Green Design » Columns

Hacking The Auto X-Prize

Jeremy Faludi — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:48:50 +0000

The Progressive Automotive X-Prize is the latest high-profile contest from the folks who kick-started space tourism with the original X Prize. The goal of the Auto X Prize is "To inspire a new generation of viable, super-efficient vehicles that help break our addiction to oil and stem the effects of climate change." Most entries to the contest are hybrids, electric cars, super-efficient combustion engines, and the like. But Jim Mason of All Power Labs, a homebrew gasification-and-biochar startup, is trying to make a bold statement by entering the contest with a vehicle that runs entirely on the contest's own waste.

Cheeky as that is, it's not even the best part -- the best part is, their system should automatically win the emissions part of the competition, beating million-dollar R&D programs of major automakers with a DIY hack on an old pickup truck. (Their entry won't be the vehicle shown above.)

How could it win? Because gasification with biochar is, in theory, a carbon-negative process. Gasifiers can turn any organic matter (peanut shells, wood chips, unused copies of the X-Prize's own 68-page-long competition guidelines) into fuel through a process of pyrolysis that gives off "syngas," a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases. Those gases can then be burned very cleanly in an engine, producing water and CO2 exhaust. Of course, depending what the original organic matter is, and how well-tuned to it the gasifier is, there can be other impurities as well; but there is a large benefit that most combustion processes don't have: the leftovers of the pyrolysis process are biochar, which is good fertilizer for gardens or fields, and which also happens to sequester more carbon than burning the syngas gives off. Hence the carbon-negative process.

Mason says:

The result is the very odd and somewhat dangerous notion that "the more we drive the car, the more we scrub greenhouse gases from the atmosphere" ...

I have no idea if and how the Auto X Prize will deal with this entry. It causes lots of issues/problems for how they have structured their rules. They can't just agree to calc the GHG equivalents like the biochar enthusiasts would do, or we win that category by default. But they also can't just ignore it. Hopefully it will at least provoke an interesting conversation.

The truck may have a hard time achieving the X-Prize's desired 100mpg equivalent -- would they allow the leftover biochar to be subtracted from the mass of input fuel, because it's a useful product? The actual fuel burned by the truck's engine will be the syngas given off by pyrolysis, which is a tiny fraction of the total mass of fuel put into the gasifier. The majority of the fuel turns into char.

Hopefully the Auto X-Prize will accept their entry and let them race. Allowing them into the competition certainly furthers many of the competition's goals: Offering a "level playing field" that newcomers can participate in, educating the public on the possibility of carbon-negative fuel processes (which sounds like science fiction, and most people would never believe), and benefiting the world. If today All Power labs can make a pickup truck named 88MPH that runs on shredded contest pamphlets, maybe tomorrow we can have Deloreans running on banana peels and other household scraps. Who knows?

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(Posted by Jeremy Faludi in Columns at 5:48 AM)

A Month’s Worth of Blogging, Condensed into a Single Column

Alex Steffen — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:31:54 +0000

It's been a crazy month, with talks to give and essays and books to write, and money to raise, and I've really fallen behind in blogging. So here's a month's worth of things I've been meaning to post about:

Screw your IQ -- what's your Buxton Index?

"The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans." ... This is an interesting concept: and one that helps explain a lot of attitudes and responses towards issues like climate change, environmental destruction, and DRM.

When you extend the time horizon out long enough, doing the right thing and doing the smart thing almost always involve doing the same things.

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Forging a Hot Link to the Farmer Who Grows the Food, a good NYT story on the growing trend (we called it first!) of revealing the backstory of food as a way to market it:

The maker of Stone-Buhr flour, a popular brand in the western United States, is encouraging its customers to reconnect with their lost agrarian past, from the comfort of their computer screens. Its Find the Farmer Web site and special labels on the packages let buyers learn about and even contact the farmers who produced the wheat that went into their bag of flour.

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SugarLabs, whose motto totally ought to be "sweet software for kids:"

The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software. Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education. Available in 25 languages, Sugar’s Activities are used every school day by almost one-million children in more than forty countries. Originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook, Sugar runs on most computers. Sugar is free and open-source software. Try it with a child today.

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All up and down the West Coast there are hopeful signs of a broad shift away from clearcut-based logging and towards sustainable forestry, heck even the NYT is on the story:

Some mills that once sought the oldest, tallest evergreens are now producing alternative energy from wood byproducts like bark or brush. Unemployed loggers are looking for work thinning federal forests, a task for which the stimulus package devotes $500 million; the goal is to make forests more resistant to wildfires and disease. Some local officials are betting there is revenue in a forest resource that few appreciated before: the ability of trees to absorb carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that can contribute to global warming.

Pragmatism drives the shifting thinking, but a critical question remains: can people really make a long-term living off the forest without cutting it down?

“I run into people all the time who think we’re lying and trying to go back to old logging ways,” said Jim Walls, director of the Lake County Resources Initiative in southeastern Oregon, a nonprofit agency that is trying to create jobs for rural residents in fields like biomass energy production and wildfire prevention. “It’s just not true.”

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If open intellectual property is a sustainability accelerator, CC0 is the new gas pedal:

CC0 (read “CC Zero”) is a universal waiver that may be used by anyone wishing to permanently surrender the copyright and database rights they may have in a work, thereby placing it as nearly as possible into the public domain.

Another early adopter of CC0 is the Personal Genome Project, a pioneer in the emerging field of personal genomics technology. The Personal Genome Project is announcing today the release of a large data set containing genomic sequences for ten individuals using CC0, with future planned releases also under CC0. “PersonalGenomes.org is committed to making our research data freely available to the public because we think that is the best way to promote discovery and advance science, and CC0 helps us to state that commitment in a clear and legally accurate way,” said Jason Bobe, Director of Community.

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Water. Srsly.

By 2030, nearly half of the world's people will be living in areas of acute water shortage, said a report jointly produced by more than two dozen U.N. bodies and issued ahead of a major conference on water to be held in Istanbul next week.

The report, "Water in a Changing World," made "clear that urgent action is needed if we are to avoid a global water crisis,"

While I'm on the bad news ... Worrying about the apocalypse may make us stupid, but if you read enough futurism, it can get to be like an itch that feels so good to scratch ... oh no, we're all going to die! Food, water and energy shortages, climate and population growth will be "the perfect storm" by 2030, says the U.K. government's chief scientist, John Beddington; Mexico is next to collapse says the U.S. Joint Forces Command's 2008 Joint Operating Environment report ("the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels" -- they do have a point there, as some Mexican towns have started building moats and walls to protect themselves from narcobandit attacks, but the answer is clear: legalize pot in the U.S.); while the U.K. is only "nine meals away from anarchy."

Still, no survivalist panic, please. When you bet against the future, you lose even when you win. That said, we can all be forgiven a bit of terriblisma.

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A cool TED talk about augmented reality as a 6th sense:

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Disturbing news that Obama administration climate policy is not yet as current as either the science it purports to be based on or the economics of our new century:

"A road map agreed to by industrialized countries at a 2007 summit in Bali, Indonesia, suggests that industrialized countries reduce their emissions by between 25% and 40% by 2020. But Mr. Stern said in his speech that it was 'not possible' for the U.S. to cut its emissions as quickly as suggested under the Bali road map. Mr. Stern reiterated Mr. Obama's goal of returning U.S. emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020, adding that the U.S. could compensate with swifter reductions in the years beyond 2020. Mr. Obama's recent budget proposal calls for reducing U.S. emissions roughly 80% by 2050 over 2005 levels."

Meanwhile, Climate-proofing the Netherlands -- if you want to see how serious coastal defense will be done in an age of rising seas, look to the Dutch:

The increased risks by future sea level changes (including the fact that climate change is also expected to promote higher precipitation in the Alps which will trickle through the rivers of Europe) have prompted the creation of the Delta Committee. Governmentally assigned, and comprised of a team of experts, the committee produced a report in 2008 that investigated how to climate-proof the Netherlands for the next century. The report proposed a 100-year mega project, which included extending the coastline and building new surge barriers while fortifying the levees. An estimated 400 square miles is to be added to the Netherlands (or seventeen ‘Manhattans’) over the course of the project.

And... Island nations to world: Stop raising the fucking seas, dudes!"

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Clive Thompson with an awesome column on what Etsy says about the future of micromanufacturing

[T]he physical world is going to be increasingly customized—built to your specs by craftspeople. Etsy now runs a service that lets you describe something you want—a pair of pants, a shoulder bag, a table—and how much you'll pay, then artisans can offer to make it for you. (Ponoko.com has a similar setup.) And as high-end atom-hacking tools like 3-D milling and laser cutting become cheaper, those folks on Etsy will be able to quickly deliver you customized versions of a huge array of personal products: Laptops, bicycles, even robots. The Age of Bespoke Everything, as it were.

(See Ethan's brilliant piece on maker culture in Argentina, too. Of course, wait till you can just buy micro-designed, cement-jet-printed buildings.)

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Speaking of cement, more news about concrete, the hidden climate catastrophe!

Aesthetic considerations aside, concrete is environmentally ugly. The manufacturing of Portland cement is responsible for about 5 percent of human-caused emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

“The new twist over the last 10 years has been to try to avoid materials that generate CO2,” said Kevin A. MacDonald, vice president for engineering services of the Cemstone Products Company, the concrete supplier for the I-35W bridge.

In his mixes, Dr. MacDonald replaced much of the Portland cement with two industrial waste products — fly ash, left over from burning coal in power plants, and blast-furnace slag. Both are what are called pozzolans, reactive materials that help make the concrete stronger. Because the CO2 emissions associated with them are accounted for in electricity generation and steel making, they also help reduce the concrete’s carbon footprint. Some engineers and scientists are going further, with the goal of developing concrete that can capture and permanently sequester CO2 from power plants or other sources, so it cannot contribute to the warming of the planet.

(You can learn everything you need to know, almost, from Jer's post on climate friendly concrete. I'm still waiting for the world to freak out about the underground coal-fire menace, which is even scarier, IMHO, since nobody seems to have much of a clue about what to do to stop it.)

