Tapping End User Content (2.0) for Speed & Scale

In the spring I gave a number of talks on how web 2.0 should really be talked about as 2.0 -- platforms for participation that invite and enable end-users to add their own content. Letting people tap into their own excess capacity is particularly potent because it is so low cost. And the platforms mean that this small and local content can be scaled to national and international proportions and influence.

Quickly.

IF you can get the platform right.

The video is a 4 minute edited synopsis of a 20 minute talk I gave at Columbia Unviersity a number of weeks ago for their Brite conference (Brands, Innovation, Technology). I reference chatroullette and couch surfing, both excellent examples of the phenomenon. 350.org does an excellent job of this as well.

Related blog posts of mine:
How Sharing Increases Innovation
Thinking about Scarcity & Abundance

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Does Everyone in America Own a Car?

I got asked to write the 500 word answer to the above question that was going in a US Information Service publication called "20 Answers" (I think). It was a very curious challenge. Anything you write, when limited to 500 words, ends up feeling biased and a bit like propaganda. There are some great paragraphs in there. I like this piece! You can also read it at its source, the america.gov website too.

It is true that 95 percent of American households own a car, and most Americans get to work by car (85 percent). It wasn’t always this way, nor is it likely to stay this way.

Until World War II and into the late 1940s, many Americans did not own cars. People lived in cities and towns, and 40 percent did not own cars but used public buses, trolleys, and trains. Soon after the war, a surge in low-cost, mass-produced houses occurred outside cities to accommodate returning soldiers and their growing families. The new housing pattern was accompanied by the National Interstate Highway System, which was started in 1956. During the next 50 years, 46,876 miles (75,440 kilometers) of highways were built across America.

Americans could live in affordable suburbs in houses built on cheap land, and they could get to distant jobs with cars. Today, only 5 percent of Americans use public transportation to get to their jobs. However, this pattern of life is changing.

It has been 50 years since America embarked on this plan that influenced how we live and travel today, and we have experienced some shortcomings. Car-dependent travel and infrastructure are poorly suited for the dense urban areas in which increasing numbers of Americans live. As in other parts of the world, Americans seek to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and address climate change through alternative-fuel and fuel-efficient vehicles, but we realize these new cars alone will not meet all travel needs of Americans: The young, the old, the poor, and those living in dense urban areas need other options.

In 2001, car ownership peaked (1.1 cars per licensed driver). By 2008, the average number of miles driven in the United States fell for the first time in history, declining 3.6 percent from 2007, and the number of trips by public transportation rose to a 50-year high. It is too early to tell if this change was the result of high fuel prices in 2008.

More people are choosing to live in cities where they don’t need a car. New York City has the lowest rate of car ownership, with only 50 percent of households owning cars. Good sidewalks and public transit and safe bicycle networks are a priority in these cities. In July 2009, New York City completed the first phase of a plan to make the city more friendly to bicycles by adding 200 miles of bike lanes separated from car traffic within the city.

During the past decade American cities have seen the rise of a service called car sharing. Shared cars owned by private companies are parked throughout dense metropolitan areas and university campuses. Members rent them by the hour or day instead of owning cars. The advantage to members is that they pay only for what they use; they don't have to worry about maintenance, parking or insurance expenses, and they can choose a car that fits a specific trip (a pickup truck, four-door, or two-door vehicle).

In New York City, more than 100,000 people are sharing about 2,000 cars. This service dramatically reduces the number of cars and parking spaces needed to satisfy the needs of a large population. Each shared car replaces 10 to 20 privately held cars and is used by 40 to 50 people.

Looking to the future, it is likely we will see a reduction in the number of car trips Americans take and a rise in the number of trips they take by foot, bicycle, public transit, or train. Car sharing will become common, and more people will take advantage of carpooling (many people sharing the same trip).

Wireless technologies and smart mobile phones will make it easy to quickly find different ways to travel; see schedules; compare speed, cost, convenience, and carbon emissions; and choose the best method for each trip. America's transportation picture once again will be highly diversified.

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NYC launches shared cabs, joins world

I’ve been taking shared cabs my entire life: in Beirut, in Guatemala, and most recently in Calcutta. Here’s how it usually works: the cabs -- often just regular cars but singled out because in any given city they have a particular brand and color -- ply common high volume routes. You stand along the route. Flag down the cab. Hop in and announce where you want to be dropped off. Pay a flat fee when you hop out. They are very much like very small buses.

I’ve never understood why we didn’t have them in the US. Fast, frequent, cheap(er than cabbing, more expensive and comfortable than the transit alternatives). I’ve chalked that lack up to protectionism and anti-competitive behavior among American taxi medallion holders.

Finally, FINALLY, an American city has changed the game.
New York city announced that starting today it will have shared cabs, plying specific routes, for $3 and $4 a ride. Subway fares in New York are $2; regular cabs across town generally are in the $6-$10 range). The cabs will have a sign on them that indicates the route/destination.

The city gets fewer cars and fewer emissions. Taxi drivers get more money. People get cheaper, faster, more convenient mobility. Hurrah!

