates that, should demographic patterns hold, the West as a voting bloc may be able to elect American presidents on their own. Will the 200 year old precedents in the constitution hold under such drastic demographic changes?

- The environmental scarcity, particularly of water resources, that have always shaped the economies of the West (read Marc Reisner's excellent Cadillac Desert) will continue to determine the future of the West. With the growing economic influence of California, specifically, and the West's ability to foster and embrace large-scale technological change, perhaps one of the enduring legacies of the West will be in re-shaping the way large, demanding populations are able to thrive under environmental and resource pressures -- surely an enduring global challenge.

Photos above and below from a Flickr search for 'California.' Interesting, I suppose, that California in our imagination is still about the Pacific and mountains and expansive, magical vistas, and not the strip malls and subdivisions populated by the small shops owned by the Vietnamese and the Indians and the Mexicans and the huge, box-store malls where all the money goes. Or, as Thomas Pynchon envisioned it:

San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts: census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile, and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set the spot apart, give it an aura. But if there was any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible on first glance. She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. She suspected that much.

GreenYour.com

I haven't had a chance to read the remainder of the NYT's green-focused magazine, but I expect I may have more to say or share from that. One of the constant challenges in trying to be more green is knowing exactly what to do. There are a wealth of great resources out there and it seems one more has been added to the mix. I haven't yet spent much time on the site, but GreenYour.com is a personal reference service for making environmentally sound choices. I believe the service was started by some folks that I crossed-paths with a few jobs back, and I figure it's Web 2.0-take (judging by the look of it) on going green is at least worth a look. More on it later, most likely.

Why Bother?

Michael Pollan with a wonderful essay in the New York Times arguing for the importance of personal choice in making a difference in the face of climate change (and an argument that can easily be extended to a wealth of other environmental, social, and economic factors). Pollan's essay touches on issues that have long troubled me. Among the positives are framing environmental responsibility as a fundamentally moral choice (albeit, in the positive sense of moral, not the finger-wagging, school-marmish sense) and framing environmentally responsible acts as pleasurable (for me, living in a city, for Pollan, planting a garden and growing your own food). More vexing is how to convince people to embrace personal change when confronted with the overwhelming sense that the problem is too large to impact, or when faced with concerns of developed countries somehow falling behind in a consumer arms race with their counterparts in China (the traditional bogeyman) or elsewhere. And kudos to Pollan for re-raising the profile of Wendell Berry, an essayist who deserves a much wider following. Read on:

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.” For Berry, the “why bother” question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

Read the rest.

You Don't Miss Your Water...

An interesting article from the NYT on how climate change, both in terms of current impact and projected impact, is creating challenges for conservation biologists. A few key paragraphs:

“We have over a 100-year investment nationally in a large suite of protected areas that may no longer protect the target ecosystems for which they were formed,” said Healy Hamilton, director of the California Academy of Sciences, who attended a workshop on the subject in November in Berkeley, Calif. “New species will move in, and the target species will move out.”

As a result, more and more conservationists believe they must do more than identify biologically important landscapes and raise money to protect them. They must peer into an uncertain future, guess which sites will be important 50 or 100 years from now, and then try to balance these guesses against the pressing needs of the present.

“It’s turning conservation on its head,” said Bill Stanley, who directs the global climate change initiative at the Nature Conservancy. He said the organization has a goal to protect 10 percent of major habitat types — like grasslands, forests and freshwater systems — by 2015.

“We are not sure exactly how to treat this yet,” Mr. Stanley said. “Areas that we preserved as grasslands are going to become forests. Does this mean we are going to have to have more than enough forest and less grassland than we had before? Or does it mean we should fight it — try to keep the forest from coming into those grasslands? Or should we try to find new areas that are least likely to change, that seem to be the least susceptible to change, and prioritize those areas?”

Interesting questions for me:

From an ecological perspective, if climate change is going to create massive and fundamental changes in local ecologies on a short time frame, how do you determine the ecological value of conserving a particular biome?

From an economic perspective, how do you make decisions on where to invest resources in conservation? How can you quantify the negative impact on a particular ecology, or the positive benefit, in the face of such overwhelming uncertainty in outcomes?

For people engaged in the public debate about conservation, be it advocacy or politics, how do you continue to make a compelling case for conservation when the ecological, economic, and for lack of a better word, spiritual arguments for conserving a place become harder to make with confidence, due to the impact of climate change?

What happens to that spiritual grounding of conservation, from Aldo Leopold to John Muir, when the constancy of a physical place is something that may become even more precious to us due to the effects of climate change?

And is there some heretical, futurist romance in being able to watch new ecologies rapidly transform in front of our eyes? Grasslands turning into forests? An underwater Everglades?

The Energy Bubble

RM over at Informed Reader summarizes an article on the next economic bubble -- supposedly being created as capital is moved into research, development, and marketing of new technologies in alternative energy. (Caveat: I haven't read the Harper's article.) Thoughts?

The small fashion among economic commentators that our entire trajectory of economic growth is a (wink-wink) sanctioned Ponzi scheme, shifting capital and hype from one sector to another, is pretty terrifying. Particularly when the debts and assets left behind from one level to the next are being bought up by foreign interests.

In general, I guess it is a good thing that this capital is being moved into alternative energy. Even if there is an eventual collapse, the initial investment should yield dividends in terms of new technologies and markets. Casualties of the Internet boom aside, that Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Wikipedia, and all the online media were wrought from that initial investment surely has been a significant and positive change in our lives.

If the bubble is starting now, I guess I'm going to be late to the party again. Damn my timing!