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Seven numbers that explain a lot about what's gone wrong in America:

Percentage of all families with debt greater than 40% of income: 12 Percentage of bottom-fifth families with debt greater than 40% of income: 27 Median net worth, in dollars, of bottom-fifth families: 7,500 Median net worth, in dollars, of middle-fifth families: 71,600 Median net worth, in dollars, of top-fifth families: 617,600 Growth in median net worth of bottom-fifth families, 1992–2004: 44% ($2,300) Growth in median net worth of top-fifth families, 1992–2004: 94% ($298,500)

Remember, crazy GINI coefficients are great predictors of disaster.

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I really want to play Flower, an insanely beautiful game released two weeks ago for the Playstation 3 by Jenova Chen. In the game, you control a gust of wind that blows a flower petal along, and you do, well, lots of things. You touch other flowers, opening them up and releasing their petals; if you do a lot of this you start to bring dead, dry land back to life. Sometimes you also cause huge rocks to shift and groan and open up like petals themselves. Other times dead trees explode with color and leaves, or winds start blowing that power wind turbines. The final 'boss fight' — such as it is — consists of a crazy, massive “awakening” of an entire grey, dead, 'fallen' city."

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A beautiful animation challenging our notions of "developed" and "developing" nations, from our friends at Gapminder.

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Are we just off-shoring our emissions to China? Yep:

"A remarkable study to be published in Geophysical Research Letters reports that fully half of China's recent increase in CO2 emissions can be attributed to demand for manufactured goods from western developed countries. Of China's total emissions, one-third are attributed to the insatiable demand for cheap exports from the west."

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Food without soil:

"Less than 10 percent of the volcanic Cape Verde archipelago is cultivable and almost all of the country’s food is imported, according to the Ministry of Agriculture ... In his 15-sqm greenhouse on Santiago Island, home to the capital Praia, Monteiro grows watercress, lettuce and other vegetables, which he sells to local hotels and restaurants. By substituting gravel for soil and recycling a continuous stream of water and minerals through trays that hold 600 lettuce and 200 watercress plants, Monteiro told IRIN he uses less than one-fifth of the water and a fraction of the land that traditional farmers use."

Hydroponics: not just for hippies any more.

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Why we need environmental law in space: Mars as a nature preserve? Space jam?

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When I wrote up my worries about the new Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (the "congressman from Caterpillar"), I warned that the sprawl lobby was gearing up to use the stimulus bill to fund exurban sprawl no bank would finance. Great, I was right:

Texas plans to spend $181 million of its federal stimulus money on building a 15-mile, four-lane toll road — from Interstate 10 to Highway 290 and right through the prairie — that will eventually form part of an outer beltway around greater Houston called the Grand Parkway.

The road exemplifies an unintended effect of the stimulus law: an administration that opposes suburban sprawl is giving money to states for projects that are almost certain to exacerbate it.

A new master-planned community called Bridgeland is rising on the prairie along the proposed site of the road; once completed, the development is expected to have 21,000 new homes on 11,400 acres. Other developers are eagerly awaiting the new road so they can start building on their empty land, too.

Are we ever going to get our heads around the politics of sprawl?

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Awesome talk by Worldchanging ally Natalie Jerimijenko:

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Collaborative services is the latest name for product-service systems, though with the added twist of open collaboration. This new report looks awesome

“Car-sharing on demand”, “micro-leasing system for tools between neighbours”, “shared sewing studio,” “home restaurant,” “delivery service between users who exchange goods”… The scenario looks at how various daily procedures could be performed by structured services that rely on a greater collaboration of individuals amongst themselves. It indicates how, through local collaboration, mutual assistance, shared use we can reduce significantly each individual’s needs in terms of products and living space and optimize the use of equipment, reduce travel distances and, finally, lessen the impact of our daily lives on the environment. The scenario also gives an idea on how the diffusion of organisations based on sharing, exchange, participation at the neighbourhood scale can also regenerate the social fabric, restore relations of proximity and create meaningful bonds between individuals

You can download the report for free. Heck, this stuff is even showing up in the NYT:

"Sharing eliminated the fixed costs of private car ownership — the upfront purchase price or the monthly payment, as well as the costs of parking, insurance, maintenance and depreciation. (In 2008, AAA figured the typical cost of owning and driving a midsize sedan to be more than $8,000 per year.) High fixed costs encourage lots of driving; since the car is being paid for, it might as well be used. Hence the paradigmatically wasteful three-block trip to the store for a quart of milk, the sort of carbon blast that few car owners fail to indulge at one time or another. Car sharing, by contrast, is a pay-per-use system, which has the effect of significantly altering driving behavior. Evidence suggests that sharers drive from a quarter to half as much as owners — a staggering reduction in energy consumption. Not only do they drive less frequently, but they also drive differently. They “chain” their trips, making multiple stops along the shortest route in order to drive most efficiently. They save money, do better by the environment and contribute less to congestion. Car sharing also has an appealing communal spirit. Brook likened it to membership in a fitness club. A gym provides its members with a range of equipment that no one member would be able to buy, house and maintain on his own. It is essentially a self-service business, but it manages to foster enough fellow-feeling that unselfish behavior — wiping down machines, returning weights to racks, keeping locker rooms clean — becomes second nature."

Progress towards a world where, as Alok Jha puts it, we can borrow cars and drink rainwater.

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Generate your own set of fifth scenario-like assumptions for the future of transportation with these automated trends and issues cards from our allies the Art Center College of Design (oh, and go check out these swanky new trend cards, too, from our pals at ARUP foresight.

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I have a whole file of Australian climate catastrophe stories, but this one is pretty much the best so far:

Just ask Greg Ogle, a 49-year-old conservationist from New South Wales who once farmed the northern banks of the Murray River north of Melbourne. Ogle came of age in the 1970s when regular floods filled the wetlands near his home and the centuries-old red gum trees — a species as iconic to Australians as maples and oaks are to Americans — provided nests for snakes and the small mammals they hunted. It was common then, he said, to see big Goanna monitor lizards — stout as logs and nearly as long as a man is tall — resting on the thick branches of the towering trees.

Today red gums are dying all across southern Australia. Frogs and snakes and small mammals are gone, and Goannas are rarely seen. Ninety percent of the wetlands in the Murray-Darling basin have disappeared or have been seriously damaged, according to reports by the CSIRO. Poisonous bacterial blooms, like one that covered nearly 700 miles of the Darling River in 1990 and 1991, are an ever-present danger. The lengthy drought is behind these changes, disrupting the natural cycle of regular flooding that once sustained thousands of square miles of wetland and floodplain.

“I see vast changes just in my lifetime,” said Ogle, who switched careers and is now a conservationist with Trust for Nature, Australia’s oldest and largest land conservancy. “It’s very alarming. We aren’t a long-lived species, and to see these changes in a lifetime is quite distressing. We can actually see several species that disappeared. We’ve watched wetlands die. The alarming thing about it all is the snowballing effect of those changes. A lot of it is yet to come.”

If you live in a part of the world which is already moderately dry, and you want to know the sort of changes that could happen, and quickly, in a rapidly warming world, look to Australia's drought. All of this is messing with Aussies' heads, of course, and solastalgia is pretty rampant down under, from what I read.

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ReCaptcha is a cool use for otherwise wasted attention:

When you buy a concert ticket on Ticketmaster, post something for sale on Craigslist, or poke an old friend on Facebook, you may not know it, but you’re helping to put millions of books online in a vast free library.

To access these websites, you must decipher two squiggly words to prove that you’re not a computer program designed to spam the site. Once it knows you’re human, the website lets you continue.

Those two decoded words don’t disappear, however. In fact, your brain has deciphered words that had baffled the scanning software used for an enormous project to digitize every public domain book in the world. ... The Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit group based in a San Francisco, has enlisted about 150 libraries and research centers to digitize as many printed works as it legally can and post them online for anyone in the world to read.

Kinda reinforces Clay's point about how our massive social surplus could be used for good.

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Former Worldchanging managing editor Sarah Rich turned me on to this: BLDG 2.0 | Crowd-Sourcing Building Energy Performance. Worth a look, and though the concept still needs ripening, "providing an open-source analytical interface to building performance databases, a collaborative community of experts, and an online marketplace for ideas emphasizing building energy performance and open innovation" sounds exactly right.

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As someone who (mis)spent a good portion of my youth writing and drinking in bars (sometimes at the same time), throwing them back with the crazy, the lazy, the sexy and the brilliant, I have to say that this essay by Tim Kreider is the best thing I've ever read about the sport: "Drunkenness and youth share in a reckless irresponsibility and the illusion of timelessness. The young and the drunk are both reprieved from that oppressive, nagging sense of obligation that ruins so much of our lives, the worry that we really ought to be doing something productive instead."

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Finally, this profile of Freeman Dyson really pissed me off, not because it's wrong to highlight dissension (though the media has consistently failed to tell the truth by running he said, she said climate stories), but because on this issue his grounds for dissension are simply not very intelligent or even fact-based, as the brilliant Elizabeth Kolbert points out:

e360: If you turn on the TV news, the weathermen are making global warming jokes, saying, “This isn’t global warming. Hey, who said anything about global warming? It’s cold today.” There’s still this reaction, even when the facts are presented to them.

Kolbert: Absolutely. This is a total system failure, okay? We’re not talking about an isolated little problem, and that’s the problem. It's a total system failure that we’re in this situation and it’s a total system failure that we can’t seem to steer away even when the evidence is absolutely overwhelming that we better do something.

It gets back to this issue of whether the public believes in science, which, to be honest, we do not. You can still find a lot of people who don’t believe in evolution, okay? So we’re talking about a country that has a very lax relationship to science. And what you need in order to grapple meaningfully with global warming is to believe that this is not a speculative thing. This is the way geophysics work, and we have established that very clearly both in a laboratory setting and on the ground — and we need to take very seriously these predictions.

