Worldchanging: Bright Green

Don't Wait for the Lifeboat: A Response to Geoengineering

2009-04-17T19:23:53Z

Imagine finding yourself aboard a burning ocean liner. An increasing number of people are trying to put it out -- and they stand a good chance, if they can get access to the fire axes and hoses. Unfortunately, some rich old fat guys are sitting in deck chairs blocking the equipment, enjoying drinks and appetizers, and every time the other passengers try to get them to move, the rich old fat guys say they don't really believe in the fire, and even if it does exist, it probably can't be put out so we should just trust in the new lifeboat being built. And, sure enough, there on the deck is a guy is a brilliant, somewhat unworldly professor, busily sketching a design for a new lifeboat as the smoke billows in larger and larger clouds.

That's a pretty fair analogy for the situation in which we find ourselves, and for the role geoengineering is playing in the climate debate.

There is no reasonable basis to doubt that climate change is an extremely pressing problem. We can observe its impacts everywhere on the planet. In our ship analogy, the fire is quite real.

Luckily, this is a fire we know how to fight. We know now that we here in the developed world need to cut emissions dramatically and immediately: probably something on the order of 90 percent over the next 20-30 years. We know we can do this, mostly at a profit, and in ways that not only avert disaster but improve the quality of our lives. We know how to build bright green compact cities. We know how to redesign our buildings, transportation systems, infrastructure and factories to slash energy demand (again, usually at a profit). We have a good idea what climate-friendly farming and forestry would look like. We even have pretty clear paths ahead of us toward running our economy entirely on clean energy.

We can do all this, and not only cut the major sources of current emissions, but also provide a model of prosperity that the developing world can use to rise out of poverty without following in our climate-disruptive footprints, thus avoiding future emissions. All of this is within our power now. To return to the analogy, we know where the fire axes and hoses are.

The only reason we aren't already on track towards climate neutrality is that the burning of fossil fuels is extremely profitable, and the coal, oil and gas industries have used their power to completely distort the political debate. Their lackeys -- climate "skeptics," lobbyists, conservative talk radio hosts -- have used every possible strategy to slow progress away from fossil fuels by convincing Americans that climate change isn't a scientific certainty, that it won't be that bad, and that, anyways, cutting greenhouse gas emissions will destroy our economy. The fat guys in the deck chairs are full of bunkum, of course.

The professor on the deck is not. He is earnestly trying to figure out a lifeboat design, just as some scientists are eagerly trying imagine what megascale geoengineering projects might save our planet from runaway climate change. There's nothing wrong with that.

What's wrong is that we have no real reason to believe that he can, in fact, build a working lifeboat from scratch in time -- or that we can, in fact, intervene in the planet's climate on a vast scale without disastrous consequences -- yet right now, those benefiting from inaction are already using the idea of possible lifeboats as an argument against fighting the fire, so to speak, with the idea being that since cutting emissions is "unrealistic" it's good we have a back-up strategy.

This is not good science, and it's not good science policy. At very least, serious proponents of geoengineering need to acknowledge the severe limitations on our actual knowledge of geoengineering, and point out that emissions reductions are a far more certain and safe approach.

The professors should continue sketching lifeboats, by all means, but they should also tell the fat guys to get out of the way and stop misrepresenting their work.

This piece was written in response to a query from SEED Magazine titled, "Will the Future Be Geo-Engineered?

Front page photo credit: flickr/FrodoBabbs, Creative Commons license.

Persuasive Design for Sustainability

2009-04-17T17:00:50Z

There's a difference between green engineering and green design.

Green engineering reduces people's ecological impact without requiring them to change their habits. For instance, when you replace coal power with wind power, the consumer still just flicks the light switch, and their lights turn on just the same.

Green design reduces people's ecological impact by changing their habits. For instance, better urban design lets people walk to work rather than driving to work. Green design recognizes that everything has a user interface, even cities. So, how easy is it to find transit, and how close does it go to where you want, when you want? Is there a corner store a block away, or just a big-box store five miles away?

