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Sustainability and Environmental Justice: The Challenges of Equity

Sustainability and Environmental Justice: The Challenges of Equity

The Sustainability Consortium: A Global Approach to Improving Consumer Products

The Sustainability Consortium: A Global Approach to Improving Consumer Products

Getting to the Meat of the Matter:
Debunking the Myths of Being Vegan

Getting to the Meat of the Matter: Debunking the Myths of Being Vegan

Phoenix Mayoral Debate:
Advancing Sustainability

Phoenix Mayoral Debate: Advancing Sustainability

Biochar and Sustainable Development: A Story About Working in Haiti

Biochar and Sustainable Development: A Story About Working in Haiti

Ryan Delaney: My name is Ryan Delaney and I am co-director of the Carbon Roots International, and a recent graduate from ASU’s School of Sustainability.

I guess, ultimately, the reason I chose to come back to school to go to the School of Sustainability was that I spent some time working for a copper mining company in South America. And I realized while working in the Andes, I want to say the injustices, but how destructive the mining industry was and not just environmentally, socially in a lot of ways. And I realized that I wanted to be able to do something about that, to do something to change that. So while I was a student at the School of Sustainability, while I was getting my master’s degree here a colleague of mine asked me if I knew about biochar. And I said no, I have no clue what that is. He told me about it and I learned that it was a way of making soil produce a lot more, improving the health of soil by mixing charcoal in with it essentially. And we decided we wanted to do something with that, it seemed like a great opportunity. So we founded a company, we founded Carbon Roots International which is a nonprofit and we used this simple technology to address food security, deforestation, and poverty in the developing world. So right now we have some projects in Haiti to test biochar, test our feasibility to determine whether or not it is going to scale as a business and we hope that it will. And I’ve been going to Haiti on and off for the past year now, I did my master’s degree through the School of Sustainability working in Haiti. It’s a very difficult place to work, but very rewarding. It’s hard to see poverty at that level every day, to live in poverty like that is very difficult to watch. But it’s a really great experience to spend time there and do what we can to help hopefully.

My experience at ASU really gave me an opportunity to talk with likeminded people and bounce ideas off them and learn from them and really helped kind of germinate the basic idea of this company of Carbon Roots and make it better, through the support and ideas of other students and colleagues and professors at the School of Sustainability. Specifically my experience doing my master’s thesis gave me the knowledge and tools that really allowed me to work with the community in Haiti which is one of the very important aspects of Carbon Roots work to ensure the participation of the individual villagers and make sure that they have a say in what we’re doing and can help guide us in our work in Haiti. They can help us help them essentially.

We’ve developed an internship program with the School of Sustainability which will be starting next spring. Starting with one internship, we have some projects that they can work on in Haiti and hopefully it will result in a trip for the intern, the undergraduate, to Haiti and it really gives them the opportunity within the context of Carbon Roots and our work in Haiti to put into practice everything they learn at the School of Sustainability and really apply it in the real world, which I think is really exciting.

One thing that I think is really important about sustainability work is that it needs to be applied in the real world. I think that the School of Sustainability really provides a fantastic stepping point to take ideas that you have as a student here – to make them reality in the real world. In the developing world, in the developed world – whatever it may be to really apply sustainable concepts and I think that’s really important that people don’t forget that. That they don’t get turned off by maybe too many reading assignments and remember that they’re here to actually do something in the real world.

It’s really exciting to be part of ASU’s School of Sustainability which is the first in the country and the best in the country. You go around the country and people recognize the name and they’re impressed and its really fun to be a part of something new but that’s defining its own discipline. It’s a great experience.

Science is Not Enough: How to Make Climate and Sustainability Cool Again

Science is Not Enough: How to Make Climate and Sustainability Cool Again

Climate Change in Arizona: Current Knowledge and Future Collaborations Among the State Universities

Climate Change in Arizona: Current Knowledge and Future Collaborations Among the State Universities

The Future Energy Abyss: An Intimate Conversation with David Brancaccio and John Hofmeister

The Future Energy Abyss: An Intimate Conversation with David Brancaccio and John Hofmeister

Rob Melnick: Good afternoon. Could everyone take a seat and we can begin. My name is Rob Melnick, I'm the Executive Dean of the Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS) here at ASU. I want to welcome you on behalf of ASU and on behalf of GIOS, the global institute, and also the Walter Cronkite School. This wonderful facility that we're in, is theirs, and we appreciate Mark Lodato and our colleagues from Cronkite School helping us put on this special event with American Public Media and the Global Institute of Sustainability.