I mean, Freeman Dyson has done a tremendous amount of damage saying, “I don’t believe models. We can’t model this.” Well, we actually can model it very accurately, it turns out. And we’re talking about very fundamental science. It’s not a very complicated science. And so when you have people like that out there sort of blowing smoke, really, I would say, it is hard for the public to know what to do. So I think scientists need to try to convey how virtually unanimous this consensus is, because otherwise people will just believe that the science is fuzzy or foggy

I think Dyson's legacy will be colored, in large part, by his willingness to boldly assert claims for which he really doesn't have the evidence (e.g., modeling doesn't work) that have been seized on for political advantage by those who want to continue making profits off fossil fuels, science and climate be damned. In hindsight, it'll look a lot like the scientists who, perhaps with the best of intentions, collaborated with Nazis in order to fund legitimate research projects, but in the process gave cover to evil.

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...and with that cheery thought, I'm out, and off to give a talk to a room full of landscape architects. Have a great weekend!

Front page photo credit: "Concrete Rectangle" by flickr user Paul Vallejo, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 7:31 AM)

Graphic Series: Earthly Ideas, Biochar

Andy Lubershane — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:55:35 +0000

This week's cartoon describes biochar -- a product that can be made from agricultural waste and other organic material. Biochar, which mimics the charcoal component in a rich black soil called terra preta created by indigenous farmers in South America, promises a way to achieve a net reduction in carbon dioxide while feeding nutrients back to the soil. While biochar offers encouraging possibilities for waste reduction, carbon sequestration and sustainable agriculture, it's worth noting that critics question the strategy's potential side effects, particularly if it were to be produced on a large scale. You can read more coverage of biochar and terra preta in these articles from the Worldchanging archive: Terra Preta: Black is the New Green and A Carbon-Negative Fuel.

Click image to enlarge

Editor's note: This post is part of a series featuring Worldchanging ally Andy Lubershane's original graphics. While many of the issues covered in the comics have been discussed on Worldchanging in the past, we hope that you'll be able to use this new medium in a different way … whether it's in your classroom, on your office wall, or to help explain ideas to friends and family.

Andy Lubershane researches, writes and cartoons about sustainability from his home in Boston. Check out more of his illustrations here

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(Posted by Andy Lubershane in Columns at 10:55 AM)

Corporate Political Transparency: The Green Business Rating We Really Need

Alex Steffen — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:00:14 +0000

Much is made of various measurements of corporate progress towards sustainability: Company X has reduced its carbon footprint by 10 percent, Company Y has introduced a line of recycled products, Company Z will offer new and more efficient technology in 2012. But the reality is, there's one measurement that matters more than all of these put together, and it's almost never mentioned in the green business press: where a company spends its lobbying budget.

See, a huge number of companies make modest improvements in practices, but lobby all-out, in a variety of ways, to stall the adoption of higher standards, better land-use practices, green taxes or even health and safety regulations. And the impacts of those lobbying efforts usually far, far outweigh the good they claim to be doing with their pilot green efforts.

The most recent shocking report? Revelation of donations by companies that like to claim green leadership, including Microsoft, Toyota and Wal-Mart, to the ultra-anti-environmental Cato Institute, which recently launched an ad campaign targeting president Obama's climate policies, relying on climate skeptic deceptions. That's right, your Prius purchase may have helped fund an attack on climate action.

This is not an isolated incident. Take Wal-Mart. The big box giant has long been known in policy circles as one of the leading opponents to better land use and greener taxation policies (even carbon offset standards). It not only spends huge sums of money paying employees to influence all manner of decisions ($5.2 million in 2008 on formal in-house lobbying alone); it also spends heavily on lobbyists influencing local and state governments (for instance, it spent more than $200,000 for one fight in Massachusetts last year) and increasingly the Federal government (more than $4,000,000 spent hiring lobbyists in 2007). This doesn't even count the much greater amounts of money it spends indirectly, from expenditures on PR to support for industry groups, publications and anti-environmental think tanks which are not formally lobbyists. Wal-Mart is also one of the largest political donors in the U.S., with its PAC alone spending more than $3,000,000 in 2008. How many compact fluorescents would it need to sell to offset the miles and miles of suburban sprawl it's fought to make possible?

These practices are not only deceptive, they're harmful. They play on our erroneous sense of privatized responsibility to sell us "green" goods, while simultaneously opposing the very kind of systemic changes we need if we've going to avoid planetary collapse. And this is absolutely not just an American problem; indeed, in our globalized world, companies are quite cosmopolitan in their efforts to corrupt government progress towards sustainability wherever it threatens their outdated business models.

Now, the reality is that for every huge company engaged in duplicitous sell-the-CFL-and-lobby-for-the-sprawl practices, there is another company (often smaller) which engages wholly and fully in doing as much good business as it can. It's not true that being in business makes you bad. Being dishonest and fighting needed change while claiming to champion it is what makes yours a bad business.

We've written a lot about how the world needs a transparency revolution. Nowhere is that more true than the emerging field of green business.

We already have certification systems and other ways of making transparent the material backstories of specific products. We have all manner of rankings and ratings of sustainability practices (however deeply flawed). What we don't have is what we most need: an absolute measurement of political accountability.

Tools exist for doing that. Here in the U.S., the League of Conservation Voters offers an annual scorecard rating members of Congress' environmental performance, based on their votes on key issues. Transparency International follows international corporate corruption and bribery, and has evolved a set of standards for eliminating it. Others have developed great tools for quickly revealing the origins of political contributions and so on.

What we need is a standard for corporate political transparency and accountability that can be clearly reported and easily understood by those who are looking to buy an item, or invest in a stock -- a sort of transparency index. That way, you could know before supporting a company if it is a) forthcoming in its political practices and b) supportive of a few critical, well-understood bedrock political issues (like climate, smart growth, human rights).

I have little doubt that such a rating system would have an outsized impact quickly (It doesn't take too many people saying "Hmmm. I was going to buy a Prius, but Toyota's Transparency Index Rating is only 25 percent; guess I'll get the Aptera after all," before it makes more sense for Toyota to stop contributing to Cato than continue). I don't know of such a system, but it sure seems like the parts to build it exist.

What might such a system look like? What would be the challenges in designing and releasing it? How could it be made most effective?

I'd like to hear your ideas.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 11:00 AM)

Reader Report: Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:16:11 +0000

By Kristin Hayden

I've just returned from a very inspiring three days in Oxford, England, at the 2009 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. This annual mega-event for the world's leading social entrepreneurs was started by Jeff Skoll, co-founder of eBay and founder and chairman of the Skoll Foundation and Participant Media.

A social entrepreneur myself, I've noticed a huge shift in the public's understanding of the field. When social entrepreneurship was first gaining ground as a meme, people seemed confused by the difference between a social enterprise versus a non-profit or charity. Over the four years that I've been attending the Skoll World Forum, I've experienced the growing institutionalization of the field in academia as well as increasing public recognition of social entrepreneurs. As the Skoll Centre's new director, Pamela Hartigan, announced last Friday at the closing ceremonies, social entrepreneurship is now the sixth-most-tweeted trend in the world!

The highlights of this year’s Forum, for me, were meeting Skoll in person (he’s a humble visionary – wow, what an amazing example of using your wealth to effect the most amount of people!) and hearing the inspiring stories of the 2009 Skoll Awardees. Among the standouts were INJAZ, leading a rapidly growing movement in the Middle East to bring business leaders and entrepreneurs into the failing public school system, and VisionSpring, providing eyewear from the developed world to the Global South.

My favorite innovation was HeroRATS, an innovation from a research organization called APOPO that uses rats to sniff out land mines and diagnose disease in Africa (see video). Founder Bart Weetjen, a Belgian-born Buddhist monk living in Africa, trains rats to use their sense of smell to find both metal- and plastic-cased explosives in the minefields of Mozambique, and to detect tuberculosis bacteria in human sputum samples. (According to APOPO, a rat can evaluate 40 samples in 10 minutes, equal to what a skilled lab technician, using microscopy, will do in two days). APOPO also teaches local people to use the rats for these otherwise costly and dangerous missions, helping local communities become less reliant on foreign assistance.

The Forum left me reenergized and inspired to do my part to make this world a better place. All of our creative ideas, innovations and belief in self and others are needed now more than ever before - may we all heed the call!

See my blog for video snippets of my favorite speakers, interviews and other highlights from the conference.

Kristin Hayden is an Ashoka fellow and Founder/Executive Director of OneWorld Now! - an award-winning & innovative program providing critical foreign languages (Arabic & Chinese), transformative leadership training, and study abroad opportunities (Middle East & China) to underserved high school youth. A passionate believer in the transformative power of international study & service, she is a leading American advocate for institutionalizing the “GAP Year” (year of service abroad) in America. She writes about social justice in international education on her blog In my O.W.N. words. You can follow her adventures at the 2009 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship on her blog & Twitter @KristinHayden.

Editor's Note: We encourage "Reader Reports" -- submissions from members of Worldchanging's global audience who volunteer to write up their notes from travels, conferences, workshops and other worldchanging happenings they participate in. If you'd like to contribute your own report, please email editor[at]worldchanging[dot]com.

Photo source: HeroRATS.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 5:16 PM)

Shepard Fairey: Notes Toward an Affirmative Art

Edward Morris — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:34:34 +0000

In the 1980s, about the time Shepard Fairey took up skateboarding in a big way, Abigail Solomon Godeau published an article called “The Armed Vision Disarmed: Radical Formalism from Weapon to Style.” The article was later published in a book called The Contest of Meaning that probably had some currency at the Rhode Island School of Design when Fairey was a student there.

In her article, Godeau relates the tragic tale of the Russian Constructivists. These somber men “disclaimed all aesthetic intent and instead defined [themselves] as instrumental in nurturing a new collective consciousness.” The ringleader of the group, Alexander Rodechenko, didn’t pull any punches. “Art has no place in modern life,” he wrote.

