A traveling exhibition about the sounds and songs of life
In 2009, Miley Cyrus reportedly made an astonishing 25 million dollars. Most of that money came from album sales, which were reported to be slightly over 4 million during that year. Four million…Four million?! Have you heard Miley Cyrus sing? Are there really four million kids out there willing to spend their hard-earned babysitting money on a Miley Cyrus album because they deeply love listening to her sing? Well, according to the findings of a study recently published in Neuroimage, selling four million albums does not translate to having four million people like your music. The study reports that there is good reason to believe that a lot of those purchases were made out of fear -- a fear well known to adolescents all over America: terror of social rejection.
[More]The ambient noise of common machines and the unexpected sounds that come from familiar objects have been a part of music for some time, but over the last fifteen years French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has been joining the two, using instruments and objects to construct complex, apparently self-sufficient systems that play music without any beginnings, endings, or performers. Videodrones (2001) isolates and amplifies the hum that all video signals make when hooked into audio systems. From Here to Ear (1999) now showing at the Barbican in London, is an aviary that resonates when its finches alight on electric guitars. In Harmonichaos, which was on view at Paula Cooper Gallery until this weekend, Boursier-Mougenot affixes the grooves of harmonicas to the mouths of vacuum cleaners, and the staggered grid of thirteen pairs produces an undulating, reedy drone.
The set-up of Harmonichaos could only be the product of a playful mind, even though its appearance deflects suggestions of human involvement. Both the vacuums and harmonicas have an assembly-line sameness, and while they perform according to design, their functions have been diverted away from the needs for clean homes and entertaining song that they were intended to meet. As a viewer and listener, you're made to feel like a confused outsider: a system of switches modulates the intensity of the air flow, as well as the sound emanating from the vacuum cleaners, but it's nearly impossible to identify the source of these fluctuations. False clues are sent by a randomized blinking of bulbs on the vacuums' bodies. As usual, Boursier-Mougenot brings a sense of humor to his work, from the irony of the hokey harmonica becoming eerie when forced to drone (like the accordion in the music of Pauline Oliveros) to the punning title. He finds both harmony and chaos in the harmonica's name, and the unlikely pairing of the vacuums and harmonicas mirrors the forcible verbal junction of two incongruous elements. While the vacuum is missing from the title, this, too could be seen to figure in the artist's wordplay, given the vacuum's double meaning as both a void and a device that operates by creating a partial one. Bouriser-Mougenot's combination of domestic and folksy objects is an eccentric, room-sized model of the universe--one that exaggerates the invisible friction of matter and its absence by making it more plaintively and strangely audible.
You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of
course. So daylight-saving time remains as absurdly named as it ever
was.
The general pointlessness of DST was the subject of a Rachel Maddow
interview Friday (video below) with the author of a whole book (!) on
the subject.
What’s germane here is that DST saves about as much energy as light,
according to most studies. In fact, a 2008 study found DST “may actually waste energy”:
Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties
set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the
fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because
farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the
morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of
sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed
upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving
time beginning in the spring of 2006.
Indiana’s change of heart gave University of
California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D.
student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects
energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from
Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern
Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption
before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time.
Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time
provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in
weather from one year to the next.
Their finding: Having the entire state switch to
daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time,
costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity
bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons
during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher
air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on
cool mornings.
“I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as
this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau
of Economic Research conference this month.
A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the
temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories
for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases
energy use.
The Kotchen and Grant NBER paper is here. It concludes:
We also estimate social costs of increased pollution
emissions that range from $1.7 to $5.5 million per year. Finally, we
argue that the effect is likely to be even stronger in other regions of
the United States ...
There are nevertheless several reasons we might infer that DST
increases electricity demand across a much broader area. First,
existing simulations suggest that DST increases electricity consumption
on average over 224 different locations throughout the United States
(Rock 1997). Our results also corroborate the results of such
simulation exercises. Second, even when prior research finds little or
no electricity savings from DST in the United States, the effect is
smaller in more southern regions (DOE 2006). Finally, the fact that we
identify the underlying tradeoff between artificial illumi- nation and
primarily air-conditioning suggests that the DST effect that we
estimate is likely to be even stronger in the more populated, southern
regions of the Unites States. Further south, the days are shorter
during the summer, meaning that decreases in electrical use from
lighting are likely to be smaller, and air conditioning is more common
and intensively used, meaning that increases in electricity for cooling
are likely to be bigger.
In “13 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Daylight-Saving Time,” U.S News notes:
Daylight-saving time was first used during World War I,
as part of an effort in the United States and other warring countries
to conserve fuel. In theory, using daylight more efficiently saves fuel
and energy because it reduces the nation’s need for artificial light.