The Tata Nano

A new "people's car," for a new era. India's Tata Motors unveiled the world's "cheapest car." From the NYT's automotive blog:

Over the past year, Tata has been building hype for a car that would cost a mere 100,000 rupees (roughly $2,500) and bring automotive transportation to the mainstream Indian population. It has been nicknamed the “People’s Car.” Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.

With the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey” playing, Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors drove the small white bubble car onto Tata’s show stage, where it joined two others.

“They are not concept cars, they are not prototypes,” Mr. Tata announced when he got out of the car. “They are the production cars that will roll out of the Singur plant later this year.”

The four-door Nano is a little over 10 feet long and nearly 5 feet wide. It is powered by a 623cc two-cylinder engine at the back of the car. With 33 horsepower, the Nano is capable of 65 miles an hour. Its four small wheels are at the absolute corners of the car to improve handling. There is a small trunk, big enough for a duffel bag.

“Today, we indeed have a People’s Car, which is affordable and yet built to meet safety requirements and emission norms, to be fuel efficient and low on emissions,” Mr. Tata added. “We are happy to present the People’s Car to India and we hope it brings the joy, pride and utility of owning a car to many families who need personal mobility.

What is exciting about this? First, that an Indian company (albeit a massive conglomerate) has developed a solution for the needs of the Indian market, in terms of cost, features, and fit to the physically crowded Indian urban landscape. Second, the opportunity for increased mobility that this provides the expanding middle class in India. The introduction of the automobile to the middle class fundamentally changed American culture. What will be the impact in India? Third, the commitment (if Tata's claims are true) to building a vehicle which takes environmental and basic safety concerns into consideration, not just cost:

"the 33hp engine meets current Euro 4 emissions standards and is cleaner than most of the scooters running around on Indian streets right now.” They also claim that the Nano can achieve 54 mpg (U.S.) and has passed frontal and side impact tests"

What is worrying about this? I make the assumption that, with or without this vehicle, there would be an explosion of personal-use vehicles by the rapidly expanding (in number and wealth) middle class in India. Still, the prospect of another million vehicles on the Indian roadways is deeply concerning -- for the local environment, in terms of smog and congestion, for the global environment, in terms of climate change and other atmospheric emissions, for public safety, of both the drivers of these tiny little death traps, and the massive number of Indian urbanites who use other means of transportation (pedestrians, bicyclists, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles) on Indian city streets, and to the political will that Indian governments will have to building public transportation infrastructure at the expense of more roads, widened roads, and highways. Perhaps not quite the head-on collision of anti-poverty versus environment that Slate suggests, but some interesting dilemmas will arrive if the Tata Nano takes off. And I bet it will.

The Lazy Environmentalist, part 2

Based on nothing more than my armchair observations, I think that in the last ten years, it has become easier to live a little more "green." From household cleaners to cars, both choice and information on more environmentally responsible product alternatives have become more available to consumers. Whether you are buying local, organic, hemp, hybrid, or nontoxic, the market has certainly delivered more products, and of higher quality, to satisfy the eco-conscious consumer, and in consistently more mainstream channels. This is undoubtedly a good thing.

Josh Dorfman's book and website (and presumably, radio show, which I have never listened to), The Lazy Environmentalist, are great entry points into making consumer choices that can make you a little more green -- covering the territory from just a little more eco-conscious, without sacrificing much in terms of status or style (i.e., shop at Bed Bath & Beyond, wear Timberland, drive a Lexus) , to more significant commitments to brands or products which push the green envelope even a bit further. For anyone looking to inject a green perspective in to an upcoming buying decision, I highly recommend both the book and the website.

And as evidenced by the brands and resources highlighted by The Lazy Environmentalist, some companies are making both an ethical commitment and seizing a market opportunity to serve consumers who want to green their lifestyles. The movement of green products from the fringe into the mainstream of style, status, cost, and availability is a trend that I hope can be sustained.

Dorfman's book, in each of his chapters, which are organized (helpfully) like an enormous environmental department story might be, also broaches questions on what it would take to live a lot more green. The challenge in moving from a little to a lot is that the choices often take us out of our comfort zone. They are no longer simple consumer choices -- do I buy product A or product B, but lifestyle choices. Where should I live? How large should my house be? How often should I travel? Should I eat meat? While Dorfman does an admirable job opening the dialogue on some of these questions, his book, with its orientation as a consumer resource, is not really well-equipped to challenge these core values deeply (nor should it be).

But, as we understand the scope of global environmental challenges, like climate change or sustainable development, the depth and dimensions of the choices we are making in "going green" must change, as well. We can't simply become more conscious consumers. We need to make much more deeply considered personal choices, with respect to our lifestyle's impact on the environment and resource use, and political choices, which can help drive policy and market constraints to make both the small consumer choices and the big lifestyle choices easier and more feasible for a lot of people to make.

A bit of an abstract argument, I apologize, but one which always creeps to the fore when I think about how easy it is to feel good as a green consumer, without necessarily making significant impact. But a start is a start, and The Lazy Environmentalist is a good start, particularly if, like me, you are lazy.

And while we're at it, a second, separate UK-based resource also dubbed "The Lazy Environmentalist," is worth a visit...

Proposed Antilia Building: More Green? Still Ostentatious

I recently learned about the Antilia building, which is under construction in Mumbai, by Perkins + Will, for Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani. A couple of descriptive paragraphs:

Construction is underway, albeit with some delays, on one of India’s highest profile and most opulent projects—the Antilia, a 490-foot-tall corporate meeting facility and private residence in Mumbai. Chicago-based Perkins + Will designed the 24-story tower for business tycoon Mukesh Ambani, whose family will occupy roughly 35,000 square feet in its top floors.