As small aside: last year I had been shopping doing this same idea using regular people on their usual commutes. Put a device on top of your car. Electronically put in the destination and price “Lexington $3” and then drive to where you are already going. Every person along the route understands what it meant. Challenges are insurance (this industry needs to enable innovation!), regulation (rules about turning yourself into a "livery service" and competing unfairly with taxis). Security and fast payment could be done using smart cards to log in/log out of the trip.

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Story of a Viral Video

Anyone who has ever been associated with new media marketing and watched a YouTube success story wonders: how and why did this video resonate with the market, and how might I produce such a 2-minute wonder? I remember attending a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum (08) and listening to four people who had done just that. And I remember one panelist saying there was some unknown piece of magic; none of them could guarantee another success.

So imagine my pride when my own 22-year old daughter hit one out of the park on her very first effort – and with a climate change message. I’d loved her idea when I’d heard it the month before. I thought the script looked strong when I edited it a few days before the filming. I was blown away by the execution of the first draft cut of the shoot. My expectations were very very high. I could feel that this was goal to be a hit. But of course, you tell yourself to stay calm and prepare for the usual outcome of low viewership.

The 1.5 minute video hit YouTube around noon on a Monday. A half dozen of us sent the link to our friends, and tweeted and Facebooked it. Within an hour or so, it hit 355 views. And there it sat as the afternoon wore on, and evening came. We heard from friends that they had loved it. We kept hitting refresh, refresh, refresh.

I emailed a colleague with experience in YouTube video postings and he replied that the view count of videos that had a rapidly rising number of views would stick, and then correct late in the day. So as the evening wore on, we hit refresh, refresh, refresh. At around 10:30pm, success! The number changed!

To 1200. We were stunned. What? That’s it? Minor depression set in. Well, 1200 wasn’t exactly bad. I mean, home videos don’t get 1200 views in half a day, but we were really disappointed. As we went to bed that night, a little before midnight, we refreshed again.

22,000! OK! We slept well. On opening our eyes in the morning, the first task was to refresh again.

65,000! We got it into the Huffington Post on its second day, and O’Reilly also picked it up on Fox. The Twitter and retweeting stream was strong. On the fourth day, it rotated into the “Currently being viewed” slot on YouTube’s home page. And it hit their “Most Popular” selections. YouTube has some kind of inscrutable (and no doubt well researched) methodology for deciding where to place its videos on the page, and which page. On the fifth or sixth day, we were definitely among the top three most viewed videos for that week.

Here is the video:



So what were the success factors?

Beautiful young women are always a pull. Yes, we know that. But it also has a nice story line. It opens setting one expectation about what it is about (sexual heat) and flips it into another kind of heat (global warming). There is drama, how far will they go? It’s fun; the people shooting it are clearly having a good time. It has a surprise ending. The music chosen was spot on. The editing is remarkable. The pacing, impeccable.

A small detail: we thought we were going to call it “Supermodels stripping for the Planet.” But a quick YouTube search of “supermodels stripping” brought up a lot of stuff we didn’t want to be associated with and that we didn’t want people to stumble upon if they looked for us using the search function. We changed it to “Supermodels take it off for Climate Change.”

And a last note: a confirmation that perception is in the eye of the beholder. The perceived tone of the video is totally based on the lens the viewer brings to it. Some people thought it was pure as the driven snow, and surprisingly modest. Others thought it verged on pornographic. Sadly, YouTube censorship seems to have come to that conclusion as well. Despite the soaring popularity, they took it off the most popular page. No doubt based on the title and screen capture without having actually viewed it.

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Powerful Advocacy: Social Media & Toyota

I am really impressed by the power of a MoveOn campaign. It was launched 4 hours ago, and already has 200 Toyota owners, in front of their Toyota's protesting that company's participation in the US Chamber of Commerce (which has been lobbying against passage of a climate change bill in Congress).

This campaign, using Flickr, and MoveOn designed signs, printed out and customized "locally," really demonstrates the power of consumer's wallets on the marketplace. It is just so much more convincing and direct that everyone agreeing to boycott tuna.

We'll have to wait and see if this actually pressures Toyota to leave the US Chamber. But an inspiring campaign.

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21 Ways I Reduced My Carbon Footprint

Change takes time. Here below is the list of my path from what was not measured, but likely a typical carbon footprint (around 20 tons per year for an American) to a smaller carbon footprint today. I think I'm down to around 6 tons a year. Goal is about 2 tons per capita worldwide. Below is how I progressed over the last 20 years.