An Australian study concluded “These results suggest that current plans and proposals to extend DST will fail to conserve energy.”
Probably the best recent case for DST is from a 2008 Department of Energy report for Congress, which found DST saved a whopping .02 percent of the country’s total use in 2007. But Wikipedia lists a bunch of other studies on DST, most of which (but not all) come to a similar conclusion as the Australia study.
DST’s general inanity is clear in this Rachel Maddow interview of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight-Saving Time:
U.S. News concludes, “When clocks spring forward, people lose sleep, have more heart attacks, and might not even save energy.”
Enjoy!
Related Links:
The other half of Kerry-Graham-Lieberman is weak too
The State of Electricity Prices
The second half could be enough to make you cry.Sens. John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman (KGL) are supposedly going to unleash their long-awaited tripartisan climate/energy bill soon. Based on the (extremely tentative) information that’s gotten out so far, it looks like it will implement some sort of cap-and-trade system for electric utilities, levy a carbon tax on transportation, return some level of dividends to consumers, and delay any cap on industrial facilities for an as-yet undetermined period of time.
That’s the carbon-pricing piece, anyway, which has been the subject of most political dispute. Said Kerry, “What’s the mechanism for pricing carbon is the real key here. That’s what we’re trying to figure out, is how we do that in the most effective way.” By “most effective” of course he means able to garner 60 votes, which is no mean feat given that the only road-tested, economically credible, bipartisan carbon-pricing policy—economy-wide cap-and-trade—has been poisoned in the Senate.
For a moment, though, let’s peel our eyes from the shiny carbon-pricing bauble. Carbon pricing is only one aspect of climate policy, and not necessarily the most important. Recall that carbon pricing was only about a third of the American Clean Energy and Security Act that passed the House. Substantial parts of that bill were devoted to directly supporting clean energy and boosting energy efficiency. In many ways they were the best parts of the bill.
Thanks to the energy-efficiency provisions, consumer spending on utility bills would go down by 7 percent by 2020. That’s right: on average, Americans would pay less for electricity, not more. The cap-and-trade program would reduce emissions 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, but, according to a study (PDF) by the World Resources Institute, when all complementary policies are taken into account, that target more than doubles, to 33 percent. That’s 18 percent more—even without the cap, enough to meet Obama’s Copenhagen target of 17 percent by 2020. [UPDATE: Ah, crap. The preceding paragraph makes a dumb mistake I’ve made (and corrected!) before. It’s not the efficiency and RPS provisions in ACES that will produce the additional reductions; they produce no reductions above and beyond the CO2 cap, as our own Ken Johnson is fond of pointing out. The complementary policies that produce additional reductions are the command-and-control caps on other GHGs, like methane. More on this tomorrow.]
So it’s worth asking what “complementary policies” will be in the KGL bill. Remarkably little has been said on that subject. The default assumption, as far as I can tell, is that the complement will be the American Clean Energy Leadership Act, which Sen. Jeff Bingaman’s Energy & Natural Resources Committee passed last year. The senators who have made reference to an “energy-only” bill, which they argue would be easier to pass than a comprehensive bill, are generally referring to ACELA.
So, what’s with ACELA? Does it stand up to the complementary policies in ACES?
No. It’s important to state this bluntly: ACELA sucks. As a standalone bill, it does virtually nothing for renewables, boosts efficiency a middling amount, and dumps a bonanza of subsidies on offshore drilling, nuclear power, tar sands, oil shale, and natural gas. It also weakens the Renewable Fuel Standard. It’s a minor deviation from the awful energy status quo and would be a depressing end indeed to the year-long Obama-era effort to finally address America’s energy problems.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (PDF), ACELA would increase the deficit by $13.5 billion by 2020. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (PDF), the renewable energy standard in ACELA would require less clean energy than is expected under business as usual. According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (PDF), the efficiency provisions in ACELA would save half as much energy by 2020, and a third as much by 2030, as ACES. In exchange for these wan gestures at clean energy, it dumps billions on dirty energy incumbents.
If KGL’s carbon pricing is as weak as it sounds, and it’s coupled with ACELA, the result will be nothing short of dismal. If the carbon pricing portion falls out and we’re left with “energy-only” ACELA, the result will be even more dismal.
Is there a way to avoid this train wreck? Some kind of third option that can vouchsafe the 2020 targets Obama pledged in Copenhagen while effectively postponing the “comprehensive bill” question for a time when the political climate is more fortuitous (say, right after Harry Reid reforms the filibuster)? I’ll look into that tomorrow.
Related Links:
Daylight-saving time doesn’t save energy
How many Venezuelan soldiers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Home of the Brave is a 1986 American concert film featuring the music of Laurie Anderson, who also directed the movie. The film's full on-screen title is Home of the Brave: A Film by Laurie Anderson. The performances were filmed in Brooklyn during the summer of 1985.