Tonight, we have a wonderful program that will be introduced to you in just a moment. I just wanted to let you know that the Institute, that this is a part of a series that the Global Institute runs on sustainability, where we bring people to campus from around the country and around the world to talk about prominent issues affecting the future sustainability of our community, of our nation and of our planet.

We've had a wonderful time with our colleagues from American Public Media today. I want to introduce one of them in particular to you who will then introduce the program this afternoon. That's Ben Adair.

Ben is the Editorial Director of American Public Media's Sustainability and Global Climate Change Initiative. He oversees reporters, producers, and editors to create a unified programming strategy across the APM National Portfolio. Even though I have many other sentences saying how wonderful Ben is, he's asked me to scratch those in the interest of time. So, Ben, let me ask you to come up here and welcome you [applause].

Ben Adair: Okay, thank you. I just want to say, first of all, thanks to everybody here at Arizona State University. It's been such a pleasure working with everyone and putting this together. We're all really, really excited about the event tonight. Specifically, thanks to Rob, Karen Leland, Vanessa Beale, the rest of his team. Thanks for Dean Christopher Callahan and Assistant Dean, Mark Lodato, at the Cronkite School.

Both GIOS and the Cronkite School are home to real innovative programs that are dedicated to the betterment of society and tackling the myriad challenges looming in our future and also today.

Most of you recognize the names up here, sponsoring this event, but there's one name that is maybe a little less familiar. It's also associated with this event, and that's the Gary Comer Global Agenda. A lot of people ask me, "What is the Gary Comer Global Agenda? Who is Gary Comer, and what's his agenda?"

Gary Comer, for those of you who don't know, is a businessman. He's probably best known for starting Land's End. He was a sailor, and he had an infinitely curious mind.

In 2004, after an Arctic sailing expedition that was far too easy, there was no ice mucking up the routes, he turned his mind to climate change. He assembled some of America's top climate scientists. He funded them, and this was cutting-edge research, all geared to try to figure out what exactly is going on here; but, doing the work, is not enough.

Gary Comer knew that communicating the size of the challenges, what we know and what we don't know, possible solutions, communication is what's going to inform people to make the decisions that will affect their own lives and change the world. That's something that we, at Marketplace, also happen to believe. It's a responsibility that we have to our 10 million weekly listeners.

Sustainability means organizing our economic activities to meet society's present needs without compromising future generations. It's more than a "buzzword" on some annual report. It's more than the environment. It's more than energy and resources. It's more than green jobs, the green economy or your green thumb. It's the challenge of or generation, and it's something that Marketplace and American Public Media have dedicated reporting resources, airtime, and even whole shows too.

That's been going on for seven years now. So, if you would allow me a couple of "buzzwords," sustainability is the challenge and the opportunity to make all of this, our economy, our political systems, the markets, our communities to look at it all together, roll it up and actually try to figure it out, make it work, maybe even thrive.

So I'm really excited to be introducing these two men who know this territory a bit better than most, David Brancaccio. I've been very happy to be working with him over the last six months or so. He's our Senior Correspondent for Economy 4.0, and I'm sure he'll say a bit more about that, but I'll give you the tagline. He's exploring how to make our economy work better for more people. He's just back from the Middle East where that very question toppled regimes, caused social unrest and has been really exciting. Those stories are going to appear on Marketplace next week.

John Hofmeister is the Distinguished Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University's Global Institute of Sustainability. He's also the founder and CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy. He's the former President of Shell Oil. He's the author of a book called Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk from an Energy Insider.

With that, I'll turn it over to David.

David Brancaccio: Thanks, Ben, I appreciate that. All right, general knowledge quiz, raise hands! Who knows what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is? Very good, the big science project in Switzerland, billions of dollars was going to get to-they're looking for the 'God particle', sort of the origins of the universe.

Do you remember what the fear was before it turned on the first time a couple of years ago? Remember what the concern was? Right, that it might form a black hole that would suck in the entire solar system, right?