Today minus 20 years
1. Bought a fixer-upper house in dense urban area 5 blocks from subway.
2. Vacation locally (most of the time)
T- 18 years
3. Stopped eating meat (most of the time). Cook most meals from scratch.
T- 15 years
4. Enrolled children in local schools.
T- 14 years
5. Emphasis on Christmas & birthday presents that were consumable or practical.
T- 12 years
6. Installed automatic setback thermostat (55 degrees at night, 65 daytime). Knit a lot of sweaters for whole family.
T-10 years
7. Didn’t buy second car, used carsharing (Zipcar)
T- 9 years
8. Husband got a local job, now commutes by bicycle 100% of the time.
T- 8 years
9. Increase emphasis on second hand or hand-me-down for toys, books, clothes, bikes.
T- 7 years
10. Stopped eating fish (except sardines, I love them so).
T- 5 years
11. Kids stop asking to be driven to school on cold, wet or snowy days because answer is usually no.
T- 4 years
12. Switched all light bulbs to CFLS.
13. Turn temperature of water heater down to ‘warm’.
T- 3 years
14. More carpooling (GoLoco).
15. Greater commitment to biking for errands.
16. Finally put insulation in roof.
17. Wash laundry in cold water and dry clothes on line (my husband getting me over my greatest hypocrisy.) Reduced summer utility bill by 50%.
T- 2 years
18. Bought a farm share at local farm for produce.
19. Curiously also plant small kitchen garden.
20. Started driving the speed limit. On highways too (that’s right).
T- 1 year
21. Selected “green” supplier of grid electricity offered by our utility (wind farm in upstate NY, only 10% more expensive).
Future:
22. Replace inefficient appliances with way more efficient ones when they finally die. Front loading washing machine, dishwasher, refridgerator. Insulate and seal old house more, replace a few more old windows, solar hot water on roof, find or build more efficient housing.

This effort will be on-going. My biggest challenge, like environmental evangelists around me, is my air travel. I do a lot of it. I keep track using Dopplr, but I don’t believe in offsets (see CheatNeutral for a beautiful explanation of why).

What's your plan or path? What other good ideas?

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Another downside for Cap & Trade: lack of transparency

The opposition says action on climate is all about raising taxes, meaning higher costs for the common man. Proponents say the bill is all about preventing the human race from a nasty, brutish, and short future, and the creation of jobs that will come with a new economy that meets the needs of the future.

As many of you know, I’ve been pretty opposed to Cap & Trade for a whole host of reasons, but I’ve been willing to bow to political pragmatism. What I really want is for the government to create a strategy that will reduce CO2 emissions in the timeframe required, and enable a new economy to flourish. I’ll take that outcome any which way it needs to happen.

But I have a new Cap & Trade fear as I watch the current debate, and remember past ones similarly built on misinformation and speedy adoption by Americans in a hurry.

If a cap & trade bill is passed (which it might), and the price of oil goes up significantly (which it will), it feels like we are guaranteed to have a Republican argument that attributes high gas prices to cap & trade. And it will be totally “provable” to people who believe what they are told. The whole point of C&T is to hide the carbon tax from consumers. Therefore, they won’t know that 80% of the rise in oil prices as nothing to do with C&T.

I think we are setting ourselves up for future political losses by offering an easy target that will require a lot of explaining to untangle. A carbon tax would be so simple, and obvious, and not be able to get mucked up with other issues. Am I wrong?


******
The day after I posted the above, we find this is already being done! At a fake grassroots rally against the climate bill in Texas, the American Petroleum Institute was passing out T-shirts that read "I'll pass on $4 gas."

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Al Gore seems to be the one man on this planet who bridges science and populism without talking down, sugar coating, or playing political games. I admire him deeply on this. His Repower America campaign has the right goals working in the right time frame for action.

Washington is deep into hearings on the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill which started out with relatively weak goals (20% reductions by 2020). Lobbyists are hard at work getting legacy setasides, and extra dollars for dirty energy that has to convert (paying the polluters rather than the polluters paying). Politics is driving everything while the reality of the need to reduced emissions sharply and quickly almost goes unmentioned.

This 8 minute update by Gore gives us the context. I hear the emotion in his voice -- still -- despite the large number of times he has spoken on this topic.

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Climate Code Red? Use the Recession

George Bush appeared to have won his re-election in 2004 on the back of American’s fear of terrorist attacks, reinforced by periodic security alerts from the Whitehouse: Code Orange! Code Red!

Pre-November 2008 elections, I often wished that Democrats (or even Republicans) could manufacture similar pseudo events to evoke that same primal fear but in service of climate change. What would make Americans take the threat seriously? Make them act with the urgency and commitment the situation requires? Wouldn’t it be great if a big chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf snapped off unexpectedly? Giving everyone a good scare but not threatening any lives?

Basically, I drew a blank. I couldn’t think up anything that matched a “Code Red” – evoking fear and delivering action but without any long-term consequences.

But the current r(d)ec(pr)ession just might do the trick.
Yes, there will be (there already is) some real collateral suffering. But it just might be that this real short-term suffering gives us a chance to avert long-term irreversible planetary changes that results in long-term human suffering.

This recession has a three-fold potential:

• Reduced economic activity means reduced energy consumption and reduced emissions. It just might be that worldwide CO2 emissions don’t increase this year. [If deforestation pressures in developing countries aren’t accelerated by the lack of alternative sources of income.]

• Government (and business) economic restructuring and reinvestment presents us with the opportunity to create more sustainable systems with each new investment and new rule set.

• People’s values and behaviors are likely to profoundly change on the back of these very difficult economic times.

After the Great Depression (does that get capitalized?), American’s attitudes changed in fundamental ways that lasted for at least a generation. People who felt the painful reality of those years, or maybe just watched others feel the pain, had a deeply seeded attitude change about life. They tended to use things up, store things that might have a useful life some time in the future, expect rainy days and save for them, keep jobs they didn’t like just in case, and value community and friendship over consumption status symbols.