Among its interesting elements, Antilia will feature a band of vertical and horizontal gardens that demarcates the tower’s different program elements. A garden level will separate the ground-floor parking and conference center from residential space above, for instance, and the outer walls on certain levels will be sheltered by trellises supporting panels that contain hydroponically grown plants.

In addition to signaling different space uses and providing privacy, these “vertical gardens” will help shade the building and reduce the urban heat island effect. “You can use the whole wall almost like a tree and increase the green area of the site by five or 10 times over what it would be if you just did a green roof,” Johnson observers. “It’s a prototype for buildings of the future.”

Oh, wow. What a crazy building, and while some of the architectural and green design aspects are interesting, it is difficult to see how this building either fits in with the development needs of Mumbai, in general, or a commitment to green design. I guess the rich get what they want, although if this building is a prototype for the future, it seems we're moving ever-closer to a Blader Runner-like dystopia, where the rich live comfortable lives in high-rises towering above the city floor, while discharging a disproportionate amount of waste to and depleting resources from those stuck on the ground, in the shadows below.

The Slate.com article which brought this building to my attention is interesting, as well, in dissecting how efforts to create standards for certifying green building design (specifically, the LEED certification standards) can be counter-productive for really achieving green design objectives. The main criticisms seem to be that LEED's check-list based system for evaluating building design give similar weight to disproportionate investments in green design, creating mis-aligned incentives, that the checklist oversimplifies many of the design objectives and fails to create baseline standards, and that the premium is placed on achieving efficiency and not on controlling scale.

I haven't really paid attention to the evolution of LEED in ten years, but the criticisms seem like pretty standard fare for most initiatives trying to bring standards for sustainability into commercially-driven enterprises. I don't disagree with any of Daniel Brook's analysis of LEED (to the extent that I am familiar with the standards and qualified to agree or disagree), but also it bears mention how difficult it is to create initiatives that both achieve sustainable objectives and will gain buy-in from the companies that need to be properly incentivized and to implement designs and programs according to those standards. Not an excuse, just highlighting the ongoing design challenge that people serious about sustainability will continue to face.

The Lazy Environmentalist, part 1

A small plug for checking out The Lazy Environmentalist, a show on NPR, a website, and a book that I am currently paging through. I'll have more to write once I finish leafing through the book and have some more time on my hands, but in the meantime, have a look...

Supply and Demand: Energy and Food Policy

A few weeks ago, I went to a lecture arranged by the Stanford alumni association by Professors Roz Naylor and David Victor at NYU. Professor Naylor, who I studied with briefly, is an economist who has long focused on food economics and other issues inter-relating environmental and developmental policy, and Professor Victor, whom I did not cross paths with at Stanford, is a law professor focused on energy policy. The lecture was good, although brief and, as such, handled some very complex issues very simply. A few modest comments that have been kicking around in the back of my head for the past few weeks:

- Professor Victor made an interesting comment in response to a question about whether small-scale "clean energy" solutions constitute an effective energy policy. Specifically, the question seemed tied to a lot of success stories coming out of India and China where distributed energy producers (like local solar-powered batteries are loaned out at the village-level) are emerging to meet the burgeoning energy demand that is occurring in areas not well served by existing energy grids. The substance of Professor Victor's comments was that while such trends were interesting, distributed/point solutions to supplying energy would simply never scale -- and therefore, couldn't be a central part of a sustainable energy policy. He suggested, as I understood, focusing on large capacity production that could be made "cleaner," including nuclear, natural gas, and the cleaner forms of coal burning. While I agree that the magnitude of our energy problems require large scale solutions, I am always curious at how quickly distributed solutions are dismissed as being a component of an overall policy solution. Unfortunately, the session was too abbreviated to really push the issue.

- Professor Naylor forced me to an interesting, if unintended, connection between food policy and energy policy. I'm still sorting the thinking out on this, but it basically works like this:

1. We are confronting a supply problem in the world energy markets. The increasing demand for energy, driven by growing economies and growing populations, can not be met by our current, known energy production capacities. We need to innovate on the ability of the world economy to deliver energy (and when you tie in climate policy, clean energy) to the marketplace.

2. In the 1940s and 1950s, the world confronted a supply problem in food markets. Population growth created greater demand for food than was immediately available. Investments were made in food technology, specifically fostering the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was successful in increasing world food supply, which, in turn, certainly staved off a lot of human destitution. However, simply addressing the supply problem did not address the challenge of world hunger. Massive logistical problems, failure of political will and infrastructure (notably, corrupt/incompetent third-world governments failing to deliver on food aid provided by incompetent/corrupt multinational aid and relief agencies, including UN and GATT), failures in wealth distribution to the poorest segments of economies, and disproportionate population growth at the bottom of the demographic pyramids (from both an income and a poverty level) thwarted a purely supply-side solution to the food problem.

So, the question I have, with this history of food policy behind us, is why do we continue to think of the energy problem as strictly a supply issue?

Not that I have a pat answer to this question, but the inability of the political, economic, and academic leaders to address either the demand side of the equation or the equality issues bound up in how resources get consumed fails to take our analyses of these problems off charts and graphs and into the human dimensions of the real world.

Still, a very compelling talk, with a lot of interesting issues to follow up on.