When you asked scientists about this, they didn't say there's no possibility, they said it was a small possibility. So people got worried, I got worried, and they turned it on in September of 2008. You know, and what happens? Lehman Brothers disappears, Freddie Mac disappears, Fannie Mae, gone!

If you take a look, it's within hours, okay? So that was funny the first time. It broke, do you remember, it broke after they got it fired up the first time. Then they turned it on a second time, November of 2009, late November in Dubai goes bust almost instantly, okay?

So what? Well, it's operating now at half-power, okay, and they won't put it back up to full power, they say, until 2014, okay? When you know that financial crises happen about every six or seven years, do the math! Yeah, I know.

So why am I mentioning this? Well, besides demonstrating that I need some remedial work on correlation versus causation, it's a reminder that very bad things do happen, and that scenarios that seem overly grim, pessimistic, and over-the-top actually can terrifyingly come to fruition.

I'm sitting here with a gentleman who is very worried about just one of those scenarios, about what happens if America stays on its present path regarding energy policy? If we keep doing what we're doing, Mr. Hofmeister, where do you see us ending up?

John Hofmeister: If we stay on the path we're on, which looks almost inevitable, because of our inability to agree a way forward, we've now had eight presidents who have promised energy independence. They've been supported by 19 congresses, since 1973, the first Arab Oil Embargo.

I say we're headed for an energy abyss, which will test the foundations of our society, could potentially destroy the sense of equanimity that exists in our culture and we will be in gas lines, and we will be living with blackouts like a Third World Country by 2018, certainly by 2020. It's almost too late to push back that inevitability.

Brancaccio: Someone going into high school now could come out of college into this scenario.

Hofmeister: That's right, and the economic consequences of that, the social consequences, the civil unrest potential of not having electricity in the heat of summer, not having electricity in the cold of winter, companies laying people off because they can't have a predictable production schedule, grocery stores throwing out their frozen foods, repeatedly, or stopping carrying frozen foods and remember the gas lines of the 1970s.

We're not nice to each other in gas lines, and you could just imagine somebody with a sick child, having to get to the emergency room, doesn't have any gas in their car, they ask if they can get in front of somebody in a gas line and somebody shoots them.

You may say that's hypothetical, you may say that'll never happen, but people got shot in the 70s, ladies and gentleman. People got beat up. They got their cars banged on because they were desperate, and the sense of desperation. I mean, Vancouver last night, when people get upset, there's no control over what might happen. I worry about that.

Brancaccio: And these are the nice Canadians [laughter].

Hofmeister: That's right

Brancaccio: I, for one, am not that interested in embracing that kind of "Mad Max" future. So I'll be very interested to hear, in just a moment, who you blame for this, but also in particular ways forward from that abyss, but first let's talk about you.

I want to know just a touch about your personal journey, John. At the point when most guys have a midlife crisis and buy a red Camaro, you went into the oil industry. You got a job with Shell Oil as president. Tell me about that.

Hofmeister: I spent 25 years of my career, after getting a Political Science Degree, from Kansas State University, in companies that consume energy, big time, or use energy, big time. General Electric for 15 years, Nortel for 5 years, a telecommunications company and Honeywell, right here in the Valley. I used to come over quite often to Garrett Engine. They all use energy.

Then, I got recruited, into Royal Dutch Shell in a global role in the Hague, and for the last three years of my Shell career, I spent as President of US Shell Operations.

Brancaccio: What period was that? Was that a barrel of laughs, that period?

Hofmeister: 2005 to 2008. I got six months into the job, Hurricane Katrina came along, and panic time. If you were along the Gulf Coast with Katrina, you still, all these years later, all you hear are Katrina stories in New Orleans and the whole Gulf Coast. Ike stories, Rita stories. I did all the hurricanes, but also I did the first high gasoline price era. I spent hours and hours testifying in front of Congress trying to explain the high gas prices.

Brancaccio: Was it that nightmare in 2008, that time?

Hofmeister: 2007 and 2008. It was when gas first hit about $3.50 a gallon Congress finally decided, "We need to understand this a little better, let's call in the oil companies." So I did the New York Times front page, you know, take the oath bit, get your picture in the paper.