My mother was one of those people (and not my father, so this idea isn’t universal). And the house I live in now -- that sheltered one family between 1902 and 1987 when we bought it – definitely held people with those sensibilities. Bags of old men’s shirts, useful one day as rags, but with the buttons removed and stored elsewhere, filled one corner of the basement. “Perfectly good” wallpaper rolls, from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, were stashed under a work bench. Tin cans with nails, screws, bits of rope, old copper mesh (we’ve made good use of that!) were shelved between the studs.

So, this crisis provides us with an unexpected opportunity to move to a more sustainable and low GHG world economy. Will we make good use of it?

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Time for Cooperative Capitalism

Crisis describes our times. The perilous state of the American and global economies, environments, and personal finances have me convinced that we’ve got to start working and thinking more cooperatively.

Last June I began to give public voice to these ideas and approach that has been taking shape in my mind for a long time -- Ann Arbor (June 11 ppt) and at the Personal Democracy Forum in NY (June 24).

For many years I’ve been attracted to the beautiful efficiency and widespread benefits of shared resources (cars, rides, networks). And over the last few years, I’ve been espousing the need for business and government to think more expansively about the web 2.0 phenomenon – where end users create content and value by building on a common platform (eBay, wikipedia, flickr, Facebook being some famous examples). We need to envision collaborative financing (lending circles), collaborative infrastructure (mesh networks), and collaborative consumption (car-sharing). It is time to push this idea and approach as far as it can go. A way to think about this approach is “cooperative capitalism.”

Here is the formula:
1. Identify excess capacity.
2. Build a platform for others to share/engage with this excess capacity.
3. Appreciate unanticipated benefits

My favorite example at a city level is Bogota’s Ciclovia:

1. The Penalosa brothers (Mayor Enrique and Gil, Head of Parks & Recreation) noted that on Sundays traffic throughout the city was very light.

2. Every Sunday from 9am to 2pm, more than 72 miles of roads are closed to car traffic and open to pedestrians and bicyclists. Tens of thousands of residents get out and use the ‘new trails and paths’ every week. Cost to the city for this highly prized and transforming resource? Just the cost putting up and taking down the barriers.

3. Unanticipated benefits include a healthier population, a stronger community, and increased bicycle use every day of the week.

My favorite opportunity at a city & national level (see my TED talk for a big vision explanation):

1. The wireless devices being used for open road tolling (and in the future for congestion pricing and road pricing) cost about $28, are single purposed, closed, and in active use for about 30 seconds a month. That is a lot of excess wireless capacity!

2. Create an open source mesh (ad hoc peer to peer) communications platform that would turn the device in the cars into nodes (routing and repeating data bits). The software could also be used in all wireless devices (laptops, cellphones, pdas, traffic lights, smart utility meters, etc.), creating a mobile internet (collaborative infrastructure). Each person will have paid for his/her own device (collaborative infrastructure financing).

3. While spending what was required to do the task of open road tolling or congestion pricing and buying in a manner that used an open standard, and an open device, we have now made this investment leverageable for any number of innovative uses, created a robust and resilient nationwide network for local data transmission, and laid the foundation for the next economic engine for the US and world economies. I have a lot to say on this topic, best not here. Email me if you want to see the white paper.

We can glean from the above example some generalization principles that the US government should apply to the relevant procurements: require open standards, open APIs, give preference to responders that leverage existing infrastructure, investments, organizations – in other words – value and encourage cooperation among companies rather than reward closed proprietary systems that shut out such opportunities.

Examples at the corporate level would include Zipcar of course, which enables all the idle capacity of cars to be put to good use through its technology platform that makes sharing cars fast, easy, convenient, and cost-effective. Last year I visited Siemens New York office where the bulk of floor space has been turned over to cubicles that are not owned by any one person, but rather used as needed by its nomadic workforce that shows up in New York only periodically – dramatically reducing the amount of office space needed if each one of its employees had their own office. The unexpected benefits of open platforms abound -- users can innovate, or point the way for innovation (see Innocentive.com for a new way of thinking).

And at an individual and household level, what can we lend and what can we borrow? What can we buy used, and what can we make sure we put back into the marketplace? Think of eBay as collaborative consumption.

This way of thinking isn’t bad for the economy. Remember that our starting point is that everyone is going to spend as much as they have to spend. We – families, companies, governments -- all have so much we want to accomplish with such limited financial resources that the most logical, rational, profitable, and self-interested thing to do is to spend it as efficiently as we can: maximizing the benefit of each dollar spent, while minimizing the resource consumption. Since we know we are going to spend every cent, let’s get the most possible value out of that spending.

Think of our times. Cooperative capitalism is not just an interesting approach, it is an imperative.

*****

Blog posts are supposed to be short and to the point – that is satisfied by the above. For a little more background on why the current financial crises leads me to move from thinking that these are just interesting ideas, to a much stronger concept of “imperative,” read on.