An Inconvenient Truth

I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth on DVD the other night. Overall, I thought the movie was quite good - although I find Al Gore to be a trying representative for the issue (particularly as the face/voice who is used to personalize the issue), even while I recognize that as a political champion of climate change, he has done an outstanding and tireless job. I should also add that I think he is dead right on the issue, and represents the science, the politics, and the moral imperatives of the debate extremely well. That said, a few further comments on the film, and a few related articles that have recently caught my eye:

- I thought An Inconvenient Truth conveyed various facets of the very complex and staggeringly large-scale issue of climate change extremely well. I was pleased at how well, in general, the film did in representing the science of climate change, including the core physics of how greenhouse gases work, the methods, data, and conclusions of long-term observation of key indicators of climate change (primarily temperature and atmospheric CO2 levels), and the relationship between human behavior and greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, I thought the film struck the right balance between scientifically-grounded projection of the impacts of climate change and sensationalism when trying to illustrate what the consequences might be in human and visual terms (ice shelves dissipating, threats to polar wildlife, shifts in local weather patterns, increased frequency and intensity of catastrophic weather events, etc.).

- In framing the question of political will (particularly, in America), I thought the movie was effective at illustrating the human consequences of climate change, drawing analogies to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, presenting time-lapse projections of Lower Manhattan, invoking the impact on sub-Saharan Africa and tying in geo-political and humanitarian tragedies that will be second-order impacts, like Darfur. I also thought that the movie did a good job explaining the non-linear nature of climate change. The shift in understanding of the impact of climate change from higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and melting ice caps to increased incidence of catastrophic natural disasters, increased intensity of resource-driven human conflict, and the potential for massive human casualty is the only way to really drive home the moral dimensions of this issue that will confront us in the coming generations.

- Acknowledging the disproportionate impact that America, specifically, has in creating and failing to address climate change (thus far) was a necessary angle, and one the film did well. Calling out the lack of political will and the need for political and moral leadership on this issue may bask Al Gore in a kind light, but it is also absolutely necessary.

- By communicating the economic opportunity and loss of competitive and technology advantage created by the obstinacy of our political and business leaders on tackling energy efficiency as core priorities of economic policy and business innovation helps to frame the economic debate that is inextricable from climate change in the proper terms.

- I thought Al Gore did a particularly good job of aligning the political choice of taking meaningful action to address climate change, by individual Americans, as well as by America as a whole, with the legacy and self-image America has of making heroic political choices, from the founding of the nation, to the abolition of slavery, through the confrontations with fascism and totalitarianism in World War II and the Cold War. As a political narrative, I think this is the strongest positioning of the climate change issue that can be broadly understood and supported by the country, at large.

My few quibbles with the movie:

- While the movie represented the science of climate change well, it also managed simultaneously to undermine the seriousness of the analytics by presenting baffling and simplistic cartoons immediately after two of the more compelling scientific segments. I don't know if this was a direction necessitated by making the movie accessible to a young audience, but it struck me as doing a dis-service to the science in the rest of the movie.

- The closing credits of the movie highlighted choices and actions available to individuals to change their behavior to positively impact climate change, although they were strangely muted, both in the credits and on the movie's website (which has a disappointing focus on self-promotion equal to education and advocacy...) What continually shocks me is how the movie, and Gore, while very clearly calling climate change a moral issue, refuse to focus the responsibility of every individual in contributing to this crisis, and the need for, yes, sacrifice. If people really believe that climate change will be a global crisis of the magnitude being described, than it is disappointing that so many advocates seem comfortable leaving their audiences with the impression that this is a crisis that can be addressed by changing your lightbulbs, weather-proofing your windows, and sending an email to your Senators and Representatives.

Tackling the question of material sacrifice, understanding that we may have to engage in less freedom to travel, to buy big houses and big cars, consume lots of things, is the hardest question in helping us to address our environmental problems. With the exception of a handful of people with a deep faith in technology innovation to address climate and sustainability issues, I don't know anybody who has thought deeply about these issues who believes that individual consumer behavior in America (now being replicated throughout the world, whenever economically possible) can continue on pace without increasing the stress on the Earth's environmental systems.

An Inconvenient Truth was a useful movie, but I remain skeptical that the necessary changes in behavior (and, consequently, political and market dynamics) can be invoked in America until a line connecting the human consequences of climate change to the fundamental lifestyle choices made by individuals. It's a difficult question, surely, but one that cannot be left by the wayside in an attempt to assure everybody that, although everything is not all right, everything will be all right.

A couple of recent articles related to climate change that bear comment:

- Salon summarizes a spate of articles in the wake of the San Diego wildfires that try to use the fires as an illustration of the consequences of climate change, even though the ability to link such specific local tragedies to an issue like climate change is quite difficult:

Fire, flood, drought, hurricanes: In a world where climate change is predicted to usher in an era of extreme weather events, the temptation for impatient activists to treat each new unsettling outburst of Mother Nature as proof that the end is no longer nigh, but busting in the door, is irresistible.

For some crusaders, giving in to that sensationalist urge isn't just a guilty pleasure, but a strategic necessity, a way of evening up the rhetorical playing field. For example, writing in Grist, Glenn Hurowitz urges urges environmentalists not to be shy in exploiting the Southern California wildfires. The right wing, he notes, rarely demonstrates any compunctions about taking advantage of disaster to score political points. Case in point: JunkScience.com's Steven Milloy is already asserting that timber-management practices, i.e., restrictions on logging, are to blame for the loss of thousands of homes in Southern California.

A good idea, to seize upon this very emotional and current news item as a means for talking about a pressing, but long-term and abstract issue like climate change? I'm not sure, particularly given how important it is to establish beyond impeachment the scientific credentials of climate change within the political consciousness of the country, but we'll surely see if it works or backfires.