Both green engineering and green design are vital for creating the bright green future of sustainability, prosperity, and health that we all want. Of the two strategies, green engineering is currently much better understood, so let's push the green design conversation forward a bit. One green design strategy that's powerful -- but almost wholly unused -- is persuasive design.

Persuasion is a science; newborn and inexact, but a science nonetheless. Advertisers and marketers know this; designers should, too. Persuasive design is not marketing or advertising; instead, it is crafting a product's user experience so that the user's actual interaction with the product changes their behavior. Stanford lecturer and researcher BJ Fogg invented the field of study, and has published two books on the subject (the first simply called Persuasive Technology, and the other focusing on Mobile Persuasion). So far, those are the only must-read resources on the subject, but the field is growing rapidly, and the fourth annual Conference on Persuasive Technology is happening at the end of this month in Claremont, California. Proceedings from the previous conferences can be bought, though they are expensive.

Fogg has isolated more than a dozen principles of persuasion, and grouped them into three main avenues: tools, media, and social actors. Each applies more to some kinds of products than others would, and since he is primarily a computer scientist, they are weighted heavily towards software and electronics. We need more physical-product designers in this field. Here are most of the strategies, in a nutshell (at least as I interpret them):

Persuasive Tools

Tools seem to be objective, but they're not. A hammer makes you want to pound things, while a screwdriver doesn't, because pounding is what the hammer was designed for. Here are the ways that tools can persuade:

- Make a behavior easier or more convenient. This can mean doing work for you, such as when Google Transit identifies what buses you should take to get from point A to point B, a task that can take hours of sifting through paper schedules and route maps to figure out on your own. It can also mean defaults or shortcuts, like laptops that come with pre-set energy-saving sleep functions (most people never bother changing defaults). Finally, it can mean leading the user through the process when you want to encourage behavior that's complicated, multi-step, or otherwise daunting to the first-timer. Again, Google Transit is a good example: it doesn't just tell you what routes to take, it lists everything step-by-step, telling you to walk to a certain bus stop, get on a certain bus, get off at another stop and walk to the train station, etc., flagging each mode change with colors and icons, both on the map and in a list.

- Calculate / simulate / measure. It's one thing to say, "global warming is a risk." It's another thing to say, "an atmospheric CO2 level of 450ppm will cause sea level to rise 1 - 3 meters." The latter argument is not only more credible, but it is specific and actionable, and tells you the consequences of inaction. There are even multiple Google Maps applets that will simulate this world, showing you what a 1m (or 3m, or 20m) sea level rise would do to the place you live. (Just zoom out to find your home.) There are a slew of carbon footprint calculators, life cycle analysis programs, and other tools to help you quantify your impacts. Many of these tools (like LCA) even help you compare the impacts of different strategies, so you can make more intelligent design decisions and know your priorities better.

- Give feedback. Nobody wakes up wanting to despoil the Earth. But heretofore product interfaces have hidden all their scary, ugly environmental impacts from us. That helps us sleep easier, but it doesn't help us make informed decisions to control our impact. Knowing how products are performing in real time can make a big difference in people's behavior. The best-known example of this is the Prius mileage screen, which lets drivers see in real time how many miles per gallon they're getting. When they see the immediate result of inefficient decisions -- driving faster than necessary, for example -- people quickly learn how to drive more efficiently, and they choose to do so.

Persuasive Media

Media tells a story. Any product with a screen or a speaker can act like media; product packaging can act like media, too. As such, your devices and packages can utilize all the tricks of the advertising and marketing trades. Here are the main ways media can persuade:

- Cause-and-effect simulations. Letting users try different choices and see the different outcomes can be very motivating. A robot pet like the 90's fad Tamagotchi can train a user to feed and care for it properly by appearing happy, sad, or sick at the right times. With simple print media, the book 1984 took real socio-political forces and extended them into a possible future so vivid it has influenced politics for decades.

- Rehearse behavior. Performing actions in a virtual world or with a physical product get the user accustomed to performing those actions, which is one of the most powerful techniques of persuasion. Even without cause-and-effect simulation, a video game where turning out lights gets you points will train you to remember to turn out lights in real life.