Yet, as Godeau narrates, in no time at all the image-making strategies of the Constructivists were adopted by the very bourgeois culture in Western Europe and the United States against which the group ardently hoped to inspire rebellion, and today their style continues to turn up everywhere in advertising and art (see recent Virgin Airlines ads, for example).

The lesson learned from this tale, according to Godeau, is that “no art practice has yet proved too intractable, subversive or resistant to be assimilated sooner or later into the cultural mainstream.” And that brings us to Fairey and his show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

Fairey himself is a prolific user of Russian Construcvist imagery, sometimes going so far as to incorporate the old revolutionary images wholesale into his designs. Yet, of course, Fairey is no Constructivist himself. Rather, he is an avowed DE-constructivist. He is very explicit about this as two quotes from his website demonstrate:

1) “My work uses people, symbols, and people as symbols to deconstruct how powerful visuals and emotionally potent phrases can be used to manipulate and indoctrinate.”

2) “There is no specific political affiliation behind what I do, only the philosophy ‘question everything...’”

And the helpful curators from the ICA are only too eager to back Fairey up on this, employing a battery of ready-made art-world cliches to describe the work. It blurs lines! It is complex! It is carefully made! It questions! It’s like Andy Warhol!

So what then are we to make of the most famous image in the room -- the “Hope” image of Obama?

The curators seem almost defensive about it. They offer this carefully worded excuse: “Throughout his career, Shepard Fairey’s portraits of policitical leaders have often questioned [there’s that word again!] the authority that those figures exercise. Fairey’s image of Barack Obama is the first instance in which the artist chose to depict a contemporary political figure in order to support his campaign.” [Italics mine].

Ok, that is technically true because of the qualifiers “political” and “contemporary” and “campaign.” But actually Fairey has made many images that are essentially hagiographic, that inspire respect or admiration or action and that do not question or challenge the authority of the figure depicted, that on the contrary posit a different sort of authority, the sort of authority that Fairey endorses. Take a second look at his images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (which has the words “rise above” written on it) or Joe Strummer or Henry Rollins or Angela Davis. The respect he has for these figures is palpable and communicable. They are powerful images. And there is no shame in their positivity. Fairey does not really want us to question everything. And why should he?

Fairey has been receiving a lot of critical attention recently and not all has been positive. Some of that negative attention is stupid and even vindictive. (Fairey is not plagarizing or stealing! Get with the program on appropriation art, ok!). But some is justified, particularly when taken as a statement of concern rather than pure criticism.

Fairey has crossed a Rubicon of sorts now that he has been fully museumified, has been employed to make bags for Saks Fifth Avenue, and seen his images, most notably the Obama image, so fully “assimilated into the mainstream.” Godeau implies that the prime consequence of such assimilation is the loss of subversive power.

Indeed, that loss of power is palpable. I recall encountering a Fairey display on the street weeks before I knew that he would be coming to the ICA. It was a wall of images placed on the boards of a store that had recently gone under. It was thrilling and, yes, subversive: it seemed like it might be advertising for a new store, but on closer inspection seemed more like a grave. It had legitimate punk rock energy. I contrast that to the feeling I have seeing Fairey’s work on the street now (which happens nearly every day in Harvard Square). I just think to myself, “Oh that is an extension of the Fairey show (yawn) at the ICA.” You can feel the title of Godeau’s piece actuated here: Armed Vision Disarmed…from Weapon to Style.

I don’t know if this is inevitable. For one thing, Fairey could do a hell of a lot better than the enervated presentation at the ICA, with its two little token graffitied newspaper dispensers in the lobby and a bunch of framed pictures in neat grids in the galleries.

But more importantly than that, it is time for Fairey to come out from behind the worn curtain of the deconstructionists. Obey his hope. Shelve the Derrida and pick up Bruno Latour and Slavoj Zizek. What Fairey has always been good at is “nurturing a new collective consciousness” – that good ole Constructivist aim. His Andre the Giant images (pictured top left) were successful because they were popular, because they created an identity for those who recognized it, forging the shadow of new collective consciousness. Now he is sought after by Saks Fifth Avenue and others for the very reason that he is able to galvanize interest in an attitude, a way of being, a product, a candidate.

If Fairey is going to continue to have punk rock vitality (and if you don’t believe he ever had it, check out the videos at the ICA show), then he may need to surf a new wave that is breaking in art and art criticism. That wave has to do with merging the nuanced and the affirmative; the questioning and the organizing; the nothing and the everything. The new movement is constructive and Fairey can rock it, but not if he allows himself to get bullied by the formidable art market (including the ICA) which is saying what it says about his work so that it can pawn it off on yesterday’s fools.

The following image of Fairey’s called Evolve to Devolve is what I am talking about. It is a potent image about climate change/sustainability and, perhaps, the sign of substantive things to come from Fairey. The image is apocylaptic and utopian; affirmative and subversive; dawn and dusk. All at once:

Edward Morris is the co-founder of The Canary Project and a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The Canary Project produces visual media and artworks that deepen public understanding of climate change and energize commitment to solutions. Morris was formerly a partner at the James Mintz Group, an international investigative firm.

All images credit: Shepard Fairey

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(Posted by Edward Morris in Columns at 4:34 PM)

Shepard Fairey: Notes Toward an Affirmative Art

Edward Morris — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:34:34 +0000

1) “My work uses people, symbols, and people as symbols to deconstruct how powerful visuals and emotionally potent phrases can be used to manipulate and indoctrinate.”

2) “There is no specific political affiliation behind what I do, only the philosophy ‘question everything...’”

So what then are we to make of the most famous image in the room -- the “Hope” image of Obama?

All images credit: Shepard Fairey

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(Posted by Edward Morris in Columns at 4:34 PM)

Open Intellectual Property as Sustainability Accelerator

Alex Steffen — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:09:26 +0000

It's the job of the world's poor to get rich, and the job of the world's rich to redefine wealth. That is, the biggest task facing the developing world is development and human well-being, while the biggest task facing the developed world is making prosperity sustainable so that as billions of more people become prosperous, we're still able to protect the planet's biosphere.

Critical to this division of labor, though, is the idea of rapid diffusion of sustainable innovation from the epicenters of innovation (the vast majority of which are still urban conclaves in the developed world, places where universities, enterprises and cultural scenes mix and accelerate each other) to the rest of the world. That demands thinking differently about intellectual property.

IP is something we've written a lot about here. In general we tend to err on the side of the commons and intellectual freedom, we also recognize that reward for one's labors is a powerful motivator, adding the fuel of interest to the fire of genius as Lincoln put it. Some things ought to be patented and copyrighted.

Some, though, should not, and this is particularly true when we're talking about sustainable innovation diffusion to the developing world. We've already written about the Open Architecture Network as a means of distributing architectural and design innovations through a Creative Commons developing nation license. Now, though, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu makes the case for open innovation in clean energy:

The main point being:

“Since power plants are built in the home country, most of the investments are in the home country,” he said. “You don’t build a power plant, put it in a boat and ship it overseas, similar to with buildings. So developing technologies for much more efficient buildings is something that can be shared in each country. If countries actively helped each other, they would also reap the home benefits of using less energy. So any area like that I think is where we should work very hard in a very collaborative way — by very collaborative I mean share all intellectual property as much as possible. And in my meetings with my counterparts in other countries, when we talk about this they say, yes, we really should do this. But there hasn’t been a coordinated effort. And so it’s like all countries becoming allies against this common foe, which is the energy problem.”

This is an incredibly important and poorly understood idea. I also believe that in an era which may see a decline in material globalization and at least something of a return to localized production, adopting open IP becomes paradoxically more important in creating competitive advantages.

That's because I think a greatly increased amount of free innovation is inevitable, both because of the forces driving commons-based/crowd-sourced/open source solutions in general, and because the vast majority of the world's potential users for anything can't afford to pay developing world rates. If something's going to spread, it's going to spread because it's cheap, easy to use, and readily modifiable. In such a world, a creative advantage is a competitive advantage: that is, being able to add special value at the top end, rather than commodity information value, is what makes a business work.

And people who embrace open informational substrates have an advantage here. That in turn requires an embrace of the commons, in architecture, energy and everything else. That's the way to save the planet. It's also the way to save the economy.

Front page image: "Intellectual Property Donor" by flickr/camb416, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 3:09 PM)

Green:Net on SmartGrids, Hurdles and the New Networked Car

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:33:44 +0000

By Mary Catherine O'Connor

At Earth2Tech's Green:Net technology conference Tuesday in San Francisco, Jesse Berst, managing director of Global Smart Energy, asserted that the smart grid is not nearly as difficult to define as many make it seem. But what will be difficult is clearing the hurdles to building out the smart grid quickly.

He said the smart grid has three parts: smart devices, two-way communication (which makes those devices smart, and pulls and pushes the telemetry data they collect) and advanced control systems and applications (which provide the controls to act on the energy demand data that the smart devices provide). But making those three parts work together is where the real work of establishing the smart grid will come into play.

First of all, we can't just rip out the old grid and add a new one. We have to upgrade the 100-year-old grid while it's running, while it's still churning out power. "This is upgrading it as a moving train," Berst explained. (This isn't a new problem, however, since the television industry has already met a very similar challenge.)

And for another thing, those smart meters and two-way communications systems and controlling software have to work. That sounds quite obvious, but by "work," the panelists are talking about "never fail." Today, we place calls on our cell phones and sometimes, if we're in dead zones, the calls fail. That's inconvenient, but it's not a huge deal. But failures in the smart grid could be catastrophic, depending how much those failures muck things up. We can't have dead zones in the smart grid.

For a third thing, all of the smart devices we deploy to measure and manage our power consumption — in our homes, cars, office buildings and everywhere else — need to be interoperable, which requires standards. And those devices need to last for a long, long time. "The cellular operators can get us to switch out our cell phones every 12 to 18 months, but we can't do this with smart meters," explained Andrew Tang, senior director of PG&E's Smart Energy Web. Standards will ensure not only that the devices interoperate, but also that makers of these devices can compete on cost, which should drive costs down.