- An almost impossibly simplistic and mis-guided back-and-forth between Steven Landsburg and Joe Romm on the economic decision-making that might influence climate change policy on Slate.com. So many poor arguments, I'm not sure where to begin.

With Landsburg's original article, I actually agree with his premise and believe that it is important: a central question in how we view our options with respect to climate change is how much a person values their own right to certain material privileges versus the right of any other person (whether an abstract future person or an abstract person living in a 3rd world country right now) to life, health, a basic standard of living, and opportunity in life. It's often incredible to me how few people who study economics in the context of either environmental or social externalities understand this question. And Landsburg, having articulated the question, also clearly does not, either. His rhetorical framing of the trade-off occurring between you, now, and some stranger born 1000 years in the future fails to understand either the science or the moral dimensions of the climate change issue. His "modeling" of economic growth and the potential for "good" to come out of climate change demonstrates an understanding of economics that fails to leave the spreadsheet, dealing without insight into the uncertainty of economic growth (forget about growth necessarily bound to stability of ecological and economic conditions) or to the human consequence of massive upheavals and changes in the economy.

Romm, in his rebuttal, lands one great point, and then immediately undermines it. Romm is able to draw out the real concern of climate change - that it will have significant impact on human life and livelihoods within the span of one or two generations, and the uncertainty and magnitude of impact on human life is likely to escalate unless we can change the dynamics of our current carbon emissions patterns.. We probably aren't in a great position to change the immediate consequences, the damage is probably done. But without a very significant change in our carbon emissions and energy policy, we are likely to lose control of our ability to improve the chances of future generations to address and adapt to the consequences of climate change, as well as our own ability to manage the crises that will arise within the next fifty years. After making this point Romm inexplicably decides that the right way to frame climate change is by suggesting that we won't have to make changes to our lifestyles. Unfortunately, the equation here just doesn't map, unless you somehow believe that world population is going to magically stabilize, that new carbon-neutral technologies are going to materialize on large scales without a changed consumption pattern driving demand, and that the rest of the world is going to freeze their quality of lives at relatively lower level so we can preserve ours at a much higher level. Bullshit. I'm consistently confused whether this demonstrates a lack of understanding by the political leaders of this movement, or a calculation that the message of sacrifice won't sell, but unfortunately, without broaching that conversation, we don't change the political and economic dynamics necessary to face up to climate change.

If you recognize the magnitude and uncertainty of the human damage that a changing climate may create then you recognize the need to change fundamental behaviors in response.

Recycling Is Stupid

A headline from a Businessweek article that caught my eye:

Green Guru Calls PC Recycling 'Stupid'

Should we hang the editor for mis-representing the article entirely, or give him a raise for getting me to read it? Salient excerpt:

Recycling IT equipment is "stupid" and should not be the top concern within a company's eco-agenda, according to an environmental expert.

Instead, companies should focus on finding kit that can be reused, with accessible parts that can be replaced easily, rather than recycled, according to a representative of the UK government's Envirowise project - which hands out free advice to businesses on green issues.

Rest of the article here.

Eat or Drive?

A spate of articles in the past few weeks have called into question whether the 'Ethanol boom' is going bust. Judged largely from the downward trends of the stock performance of many ethanol biofuel companies, but drawing also from long-standing criticisms of ethanol subsidies as a deeply flawed government policy, there has been a clamor that ethanol, in America, at least, has been a failed energy policy. The reason for this failure is laid partly at the feet of the policies themselves, in creating subsidies for a fuel that has not yet found sufficient use, and partly at the implementation of the policies, specifically, in the lack of investment made in fostering the demand side of the market for ethanol, and in creating the delivery infrastructure for bringing ethanol to the consumer. Every critique of ethanol has, at some level of subtext, a questioning of the motivations of the public policy. Was it driven by smart energy policy, or simply to satisfy the powerful agribusiness constituencies which control so much of the farmland in the US? As observers like Daniel Gross in Slate have concluded:

Critics of ethanol have long argued that ethanol production subsidies are a half-baked industrial policy scheme intended to reward politically powerful farmers in the Midwest. The gulf between the rich incentives for creating ethanol supply and the poor incentives for creating wholesale and retail distribution suggest the critics were absolutely right.

An early death-knell, perhaps, but one made the more interesting by a complementary article in the New York Times that emerged at the same time, describing how the diversion of corn crops into biofuels have driven up the price of the commodity, essentially pricing buyers, trying to secure corn for food aid programs, out of the market. One ill-advised, if well-intentioned public policy inadvertantly gutting another (as foreshadowed in a lengthy Foreign Policy article from earlier in the summer).

Not that this most recent set of concerns signals that giant of a catastrophe. Unfortunately, neither food air nor ethanol have proven to be fundamental solutions to the problems of hunger and energy supply that they are trying to address. The silver lining, in this case, is that the situation is more bleak.

Green Monsters

Flipping through a magazine the other evening, I stopped on a two page advertising spread by Chevron entitled "Chevron Presents: Energyville." Billed as an "energy game," Chevron asks "This is your city. How will you power it? How do we meet growing global demand? What new kinds of fuels and power sources should we develop? And how do we safeguard the environment at the same time?" The reader is then directed to play the game, hosted at the website www.willyoujoin.com.

Now, it is easy to be dismissive of the efforts of massive energy companies to engage in fundamentally changing the dynamics of our energy economy. Their generally upbeat and eco-friendly advertising campaigns, which cheerily suggest that we've got a problem, but, hey, together we can fix it are a little to, well, cheery and upbeat. And I have no illusions that the extremely rich and extremely powerful people who run these companies are concerned as much about tackling global sustainability problems as they are about finding new markets in which to create better margins (after all, when they send the lucky one percent into space after we've despoiled this lovely planet, no doubt the heads of oil companies and their antecedents will be first in line at the launching pad).