We are living in a world of very precarious revenue sources at all levels of the economy – household, corporate, and governmental. Americans are at their lowest savings rate since the 1930s. In August, the GAO estimated the 2008 Federal deficit to be $410b, 3% of the GDP. The addition of the $700 billion bailout has the potential to double this to 6%. On October 1, our national debt passed $10 trillion dollars (that’s a 1 followed by an unlucky 13 zeroes).

And yet, despite our incredibly tight – and shrinking – budgets, we face spending imperatives of unparalleled proportions. In the US, the explosive highway and infrastructure building of the 1940s-1970s, are now meeting the end of their 30-50 year anticipated life spans. We have much rebuilding to do, just to stay even, and we have much new building needed to accommodate our growing population and 21st century transportation and communication needs.

We have an energy and climate crisis, that demand we rethink, retool, and build anew our power plants, our factories, our office, our stores, our homes, and our travel patterns. We have a broken healthcare system that without a fix will swallow the budgets of business and government, and then, despite those expenditures, leave many uninsured.

And of course, we Americans live in a world of 6.3 billion people, rising rapidly to 9 billion. And we all know this world cannot sustain the current use patterns many ‘enjoy’ if applied to everyone.

A friend of mine, Juan Enriquez, just gave his 20 minute analysis and prescription last week at PopTech, on the need for the next administration to start a program of austerity. He gives a compelling argument and has some nice visuals. And last week, Bruce Nussbaum blogged for Businessweek an opinion piece called “Zipcar Capitalism, a new economic model?,” an approach the author says he will bring with him to the World Economic Forum this week in Dubai. Both of these argument are running down the same path I am.

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What Does It Cost to Drive?

The IRS formally increased the number it uses for cost per mile car travel, from 50.5 cents per mile, to 58.5 cents per mile. The question for drivers is -- are you sharing that cost or sucking it up all by yourself?

I recently did an analysis of AAA 2007 cost data for driving. I wanted to understand how much the rising cost of gas is actually changing the real costs of driving. [These aren't quite real costs since they don't include any of the externalities associated with driving like global warming, protection of oil resources, asthma, car accidents, among others.] AAA numbers are averaged over five years, assuming you own the car for the first five years of its life.

Today, with gas at $4 a gallon, looking at the two extremes of car types, it costs

$18.60/day for a small sedan ($6,795/year)
$31.00/day for an SUV or pickup truck ($11,309/year)

This covers travel of 41 miles per day (15,000 miles per year), average for Americans.

When -- not if -- gas goes to $5 a gallon, it'll be

$21.66/day for a small sedan ($7,906/year)
$33.32/day for an SUV or pickup truck ($12,161/year)

What was particularly interesting to me is how the rising price of gas has transformed the variable costs of driving. When gas was $1/gallon, it was only 9% of the total cost of owning and operating a small sedan. Today, at $4/gallon, gas ranges between 28 and 30% of the cost of operating a car. When it is at $5/gallon, that'll be 32-35%. With such high variable costs, people are really having to think twice and three times about when and how they drive. [see blog entry on changed driving behaviors]

This is so much money!!!

Back in 2006, 17% of household income went toward cars. I ask myself: if the median household income in the US is $48,000/year, what percent of income is going to car transportation today? A recent study found that in households with cars, they own on average 2.28 cars per household. Now comes some very murky and suspect assumptions, just to get it into the ballpark. Those households are unlikely to have 2.28 new cars, so what if we just round down and say 2 cars that are 0-5 years old are going to stand in for 2.28 cars of unknown age. And that households will have one big car and one little car, which is kind of like saying they have 2 average-sized cars.

OK, if we accept these bad assumptions, the answer to the question:

What percent of household income is going today to car transportation when gas is $4/gallon?

[drumroll]

38%

wow.

Another way to look at this is to use a a report written in September 2005 by Mark Singer of the Consumer Federation of America. His estimates of gas prices for 2005 were about $1.80/gallon. For prices found between 1995-2003 (his baseline) he found little elasticity in demand. Here is his table:



We know that $4/gallon seems to have been a tipping point for demand. And $4 is more than double $1.80. But what if we imagine that people today are spending about double on gas, taking into account some reductions in demand? That would put low income groups spending 20% of their incomes just on the gas.

Washington, I think we have a problem.

Americans need options to traveling around by car all by themselves. Some of those options can happen fast (GoLoco! and for those lucky enough to live in cities feet, bike, transit, train); some will take longer (changing where we choose to live, work, shop, creating dense mixed use communities, adding more transit of all kinds, reducing fossil fuel dependence on all motorized modes).

Next Mr. President: are you listening?

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The Most Important Thing to Read on Global Warming

James Hansen, the US’s leading climate scientist, to whom I turn for climate science, spoke to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming, and the National Press Club on June 23 2008. His entire talk is only 4 pages. Read it. If you don’t think you'll get to it -- or maybe to inspire you to do the reading -- I’ve excerpted some of the high points.

These are Jim Hansen’s words:

I argue that a path yielding energy independence and a healthier environment is, barely, still possible. It requires a transformative change of direction in Washington in the next year…Elements of a “perfect storm”, a global cataclysm, are assembled.

In my opinion, if emissions follow a business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two meters is likely this century. Hundreds of millions of people would become refugees. No stable shoreline would be reestablished in any time frame that humanity can conceive.