What just happened in May with the five CEOs, three of whom were brand new, and two of whom had experience from the last time around, and what I found in testifying in front of Congress was just as much misinformation, disinformation and lack of information, that I was finding all over the country, because I didn't sit in Houston and bury myself in a bunker with high gas prices. I took 250 Shell managers out to 50 cities across the US to engage real people on what gas prices mean to their life, because I wanted our managers to be sensitive to this, and let's go out and face the music.

They come to our gas stations every day, some six million people visit Shell stations every day, and they're angry. They're upset, they're disturbed and they don't know why. So we have an obligation to them, as consumers of our product, to go explain it. I met with 25 governors. I met the mayors of the top ten cities in the country, hundreds and hundreds of elected officials, but most importantly tens of thousands of everyday people.

I became convinced during that period, 2007-2008. This country can't continue on its present course. So I had to retire at 60. Shell boots you out at 60 if you're a senior executive. I said, "What are my options?" I have a lot of different options but I decided I want to go into the not-for-profit world as an educator. I think people deserve to know what it is that we are facing as a nation because as an energy expert, somebody who is investing billions and billions of dollars in the future, people need to know that a. we can have a future, we can have a brilliant future, but we need to have an enabling future.

The only way to have an enabling future, in a world that has more energy that it will ever need, in a country that has more energy than it will ever need, is to have a plan. We have no ability, no capacity in this country, to make a plan, a short-term, a medium-term, a long-term plan, a plan that goes 0-10 years, 10-25 years, 25-50 years. That plan can not only take into account the production of energy and the conservation of energy but the environment as well, because the implications on the environment, from whether it's hydrocarbon, or uranium, or wind, or solar, or biofuels, huge implications from every source of energy that have to be managed.

There's no such thing as "clean energy." There are environmental implications from every form of energy, land use for solar and wind. I've been on solar farms and wind farms that are embarrassing with the land abuse that's taken place, because in the beginning there haven't been any standards. You get gully washouts, you get land erosion. Nobody ever talks about the number of birds knocked out of the air, to the death, as they try to migrate through wind farms, but you know how many birds are covered with oil at an oil spill because it's mandated that you count and report the birds.

Brancaccio: Well, I think that the Audubon Society does complain about, what do they call it, wind generators, something like condor Cuisinarts, you wrote?

Hofmeister:

But the real issue is, to me, lack of information, lack of information in a democracy that only succeeds if people know what is possible, what to vote for, what to vote against, because they know something. So my passion, and it is a passion, and I'm doing it pro bono, is to educate as many people as I can as fast as I can so we can head off the energy abyss. We've got to head it off. Our society cannot tolerate what I described earlier, and it's not too late to head it off.

Brancaccio: How much of this potential abyss is the making of your old industry itself? You accuse the oil and gas industry of being tone deaf, even obnoxious, essentially, in your book, but you do think they're right on a key point. When the oil companies say, "We gotta drill a lot domestically and quickly."

Hofmeister:

We spent a 100 years building a hydrocarbon economy because we had plenty of hydrocarbons. You don't suddenly turn that off. You don't suddenly talk about oil in the past tense, which has been happening lately, where the statement in the State of the Union message this past year, and I'm a registered Democrat, so don't think this is an oil guy banging on a Democratic president. I voted for President Obama, but when he said, "Why should we invest in the-why should we subsidize the past when we could invest in the future?"

Anybody that thinks oil's in the past tense should rethink their position. I'm saying it as diplomatically as I can, because we're not anywhere near peak oil yet. We're not anywhere near the maximum production and consumption of oil. While we were in a recession, for example, China built and bought 37 million new cars that only use oil. So the demand for oil today is 86 million barrels a day. Before we're halfway through this decade the demand will be 96 million barrels a day. Where are those 10 million barrels coming from?

China has a plan. China's plan, and they've already been at it for three years, is to subsidize with loans, state-owned oil companies so that they get guaranteed oil supplies which takes new oil away from the global trading market and we're declining the production of oil in this country by making it very difficult to drill for more oil. The most oil you get from a well is when it's brand new. Then it goes into decline immediately. So if we don't keep drilling and we don't produce our domestic oil, there's going to be less oil available to import because China is consuming ever more. They're going from 9 million barrels a day consumption to 15 million barrels a day consumption by 2015. That's only four years from now.