-- FROM THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY FOR "HOME OF THE BRAVE"The Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) is offering an award to artists (fine art, media, architecture, design, music, theatre, visual communication etc.) and scientists who work between the arts and sciences. Prize-winners will receive 7,500 euros which can be used in the realization of projects, or projects that are already underway. For more information or to apply, visit the original call here.
Valerie CaseyAUSTIN, Texas—Techno-hip trend-setters that design online services, software, buildings, and other components of modern life were told Sunday to “get off the sidelines” and start saving the planet. Designers Accord founder Valerie Casey issued the rallying cry at a South by Southwest (SXSW) gathering considered “spring break for geeks” and a mecca for those that deftly wield Internet Age tools.
“Despite the fact that the interactive community has been virtually absent in the talk of sustainability, almost to the point of complicity, it is that community which will take the lead,” Casey said in a keynote presentation. “We don’t have the luxury of deciding whether we want to do this.”
Designers Accord was established in June of 2007 with a stated mission of changing the way the creative community does business. Casey referred to the credo inked by the group as a “Kyoto Treaty” for the creative community. The agreement sets a philosophical framework for factoring climate change and humanitarian concerns into designs from urban developments to web-based applications.
“We started an accord which could look at design with optimism and creativity rather than doom and gloom that paralyzes,” Casey said. “We have to do it as a collective.”
The movement has grown to include firms and schools in 100 countries on six continents. Among the group’s projects is setting ecological performance standards for buildings.
“The creative community designs systems, and systems effect how things come out,” Casey said. “Everyone in this room creates the strategies and designs shaping the global community. It is powerful.”
“What would happen if our purpose was oriented toward cultural sustainability instead of profits?” Casey asked rhetorically. “What if social media was about social impact? This is the time to make change.”
SXSW launched more than 20 years ago as a premier annual event for new music and has grown to also be a showcase for fresh independent films and innovative internet technologies such as Twitter, Foursquare, and Gowalla.
Related Links:
Adding iron to sea boosts deadly neurotoxin, study finds
Seedy tactics in Iowa and Norway in the news this week
The Climate Post: Uptick in denialism halts glacier melt, lowers sea levels
Send your question to Umbra!
Q. Dear Umbra,
I work
in an office that is fairly environmentally conscious. However, we have a
coworker who religiously sprays keyboard cleaner. How do I confront my coworker
without sounding like an eco-turd? I’m just not thrilled about becoming
infertile or dying.
Suffocating
in Seattle
A. Dearest Suffocating,
Is she spraying it into her mouth? Or
worse yet, into your mouth? Is your coworker’s name Allison the Huffer? One of
my fellow Gristies told me about an episode of A&E’s Intervention—I haven’t the stomach for that stuff myself—in which Allison the Huffer enjoyed getting high by spraying keyboard cleaner
into her mouth.
But I digress. Let’s say that your coworker is
spraying this cleaner only on his/her computer keyboard. Allow me to arm you
with a little info-ammunition before you start your crusade.
While aerosol keyboard sprays may be
labeled “canned air,” they are
rarely just that (desperately trying not to use a “full of hot air” pun). Here’s
the chemical soup nozzled straight at your nostrils:
OK, time to chat with your
coworker. Might I suggest making cookies first and approaching your comrade’s
desk with baked goods in-hand? These will surely distract him/her from the
daily cleaning ritual momentarily. Then, after having carefully memorized the
above treatise on the ills of these spray cleaners, explain to your colleague
that you’re simply concerned for his/her well-being as well as that of the rest
of the office and Mother Earth. Casually pick up the keyboard cleaner—no
sudden movements—and offer to take care of handing over the offending can to
your local hazardous waste peeps (if your colleague reaches for the can, turn
his/her attention back to the plate of cookies).
Then suggest these much cleaner
cleaning options for your tidy officemate. First the simple approach: Turn your
keyboard over and give it a gentle shake over a trashcan to get any crumbs and
debris out
However, since I’ve read that our
keyboards may actually harbor more potentially harmful bacteria than a toilet
seat (‘scuse me while I go wash my hands), a deeper clean may be in order.
And would you believe I just flipped open a copy of InStyle magazine (choice dentist office reading), which
actually clued me in on how to do just that: Spray a mix of Dr. Bronner’s soap and water on a
microfiber cloth and gently wipe the keys. A Q-tip dipped in alcohol can clean
between the keys, and a makeup brush (or reusable keyboard brush for the makeup
brush-less) removes crumbs—perhaps remnants of those cookies you kindly
baked.