- Environment simulations. Virtual worlds can train people to go beyond their normal comfort zones, either by making activities more fun or interesting, or making them safer. If exercising on a stationary bicycle is boring, it can be juiced up by getting to explore a virtual terrain while pedaling. As the videogame industry knows well, an environment that would be overwhelming or dangerous in real life can be harmless, and even quite fun, in a virtual world where no real harm can come to you, or where you can pause and step out of the world when it is too much. The game "A Force More Powerful" trains players to overthrow oppressive governments through peaceful opposition, an activity quite frightening and dangerous in the real world.

- Telling the backstory. This one is not part of Fogg's book, but is an important point where sustainable products and packaging can communicate with people. The products on the shelf in the store are as anonymous as strangers on the street. Where did they come from? Who made them, and how well were the workers treated? How much energy, water, and materials were used to make them? How much waste and toxicity did they produce, and how much will they produce in your home? How long will they live? If we knew the story of all the products on the shelf, many people's buying habits would instantly change. Some people [full disclosure: myself included] are pushing the creation of detailed eco-labels to make the backstory a more deliberate part of the purchase decision.

Persuasive Social Actors

Both real and imagined social actors can be persuasive--persuasive technology can leverage the persuasiveness of real people by multiplying their outreach. Even products themselves can behave as social actors, because we often treat them as such. Does your car have a name? Is your computer cranky, or well behaved? Even when we know objects to be simple conglomerations of steel and plastic and electronics, we still tend to imbue them with personalities. We react to them not as if they were fully human, but as if they had some character and "elan vital"--as if they were social actors. Here are the ways social actors can persuade:

- Rewards / punishments. This is the most obvious persuasive interaction, straight out of behavioral psychology. If alarm klaxons went off every time you left a room without turning off the lights, you'd quickly learn to always turn them off, and save energy through better habits. More realistically, many software tools that involve long complicated procedures (such as TurboTax or many install wizards) will give users a "Congratulations!" at the end to make them feel better about having gone through the process.

- Liking / attractiveness. Attractive people don't need interesting personalities to convince others to want to hang around them; likewise, attractive products don't have to perform that well for people to want to use them. This has been the cause of decades of frivolous garbage in the ID world, but it can also be leveraged to promote sustainable products. One of the reasons the second-generation green wave is stronger than the first is that it is aesthetically slick and polished instead of feeling outdated or like a sacrifice (think efficient, exciting tools and gadgets -- not hairshirts). Many green products have become aspirational, rather than embarrassments.

- Reciprocity. One of the most fundamental and universal human values is that if you do something nice for me, I should do something nice for you. A product that performs better for a user can get the user to do more for it (perhaps maintenance and upgrades, or data collection, or other environmentally beneficial actions). This can be used to extend product life or change user habits.

- Nagging. Gentle but persistent, reminders to take a certain action can be very effective. Nearly all shareware software uses nagging to get users to pay for it. However, nagging can get annoying rapidly, so it is important not to overuse.

- Modeling a behavior / attitude. Seeing someone else behave a certain way, or propound a certain outlook, can convince people to behave or think that way. This is by far the most effective with social actors whom users are attracted to or identify with (including aspirational attraction and identification). Countless nonprofits and political activist groups use technology such as email, websites, twitter, and text messages to leverage the modeling actions and attitudes of a few influential people to convince others to write their senators, vote a certain way or boycott certain products.

- Social support. People are more confident and comfortable behaving or thinking in ways that they know are shared by others. People regularly work out the bugs in their own pursuits by asking questions or having discussions within their communities. Every application with "Web 2.0" functionality--WiserEarth, Ask Nature, even this news site--leverages real people's social support by connecting them together.