So you ask about the industry. The industry, like every industry, has self-preservation in mind. What they do is drill for oil and gas. They know there's plenty of oil and gas. They don't really think that material alternative energy is commercial yet, although many of the companies, and my former company in particular, has invested billions of dollars in alternative forms of energy, but knowing that, knowing how inefficient and ineffective alternative forms of energy are, you develop an inherent knowledge that says, "Well, we better do more gas, we better do more oil, because that's what we're going to live off of," that's what's going to lubricate our economy for decades into the future. Our shareholders deserve a return on investment and so we better look out for ourselves.

So, yes, the industry is very self-protective, but no more self-protective than bio fuels industry or wind industry, or solar industry or public utilities looking out for their interest, whether it's coal or uranium (meaning nuclear) or other forms, natural gas. We have a system that's predicated on self-interest. Everybody is looking out for themselves.

Brancaccio: But they're very effective at looking after themselves, when you take a look at how much money that industry has spent on lobbying Washington. I saw one figure, last year, $175 million, and in then someone else added up all the money lobbying by all the environmental groups. It was like $22 million. They've got a lot of clout with that self-preservation.

Hofmeister: You bet they do.

Brancaccio: Doesn't that produce an investment in the status quo rather than turning to alternatives?

Hofmeister: That's why we need a plan, but we can't get a plan for three reasons, four reasons, actually. First, the nation is caught in a trap of perverse partisanship, where it's more about power than it is about the nation. It's more about getting or keeping power on the basis of party affiliation than it is about what's good for the nature. Whether it's the deficit, whether it's healthcare, whether it's energy future, the partisanship is supreme.

Number two, we have politicians who gear their priorities according to the nearness of the next election. I call it political time. Political time prompts energy time all the time. Energy time is decades. Political time is two years-four year cycles.

Third, we have allowed US government to grow so big and to be so involved that we now have 13 cabinet level agencies governing energy. We have 26 congressional committees between the House and the Senate, governing energy, and every federal judge appointed for life can decide at his or her bench the energy policy of the nation, based upon a case brought before their bench.

So we have judicial, legislative, and executive branch all managing energy simultaneously. Do they talk to each other, do they cooperate? No, they don't.

The fourth problem is what you just brought up, the special interest money. We call, what in other countries call corruption, what we do legally. Who makes the law that makes the corruption legal? The fox is in the hen house. The fox designed the hen house because the fox is getting the money from the special interest lobbying groups. It's called campaign finance and so that campaign finance is money that is declared legal, that comes their way, which is the source of what? The next election.

So with the special interest money, wherever it comes from, individuals, organizations, corporations, you name it, people are going to follow the money and they're going to do what the money asks them to do. That system is going to take us to the energy abyss.

Brancaccio: Forget the fourth, I'm going to offer a fifth. Maybe also part of the problem here is us. I was hearing a British expert on energy speak and he used a term I hadn't heard before, "hyperbolic misdiscounting." What the heck does that mean, but it apparently means human beings have a very hard time taking the future seriously. It's vague, it hasn't happened, they know it's kind of coming, but the immediate, especially if there are pressing problems right in front of us, that's concrete.

We have this amazing capacity. It's like asking a young person to stop smoking when they're 16 years old and they're trying to be cool with their friends. They know about the lung cancer stuff, but it's when they're 40 they're going to get that. They just can't fully visualize it. Maybe politicians are simply catering to the fact that we all have this disease.

Hofmeister: I call that political time, because it is a very short-term focus, where what really matters is, "What do I do between now and the next election to make sure I get either elected or re-elected?" That's what drives them. We're already into the 2012 campaign, deeply into the 2012 campaign. Things are being decided today based upon the bet that either party is making or candidates, potential candidates are making, relative to November 2012. There's no day after that which is more important than November 2012. That's what's driving the nation. When it comes to energy, that doesn't work!

Energy takes time. When you put a new deepwater platform in place, it's a 30-year project. When you build a new power plant, it's a 50-year project, and on and on, so that energy-you know, the energy system that we have, we've got 600 coal plants. The average is nearly 40 years old, average age, with plants that are designed for a 50-year design life.

We've got 104 nuclear plants. We haven't built one in 30 years. The average age of nuclear plants is just over 30 years, design life of 40 years, permitting life of 40. So the NRC has improved license extensions for 60 of those 104 plants. So people who now live next to a 40-year-old plant, they're going to get to live next to a 60-year-old plant. How safe and reliable are 50- to 60-year-old nuclear plants?