And there's one more big hurdle to consider: security. It's kind of the big gorilla in the room when it comes to the current analog, centralized electrical grid. But once the grid turns into this new, huge computer network with two-way communications, the issue of security is going to loom even larger. As Earth2Tech pointed out just last week, smart grid hacking may already be afoot.

So why bother? For one thing, we have nary a chance of survival without completely overhauling our energy systems. Smart grids offer the ability to diversify our sources of power much more easily and reliably -- and they might even make energy cheaper. And overhauling our energy systems must include making the grid smarter, such that all of the end-points of the grid — everything from a home to an electric car — will be able to not only pull power from the grid, but also add power to it.

And this is where the smart grid gets really exciting, as was discussed during a session dubbed The New Networked Car. Here, Felix Kramer, who founded Cal Cars, an initiative to promote plug-in hybrid cars, led a panel that included reps from Coulomb and Better Place — two startups developing charging stations — as well as Rolf Schreiber, who is leading Google's RechargeIT effort to study electric cars, and John Clark with GridPoint, which makes software designed to allow utilities and regulators to better manage and store energy from various sources.

As electric, plug-in vehicles evolve, they will increasingly become nodes in the smart grid, with the ability to determine not only how much of a charge is needed to top off the battery, but also from what source that energy is derived (wind, solar, etc.). Plus, drivers will be able to consider their power needs through a macro view, allowing the electric car to offer what Schreiber referred to as "grid ancillary services." This means that if power demands are very high at the time when a driver wants to charge her car, she might decide to only charge it enough to get home, and no further (plus, using GPS and other sensors, the car will be smart enough to know just how much charge that would require). In some cases, that same car could also supply power from its battery back up to the grid, thereby offsetting the driver's costs … and turning the car into a tiny power station.

(Editor's note: Read more about this work in recent Worldchanging articles: Worldchanging Interview: Amory Lovins, Project Get Ready Aims to Create an Electric Vehicle Revolution, and Smart Garage: An Integration Revolution.)

Freelance writer Mary Catherine O'Connor lives in San Francisco, with her husband, dog, and five bikes.

Photo credit: flickr/Ian Muttoo, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 10:33 AM)

Heirloom Design

Adele Peters — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:05:50 +0000

Can we live sustainably while still enjoying our stuff? Buying better stuff (and less of it), and keeping it for longer is one realistic strategy for making that possible. But we know that won't work with most of the stuff we have now. Whether it's clothes, computers, appliances or even homes, throwaway culture in the developed world -- accompanied by throwaway design -- makes for stuff we not only don't want to keep, but that we often can't continue to use even if we try.

Enter a new meme: Heirloom Design. At Compostmodern, Saul Griffith proposed the concept, which he describes as design that is intended to last for generations. Griffith said he's planning to give his soon-to-be-born son a Rolex and Mont Blanc pen ... and then tell him that these would be the only watch and pen he could use for the next 100 years.

"It sounds like I'm a pretentious wanker when I say 'green' is a Rolex and a Mont Blanc pen, but what I really mean is, you have to design things and experiences that will last a very long time, that have been thoughtfully designed and are very beautiful," Griffith explained.

Durability is not a new concept for sustainability. In theory, if a product stays around longer, it means that a replacement product doesn't need to be manufactured and transported to the consumer, and the original product stays out of the landfill. But durability alone doesn't ensure that something won't be thrown away. Heirloom design introduces something more: our desire as consumers to keep an object because it has some meaning for us. What makes something worthy of passing down through generations?

Griffith's examples involve heavy initial investments, which can certainly motivate someone to care for and keep a product longer. But the power of price is relative to the consumer's disposable income, and it still isn't everything. The point is to not limit heirloom-quality goods to certain people, but to recover an ideal of making things for everyone that will last for generations. When I spoke with Griffith about this, he suggested that designers really need to figure out how to make something beautiful and well made that isn't expensive.

That goal may not be as pie-in-the-sky as it sounds. In a book called Antiques of the Future, product designer Lisa Roberts put forth a collection of mass-produced objects that she believes will be valuable in the future, once they are no longer in production. Many of the items are relatively inexpensive, but are well made and attractive: one of her primary criteria in selection was just that the objects have "a strong and immediate visual appeal." Among her selections were Michael Graves’ tea kettle and Karim Rashid’s Garbino trash can (now, she notes, the trash can is available in biodegradable corn-based plastic).

What other products being designed now have the best chance of becoming future heirlooms? Usefulness wasn't mentioned among Roberts' criteria, but could also be a reason something is kept. A classic multifunctional tool like the Swiss Army knife may be likely to be handed from one generation to the next. Sentimental appeal is another reason something may become an heirloom, and designers can aim to create products that inspire emotional responses.

Though Roberts' book demonstrates that heirloom design doesn't necessarily have to be expensive, her work doesn't focus on design that promotes sustainability specifically. Griffith's strategy of choosing investment pieces isn't necessarily foolproof in this regard, either: a report by the World Wildlife Fund gave the world's largest luxury companies abysmal sustainability ratings. Even if an item is durable and provides heirloom appeal, limited raw resources and a growing awareness of the impacts of waste mean manufacturers will need to consider lifecycle sustainability from the beginning. A few designers, however, are already using the concept of heirloom design as a way to consciously improve their sustainability, like the clothing company Howie's, in the UK, and Entermodal in Portland, Oregon.

It's worth noting that durability/heirloom quality isn't always the best solution for every product. In some cases, it might make sense to design something to adapt to a radically shorter lifespan, like packaging that instantly biodegrades. In other instances, if a particular product is currently harmful to the environment, a short lifespan would be useful so that the product can be replaced as soon as sustainable technology is available.

At the other end of the spectrum, in some types of products -- like rapidly changing technology -- the idea of heirloom design can be taken to creative new heights. It could take the form of long-lasting hardware that accepts software upgrades: perhaps, for example, a permanent computer or cell phone case, with replaceable insides (more on this topic in John Hockenberry's terrific article for Metropolis magazine). Taking that idea to its furthest extension is a future of closed-loop manufacturing, where you could purchase only the service an item provides, relying on the manufacturer to offer you both regular upgrade opportunities and a place to return physical materials to the industrial nutrient stream.

Overall, the idea that products should last -- and that consumers should want to keep them -- is an important part of designing a sustainable future. Where do you see opportunities for heirloom items that don't yet exist? Please answer in the comments!

Adele Peters is currently earning her Master's in Sustainability at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden.

Photo credit: flickr/Lid-Licker!, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Adele Peters in Columns at 11:05 AM)

The Wall Street Crowd and the Transparency Revolution

Alex Steffen — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:18:53 +0000

There is a great cluelessness afoot in this land. It's padding around in Europe and Asia as well, but here in the U.S., it's staggering around with giant clomping feet, and its favorite stomping grounds are the economic punditry centers of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Consider this article by Joe Nocera about the AIG scandal. In it, Nocera argues that the anger over the AIG bonuses is irrational and self-hurting. He's completely missing the point on both accounts.

For most Americans, anger about the economy -- indeed, sheer blind lynch-the-bastards rage -- is not irrational at all. The American future has just been looted by a small class of thug investors. The average American makes less now than he or she would have in 1973, and probably works longer hours for worse benefits. That, on top of a grinding away of all manner of public goods -- things regular people depend on, like schools and libraries and childcare, not to mention a functioning climate -- has left the average American in a profoundly tenuous condition: and it was all done for the profit of a tiny percentage of the wealthiest people in this country. Describing that reality is not class warfare, it's history.

In this situation, anger is a completely rational response. The only way that things will be righted is through real change, and the only hope of real change in a system as corrupt as this has become is to blow the lid off things, to open them up to sunlight, with or without the permission of the exposed.

That's the power of transparency: it is the cure for corruption.

And corruption is what has gotten us into the mess we're in. If we had a perfectly fair and enlightened government, with a strong regulatory apparatus and a fair legal system, we would not now be arguing about corporate looting or wasted ecosystems or how to provide basic health care. The biggest reason we haven't already built a bright green economy where all boats rise is that a small class of people has profited so enormously from continuing obviously broken systems to absurd degrees that they could afford to dump billions of dollars into candidate coffers, astroturf campaigns, ideological think tanks and lobbyists to bullshit everyone else. Again, history.

So I think the AIG scandal has not gone nearly far enough: we need to see that anger spread to inquiries and whistle blowings across the business world. The point is not to be anti-business. Most people in business are good people; we all need a thriving economy in order to provide sustainable prosperity. The point is that we can't get a thriving, sustainable economy through open looting and a complete collapse of ethics, which is what business during the Bush administration became.

What worldchanging people need to do in this crisis is continue pointing not at the scandals, but at the system. We should all support efforts to force the workings of government and the economy into the open: Yes We Scan, FarmSubsidy.org, DeSmogBlog and Exxon Secrets, and a host of other great efforts.

The world needs a transparency revolution. That starts with people howling for justice, but let's not let it stop there. Let's use this opportunity to bring anti-corruption transparency to our financial institutions, regulatory apparatus and business media. Let's put a little sunlight on the subject. Let's demand full disclosure on all public money. Let's demand shareholder rights to accountability, and open regulatory records. Let's hold our philanthropic institutions, university endowments and pension funds to a higher standard. Let's demand greater objectivity and professionalism from the business media. Let's teach openness and transparency as a path to profit in business schools. Let's close loopholes, reveal offshore accounts, and root out tax cheats. Let's blow the whole thing open.

Let's demand a financially transparent world in exchange for our bailouts.

Image by Ji Lee. Source: Portfolio Magazine.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 10:18 AM)

Worldchanging Interview: Amory Lovins

Julia Levitt — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:50:47 +0000

Amory Lovins is a bright green visionary. Lovins and the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute he leads have set pace of the debate on a number of critical innovations, from green building to hybrid cars, for almost three decades.

RMI (as it's called) takes an entrepreneurial approach, looking for opportunities to leverage changes in systems and policies to organically encourage people to choose the better car, the better home, etc., on their own.