Levels & Locations of Persuasion

Persuasion can happen on different levels, as well. Fogg divides things into two levels: "macrosuasion" and "microsuasion." Macrosuasion is when the sole purpose of the device or website or whatnot is to persuade you. (He uses the example of Quitnet, a website dedicated to helping people stop smoking.) But sometimes subtler persuasion can be even more effective. Microsuasion is when the persuasive feature is a small part of a larger product or software. (For instance, in Google Maps, you can click a button to get transit directions or walking directions, instead of driving directions. Originally Google Transit had its own separate page, but it is used and viewed by far more people as a button on an already-popular tool than it ever was or would be as a separate site. As a result, it persuades more people to take public transit even though it's a less dominant tool.)

Persuasive design in mobile devices can be especially powerful, because it can present you with exactly the right information or suggestion at exactly the right time and place for it to be most relevant and actionable. For instance, the transit function in Google Maps on the iPhone lets you find a bus route to your destination without you even having to know where you are, just using the phone's built-in GPS to find you and tell you where the nearest or soonest bus will be. Armed with this knowledge, you know you don't have to drive or use a taxi to get back home reliably, and in the process of using it you start to learn the local transit lines most relevant to you, so eventually you won't even need the tool for common trips.

Persuasive Design for Sustainability

Persuasive design can be an extremely powerful tool in the green designer's tool belt. It shouldn't be the only tool, certainly, but it can do things impossible for engineering, and can also complement green engineering that requires new habits or heightened awareness from the user. Persuasive technology isn't inherently green -- in fact, we are already living in a world with design biases that push our behavior towards over-consumption, irresponsibility and shortsightedness. We need to short circuit those existing persuasions, and steer users in the right direction. Knowing how objects persuade can help us do this, and using persuasive strategies can encourage more sustainable user habits in everything from building design to transportation design, from computers to coffee makers to clothing.

One last thing to consider about persuasive design is the ethics of the tactics you use, and the agendas which your persuasion promotes. Use your super-powers only for good. There can be a fine line between making things convenient and making things constrictive, or between educating the user with knowledge and manipulating them with propaganda. In our efforts to create a brighter, greener future, we have to remember the means are as important as the ends, because by the definition of sustainable design, better means are the ends we seek.

Ed Mazria's Two-Year, Nine-Million-Jobs Investment Plan

2009-04-15T21:00:16Z

By Caroline Dobuzinskis

With the job market crashing and a reported one in five mortgages underwater, the need for complex solutions to fix the US economy grows increasingly urgent. Ed Mazria, founder of the non-profit research and education organization Architecture 2030, has put forward a proposal to combat two urgent economic crises with one plan that will not only relieve financially strapped homeowners and generate job opportunities, but also leave us with a more resilient, more efficient built environment when this crisis is over.

Mazria believes the government should invest in the private building sector by giving developers and homeowners financial incentives to build (and retrofit) greener buildings – thus boosting jobs around construction and renovation. To outline his plan, Mazria and Architecture 2030 have developed the 2030 Challenge Stimulus Plan, a proposal that Mazria calls the "Two-Year, Nine-Million-Jobs Investment Plan. (Download details of the plan here.)

According to Mazria, the next energy bill to come through Congress is already likely to include a plan for making all buildings carbon neutral by the year 2030. President Obama made this promise during his campaign. The Architecture 2030 Challenge lays out a timeline: all new buildings and major renovations should should meet a 60 percent fossil fuel reduction standard by 2010; all buildings should be carbon neutral by 2030, and all state and federal buildings should follow suit. But Mazria and his team are making a case for implementing these goals in the private building sector now. And the way they see it, no start date is too soon.

I spoke with Mazria about his investment plan, and how he expects industry representatives, government officials and homeowners to react.

Caroline Dobuzinskis: When did the idea for the Two-Year, Nine-Million-Jobs Investment Plan come about?

Ed Mazria: We have a unique perspective because, as a research organization, our focus is the building sector, climate change, and the economy. At Architecture 2030 we were able to address the [economic] situation from that perspective, looking at the economy and the building sector that was dragging the whole economy down because of the mortgage prices. And, since we know the building industry really well having been in it for forty years, we know what it takes to bring it back, and we want to bring it back in an environmentally sound way. That was the reason why we investigated the economic crises in the building sector, and then how to create the jobs in the building sector to bring the US economy back.