Qwertyly,
Umbra
Q. Dear Umbra,
We’re
considering the purchase of a small, electrically powered, automatic composter;
this one is made by NatureMill, but I
imagine there are other brands. I know composting is good, but is this a good
idea?
Donnie
D.
Highland
Park
A. Dearest Donnie,
Would that be Highland Park, Ill., or
Highland Park, Texas? How can I make appropriate mentions of your state song,
state flower, or license plate motto?
Anywho, ah, composting—one of my
very favorite topics. So obvs, Donnie, you’re on board with wanting to compost,
but for those who don’t know, here’s the deal on why you should: An estimated
13 percent of the nation’s trash is food. And keeping food out of landfills is
important, because when it’s in there cut off from air, food releases methane,
a potent greenhouse gas, as it breaks down.
What is it that appeals to you about
an automatic composter like NatureMill’s? Perhaps you live in a small urban
space, in which case, allow me to clue you into some less expensive (NatureMill
models run from $300–$400) options presented delightfully in my video on composting:
vermicomposting (read: worms!) or countertop composting, in which you just get
the composting party started in a small, odor-containing vessel.
Maybe you like the quick
food-scraps-turned-compost time that the automatic composter offers. I will
say, it’s pretty sweet that in just two weeks time you can get fresh compost
with these babies. And despite the fact that an automatic composter is just
more stuff, it does potentially
make it possible for people who might not be on the composting train (those who
don’t want to live with worms, peeps without a yard, folks without a place to
dump their countertop composting) to jump on board. And I will say that
NatureMill’s composters only require 5 kwh/month, about the same as a typical
nightlight—it uses the compost’s heat to drive the reaction. Plus, they’re
made from recycled and recyclable polypropylene, food-grade stainless steel,
and are meant to last several years. So as far as stuff goes, I’d say it’s not too shabby (aside from that
killer price tag—ouch).
Nitrogen-richly,
Umbra
The new Ask
Umbra’s Book Club has launched and reading is underway. I’ve been getting
lots of great feedback about potential books, discussion points, and our first
book, Possum
Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and With (Almost) No Money, and wanted
to share one of them from Bart A.
One of my favorite books ever. I
picked up a copy in a used book store maybe 25 years ago and was inspired by it
ever since. I didn’t do all the things that Dolly and her father did, but their
devil-may-care, to-hell-with-respectability attitudes were infectious.
I always wondered what happened to Dolly. In
fact I wondered if she were real or not. I found it hard to believe that an
18-year-old wrote such a great book.
I’m delighted to see that she is a real person and made her life in the mainstream culture.
Hooray Dolly for going public, and hooray for Tin House Books for reprinting
the book.
Bart A.
A. Dearest Bart,
Hooray indeed! I’m excited to begin
breaking it down on April 6. It’ll be a bulletin-board-style discussion, so you
can pop in and out and give comments, feedback, and questions as they come to
you. And for those that haven’t started reading yet, you’ve still got time—it’s a quick read. If you have books that you think would be a good fit for the
club, hit me up in the comments below.
Bookishly,
Umbra
Related Links:
Ask Umbra’s pearls of wisdom on sleeping
Garden Girl TV: Raised beds in the city
Ask Umbra visits the Fixers’ Collective [VIDEO]
Representative Baird. There aren’t many psychologists in Congress (though many members could probably use one), so Rep. Brian Baird (D) brings a unique perspective. He has a PhD in clinical psychology and published two books in the field before coming to D.C. to deal with dysfunctions of a different sort. He has represented Washington’s 3rd congressional district for 12 years, but after this year, he’s calling it quits and heading back home.
Before he retires, he hopes to help his colleagues understand the critical role that human behavior can play in reducing energy use. To change the way Americans use energy, he argues, we need to better understand how they make decisions. Hint: It’s not just about money.
I chatted with Baird about energy use and behavioral psychology last week.
———
Q. Last year you introduced a bill, HR 3247, that would create a program at the Department of Energy to study the application of behavioral sciences to energy policy. What happened to it?
A. Colleagues on the other side of the aisle began to speculate that it was a secret plot for mind control of the American people. [Rep.] Dana Rohrabacher [R-Calif.] went on Glenn Beck and misrepresented the bill. He said it contains words like “behavior modification.” It does not—you can’t find it in the bill.
On one hand, the argument was, why do we need to do social science research at all? Everybody knows it’s just a matter of economics. Everybody acts rationally. Social science can’t teach us anything new. The same people then said, “This sounds like mind control!” On one hand it doesn’t have anything to offer, and on the other hand it’s so powerful we can control people’s minds.