Animal and plant species are already stressed by climate change. Polar and alpine species will be pushed off the planet, if warming continues. Other species attempt to migrate, but as some are extinguished their interdependencies can cause ecosystem collapse. Mass extinctions, of more than half the species on the planet, have occurred several times when the Earth warmed as much as expected if greenhouse gases continue to increase. Biodiversity recovered, but it required hundreds of thousands of years….

Carbon dioxide amount is already 385 ppm and rising about 2 ppm per year. Stunning corollary: the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation…

Solution of the climate problem requires that we move to carbon-free energy promptly… If politicians remain at loggerheads, citizens must lead. We must demand a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. We must block fossil fuel interests who aim to squeeze every last drop of oil from public lands, off-shore, and wilderness areas. Those last drops are no solution. They yield continued exorbitant profits for a short-sighted self-serving industry, but no alleviation of our addiction or long-term energy source….

Cheap, subsidized fossil fuels engendered bad habits.


We import food from halfway
around the world, for example, even with healthier products available from nearby fields. Local produce would be competitive if not for fossil fuel subsidies and the fact that climate change damages and costs, due to fossil fuels, are also borne by the public. A price on emissions that cause harm is essential. Yes, a carbon tax. Carbon tax with 100 percent dividend3 is needed to wean us off fossil fuel addiction. Tax and dividend allows the marketplace, not politicians, to make investment decisions.

Carbon tax on coal, oil and gas is simple, applied at the first point of sale or port of entry.
The entire tax must be returned to the public, an equal amount to each adult, a half-share for children. This dividend can be deposited monthly in an individual’s bank account. Carbon tax with 100 percent dividend is non-regressive. On the contrary, you can bet that low and middle income people will find ways to limit their carbon tax and come out ahead. Profligate energy users will have to pay for their excesses.

Demand for low-carbon high-efficiency products will spur innovation, making our
products more competitive on international markets. Carbon emissions will plummet as energy efficiency and renewable energies grow rapidly…

We must establish fair agreements with other countries. However, our own tax and
dividend should start immediately. We have much to gain from it as a nation, and other countries will copy our success…


Democracy works, but sometimes churns slowly. Time is short. The 2008 election is critical for the planet. If Americans turn out to pasture the most brontosaurian congressmen, if Washington adapts to address climate change, our children and grandchildren can still hold great expectations.”

Robin’s words: We can’t get sidetracked by cap and trade agreements. They may be "politically acceptable" but won’t produce the results in the time frame required or redirect the economy as needed. We need carbon taxes “incentives” as fast as is politically possible. We should all do everything we can to make sure our next president understands this clearly. See www.350.org for ways to make your voice heard and see what others are doing.

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Rant about the Urgency of Action

I wrote this for International Design Magazine, where it appeared in the June 2008 issue.

You’re in a deflating raft. You have 4 minutes and 30 seconds until the black storm on the horizon reaches you. Only some of you can swim. Do you: a) organize time-intensive swimming lessons? Or b) ask everyone to fix the leaks nearest them with the repair kits they have in their pockets?

Curiously, when it comes to climate change, where the states are worse than bleak, the answer seems to be swimming lessons: Invest more in alternative energies. Establish higher standards for fuel efficiency in cars. Invent carbon-capture technology. Force big businesses to come up with plans that will change the way they do business. None of these measures is capable of effecting change in the here and now.


Many of us know that we’re currently facing 50 percent species loss this century; five meter sea rise this century; and 10 to 20 percent reductions in corn, wheat, and rice yields – despite a more than doubling of population – this century. But way too few of us have paid attention to the timetable required to avoid this possibility, as laid out by the U.S.’s two leading climate scientists. James Hansen director of NASA’s Space Goddard Institute, released a new paper in March that says we have close to zero percent change of avoiding “catastrophic effects of climate change” if we continue with “business as usual.”
And in his report to the UN last September, John Holdren, director of the Wood’s Hole Institute, projected that we could improve those odds to 50 percent if we begin curbing emissions by 2015. If you ask me, 50-50 odds of facing major worldwide catastrophe are unacceptable.

Regardless, with heads firmly embedded in the sand, we continue to focus on what the scientists tell us needs to be accomplished by 2020 and 2050. And because there is no action at the federal level, cities and states, and companies and universities and institutions, are one by one setting 2020 and 2050 goals for CO2 reduction. Even presidential candidates give us these benchmarks, and talk about capping and trading emissions so that power plants will figure out a plan and make new investments that will start reducing their emissions.

But in fact we have only two to three years to get worldwide CO2 emissions to stop growing and begin their downward crawl if we want to improve our odds of averting disaster. Which means we only have to change our ways enough to avoid the 3 percent annual emissions rise driven by “business as usual,” and then next year we need to reduce our rate by 3 percent again. It isn’t that hard. Just focus on the ways you consume energy.

The difference between long-term strategies and immediate behavioral change can be easily visualized using the example of cars. If everyone in American bought a fuel-efficient car when it was time to replace their current model, 10 years from now (well beyond our critical period for action), demand for fossil fuel would be reduced by 5 percent. But if we shared 1 out of every 20 trips, we would reduce demand by 5 percent this week.