CD: Tell me how your plan aims to help the private building sector and homeowners.

EM: We think now the federal government should step in and create an incentive for the private building sector to get back on its feet. Probably the largest segment of unemployment driven by the economic downturn is in the private building sector, both in construction and manufacturing of materials that go into the building sector and services that support the building industry. So in order to turn the economy around, you must address the building sector.

For every federal dollar that you put in, you want the private sector to add at least $2 to that, so that you can create at once as many jobs as possible. And the one way to do that is to tie federal money to energy reduction targets, so that the private sector has to then come in and fund energy upgrades in order to get the federal dollars.

Homeowners get greater incentives for the greater reductions that they can accomplish on their buildings. With a mortgage buydown tied to energy reduction, the homeowner saves on his monthly mortgage, and he also saves on his utility bills. He not only saves on mortgage interest, he also recaptures the money that’s [currently being] lost because most housing is leaking energy. [The money generated by creating] more jobs, and by the taxes from the folks paid to do the renovations, can go back to the federal government and the states to fund both infrastructure projects and to pay the government back for the outlay. It’s kind of a full circle proposal.

CD: How can homeowners receive lower mortgage rates to improve the energy efficiency of their homes?

EM: Homeowners can aim for 30, 40, 50 or 75 percent below the energy use target required by the IECC 2006 and ASHRAE 90.1-2004 code standards, or they can aim for carbon neutral, and each target is tied to different incentives. So one of the examples we give is, if you want to get 75 percent below code -- basically saving 75 percent on your energy bills -- we estimate that [the renovations] would cost about $51,000. So you add that amount into a new mortgage but as an incentive you receive a much, much lower interest rate so that your monthly outlay, even with $51,000 added to the amount of the mortgage, would be much, much less.

You would be investing that $51,000 in upgrades like replacing equipment that was outdated, not working properly or not really efficient. You might be adding insulation; you might be adding skylights and windows to let the sun in; you might be making windows operable so you have natural ventilation so you can look at passive solar heating/cooling strategies. You could take advantage of tax credits, for example, to install a solar voltaic system. There are almost an infinite number of ways you can make your home more efficient if you have an existing home.

CD: The federal government would be setting the mortgage rates?

EM: Right now the federal government is the only one that is buying mortgages. Banks that are lending mortgages are selling them to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We think that number is now 90 to 95 percent of all mortgages so [the federal government] can then set the targets.

CD: Is the average homeowner ready to make these changes?

EM: Absolutely, because everyone wants to save money and have more expendable income on a monthly basis. The reason the first stimulus last year didn’t work was because you gave everybody a check on a one-time basis. In our plan, you are talking about $300 to $500 a month in savings. That’s huge. We think people will be lining up at the doors to take advantage of this.

The one place we think people will invest is in their own house. The other thing we think is, by taking advantage of the lower rates, people would not only make the efficiency upgrades but they would probably spend some more to do some things that they had put off for awhile because the rates are fairly lucrative. Our analysis just took into account the spending on efficiency, but we think there would be a lot more spending as we go along.

CD: Do you see your plan as part of an upcoming bill?

EM: I think that the plan will come up when [legislators] talk about how we get the building sector back on track. Right now what they have been doing is focusing on the foreclosure crisis, not on the building sector as a whole. They haven’t yet focused on the private sector, but I think that is going to be coming up. I am not sure which committee is going to take the lead on that, but it has to be dealt with because it is a sector that is dragging the economy down. I think right now the administration is focused on putting out fires.

CD: At your presentation at the National Building Museum in February, you and John Podesta talked about the US serving as a model for other countries. Do you think that there needs to be international policy to follow?

EM: I certainly do. I think the US must take a leadership role when it comes to the environment, and climate change, and building efficiency. How we turn our economy around is going to influence how other entities and governments turn their economies around. If we just deal with the economic situation without dealing with the energy crisis and the climate change issue, we are not going to get very far, because those are coming right up and will drag us down again. And, we have a great opportunity to deal with all three issues at one time, and that will set the stage in terms of other governments.