As he told Popular Mechanics in a 2007 interview, Lovins is more confused than frustrated that the pace of change in the U.S. has yet to catch up with ideas he's been pitching since the 1970s -- ideas which are becoming commonplace in other parts of the world. It's not just about business and profits, although in best-selling books like Natural Capitalism
and Winning the Oil Endgame, Lovins has certainly made a believable and detail-rich plan for shareholder-friendly sustainability. It's also about something more intangible: the deep satisfaction that comes with elegantly solving a difficult problem.

In short, Lovins is just the person to talk to if you're in the business of envisioning a bright green future. I spoke with Lovins earlier this month about the search for elegant solutions:

Julia Levitt: What do you think is the least amount of energy that could be used to deliver a comfortable American lifestyle? For example, is the 2,000-watt society proposed by the Swiss Council of the Federal Institute of Technology a realistic projection?

Amory Lovins: It is very realistic. The Swiss work on the 2000-watt Society is excellent. I actually think that, with integrated design and even newer technologies, 1,000 watts is probably realistic -- and it may even be cheaper. We [at RMI] haven't developed that in as much detail yet as they've developed their 2,000-watt scenario, so I'm just giving you my impression from looking at the numbers, but I think it'll be closer to 1,000 than to 2,000 watts. That's counting, of course, all forms of energy for all purposes.

JL: What would that society look like?

AL: It can look like whatever you want. Because so much can be done with just technical efficiency, there's a great deal of flexibility -- in how and where people live, what houses look like, how we get around, what our settlement patterns are. For example, it's very straightforward to have uncompromised, normal-sized family cars achieving upwards of 100 miles a gallon, with improved safety and excellent economics. We know how to triple the efficiency of trucks, and we can probably do even better on planes, I think by a factor of six or so better than now.

My own house uses 1 percent the normal amount of space- and water-heating energy, and 10 percent the normal amount of electricity. The efficiency upgrades took ten months to pay for themselves in 1983. But if we were building the house now, we'd be able to save another two-thirds of the remaining electricity, and it would probably cost even less to build.

JL: So you think that the vision of a 1,000- to 2,000-watt lifestyle would look pretty similar to how we're living now.

It can if we design it that way.

Of course, you could also get to such a society with changes in settlement patterns, with more of a New Urbanist pattern where we no longer subsidize and mandate sprawl, so we have great cars but we don't need to drive them much. That could be a healthier, more convivial society with stronger families and communities. And that's a perfectly legitimate way to do it as well.

You can mix technical and social change however you want. I tend to look just at the technical change, because I'm not comfortable telling other folks how to live. But I notice that real estate developers find more demand -- and make more money serving it -- if they make a place where it's possible to live better. If you design your communities in the New Urbanist fashion so that most places you want to go are within a five-minute walk, then you will have much brisker demand for your properties, and you'll sell at a higher margin, you'll have faster absorption, all the project's economics get better and you'll have happier people living there, than if you design the place around cars instead of people.

JL: How long do you think it would take to build a carbon-neutral prosperity in America?

AL: Several decades, partially because of the amount of capital stock we have to fix up or turn over. But it's time to get started. There's a Chinese proverb that the best time to plant a tree is 100 years ago, and the second best time is today.

JL: What is the most promising energy technology that you think remains unfairly obscure?

AL: Advanced energy efficiency. By that I mean, efficiency so designed -- whether in buildings, factories or vehicles -- that very large savings are cheaper than small or no savings, so we get expanding, not diminishing, returns to investments in efficiency.

There isn't a single official study that recognizes this possibility. But in RMI's consulting practice, we've demonstrated it in scores of buildings, in 30 billion dollars' worth of factories in 29 sectors, and in a number of vehicle designs, so we think it can be generalized. I described how to do so in my March ’07 lectures on advanced energy efficiency at the Stanford Engineering School, posted at http://www.rmi.org/stanford. My five public lectures there give the basics of advanced energy efficiency in buildings, industry and transport, and then how to implement them and what they mean.

JL: We've recently covered your Smart Garage summit and Project Get Ready, an initiative from RMI's MOVE team, here on Worldchanging. What are the major blocks to these ideas when it comes to business, community and politics, and how do you think these will be overcome?

AL: Smart Garage is our shorthand for arrangements that will let electrified vehicles, buildings, and the electric grid exchange information and energy to mutual advantage.

The short answer would include that there is no standardization -- or move toward it -- in the physical connections for electrons, nor in the telecoms and software protocols needed to swap information, do financial settlements, and control the energy flows properly so that all parties benefit.

There are some interactions with existing laws that could cause confusion or counterproductive effects. There are cultural barriers within the auto industry to making cars strong but light -- but if we did that seriously and with a level of design integration beyond what they're used to, we could cut the size of the batteries required by as much as two-thirds, and thus make them rapidly much more affordable and stretch the limited supply of batteries into more vehicles. Reducing battery size would also make recharging a lot faster, so we needn’t necessarily go to 240-volt charging infrastructure.

I think we also have had some blockages in business strategy and language just in conceptualizing the evolutionary path for Smart Garage. The charrette we held last October in Portland, Oregon went a long way toward helping us all think more clearly about the evolutionary path in the industry, and it actually looks easier than most of us had thought.

I was very happy to see that, because I had thought of that notion -- of vehicles being power plants on wheels and selling power back to the grid profitably when parked -- back in ’91, but now it looks like the technologies and attitudes are coming together that will make that a reality.

There are many more details to answer this question posted in the Smart Garage Summit report at move.rmi.org.

JL: In your December statement to U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, you offered the advice that the DOE take a more aggressive approach to public policy development. What are your strongest recommendations for the policies we need in the next four years to ensure a clean energy future?

AL: Well, let me mention three. First, the strongest lever in saving electricity and gas is to decouple utilities' profits from how much energy they sell, and then to let them to keep as extra profits part of what they save the customers through (for example) more efficient use. Last year, only two states had done this decoupling and shared-savings reform, even though all the states' utility commissioners unanimously agreed in ’88 to follow such a course. But they got distracted by restructuring.

Now 25 states have adopted or are adopting decoupling and shared savings, so they’ll reward utilities for cutting your bill rather than for selling you more energy. Most states still do [the latter], and it's just as dumb as it sounds.

For getting efficient cars from the drawing board to the showroom and onto the road quickly, the most powerful and attractive tool we know is called a feebate. It's a cross between a fee and a rebate. It works like this: when you go to the dealer to buy a vehicle of the size that you want, there will be more and less efficient models on offer. Buyers of the less efficient models will pay a corresponding fee, while buyers of the more efficient ones will get a corresponding rebate. The rebates are paid for by others' fees, so it's revenue-neutral, and because you do it separately in each automobile size class, it's size-neutral. Therefore, you're incentivized to buy a more efficient car of the size you want, but not to buy a different size than you want.

In practical effect, such feebates would broaden the price spread within a given size class by perhaps thousands of dollars between the most and least efficient vehicle. This would therefore cause the buyer to pay attention to how much fuel the car will save over its life, not just in the first year or two; therefore, the private buyer will make a decision that's economically efficient for society.

This has been such a success when tried last year in France that they now want to roll it out to 20 other categories of products. And the automakers will also make more profits under feebates, because of course they will want to move their offerings from the inefficient (fee) zone into the efficient (rebate) zone, and to do that they’ll add more technology content, which has a higher profit margin than the rest of the vehicle.

RMI ran a private industry seminar for a few days about a year and a half ago, and got a clearer sense from the diverse stakeholders that there’s something important here to be worked out and experimented with at the state and regional level, and then to go national. Of course, since then, the auto industry has had other things on its mind, but it’s now clear that feebates are much more effective and more politically attractive than either fuel taxes or efficiency standards.

And feebates are not limited to cars. For example, they are more powerful than building codes as a way to increase the efficiency of buildings. When you go to hook your new house or commercial building to the grid, you would pay a fee or get a rebate; which, and how big, would depend on how efficient your building is. The fees pay for the rebates, so it remains revenue-neutral, but it's much more powerful than a building code, which is obsolete before the ink is dry and gives you no incentive to do better.

The third category of important policy action is to remove the biases in our regulatory system favoring supply over efficient use; favoring big over small units; and favoring particular technologies or forms of energy. I would love to have all ways to save or produce energy enabled and required to compete fairly at honest prices regardless of their type, technology, size, location or ownership. Who wouldn’t be in favor of that? Probably the incumbents who are very satisfied with current arrangements in which they've made a major investment to influence the political system. But as we revitalize our democracy, this would be a worthy goal. It's pretty much the opposite of the energy policy that we currently have. But I think it's actually much better to take subsidies away than to add more.

In particular, I would remove the numerous obstacles to distributed electric systems. Now, to give credit where it's due, when George W. Bush was governor of Texas, his head of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, Pat Wood, put in an excellent rule, which I call "plug and play," that says, if you're making your own power, say with solar cells on your roof, and you use an inverter from an approved list -- meaning it meets the state and national safety standards -- there's nothing else that can be required of you. You can just plug it in and start sending power back to the grid, and you don't need to ask or even tell the utility that you're doing it, because they will be fully protected by the technical standards that you’ve met. I think that ought to be a national standard.

And we ought not to discriminate against decentralized sources or against cogeneration of heat and electricity. We're one of the few industrialized countries left that makes it very hard to cogenerate heat and electricity, but if we did more of that, as is common abroad, we would save half of the fuel, carbon and cost. And we lag badly, making only 6 percent of our electricity from cogeneration or distributed renewables, while a dozen other industrial countries achieve from 16 to 50-odd percent, with higher reliability and lower cost.

In general, I would put even more emphasis on barrier-busting than on getting energy prices right. Of course we should price carbon, whether through cap-and-trade or a carbon tax. The right number is not zero. But if we get the prices right and don't enable customers to respond to price, not much will happen. And I think it's even more important to turn the obstacles to buying energy efficiency into business opportunities than to fine-tune the prices. We should of course do both, but policy tends to focus, in my view, more than it should on price and less than it should on correcting market failures. There are 60 or 80 market failures in buying energy efficiency, and each can be turned into a business opportunity. It's not easy, but it's immensely rewarding, because in the United States we know how to save half of our oil at about one-third or one-fourth of its price; half of our natural gas at less than one-fifth of its price; and three-fourths of our electricity at about one-eighth of its price. So what are we waiting for? We're the people we've been waiting for.