But it can't be denied that each and every energy company, whether on the exploration/ production-side or the delivery-side, has a distinct strategic interest in understanding the dynamics of energy in coming years, influencing the market to align with the investments in technology that they are making, and innovating more efficient (and, consequently more eco-friendly, one would hope) solutions to our collective energy needs. Nor can it be denied that the actors most readily positioned to dramatically influence our energy economies are the energy companies themselves. And outside a small coterie of academics and advocacy groups, no one has been forced to think quite so deeply as the energy companies.

Which all sounds like a resounding defense of the Goliaths! Not meant to be. But what has caught my interest is the effort made, in advertising and public relations, at least, by energy companies to engage the public in a dialogue about our energy future. And with the resources available to them, energy companies have been able to provide slicker tools to help the conversation move forward, and often are doing quite a good job at putting out worthwhile information and analyses. Take the aforementioned game at www.willyoujoinus.com, BP's Carbon Footprint Calculator or Statistical Review of World Energy site, or ConEd's more humble, but useful campaign to educate consumers on household energy conservation tips.

Are my fundamental concerns about energy consumption allayed? No. Do I think that these resources are actually useful in furthering questions about looming energy problems into our consumer consciousness? Yes.

Not Enough? Doerr on Green Tech

KPCB is a remarkable organization. They have been incredibly effective at identifying, investing in, and cultivating truly revolutionary ideas over the past 30 years. I have worked within the KPCB family, at a low enough level not to be noticed conspicuously, but at a high enough level to have some visibility into how Kleiner does things. Fundamentally, the ability of KPCB to marshal talent to create markets and solve problems through innovation in technologies and services has been impressive. And in the past few years, Kleiner's increasing attention on "green tech" and questions of long term environmental sustainability has been a positive development - even if a $200M net investment is, to steal John Doerr's reprise, "not enough." Not that I'm really knocking the investment and, heck yes, I'd love to be involved in another Kleiner company tackling green tech problems..

So I was very curious to hear what Mr. Doerr, the talisman of Kleiner's success in the last fifteen years, had to say about green technology and our looming environmental problems. Mostly, I'd suggest that you watch the video, as I think it speaks for itself - and the message is clear: while many actors, from Wal-mart in reducing its energy footprint to Brazil shifting to biofuels, have been able to successfully innovate to mitigate their environmental impact, the scale of change is simply not big enough yet. And I whole-heartedly agree with that basic analysis.

Beyond that, I do have some comments:

- Doerr identifies four agents of change ("four lessons") that can be influenced by entrepreneurs: Companies, Individuals (i.e., Consumers), Policies, and Radical Innovation. While I agree with his implicit commentary, that the efforts of any given influential individual (i.e., TED audience member) might be best targeted at a company, a government policy, or invested in innovation, and not targeted at changing consumer behavior, I think that Doerr, and most of the policy makers, innovators, technocrats, and academics give short shrift for the need to change the behaviors of individuals, and the need to address individuals directly through politics and cultural dialogue. I'll come back to this;

- Doerr frames the market opportunity of addressing the world's energy crisis as a $6 trillion dollar market. I agree. This market is huge. I also firmly believe that market forces, and disruptive innovation to meet market needs can radically change both the supply side economics of meeting a market need and the demand side behaviors in creating that need. What I do find curious, however, is framing the energy market as the market that needs to be satisfied to address the world's sustainability crisis (or put another way, isn't sustainability a much bigger question than a looming energy crisis)? Isn't energy always an input to other goods and services? Like transportation, primary industrial processes, commercial and residential electricity, etc. Don't we need to start thinking about how to fundamentally change the dynamics of those markets, not just focus on how to more efficiently solve the energy supply question?

- Selling a vision is a key part of what any entrepreneur must do, particularly entrepreneurs trying to market disruptive technologies. Do we have a coherent vision of what a sustainable future might look like? What kind of house will I live in? What kind of car will I drive? What will the place that I live in look like? I think some of the symbolic examples that are drawn forth in the current conversation on green tech are useful in selling this vision: electric vehicles, biofuels, carbon markets. But do we have a coherent vision of what a sustainable future might look like? And are we effectively communicating that vision?

- At the end of his speech, Doerr urges his audience with a few calls to actions, exhorting them to "really think outside the box." His suggestions are all good: make going green "your gig," get carbon neutral (and buy carbon credits), join other leaders in lobbying for cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gases, use your personal power or rolodex to "go green."

But what about the potentially most seismic change: consume less?

Why is this meme never engaged by the business, political, and academic leaders who claim to be serious thinkers about the environment?

Personally, I don't think it is either a naive conversation to engage, nor one that necessarily a compromise in quality of life or achievement. There are abundant reasons to believe that a less materially-driven life and culture will not only improve our ability to change market dynamics and address the salvo of "not enough," but will actually improve our quality of life, as well. But if our business and political leaders refuse to engage in this conversation, then the core dynamic driving the demand side of our market equations, and the A in our good old IPAT formulation, that dynamic will never change.

NYC - Green Master Plan

I was not in New York this past Earth Day, so I guess I missed the detailed news about New York City's "Green Master Plan," as advocated by Mayor Bloomberg this past April. I have nothing but grudging respect for what Mr. Bloomberg has been able to accomplish in the city, and am intrigued by the scope of his plan, as well as some of the messaging being used to promote it (although I don't know how visible it actually is...)