A [Northwest Energy Efficiency Taskforce] report [PDF] recommended precisely what this bill would have done, which is place much greater attention on behavioral and social factors in our analysis of how we could conserve energy. Anybody who’s followed recent economic theory, or Dan Kahneman‘s Nobel Prize in economics, knows that people are in fact not rational, and understanding those irrationalities helps us craft both our economic and our energy policies. But that seemed to be lost on our colleagues.
Q. What ultimately happened to the bill?
A. [The House Science and Technology Committee] actually passed it, but it has not been brought to the floor. The hope is that if we actually have an energy bill, some of these issues might be incorporated in that rather than as a freestanding bill.
Whether or not the bill makes it to the floor, people in the Department of Energy understand the importance of this and are already beginning to incorporate it. [Energy Secretary] Steven Chu testified before our committee [on March 3] on budget issues and acknowledged the importance of social science. I just spoke today [March 10], literally an hour ago, at a hearing with the EPA; we asked them about behavioral science in their activities.
Understanding how we can promote behavioral change in a constructive way is actually part of what government is about. These folks who get all nervous about government behavioral control ... a speed limit sign is a form of behavioral control, you know?
Q. What do you tell constituents who say this sounds like the government trying to figure out how to manipulate and control them?
A. I say to them, thank you for sending us your address. Now we know how to locate you. [laughs]
No, we just try to reassure people. This is not government mind control. This is understanding how human beings interact with technologies, to help them save money. How do we give them information in a way that’s most useful for them?
I’ll give you an example. My gas bill gives me the year’s energy consumption, from February of last year to January of this year. But not January of last year—what I used in the comparable month. I can’t tell whether I’m doing better or worse!
Opower has taken [behavioral psychologist] Robert Cialdini‘s work and made a business model out of this; they give people meaningful information as part of their energy bill. They’ve shown a 3 percent reduction in energy consumption, just by telling people how their energy consumption compares to other people in similar houses.
Science offers ways of figuring out how to help people understand and adapt to new technologies. The example I used in our hearing, which largely fell on deaf ears on the other side, is: nobody designs a fighter plane or a spaceship or a nuclear power plant without human factors engineering. You can’t build a fighter plane without putting people in mockups to see whether they can read the dials, whether alerts make sense, whether the radar information is understandable. That’s social-behavioral research in the applied realm.
These are little, simple things about how to interact with technology. Should adjustable thermostats be pre-programmed at the store so people don’t have to worry about it? It’s not always clear on the water heater how you set the temperature. People say, ha ha, it’s obvious. Well, if it’s so obvious, and people can save money, and people are motivated by the desire to save money, why don’t they do it? The argument that it’s all economics just fails repeatedly, but people continue to make it.
Q. What’s the potential for [behavioral science work in energy policy]? Is it a marginal contributor or something bigger?
A. I’ll state it bluntly: The big debate in Copenhagen is whether we do a 17 percent reduction [in greenhouse-gas emissions] by 2020, but the evidence is clear that with relatively simple changes in our actions, we could reduce our energy consumption by 20 percent in 20 weeks.
Here’s how I would do it: get national leaders, clergy members, political leaders from both parties, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, economists, throw in some pop stars if you want, together and say, “Look, the quickest way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to save consumers money, lower the deficit, and improve the environment is to begin to save energy. Here’s how we’re going to help you do that. Every week, we’re going to have one simple, easily accomplished task. On Monday, we’re going to turn the temperature down on our water heaters slightly. Monday next week, we’re going to vacuum the cooling vents on our refrigerator. It takes about five minutes.” It doesn’t make a massive difference, but it makes a substantial difference, and nationwide, it will add up.
It would be the single quickest economic stimulus we could do for the entire country. If we saved just 10 percent in automobile use, which you could easily achieve by slight changes in driving behavior (tire inflation, obeying the speed limit), that’s $50 billion back in people’s pockets. Or you could double that by carpooling once a week; then you’ve got $100 billion.
By the way, most of the changes I’m talking about do not require you to spend any money. You don’t have to go out and buy CFLs, although that might be a bright idea (pardon the pun). You can do this just by behavioral change. I always talk up the example of taking a military shower. Most Americans take showers that are too long, too hot, and under too much water pressure. Take a military shower and you’ll use no more than 30 percent what you did on a normal shower. That’s a 70 percent savings, and no real sacrifice.
Q. How do you address the common impression that behavioral change is code for sacrifice? Carpooling seems like a hassle. Shorter showers seem like a hassle.
A. People say, “I like long, hot showers.” I understand that. Do you like passing $1.3 trillion in debt on to your kids? Do you like having them possibly enlisted in wars to go fight for foreign oil? Do you like the plausibility that by the end of the century, most coral reefs could be dissolving? Not engaging behavior change is also a sacrifice—it’s a sacrifice of our children. We are sacrificing the economy because we’re racking up deficits, partly because we spend so much on energy. We’re sacrificing the environment through ocean acidification and lethal overheating of the planet.