JL: So, really it seems that you just favor an approach helping people make more and smarter decisions for themselves.

Yes, subject to realizing that people have other things going on in their lives and can't afford the time or other hassle of becoming an efficiency expert, so efficiency needs to pervade what business offers in the market. It's not more difficult than doing things inefficiently, but changing the technologies on offer does require relentless patience, meticulous attention to detail, and fearlessness. And none of those is a very common trait.

The cornucopia of efficiency is real, but it's the manual model: we actually have to go turn the crank. It's not easy, but it's easier than not doing it. And if we do get serious about using energy in a way that saves money, some big problems like oil dependence, climate change, and the spread of nuclear weapons will go away, not at a cost but at a profit, because efficiency is cheaper than fuel. That's a prize worth working hard to capture.

Image source: RMI Smart Garage Charrette Report

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Columns at 10:50 AM)

Worldchanging Interview: Amory Lovins

Julia Levitt — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:50:47 +0000

In short, Lovins is just the person to talk to if you're in the business of envisioning a bright green future. I spoke with Lovins earlier this month about the search for elegant solutions:

JL: What would that society look like?

JL: So you think that the vision of a 1,000- to 2,000-watt lifestyle would look pretty similar to how we're living now.

It can if we design it that way.

JL: How long do you think it would take to build a carbon-neutral prosperity in America?

JL: What is the most promising energy technology that you think remains unfairly obscure?

AL: Smart Garage is our shorthand for arrangements that will let electrified vehicles, buildings, and the electric grid exchange information and energy to mutual advantage.

There are many more details to answer this question posted in the Smart Garage Summit report at move.rmi.org.

JL: So, really it seems that you just favor an approach helping people make more and smarter decisions for themselves.

Image source: RMI Smart Garage Charrette Report

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Columns at 10:50 AM)

Artists, Foreclosures and the Ruins of the Unsustainable

Julia Levitt — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:40:54 +0000

I've been waiting for a story like this to pop up, so when I heard it on the radio yesterday I geeked out a bit. As NPR's Jennifer Guerra reports, artists in Detroit are buying up foreclosed properties and turning them into cultural havens. In the crumbling Motor City, Mitch and Gina Cope have been purchasing ailing properties at rock-bottom prices, and are encouraging other artists to do the same.

That part isn't shocking; rather, it was just a matter of time until a really good example showed up. Artist communities are known for reinventing downtrodden neighborhoods the world over; in fact, the phenomenon of artists-come-in, neighborhood-becomes-hot, prices-go-up, artists-forced-out is so familiar now that what's happening in Detroit can be seen as something like the larval stage of neighborhood development. But Guerra uncovered a development that hadn't even occurred to me:

Then [Mitch and Gina Cope] set their sights on the foreclosed house down the street — a working class, wood frame, single family house that was listed for sale for $1,900. The house had been trashed by scrappers who stole everything, including the copper plumbing, radiators and electrical lines. Still, they decided to buy it and turn it into what Cope calls the "Power House Project."

"Our idea — instead of putting it all back and connecting to the grid, we wanted to keep it off the grid and get enough solar and wind turbines and batteries to power this house and power the next-door house," [Mitch] Cope says.

Although it is small consolation in the face of overwhelming economic strife in Detroit and elsewhere as the foreclosure crisis continues, this story gave me a real feeling of hope and renewal. To me, this example and other corresponding cases – like the artist-driven re-imaginings of shopping malls and big box stores seems symbolic of an even larger cultural shift. The arts community isn't just moving into one downtrodden urban neighborhood; rather, they're taking on the ruins of the unsustainable. They're taking on big box stores, shopping malls, and grid-connected homes in the car capitol of North America. And they're not just creating new art. They're seizing the opportunity to turn old shells of buildings into independent, renewable energy-powered, 21st century-ready spaces.

What I'm most eager to hear next is that creative pioneers are conquering McMansions in the suburban hintersprawl. As Bryan Walsh wrote recently for Time Magazine, "The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (on one-sixth of an acre [675 sq m] or more) in the U.S."

Will subdivisions be turned into workshops and performance spaces? Or possibly into small-scale agricultural communities, or enclaves for artisan food-production? At the very least, will they become denser, transit-connected and less car-dependent ... and what will drive that?

The future of North American suburbia is a question on everyone's lips these days, but I have yet to hear a truly beautiful, bright green answer. If you have one, please share it below.

Photo credit: Jennifer Guerra

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Columns at 11:40 AM)

Artists, Foreclosures and the Ruins of the Unsustainable

Julia Levitt — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:40:54 +0000

Then [Mitch and Gina Cope] set their sights on the foreclosed house down the street — a working class, wood frame, single family house that was listed for sale for $1,900. The house had been trashed by scrappers who stole everything, including the copper plumbing, radiators and electrical lines. Still, they decided to buy it and turn it into what Cope calls the "Power House Project."

The future of North American suburbia is a question on everyone's lips these days, but I have yet to hear a truly beautiful, bright green answer. If you have one, please share it below.

Photo credit: Jennifer Guerra

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Columns at 11:40 AM)

Graphic Series: Earthly Ideas, Ocean Harvester

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:50:06 +0000

This week's cartoon describes the Ocean Harvester, a device designed to help capture clean energy from ocean waves. You can read more about the Ocean Harvester in Tyler Seed's article, Harvesting the Ocean: A New Approach to Wave Energy Conversion. Read our most recent posts about other wave-power initiatives in Andy Lubershane's earlier comic on wave power, or Serena Batten's post, Green Tech Watch: Principle Power.

Click image to enlarge

Andy Lubershane researches, writes and cartoons about sustainability from his home in Boston. Check out more of his illustrations here

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 3:50 PM)

Training the Green Collar Workforce: A Role for Community Colleges

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:00:55 +0000

By Xarissa Holdaway

President Obama's appointment of Van Jones’s as Green Jobs Adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Quality seems startlingly à propos, especially on the heels of Power Shift ’09, — a major youth campaign which demanded, among other things, green jobs. In light of federally funded job-creation initiatives, a rumored shift in the U.S. economy as a whole, and louder-than-ever support for new green infrastructure, the timing couldn’t be better for paying more attention to how a green economy really works.

Political support is only the beginning. A key issue will be sourcing the workers that can produce and manage clean energy. Many fields require more boots on the ground per kWh than fossil energy sources. For example, in 2008 the number of workers employed in the US wind industry jumped to 85,000, surpassing the 81,000 currently needed to mine coal, even though wind power currently provides only a fraction of the electricity in the US that coal does. According to this University of Massachusetts study, (PDF) investing in projects such as wind power and mass transit creates three to four times more jobs than the same spending directed towards the coal industry.

And training these workers is more complicated than pointing Joe the Plumber towards a solar water heater. The National Council for Workforce Education, in a recent report with the Academy for Educational Development titled Going Green: The Vital Role of Community Colleges in Building a Sustainable Future and Green Workforce (PDF), points out:

[M]any jobs that are currently, or predicted to be, in demand are ‘middle-skilled’ jobs that require more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree. It is important to note that although there will be a growing number of new green occupations requiring new knowledge, skills, and abilities, it is expected that the majority will be transformed from existing jobs, requiring a redefinition of skill sets, methods, and occupational profiles.

The report goes on to say that community colleges are an ideal place to begin offering such training, since existing vocational programs can be modified, rather than starting from scratch. Fast-growing fields such as energy efficiency, renewable energy and alternative fuels are particularly unable to wait for the development of entirely new programs. Courses already exist at several US schools, including Santa Fe Community College, Great Basin College, Cuyahoga Community College, Central Carolina Community College, and Lansing Community College.

“Community colleges fill a very different role than the other higher education institutions,” says Jay Antle, Sustainability Committee Chair at Johnson County Community College. “The real difference is that the research institutions are inventing and perfecting the technology that community college-trained workers will install and service.”

So, where will the money to fund these training programs come from? As much as $75 billion of the new stimulus bill has implications for the higher education sector, in areas like campus renovations, student loans, federal work-study programs, technology and climate research. Four billion is earmarked for job training. Another $500 million was allocated to the Department of Labor for green jobs education and training, though none of it was set aside specifically for community colleges (though it looks like the DOL may end up granting some to those who apply).

In order to make the most of the limited funds, community colleges are finding creative opportunities to collaborate. A joint project of San Francisco Bay community colleges called the New Energy Workforce (NEW) Initiative has found that cooperation with local workforce boards and each other increases their ability to respond to trends in clean and green technology. In concert, they are launching coordinated courses in photovoltaics and energy management, expanding offerings in renewable energy, and providing “Train-the-Trainer” courses for instructors at other schools.

Department of Labor resources will primarily be coming through local Workforce Investment Boards (WIB), says Kitty O'Doherty, convener of the NEW Initiative. "There are roughly 13 WIBs in our region, and they oversee the operation of one-stop career centers, using Department of Labor funds to provide a variety of career services, including job training, to unemployed and recently laid off adults as well as youth."

As community colleges coordinate with the local workforce boards, they are better able to predict local employment opportunities. Available energy from wind, solar and geothermal sources varies according to location, and regional networks are more likely to have connections to area employers and estimate training needs.

For example, Centers of Excellence hosted at City College of San Francisco and West Valley College conducted a study in 2008 on Bay Area solar sectors, finding that there was a growing demand for photovoltaic panel installers, solar thermal installers and professionals in photovoltaic sales and marketing. Some fields, like photovoltaic installation, were projected to grow as much as 56 percent in the next 12 months. It was the perfect place for the NEW Initiative to step in.