So turn your heat down 2 degrees, turn your air conditioner up 2 degrees. Feeling just a teeny bit uncomfortable? Pick half the species in the world –humans, animals, vegetables, insects – and imagine them gone. Don’t drive for single errands, don’t drive if the place you are going is less than a mile away, ride with a friend once a week. Mildly put out? Imagine the worldwide suffering of even fewer basic food staples than exists today. Use the dishwasher and dryer only for full loads. Hang your laundry on a line! Walk or bike more. Don’t like having to think about energy all the time? Imagine the political and economic unrest that will result from the immigration precipitated by a 5 meter sea rise.

We all have life-raft repair kits in our pockets. Put them to work.

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Biofuels Bad; Efficiency Good

A recent article in the popular press (New York Times) reporting on the scientific press (Science) laid out the researched case that many of us had intuited. Use of biofuels will result in increases in CO2 emissions because of changes in land use -- increased deforestation -- despite vows to guard against it.

Biofuel crops grown in the US on previously plowed fields result in a decline in yields of whatever was planted there before, increasing the price of that former crop (soybeans, corn). Therefore:

• new land is deforested in other countries to plant this displaced crop which now has an economically more compelling value; and

• new land is deforested in other countries to plant the biofuel itself, which of necessity has a higher value than the crops it is displacing.

A nice quote puts the order of magnitude into perspective, from the New York Times article:

The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land, said Joseph Fargione, lead author of the second paper, and a scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “So for the next 93 years you’re making climate change worse, just at the time when we need to be bringing down carbon emissions.”

Another negative, which doesn't contribute to global warming but does contribute to global suffering, is the effect of higher prices of basic staples (corn and food oil) on the very poorest among us.

Using biofuels that are not a bi-product of some other crop (sugar cane stalks, for example) is just plain a bad idea. Conservation is the best alternative fuel in the transportation arena that we have in the near term. And of course, I have to say it, a carbon tax would go a long way towards encouraging (enforcing?) the judicious use of fossil fuels.

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Add 40% more cars and...pray

Today, Tata Motors unveiled the cheapest car in the world: the Tata Nano, priced at $2,500 and in dealerships by year end. It is touted as the People’s Car, and opens up the option of personal car mobility for a huge new population segment. It was unveiled to the theme music of “2001: a Space Odyssey.”



And what does this future hold? An environmental and urban disaster.


The new Nano will add enormously to the numbers of underpriced and therefore overconsumed cars on our planet. The price of the Nano, to individuals and to society, is a heck of a lot more than $2500.

We can think of the cost of a car has having three components (and yes, for those life cycle sticklers, I'm simplifying by ignoring the horrors associated with manufacturing and disposal for this post):

THE CAR: purchase, depreciation, maintenance. In the US, that is about $8k a year. While I imagine maintenance to be significantly cheaper in India than here, I am sure it will be the same unanticipated and underappreciated cost it is here. Americans currently spend 18 percent of their household budgets on their cars, how sad it is to contemplate the effects of that percent of income being taken out of the wages of low-income Indians. And because of the size of these unplanned for maintenance needs, I can also easily imagine that many of these cars will end up very poorly maintained, much like the ubiquitous auto rickshaws that flood Asian cities and are some of the dirtiest vehicles around.

CAR STORAGE: People typically park their cars for “free,” even in dense urban areas where the value of street and sidewalk space is high. This free is dramatically undervalued to the other users of this public space. Just as we saw beautiful squares in European villages being turned into parking lots, and acres and acres of land in American suburbia being paved to accommodate the one peak day a year at the mall, so too we can anticipate that every single possible space in Indian cities, in Indian poor neighborhoods, in Indian village squares, on what few sidewalks there were, will soon be filled with beautiful shiny Nanos. I can see the crowded sidewalk clearing for the Nano that pulls in and parks. The driver walks away and the crowd of pedestrians is left with less space. Gone will be places to play, places for markets, places to walk in narrow old neighborhood streets.

CAR DRIVING: Most people think that the cost of driving is just the cost of gas. In the US, this amounts to about 7% of the total costs that we account for and actually do pay. In India, one can imagine that fuel costs will feel like a heavier burden to those driving the Nanos. But the costs of gas are just a very tiny part of the whole. As we have seen from the wave of cities exploring congestion pricing (unfortunately no Indian cities). Congested roads, jammed past capacity already, will become gridlocked. The scooter that has a family of four on it, will be replaced by the safer-for-the-family Nano that occupies four times the amount of space.

What is to be done? Is it fair to deprive lower-income people the opportunity to travel more conveniently and more safely? No. But we need to make every driver pay the real costs of using a car. Those real costs include market prices for storage; road taxes high enough to adequately maintain them once they’ve been built; congestion pricing as appropriate, and carbon taxes on emissions. More details can be found in my other posting on this subject.

Once driving personal cars becomes appropriately priced, we choose to use them == rather than other modes of travel -- when they are the best value for our need.

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Infrastructure changes are important but we need to change behavior now

When I first read Jim Hansen and John Holdren reference the time frame for action – now! In 10 years is too late – I got out my pencil, sketched out this time frame, and drew in all the transportation solutions I could think of: more transit and trains; fuel efficient and alternative fuel cars; smart growth; walkable communities. Above is the powerpoint version of my sketch.