Well, we just found out in Fukushima, 50-year-old technology, 50-year-old construction, not a good scene in Northern Japan right now.

Brancaccio: We're still voting on a nuclear future after what happened in Japan?

Hofmeister: Absolutely, I think we have to have a nuclear as a part of the mix. Why, because uranium is two million times more powerful than the BTUs that you get out of coal, gasoline or diesel, two million times. It's carbon-free and the waste management is possible. We see how France manages waste. It works.

France is using technology invented in the United States to reprocess waste. There's no debate in France about the storage and the reprocessing of nuclear waste. In this country, it's one big food fight over Yucca Mountain in Nevada, where $20-some billion has been spent to build a facility to store waste. It's an Act of Congress to build that facility. Administratively, the Executive Branch is taking away that opportunity.

I say in my book, you know, Harry Reid never wanted Yucca Mountain. Harry Reid was supporting the candidacy of one of the Democratic candidates who happened to win. The reward is to shut down Yucca Mountain. I think it's a political bone. It's now payback time. Nobody has been against Yucca Mountain in the other 49 states, and the way we got to Yucca Mountain was through a congressional act, not an administrative decree taking it away.

What happened to the rule of law? So it's now being investigated by Congress, as it should be, but here's the point. Nuclear energy is so powerful that if you manage the risks, how can we not do that? How should-why wouldn't we-why shouldn't we expand it? We know so much more now than we did 40 or 50 years ago when we built 100 plants. Why don't we just reinvest, but we can't. Even the heads of nuclear businesses are not willing to reinvest because we put so many disablers in place, the most serious of which is a failure to deal with waste. If we don't deal with waste management for nuclear then we shouldn't build any more.

Brancaccio: You said that if we managed the risk. I mean, one of the other lessons of Fukushima is the fact that bad things can happen with huge effects when it comes to that technology.

Hofmeister: I submit that bad things can happen with every form of energy from geothermal, from hydrogen to wind, solar, biofuels, coal, oil, natural gas, hydropower. What are we going to do when the those dams that hold back so much water get so silted up that the actual utility of the dam is about gone.

You get some of the old dams built in the 1930s that have a huge silt problem now, and we're not going to get the level of electricity we would like and water is a precious resource. So every form of energy has implications that have to be managed. Every form of energy has a risk management responsibility.

Brancaccio: I want to hear-I have a solution to all our problems that I want to run past you in a moment, but I want to give you a shot at your fascinating solution about getting over this, addressing this issue of the political system being unable to deal with this long-term issues. It involves almost drawing inspiration from the beloved Federal Reserve.

Hofmeister: Exactly, during the 19-I mean, I just believe in history. I believe in political science and politics and democracy. If you go back and study American History in terms of how this nation managed its monetary system, it basically did not. The Constitution was silent on Central Bank. For the first 100-year history of the nation there was a huge debate and an argument over whether we should or shouldn't have a Central Bank. Alexander Hamilton versus the others who felt there should be a central bank.

After a century of wrestling this, we were having the second half of the 19th century was chaotic in terms of the rise of industrialization but not enough capital. We celebrated the beginning of the 20th century by the US Treasury declaring bankruptcy.

We don't teach that in high school. We don't teach Americans that the US Treasury went bankrupt in 1907. It's pretty embarrassing. We also don't teach the fact that after it was bailed out by JP Morgan, and Wall Street financiers with the promise that this will never happen again, it did happen again, in 1912.

So in 1913, in the face of these two crises, two bankruptcies of the Federal Government in less than a decade, Congress finally acted and the White House went along with the Federal Reserve Act.

In the 98 years since 1913, the United States of America has become the world's largest economy with the world's most safe currency. There have been human error judgments made by the Fed over the 100 years. Not enough money in the 30s, too much money in the last decade. So they've proven that they can make mistakes, but they've also proven that they can fix mistakes.

I'm saying, with that kind of independent regulatory authority to manage a monetary system for the good of society with a Board of Governors who happen to know what they're doing, generally, with not worried about political time, not worried about Democratic or Republican solutions to problems. Why don't we learn from that?