So the choice for me is, make relatively small and not particularly sacrificial behavioral changes or pass crippling financial debt and environmental damage on to my children. That should not be a difficult choice.
Q. Don’t you also need to change public policy and utility regulations?
A. Here’s the problem. I’ve been in Congress 12 years. I said to people several years ago, you are not going to see a cap-and-trade system pass the United States Congress. If you accept that you’re not going to get it, but you still have a problem you have to resolve, try other ways of solving it.
Q. There’s public policy outside of cap-and-trade, though.
A. One of the challenges is, too often we look at the legislative solution. Legislation is one element of a much broader effort to try to address this issue. That effort includes meeting with energy companies, talking with the administration, talking with people like yourself to try to figure out how best we can communicate this message.
If you have alternatives that don’t require an act of Congress, why not start there? Admittedly, we have a much more self-serving generation alive today than the one that responded to the Great Depression and World War II, but at the same time, I think people are willing to make sacrifices for the good of the country. Most people want to do the right thing. We just have to help communicate what the right thing is, and then also point out that in most cases, it’s in their self-interest to do it.
Q. You were part of some health-care town halls that turned contentious over the summer. And then you introduced a fairly modest bill that provoked crazy conspiracy theories. Is the sheer irrationalism of public life these days part of the reason you’re retiring?
A. No. But it makes the task of crafting responsible policy much, much more difficult. When people are so susceptible to arguments designed to inflame emotion, when politicians and interest groups are so eager to pander to that susceptibility, when politicians are afraid to take stands that confront irrationality and instead pander to it or practice it themselves, it makes it very difficult. Just two hours ago in a hearing with the EPA and NOAA, some of our Republican colleagues in the Science Committee argued that there’s no consensus whatsoever about climate change!
For three or four years, I’ve been urging everyone in the global climate debate to quit just talking about climate and start talking about ocean acidification. It’s more irrefutable and ultimately as dangerous as temperature increase. You can demonstrate it on a lab bench. You can speak to sport fishermen and explain that salmonids eat terapods. Terapods perish in acidic water. The water is getting more acidic. Wanna fish? You have to stop ocean acidification.
But everybody’s been focused on global warming, which is a bad choice of phrase anyway. It’s really global overheating. Warming is a nice thing. Overheating is a bad thing. Acid is a bad thing. People get that.
So our messaging has been bad, our strategy has been bad, and our economic arguments have largely been ineffective. One wonders why we haven’t been winning on this.
Q. Other than that, though, things are going pretty well.
A. The only saving grace is programs like ARPA-E may actually produce that game-changing technology that gets us out of this in spite of our worst intentions.
Q. You still have to know something about people and how they’ll adopt that new technology.
A. In the hearing, one of our colleagues suggested using existing natural gas lines going into people’s houses as refueling stops for natural gas-powered cars. Clever idea. But here’s a problem: we don’t think we’re going to blow up when we fill the gas tank. If people aren’t confident they can use the technology safely, then forget about it. The first guy who leaves his gas line on inadvertently and the whole neighborhood blows up, there goes your transformative technology. If you don’t take into account the behavioral aspects of that ...
That’s true of most everything we’re trying to do. Forty percent of the nation’s energy is used in buildings: lighting, heating, air-conditioning. But one of the greatest determinants of how much energy a building uses is operator characteristics, as much as building design. That’s a behavioral question. You could build the greenest building in the world—if people leave the windows open and turn the heat up too high, you’re going to have high energy use.
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I don’t make it a point to try to spot the Next Big Thing here at FMB. But sometimes the Next Big Thing just falls into my lap.
In May of this year, Kirtland Records will be releasing Suburban Nature, the debut album from Texas artist Sarah Jaffe. I recommend you mark your calendar.
The overall sound of the album is fairly familiar, the basic Lillith Fair template of female acoustic singer-songwriter. (You always need at least one in rotation, right?) The strength is in the details—an expressive voice, rich and varied instrumentation, production that’s lush without losing a live feel, and great, great songs. Over the Spring and Summer Jaffe will be opening for bands ranging from indie favorites Midlake to Starbucks favorite Norah Jones. That should give you some sense of the breadth of her appeal.
Here’s a song called “Summer Begs.”
———
Bonus FMB!
Just for kicks, here’s a song from the artist Jaffe most reminds me of: Sarah Harmer, who 10 years ago I would have told you is the Next Big Thing but who never really took off the way she should have. (According to this, she’s finally got a new album coming out in June of this year. Wo0t!) Her 2000 album You Were Here is one of my all time favorites. This song, “Open Window,” was my and my wife’s wedding song. I once pursued Harmer halfway to the women’s bathroom at a show to beg her to play it. She ended up dedicating it to “the guy in the red shirt”—that was me!