Caroline Dobuzinskis is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

Editor's note: This text features slight corrections to the original. Revisions posted 4/14/09.

Photo credit: flickr/Trebosc, Creative Commons license.

Graphic Series: Earthly Ideas, 20-Minute Neighborhoods

2009-04-15T20:40:28Z

This week's cartoon describes 20-Minute Neighborhoods. This term for walkable communities, which has often been used by urban planners, gained a lot of attention in Oregon last summer as city officials discussed the next version of the Portland Plan. We think it's great to see city planners actively pursuing this connected, mixed-use model of development, which enables and encourages residents to walk or bike rather than drive. Living near basic amenities like grocery stores not only makes everyday errands much easier; it can also make you healthier. Read more about real 20-minute neighborhoods in 20 Minute City, our newest series on Worldchanging Seattle!

Click image to enlarge

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

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

Friday Roundup: Our Favorite Finds This Week

2009-04-10T01:17:53Z

PUMA
We can't decide if we love this concept or hate it (though we'll admit our animosity stems partly from a nasty accident Alex once had while racing a souped-up Segway at FOO Camp). While the concept of a 300-lb vehicle is pretty cool, we know the main problem with vehicles won't be solved simply by building smaller vehicles, gasoline-powered or otherwise. From this article, however, it seems like there's no danger of the PUMA being developed for sale anytime soon ... put that way, the concept sounds a little like a grasp at relevance from the ailing GM. (See Clark Williams-Derry's blog on the PUMA for the best headline we've seen all day.) Photo source: Segway Inc.

Living Walls on the Rise
We posted this week about Vancouver's new six-acre green roof, an impressive civic development project that underscores the scalability and growing feasibility of living roof design. But when we stumbled across this post from WebEcoist -- featuring photos of 15 very different living wall installations around the world -- we realized that the vertical version isn't far behind. On the contrary, it seems like green walls offer even more versatility for indoor and outdoor uses, which offer the potential to boost insulation, improve air quality, and of course add visual appeal.

Update: Shipping Containers as Sustainable Housing
The team at Clemson University is making quick progress on their plan to design livable, sustainable dwellings using the large shipping containers sent to Caribbean nations (get the background in this post). According to Professor Douglas Hecker, the students will begin construction on two containers next week, using two separate "pod" designs created to be completely off-grid. One is a "water pod," which provides drinking water and water for personal hygiene, uses a self composting toilet to minimize wasted water, and stores graywater for reuse in the unit's "emergency garden." The other design, a "tech pod," provides minimal cooking, lighting and an outlet for power, with the goal of allowing residents to pursue business opportunities more competitively. Hecker says the project -- which has been selected for the 2009 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam -- has garnered industry support, via their Atlanta-based corporate partner Container-IT, and as a part of the Intermodal Steel Building Units (ISBU) Association's Project Greencube, an initiative which plans to introduce ISO Containers into architecture curricula nationally. Read more about their progress, and watch videos, on the project blog. Photo credit: Dustin White

36 Gallons Per Egg?
We've talked before about virtual water and water footprints, which are great ways of making visible the surprising amounts of H20 needed to produce our stuff. Our friends at GOOD prepared this great-looking chart that shows how many gallons of water are embedded in a few daily activities -- and how much we can save with alternative appliances, energy sources, diet choices, etc. Instead of steak (1,500 gallons), wine (31) and bread (11) for dinner, try chicken (287), beer (20) and a baked potato (7). Put the dishes in the dishwasher instead of hand-washing under a running faucet, and you'll save a whopping 1,255 gallons of water a year at your evening meal. Though we understand that the chicken option keeps many readers from balking, we do wish GOOD would have thrown a meat-free dinner menu up there for an even starker comparison.