Given that energy is such an important part of a 21st century US nation, and actually we're becoming noncompetitive because of expense of energy or scarce energy, man-made, why don't we look at the solution for the monetary system and apply those principles to the energy system, and create an energy Fed, a Federal energy resources board with an Act of Congress, so that it's democratic, have a president sign the bill, create a board of governors who know what they're doing, 14-year terms just like the Fed.

They don't care about elections, they care about America. They care about society. I believe that technology is a way of remaining democratic because here's what I fear. We get into the age of energy abyss, we're going back to 1950. We're going to find, re-find the solutions, which made the second half of the 20th century so successful for this nation.

We'll go for coal, we'll go for oil, we'll go for gas. We'll "drill, baby, drill" and go right through the backyard swimming pools of anybody that happens to be in an area that has oil or gas because we will not be tolerant of not having enough energy. Rather than revert to an unsustainable 20th century solution. Let's have a Fed that has four authorities, a Fed for energy, to manage over a 50-year timeframe, the sources of energy, how much energy from what type of supply, the conservation of energy with the technology. Let's rule out the internal combustion engine by 2035, replacing it with batteries with hydrogen fuel cells, with mass transit systems.

Let's get rid of the internal combustion engine. My goodness, it uses 40 percent of all the oil we consume. It's dirty. It's only 20 percent efficient.

Third, manage the environmental implications of all those different forms of energy to protect the land, the water, and the air that we need, not just for this generation, but all future generations.

Fourth, make sure we have the infrastructure that moves energy from where it's produced to where it's consumed.

With that kind of long range planning, just like the banks under the guidance of the fed can go serve their customers and make money for their shareholders, when they're not abusing the privilege, which they did in the last decade, the energy companies can go do what they do, take care of their customers and make lots of money for their shareholders, but according to a plan.

Brancaccio: But you think that the energy Fed is democratic? It sounds un-democratic, the way the Fed is often accused of being un-democratic. You appoint people who have, not jobs for life, but what are you giving them? Fourteen years?

Hofmeister: There is certainly a non-democratic element that is created by democratic processes, and if Congress ever is unhappy with the Fed, they can change what the Fed does by an Act of Law. I would submit that with a Federal energy resources board they can do it. If they don't like what the board's doing, they can change the law, but let's have the law first to see how they do.

In the case of the Fed, 2010 July, Financial Regulatory Reform Bill, Dodd Frank, what did it do to the Fed after the disaster of 2008? What did it do to the Fed, it gave it more authority. Congress gave the Fed more authority after the debacle of the financial failure of this-the near financial failure of the country, because in its wisdom it can see that, Lord knows, if you gave the responsibility to the monetary system to Congress, Heaven help us.

That's what we're doing with energy. Heaven help us, because Congress is doing nothing and the presidents, the last eight, all talented people have done little or nothing for our energy future.

Brancaccio: The trick is how to pick these grand poobahs of energy. I'm sure some of your old associates in the oil industry would love to nominate their candidates for this particular 14-year thing. That's something that-that's the key to this.

Hofmeister: The law should say what the makeup of the Board of Governors should include. As I write about it, yes, people that know about energy. Yes, people that know about technology. Yes, people that know about the environment. Yes, people that know about consumer needs and interests.

So, by diversifying the Board of the Federal Energy Resource, you could have a collection of interests so that all the appropriate sectors of society are represented by a board of experts who know what they're doing.

Brancaccio: Let me move now by asking you, Mr. Hofmeister, about climate change. You worry about it in the book. You worry about the effects of too much CO2. I mean, one British reviewer had an interesting point about you that you don't seem worried enough about it. You sort of see it as like other pollution, we want to mitigate it, like garbage or something. What is your feeling and how worried are you about human activity changing the climate?

Hofmeister: I do believe that human activity, in many different forms, is destructive of the biosphere, not just in the energy space, but in the agriculture space, in land use management issues and so forth. So there are many things that man does that jeopardize the future of the biosphere. When it comes to hydrocarbon energy, and its impact on the environment, I have no doubt that there's impact, but I also believe that there is no quick fix available. We're going to have to learn to deal with a continuation of hydrocarbons in the energy system, whether in this country or whether in China.

China, by the way, is getting ready to build five million new kilometers of highway. What do you do with five million kilometers of highway? You fill it up with cars and trucks and buses! They're going to build 40 billion square meters of new space under roof in the next decade. What do you do with 40 billion square meters of new space? You heat it, you light it, you cool it, as the case may be, more energy.