I haven't read enough yet to have an opinion, but for more information, check out this official site.

Sustaining Junk

In college, I studied economics and environmental science and policy. The two disciplines are very rarely harmonized, and people who think seriously about sustainability from an ecological perspective have been able to challenge a lot of assumptions core to economic modeling. When we consider the global ecological system, we are forced to account for behaviors, constraints, and outcomes that are generally ruled out-of-bounds for the purpose of economic decision making - for example, performing cost-benefit calculations and making rational choices where the consequence must be spread over long time horizons, recognizing and valuing all externalities in a system, creating an accounting system for resources, like air and water, than aren't traditionally paid for with money, but which are fundamental to all economic transactions, understanding scarcity in situations like extinction, and so on.

For all the challenges that environmental thinking can pose to economics, a key vexing question that economics posed to ecological systems was the ability of the market, through demand, competitive advantage, and ultimately price, to foster technology innovations that would, at the right time and over time, allow us to address environmental problems through technological solutions. A key example of this has always been in energy, where one line of thinking projects that, as soon as the market conditions exist that make innovation in alternative energy feasible, that market need will be filled. And perhaps we are seeing the beginnings of such a set of innovations in green energy today.

A recent Slate.com article got me thinking again about this issue:

In an act of macroeconomic karma, materials thrown out by Americans—broken-down auto bodies, old screws and nails, paper—accounted for $6.7 billion in exports to China in 2006, second only to aerospace products. Junkyards may conjure up images of Fred Sanford's ratty collection of castoffs. But these days, scrap dealers are part of a $65 billion industry that employs 50,000 people, who together constitute a significant arc of a virtuous circle. The demand of China's factory bosses for junk—which they recycle to make all the junk Americans buy from China—creates jobs, tamps down the growth of the trade deficit, and might help save the planet.

Is it possible that one nation's folly in managing resources can be another nation's opportunity, and that on a global scale, the market will be efficient in distributing resources (and managing the impact on those natural resources need to sustain economies and fuel innovation?) It seems folly to blindly say yes, although I believe many business decision makers believe this to be true, if not in this exact framing, then as evidenced by the way they behave.

Where this strikes me as folly is that it fails to create the right incentives, culture, or organization (switching from economics to business) to address more efficient use of resources. It puts us in the wishful position of hoping that the market will create conditions to clean up its mess, rather than avoiding the mess in the first place. Put another way, it puts the burden of sustainability on policy makers, influencing the outcomes of a business system, rather then as a design challenge, influencing the initial objectives and processes of the system.

It is as a design challenge that sustainability becomes a truly influential idea for business and the economy, and while I'd like to return in further detail to this topic, I will leave off by highly recommending you watch the Bill McDonough video hosted on the TED site, above, as well as reading a bit about McDonough's Cradle 2 Cradle design philosophy - which can be consumed as a very interesting book (in both the intellectual and physical sense, the book itself having been designed according to the Cradle 2 Cradle principles), as well as on many websites, including McDonough's own website.

The Energy President?

The reviews that I have seen of Bill Richardson's record on energy and the environment over the years have always been fairly mixed. I should qualify that: mixed from the perspective of advocates of environmental policies -- but always reasonably good in the context of mainstream politicians. Grist magazine is running a series of interviews of (Democratic) presidential candidates, focusing on the environmental and energy policy planks of their respective platforms. While the aesthetic of Grist is pretty crunchy, there features can be decently substantive, and the few interviews I have scanned are worth a read. Grist also hails Bill Richardson's climate and energy plan as the "boldest and most visionary."

From Bill Richardson:

Right now, the most important domestic and national-security issues involve America becoming energy independent and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. I believe it's going to take an "energy president" who will lead this country toward these goals by asking all Americans to sacrifice for the common good and be more energy-efficient and promote a green style of living.

At the end of the day, it is still just rhetoric, but I am impressed that Richardson has proposed substantive targets in reducing emissions and increasing energy efficiency, broached the question of nuclear and biofuels, cited Brazil as an exemplar in energy policy, and invoked the 'S' word - Sacrifice - when discussing energy policy. Also curious to me that the twin messages of climate change and energy independence don't seem to be playing a major role in the Democratic primaries to-date.

The other candidates?

John Edwards, long on rhetoric:

The thing that I am certain is true is that our dependence on oil has an incredibly negative effect in trying to stop the forces of terrorism. It props up bad governments, particularly in the Middle East, who don't educate their kids, don't reform their governments, don't economically develop, and in many cases are largely isolated from the rest of the world, and the main reason is because they are on drugs, and that drug is oil. So long as they are mainlining oil, they will never reform.

Which is why America needs to make a switch from our addiction to oil and carbon-based fuels to wind, solar, safer biofuels, and cleaner renewable energy, which will have positive impacts far beyond economic impacts. No. 1: It will create at least 1 million "green-collar jobs" in this country. No. 2: When we drive down the price of oil, it creates an environment where these countries that are mainlining oil all of the sudden have no choice, and they have to reform, they have to educate their kids, they have to economically develop.

Hillary Clinton, lots of names dropped and a win-win rhetoric, but not sure if there is a real plan in there:

I have worked to pass the Brownfields Revitalization Act and the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act. I've taken many actions specific to New York, like pushing for the Hudson River cleanup by GE. I have been very committed on health-related effects -- that is why I've got legislation to try to deal with asthma and other respiratory diseases and to reduce pollution from power plants. Time and time again I have tried to protect public lands, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. I cosponsored the Roadless Area Conservation Act to try and get back what my husband had done as president to protect the National Forest system. I believe strongly in supporting the "polluter pays" principle, and I am going to work to try to reinstate that.