“When we saw the need [for PV solar technicians], we turned our attention to it immediately,” says O’Doherty. “DeAnza College led the way in securing a grant to fund the effort; Cabrillo and San Jose City Colleges capitalized on existing infrastructure to quickly develop and offer new courses; seasoned faculty at Diablo Valley College hosted a train-the-trainer event to jumpstart both the Cabrillo and San Jose City College courses as well as five others in the region. We can be fast at figuring out which colleges are best positioned for each need; work to meet it; and all the while ensure we don't over-saturate the market.”

She goes on: “This is a call for new levels of collaboration. We convened the Workforce Investment Boards and the colleges in our region in February, and both groups are extremely committed. They [WIBs] are going to have the funding to place people in these jobs, and we're going to have the training. The common mission of preparing individuals for meaningful careers and creating a well-qualified workforce for our region is a very compelling motivator.”

Xarissa Holdaway blogs for the Campus Ecology program at National Wildlife Federation and edits ClimateEdu, an email newsletter for colleges and universities.

Photo: Lindsay Randall, Environmental Sustinability Coordinator at Purchase College, advocates for green jobs at the Capitol during PowerShift '09.
Photo credit: Xarissa Holdaway

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 5:00 PM)

Training the Green Collar Workforce: A Role for Community Colleges

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:00:55 +0000

By Xarissa Holdaway

[M]any jobs that are currently, or predicted to be, in demand are ‘middle-skilled’ jobs that require more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree. It is important to note that although there will be a growing number of new green occupations requiring new knowledge, skills, and abilities, it is expected that the majority will be transformed from existing jobs, requiring a redefinition of skill sets, methods, and occupational profiles.

Photo: Lindsay Randall, Environmental Sustinability Coordinator at Purchase College, advocates for green jobs at the Capitol during PowerShift '09.
Photo credit: Xarissa Holdaway

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 5:00 PM)

Too Big to Fail? Think Again.

Alex Steffen — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 07:22:54 +0000

Clay Shirky, makes an excellent point about the collapse of newspapers, which could just as easily apply to a host of other North American industries that are so unwilling to even consider the possibility that times have changed that they've entered a period of surreality:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

A whole host of North American industries have allowed fabulists to set their agendas for resisting reform: sprawl developers, auto manufacturers, coal-dependent power companies and cattle feed lots.

What they refuse to see is that a business model is not a mandate. People still want good stories and quality information today, just as they will want housing, mobility, energy and food tomorrow: the newspaper is still a doomed model.

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift.

You could very easily rewrite the last sentence to read "the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational model of American industry, as a general-purpose vehicle for delivering prosperity, was basically sound, and only needed a sustainability facelift" and it would ring just as true.

The single biggest delusion in North America today is that the interconnected planetary problems bearing down on us can be faced with slight alterations to the current order; that a model of delivery prosperity based on suburbs and big cars and consumerism and profligate energy use and the careless spewing of pollution in all directions can be fixed through the swapping out of some of its constituent parts for slightly greener parts -- that green-built McMansions and hybrid cars and compact fluorescent light bulbs will prop the model up indefinitely. They won't, because we are in a situation where incremental reform has already been made meaningless by a revolution in context, and industry CEOs who demand incredulously to know how we're going to run an economy if car-dependent, high-consumption suburban lifestyles go away would do well to understand what Clay is saying here:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

We're moving more and more quickly into a period of rapid transformation. We could be embracing that change and setting out to build the next smart, bright green economy. Instead, we allow ourselves to be deceived into thinking that the current models are "too big to fail." They're not, and the longer we listen, the more epic the failure will be.

Photo credit: flickr/jmtimages, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 11:22 PM)

Worldchanging Interview: Ethan Schaffer on Powershift 2009

Sarah Kuck — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:36:03 +0000

Last week, I caught up with Worldchanging ally Ethan Schaffer, Director of Major Gifts and Grants at Northwest-based nonprofit Climate Solutions, to talk about his recent participation in Power Shift 2009. The epic event featured four days of workshops, speakers and music focused on mobilizing, networking, learning, teaching and lobbying congress to make real progress on global warming. More than 12,000 people attended the event, which organizers are calling the largest gathering of U.S. youth climate activists in history.

Schaffer attended with coworker Bonnie Hemphill on behalf of Climate Solutions to talk with congressmen and senators from the Northwest Delegation to encourage them to support bold climate action. Scores of young people lobbied alongside them, many stepping onto Capitol Hill for the first time.

Between training some of the nearly 6,000 people who volunteered to lobby their representatives and talking to people about solutions to climate change, Schaffer managed to attended a few of the event's keynote speeches and workshops, which he called inspiring and exciting.

“It was more like a rock concert than some sort of policy wonk briefing,” Schaffer said. “Plus the energy was very different with a new administration in office. We could feel palpable support from the Obama administration.”

Sarah Kuck: What was unique about Power Shift 2009 for you?

Ethan Schaffer: For me I think it was amazing to see so many youth excited about this issue in such a big way. Each person there, each one of the 12,000, represented an entire group that couldn’t make it for travel or time reasons, and just in the past few years even from the time when I was in school, it’s grown so much. The interest has grown so much.

SK: What was the most informative or inspiring part of the weekend for you?

ES: I was running around and meeting with folks a lot, but I did get to attend a few workshops. And all day Sunday, I was leading lobby day trainings to get people ready for the lobby day. We broke up 6,000 people into teams of eight, then we prepared teams to go into meetings with representatives. We went over things like talking points, who would talk when and what they would each say, and helped get them ready.

SK: So what was it like training 6,000 young people?

ES: It was fun. Most of the people had never been in on a meeting with their representative, so they were pretty nervous, and asking lots of questions. But they were really eager and energetic. It really felt empowering, like we were helping to impart important political skills that they could end up using for the rest of their lives to make an impact on government and the world.

SK: What’s the benefit of being involved with a lobby day, especially a climate action-focused one?

ES: This was the biggest lobby day ever, for any thing, for any issue.

It’s incredibly important. I think anybody working on any issue knows that it’s important to be in front of your representative. As constituents, as people who got them elected, it’s important to let them know what you think. And it’s especially important right now with young people, since young people have so much political power. It’s really arguable that youth put Obama into the office and changed the entire administration. It was that same youthful energy and campaign tactics and really the large percentage of the voting block. And that was really a theme throughout Power Shift: The youth were exercising their political will. And making sure that the representatives know that this is something that they are really concerned about. And particularly I think climate change is the type of issue that will affect the youth more. The youth are going to be around longer on the planet to witness the effects of climate change -- beyond what we are already seeing now.

SK: What were some of your favorite solutions or big ideas that were presented?

ES: The biggest one on the table is whatever this new climate bill coming down the line is, some kind of market-based cap and trade system. That’s the biggest solution. Will need a number of solutions under that.

I think Van Jones and his push for more green jobs and investment in the green economy, is also very exciting; Investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency that will create more jobs.

They announced that Obama released his recommendation to shut down the Yucca Mountain site. So it was exciting to see the climate community coming together against the other impacts around energy like clean coal and nuclear...They are realizing that those things are related and they are making the connection.

SK: Did the young people show any sense of frustration about the economy?

ES: I think there was a lot of talk and energy around the need to use climate change and energy efficiency to drive the economy. The solutions to climate change are the solutions to the economic crisis; I heard that theme throughout the conference. And for the most part, the participants seemed very optimistic about the future. They see addressing climate change as very positive for the economy.

SK: What was the big take away message for you? Have you brought back any lessons that you are going to either share with your community or turn into action?

ES: One thing that stood out at the Power Shift conference was the presence of new media. The entire time. I’ve never seen such a full embrace of new media. Even the conference schedule -- they printed it well before they knew what rooms and things were going to be taking place in, there had to be some room shuffling, there were so many events and stuff to set up. In the conference schedule they didn’t have room numbers assigned, they just had a number where you text message and it would automatically text message back where the most recent update of where the room was. And then you could subscribe to all sorts of text feeds and they would update you with the things that were happening, and then if there were any special surprises, you get a text message. The whole thing was run by text. And then, you know, they had live Twitter Feeds and everyday they had YouTube videos, and you could share photos on Flickr, and they were doing live video of all the keynotes so you could watch them from anywhere in the country.

SK: The focus of the conference seemed to be teaching young people how to take a stand in government. How do you think government will be different 10 years from now?

ES: Obama's administration is going to have a revolutionary effect on government in general, just for instance, in how they utilize new media. It’s really not just coming from the administration, it’s coming from the youth who are influencing the administration. I think almost the entire Obama new media team was at Power Shift, and they were all in their early 20s, and they are all taking positions in the various departments inside the government now, and they are setting up all sort of more interactive new media websites for the actual departments. For instance, Ken Salazar mentioned that the Department of the Interior is going to launch a new website that will be like nothing we’ve ever seen before that will completely integrate all the new media and social networking functions. I think we are going to start to see a lot more youth participation in government and opportunities to engage and have our voices heard.

Those tools open up the possibility for new participatory democracy.

SK: Will your organization send you back? Will there be a Power Shift 2010?

ES: I know they don’t want to lose the momentum. But a lot of work goes into an event like this. I think the realistic next steps will be a push for some form of climate legislation in 2009. So, everybody who met with their representatives delivered a request to meet once the representatives are back in district, keep talking to them, keep the pressure on, and keep including more and more of our friends into the movement. So we can keep the pressure on to get the climate legislation passed so that they can bring that to Copenhagen and really negotiate an international treaty that will be a real solution.

A number of workshops specifically focused on Copenhagen and the international agreements, but I think also everyone recognizes that the first step is to show that the U.S. has some serious commitments, and that will give us bargaining power at the international level.

SK: Did you get a sense that the youth came to the table with a strong understanding of the issues?

ES: There were people there who were just learning about things for the first time, but the majority were pretty well versed in the issues, and I was just blown away by the level of sophistication and understanding -- often times well beyond of what my understanding – either of the policy, of the actual solutions or technologies, things like that -- people are really into this.

Image credit: Flickr/Powershift 09, Shadia Fayne Wood

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Columns at 5:36 PM)