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The latest musical trend is annoying the Senate into climate action
Home Star: Creates
jobs! Slashes energy use! Saves money!
All of that was said yesterday and more, during a hearing in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
The Congressional Research Service, the Department of Energy, and a
collection of business, utility, and state advocates all testified yesterday along those lines.
Home Star is a $6 billion proposal that would create incentives for
homeowners who choose to make their homes more efficient. Silver Star
would offer rebates for individual measures like insulating your attic
or installing an efficient new furnace (capped at $3,000 but always
requiring at least a 50 percent match from homeowners), while Gold Star
creates a performance path where the homeowner and their contractor
figure out what measures to undertake, and the size of the incentive is
determined by the percent improvement of the home’s efficiency. Gold
Star incentives start at $3,000 for a 20 percent improvement and go up
$1,000 for each additional 5 percent from there
From the hearing, it sounds like we all emphatically agree – it’s a great idea. We are big supporters of the program and a member of the Home Star Coalition. But the details matter.
And there are details upon details. Arguments about AFUEs, SHGCs,
SEERs, and EERs and other esoteric concepts that most people don’t want
to know about. But these nasty acronyms are crucial to making sure
this program actually saves energy and creates jobs and doesn’t just
sell a bunch of stuff with no long term benefit. In other words, we
shouldn’t just spin our wheels.
Some of the issues came up during the hearing yesterday are crucially important.
Do we need an incentive for do-it-yourself insulation?
A tough call, since this wouldn’t create jobs in installation and
the insulation, if not installed properly, may not save energy. But,
as someone who likes to DIY whenever possible, I understand the
appeal. I think we should be able to figure out some way to make sure
the DIYers get the installation right and get the energy savings.
Should we lower all the efficiency requirements that equipment
must meet to receive incentives in Silver Star to Energy Star?
NO – and I can’t say that emphatically enough.
Just based on last years sales of Energy Star products, free ridership
(folks who would have bought these units anyway) would suck $3 billion from the program budget and no additional energy would be saved. That’s almost 90 percent of the proposed Silver Star budget! These products will be purchased, incentive or no incentive. Bad idea.
The levels currently in the bill were negotiated with industry and
advocacy groups at the table, and they thread the needle on maximum job
creation and energy savings. We should leave them where they are.
Cathy Zoi, DOE’s Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Energy, said as much in the hearing.
Should we relax the certification requirements for contractors?
I don’t think so. We need good contractors doing the work right to
actually save on energy bills. And beyond that, there are safety
implications of improper installations. Contractors who aren’t
certified but really understand how to improve a home will have no
problem getting certified. The extra business they will get as a
result of this program will more than outweigh certification costs.
Should states with existing programs play by the same rules?
Everyone wants to see Home Star build on the great work that is
happening in the states, largely as a result of the Recovery Act, but
we also need to make sure we have consistent standards and quality
assurance everywhere. Basically, you should be able to do the work,
play by the rules, and get the money whether you are in Ketchikan,
Alaska, or Miami, Florida.
These are all tricky issues, and we will see how the political
process plays out. Home Star is tantalizingly close to being the
performance-based program that will create jobs in the ailing
construction industry and make American homes much more energy
efficient that everyone wants to see. Home Star, in its current form,
hits the bulls-eye on job creation and energy savings. It would
successfully jumpstart the home retrofit industry and be the bridge to
the efficiency programs that accompany comprehensive climate and energy
legislation.
Of course, whole lot more work has to be done by Congress to make
sure that the program mechanics are right and the work can start as
soon as possible, and that is significant. Congress, President Obama,
and the broad based Home Star Coalition have worked incredibly hard to
get it this far and we will all keep pushing it forward towards the
finish line.
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Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybean seedPhoto: MonsantoThe first in a series of daylong federally sponsored workshops kicked off today in Ankeny, Iowa, to debate whether consolidation in agriculture—in particular in the seed industry—has stifled competition and harmed farmers.
While it may be much more convenient for farmers to do their one-stop seed shopping at Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta, et al—assuming they don’t mind that the selection is starting to resemble Soviet-era grocery stores—it certainly hasn’t saved them money.
In the past year, farmers have paid 32 percent more for corn seed and 24 percent for soybeans, reports the New York Times. USDA figures show that corn seed prices have risen a hefty 135 percent and soybeans 108 percent since 2001, five times the Consumer Price Index. Monsanto alone is responsible for the patented technology used in more than 90 percent of corn and 80 percent of soy grown in this country. The rising prices and the shrinking number of companies selling seeds have caught the attention of the Justice Department, which began an antitrust investigation of the industry last year, focusing on Monsanto. (Grist has been documenting the company’s shenanigans for years.)