What I realized is that technology and infrastructure solutions –invent things, build things, and get these things distributed and used by people all across the country – can not produce the outcomes we need in the time frame we need. It is physically impossible. They are great and needed products, and we need to start today because they take so long to implement. But they are not enough.

What we need today, right now, are changed behaviors. It is the only thing we can change fast enough. How? Money talks: congestion pricing, car sharing, carbon taxes.

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Keeping our Eyes on the First Milestone

In his most presentation to the UN in September 2007, John Holdren's slides had a stunning number:

If worldwide CO2 emissions peak in 2015 – that’s seven years from now – we have a 50 percent chance of avoiding catastrophic effects of climate change.

50 percent chance
of avoiding catastrophic effects

Those aren’t odds I like to play with given the stakes. What is catastrophic?

50-75% species loss this century
5 meter sea rise this century
10-20% reductions in corn, wheat, and rice yields this century

I imagine there are many many other things that could be added to this list.

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Never confuse the words "hybrid", "dual fuel", and "fuel efficient"

Toyota Highlander or Toyota Echo -- which one is better for the environment? Across American legislators, city governments, policy advisors, and every day people are getting it wrong. We need to understand that the word “hybrid” does not mean “great for the environment.” “Dual fuel” does not mean great for the environment. Fuel efficient -- with a specific reasonable benchmark applied -- can mean better for the environment.



Below the benchmark of the US fleet vehicle average of 22mpg, we do find the obvious problem cars:

Hummer 8-10 mpg
Ford Expedition 14-19 mpg
Chevy Suburban 13-17 mpg

But here are examples of two cars with the "hybrid" word attached

Hybrid Lexis GS 450 h 25/28 mpg (highway/city)
Hybrid Toyota Highlander* 27/32 mpg

that are worse performing than these traditional gasoline-powered cars:

Honda Civic 26/34mpg
Toyota Yaris 34/39 mpg
Toyota Echo 35/43 mpg

We should definitely not be giving special dispensation to people who buy SUV hybrids over people who buy small space- and fuel-efficient traditional engine cars.

Amazingly, Al Gore is giving away a Toyota Highland Hybrid to the person who comes up with the winning 30 second advertisement that alerts the American public to the perils of climate change.

Al, I admire and respect you. An Inconvenient Truth changed the way Americans think, but you need better transportation policy advice. Send me an email, I’m happy to help.

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The Climate Change Window of Requirement, and the Myth of the fuel-efficient or alternative-fuel car as Savior

I’m not a climatologist and don’t pretend to be one, ever. So I defer to the top two US experts. Here is what they tell me:

John Holdren, Director of the Woods Hole Institute, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, writes “Without swift and urgent action, the problems could spiral toward disastrous, permanent changes for all of life on Earth.” In September, 2006, he told me, “Within five years, we need to not only level but start reducing CO2 emissions if we are to prevent catastrophic human interference in climate change.”

Dr. James Hansen, NASA's Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and considered the doyen of American climatology said in an interview: “If we do follow the “business as usual” path, even for another ten years, it guarantees that we will have dramatic climate changes that produce what I would call a different planet… It's likely that a large fraction of the species could go extinct.” He said this also in September of 2006.

I am a genius at basic math. I now understand that we have between four and less than nine years to get worldwide CO2 emissions onto a downward slope, or else.

So I took this frame of reference and I plopped it into the transportation sector. Why transportation? Well, a) because I know something about it and b) transportation accounts for 33% of all US CO2 emissions. In fact, our own personal cars contribute 20%.

In fact, driving our cars is the most significant way we as individuals produce CO2 emissions. [Eating beef and therefore demanding a huge worldwide population of cows is the number one contributor to man-made climate change, primarily through methane gas.] After cars, the next largest way we as individuals produce CO2 emissions is through our residential electric bill – and think about how many appliances contribute to that number. Changing your light bulbs to compact fluorescents is a good thing, and we all should do it, but reducing the CO2 output from your tailpipe is much much more significant.

And we know the best ways to do that: buy a hybrid! Support the development of alternative fuels! NOT. Not if you have your eye on the window of requirement. According to a study produced for the Department of Energy, if we all started today replacing our old cars with fuel efficient cars when it was time to buy a new one, in year ten – yes, after the window of requirement has closed, American’s demand for fossil fuel will be reduced by 5% by these efforts. How and why could that be? The average age of the American fleet has been growing. Today, the average car lasts 9 years, so it takes a long long time to swap out our fleet of 200 million vehicles.

Don’t want to believe that it is only 5%? My other source is from the mouth of President G,W. Bush in his 2007 State of the Union address.

Hydrogen Fuel vehicles, solar-powered vehicles, and every other alternative fuel vehicle will not be market ready or widely adopted within the four to less than nine year time frame to help matters. And yes, we should absolutely positively keep pursuing these things because we are going to want them in the long run.

Next up: What can we accomplish in a 4 to less than 9 year timeframe?
Related: Why we should never confuse the words hybrid, dual fuel, and fuel efficiency.

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