The Silicon Valley of Water
Ally Jacqueline Novogratz discusses the idea that Milwaukee is positioning itself as the “Silicon Valley of Water:”

I also couldn’t help but think that this approach of retooling some of America’s own cities to focus on transforming other parts of the world could have an incredible impact on transforming the cities themselves. It is this virtual cycle that we need not only to be aware of but to pursue avidly, and to communicate effectively. My mentor John Gardner would often tell me that sometimes you have to “push the inevitable.” Taking our best and brightest and asking them to focus on solving some of the world’s toughest problems from a sense both of humility as well as audacity is what is needed at this critical time in our shared history on the planet.

Indeed, cities in the developed world have a giant opportunity to lead the way towards new, bright green infrastructure and urban design (with resilience and economic benefits galore) and then share the results to help emerging megacities in the developing world adopt the technologies they find useful in building their own versions of sustainable prosperity.

What Era Is This, Again?
We've touched on this before, but in light of our Save the Holocene! essay, it seemed worth noting that it's gaining credibility: the Early Anthropocene hypothesis. Put succinctly:

"A wide array of archeological, cultural, historical and geologic evidence points to viable explanations tied to anthropogenic changes resulting from early agriculture in Eurasia, including the start of forest clearance by 8000 years ago and of rice irrigation by 5000 years ago. In recent millennia, the estimated warming caused by these early gas emissions reached a global-mean value of sim 0.8 °C and roughly 2 °C at high latitudes, large enough to have stopped a glaciation of northeastern Canada predicted by two kinds of climatic models. CO2 oscillations of sim 10 ppm in the last 1000 years are too large to be explained by external (solar-volcanic) forcing, but they can be explained by outbreaks of bubonic plague that caused historically documented farm abandonment in western Eurasia. Forest regrowth on abandoned farms sequestered enough carbon to account for the observed CO2decreases. Plague-driven CO2 changes were also a significant causal factor in temperature changes during the Little Ice Age (1300–1900 AD)."

In other words, it's possible we've been causing climate change for longer than we thought.

Day in the Life
And while we're on the subject of knowing the planet, here's a fun short video about what a day on Earth is, in terms of our relationship to the Sun:

Resilience is Good Business
Jamais does a great job explaining the basics of resilience thinking in this Fast Company post:

Two factors stand out as core assumptions of a resilience approach:  the future is inherently uncertain, so the system needs to be as  flexible as possible; and failures happen, so the system needs to be  able to identify failures early and not make things worse as a result.  These may seem like common-sense notions, but today's global systems  work best when everything's running smoothly and predictably.  Resilient systems are optimized for rough roads with sudden turns.

Resilience/ survivability is not the same thing as sustainability, just as sustainability is not the same thing a prosperity: but if we do our job right, we'll get all three.

True Meme:
Wind power now employs more people than coal mining.

Have a great weekend!

Hacking The Auto X-Prize

2009-04-06T13:48:50Z

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

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

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

Mason says:

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

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

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

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

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

2009-04-03T15:31:54Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Water. Srsly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember, crazy GINI coefficients are great predictors of disaster.

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

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

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

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

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Food without soil:

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

Hydroponics: not just for hippies any more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Awesome talk by Worldchanging ally Natalie Jerimijenko:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ReCaptcha is a cool use for otherwise wasted attention:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graphic Series: Earthly Ideas, Biochar

2009-04-02T18:55:35Z

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

Click image to enlarge

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

Reader Report: Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship

2009-04-02T01:16:11Z

By Kristin Hayden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo source: HeroRATS.

Corporate Political Transparency: The Green Business Rating We Really Need

2009-04-01T19:00:14Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd like to hear your ideas.

Shepard Fairey: Notes Toward an Affirmative Art

2009-03-28T00:34:34Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All images credit: Shepard Fairey

Open Intellectual Property as Sustainability Accelerator

2009-03-27T23:09:26Z

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

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

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

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

The main point being:

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-03-26T18:33:44Z

By Mary Catherine O'Connor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heirloom Design

2009-03-25T19:05:50Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wall Street Crowd and the Transparency Revolution

2009-03-24T18:18:53Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image by Ji Lee. Source: Portfolio Magazine.