Barack Obama, the right rhetoric, a solid approach, but is the depth of analysis really there:

I consider energy to be one of the three most important issues that we're facing domestically, along with revamping our education system and fundamentally reforming our health-care system. And the opportunities for significant change exist partly because awareness of the threat of climate change has grown rapidly over the last several years. Al Gore deserves a lot of credit for that, as do activists in the environmental community and outlets like Grist. People recognize the magnitude of the [climate] problem and are ready to take it on.

Get Green: Design Leads the Way

In my mind, there are three keys to solving the "green equation" of how we can live more sustainably, particularly with respect to energy and natural resource consumption. The first is driven by science and public policy, and has to do with our ability to discover and develop fundamental advances in our ability (as a society/economy) to get the goods and services we need out of the primary inputs we consume, with minimal adverse impact. Clearly, research and development efforts in fields as disparate as biofuels, solar/fuel cells, genetic engineering, carbon sequestration and other core science and technology initiatives are targeting these fronts. To my inexpert eye, the investments we are making here are limited to-date, and the initiatives, though encouraging, are insufficient.

The second piece of the puzzle is cultural, and lies with the willingness of individuals, as consumers and political actors, to make decisions that take into consideration environmental consequences. These decisions include choosing to consume less, pay market premiums for goods and services that provide greater dividends in protecting environmental and natural resources, and promote, through voting and civic engagement, a political climate that supports policies targeting sustainable development. A political and economic climate created by an environmentally conscious public could more effectively create market opportunities for alternative, efficient technologies, fund research in core sciences and technology, re-aligning tax policy to create incentives environmentally responsible behavior, and create a baseline understanding of the values and ethics of "sustainable development." While the cultural sensitivity to certain issues like global warming and a potential energy crisis have been heightened in recent years, I don't think that a true ethic of sustainability is anywhere near close to existing in the U.S. Additionally, as a sometimes student of economics, I'd mention that much 0f what I discuss above is somewhat anathema to parts of economic theory - in that, I believe that people as consumers will have to make economic choices that aren't rational w.r.t. price because of a deeper core set of values, ethics, or understanding about environmental consequences. Consumers will have to shape the market, not vice versa.

The third piece of the puzzle is very much design-driven, and have to do with the ability of architects, engineers, product designers, and policy makers to create appealing consumer choices - in terms of what car to drive, where to live, what to buy, and so on - that align environmentally-positive consequences with benefits that appeal to other values, like status, cost efficiency, comfort, quality of life, aesthetics, and so on. Where I have a dim view of the progress we're making on each of the previous two fronts, I am excited about the cool new products, across all facets of life, that seem to come out every day. While the impact on the bottom line may be modest, it is tangible. And the further impact of these "green" products and policies, if successful may be a heightened environmental consciousness for individuals and greater investment from government and private capital in the fundamental technologies that can allow us to take big steps forward.

I lay out this somewhat abstract framework for two reasons: first, simply to put it out there, to solicit feedback, and to reference in future posts. I hope it is a useful framework. Second, as an excuse to post about a handful of interesting innovations in technology and design recently published in Wired magazine:

- A proposed new dorm at Stanford University, whose theme will be eco-efficiency, but which also proposes to be the "most desirable housing on campus." Thankfully, having gone through Stanford's undergraduate housing lottery, that claim is readily falsifiable. See here for more detailed plans;
- A Jetsonian plan for improving transportation efficiency and quality of life in San Diego, through the deployment of "robot buses." Cool if it works, and a great example of how environmental efficiencies and quality of life improvements can be made in one fell swoop;
- A proposed residential tower in Chicago that falls back on pre-Columbian building design to create a more energy efficient and more pleasant living environment. The simple decision to angle the buildings Southern exposure to maximize passive solar heating in the winter, and minimize direct sunlight in the summer helps keep electricity and heating costs down while letting more natural light in. Not the first time such a dwelling was built in the Americas, and hopefully not the last.

Green/Yellow Journalism

In general, I like reading Jack Shafer's columns on Slate.com. His most recent, a brief invective against "environmental" journalism, is a little puzzling. Opening with this broadside attack:

green journalism tends to appeal to our emotions, exploit our fears, and pander to our vanity. It places a political agenda in front of the quest for journalistic truth and in its most demagogic forms tolerates no criticism, branding all who question it as enemies of the people. Not all green journalism harangues, but even the gentlest variety sermonizes, cuts logical corners, and substitutes good intentions for problem solving.

Shafer goes on to haul a small and unimpressive set of evidence out damning environmental reporting, squaring off most directly with Slate's own "Slate Green Challenge" series, which was jointly authored with Treehugger.org a few weeks ago.

While I tend to agree with Shafer, that, overall, journalism about environmental concerns can be sloppy, and from the perspective of an environmentalist, possibly self-defeating in so far as the softer, do-gooder reporting undermines the more serious scientific, technical, and policy reporting, it is curious that Shafer tries to hang environmental journalism on failing to prize journalistic truth and cutting logical corners, without providing more than one instance of this (the NYT article). I don't have any data in hand, but my general impression is not that "green" reporting is factually incorrect, or even incomplete, but that it suffers from too much rah-rah cheerleading and a bad case of the telling-you-what's-best-for-yous. This puts green journalism more in the camp of journalists advancing unpopular causes grounded to a journalistic truth (see Kristof on Sudan), than in the company of yellow journalists, doesn't it?

Or maybe sensationalism isn't that damning a charge, after all?