Seeds of acrimony
At issue is whether the St. Louis-based company is using its power to keep competing technologies off the market and leave farmers no choice but to pay whatever it wants to charge. Monsanto says the rising prices are justified because the seeds now come with more bells and whistles, and the company’s lawyers argue that because Monsanto licenses its RoundupReady gene to other corporations, like DuPont, to combine into their own “stacked” seeds, its practices are not anticompetitive. Critics say the licensing agreements are overly restrictive and often worded in such a way as to compel the licensee to sell Monsanto’s traits over those of competitors.
It’s possible that the company’s patents may trump antitrust law, suggests a Bloomberg article today, citing previous cases with Xerox in which the courts sided with the intellectual property holders. And indeed, there are many parallels with previous antitrust cases against AT&T (before the company’s 1984 breakup) and Microsoft (for its Windows dominance in the 1990s)—and many of the same faces. DuPont has hired the lawyer who led the government’s case against AT&T, while Monsanto’s enlisted Dan Webb, who defended Microsoft in 2002 against the feds. (Over at the Beyond Green blog, Grist contrubutor Tom Laskaway worries that the biotech-friendly Obama administration’s goal in these antitrust investigations appears to be to broaden access to Monsanto’s intellectual
property rather than improve access to conventional seeds.)
Today’s hearing in Iowa is subtitled “Issues of Concern to Farmers,” but sustainable agriculture groups have complained that the panels are heavily tilted toward politicians and academics and allow little time for public comment. Even former American Farm Bureau President Dean Kleckner told the Des Moines Register that the session today “will be mostly for show. It’s about politics and posturing.”.
To protest, groups like Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and Food Democracy Now are holding their own parallel workshops and events. Last night more than 250 small farmers and activists packed a town hall meeting and chanted “Bust up Big Ag.” And today, “Lunch from a Farmer’s Perspective”—sponsored by Farm Aid, the National Family Farm Coalition, the Farmer to Farmer Campaign on Genetic Engineering, and others—brings together farmers who’ve been directly affected by seed market concentration. Among them is Moe Parr, the seed cleaner who Monsanto essentially put out of business through extended legal harassment over whether he was helping farmers to “brown bag,” or illegally save and replant, Monsanto’s seeds.
Entrance to the Svalbard “Doomsday” Seed Vault in Norway/Vaulting ahead
In other seed-related news this week, the super-cool-looking two-year-old Svalbard “Doomsday” Global Seed Vault in Norway just received thousands of new seeds that puts its collection over the half-million mark. Among the new samples are 400 from the Seed Savers Exchange, an Iowa-based nonprofit, including the German Pink tomato, a rare large, hardy sweet-flavored tomato variety transported to Iowa in 1883 by a Bavarian immigrant who is the grandfather of one of the co-founders of the Seed Savers Exchange.
The half-million milestone “brings mixed emotions, because while it shows that the vault at Svalbard is now the gold standard for diversity, it comes at a time when our agriculture systems are really sitting on a knife’s edge,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, in the press release. (The trust partners with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden for the vault.) “If crops and agriculture don’t adapt to climate change, neither will humanity. But to help farmers adapt, plant breeders need access to as much genetic diversity as possible to keep crops vigorous and productive in shifting climates.”
Somewhat ironically, given the hearings in Iowa, the USDA’s National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation sent the vault a soybean collection that comprises almost the entire lineage of soybeans developed in the U.S. in the last century, as well as hundreds of wild soybeans. The seeds include disease-resistant varieties and soybeans with genetic traits that could be especially important for dealing with the stresses of climate change.
Banks that really need a bailout
But university researchers will no more have access to these particular seeds than they will to Monsanto’s patent-locked varieties. The vault’s seeds are duplicates of those maintained by national and regional crop genebanks, intended for safekeeping, not for everyday use. And as Fowler notes, many of these collections are threatened by neglect and lack of funds.
The USDA’s National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation and the National Plant Germplasm System, for example, through which researchers can request seeds to study and breed, are part of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service arm. The total ARS budget for 2009 was $1 billion, down 17 percent from 2008 (PDF from USDA).
Compare this with Monsanto’s 2009 gross profit of $4.5 billion for its seeds and genomics unit [PDF of annual report]. The market dominance of Monsanto and others is not the only threat to preserving seed diversity in this country—budget cuts to federal and dwindling funds for independent research at public universities are equally concerning. Because if we really are worried about “feeding the world” in a changing-climate future, it might be a good idea to hedge our bets a tad, not put all our faith in one patent-locked-up seed supply.
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