So we could eliminate, totally eliminate hydrocarbons in the United States of America, suffocate and watch the world be destroyed by a country that we don't control. It's unlikely that they would agree to a voluntary agreement to be held accountable for hydrocarbon waste reduction through some international agreement if it interfered with their economic development plans.

Brancaccio: The argument is that we would lead by example. It's going to be hard to lean on the Chinese if we're drilling every which way, domestically.

Hofmeister: That's why we need a plan. It all comes back to a plan. We can't willy-nilly. That's one of the reasons I'm so pleased to be a part of the Global Institute of Sustainability so that we can discuss these things with people who know what they're doing, who know something far more than I do about the various technologies available. Quite frankly, what it comes down to in my mind is, we have not yet tried to make hydrocarbons clean.

I think we should try that. I think technology is available. We know that automobiles are 90 percent less polluting today than they were in the 1990s, a 90 percent reduction in what comes out of the tailpipe of a car.

Brancaccio: You also must be having faith in carbon sequestration.

Hofmeister: And carbon sequestration, which we have yet to try, except that we know that in West Texas, carbon dioxide taken from the earth, pumped back into the oil fields, is producing more oil in the oil fields because of the carbon sequestration. So we could do a lot of things with putting carbon into the ground as a liquid, where it turns to crystal. It's not the gas going in, it's the liquid going in that turns to crystal and stays there forever.

So why don't we try that? Why don't we give it a go instead of just talking about it. Let's see. Let's see with coal. I've seen sustainable mining. Actually, I spent-I went to Pike County Kentucky and Hazard County Kentucky last November. They're proud of the restoration, the reclamation of some of their open surface mining because now, you know what, they have flat space.

They had no flat space in Eastern Kentucky or Western West Virginia. It's all hills.

Brancaccio: Chopping the hills down is a good thing?

Hofmeister: They chop the hills down. They can now put shopping centers there.

Brancaccio: As a bicyclist I can see the point that I wouldn't have to ride up hills, but are you serious?

Hofmeister: They are very serious about how they reclaim land and clean up their dirty mess, over time, and provide jobs for their citizens with how they're managing both deep mining and surface mining. They believe that is a valuable commodity, which they're proud to produce.

I went to a deep mine six miles underground. No human being touched the coal. It's all done with machinery and equipment. What the human beings were doing was making it safe and making sure that there was no dust, that there was ventilation. So it was all about the engineering of the mine. That's where the human capacity was applied. Machines did the dirty work. So nobody was perspiring. Nobody was in a terrible physical condition.

Yeah, they were dusty, they were dirty, but there can be ways of doing dirty work in cleaner ways. So when it comes to global warming, climate change, I do believe that if we put our technical talents to work on managing waste, our land, our water and our air could all be cleaned up. The human impact could be massively reduced because just stopping using hydrocarbons is not an option. We may have a dream one day, but today it's not an option.

There's 250 million cars on the US highways. Over the next five years, the president is proud of his program to have a million new hybrids, hybrid electrics and battery cars. I'm proud of it too, but that's a million over 250 million. Who knows how many more cars will be built that are only gasoline or diesel powered, and the rest of the world's doing the same thing.

So to think that we're suddenly going to move off of hydrocarbons, ain't gonna happen!

Brancaccio: I've got one more option for you that I want to discuss with you in a second, but just in eight to nine minutes, your questions. So start formulating your questions. I once got quite a lesson in this area, I was-there was a momentous news story going on in Britain. The prime minister had said she was not going to run for office. She was essentially being shoved out.

It was Margaret Thatcher in a party coup. She was going to do a keynote radio interview on the subject. I was wondering what will the interviewer ask for a question? Okay, and what would I ask?

I came up with this very long-winded question that would demonstrate my profound wisdom about the British political system. So I tune in to like, essentially, Morning Edition, the Marketplace Morning Report and "Good Morning America" combined as the show that had that kind of clout.

On comes the prime minister of the country and the question the interviewer asked was, "Ms. Thatcher, what gives?!"

Now, I'm sharing that with you to give you a sense of the model question, which is a question, not a statement and reasonably punchy if you can, so I can get a lot of questions in.

I was talking up at an accredited institution at Cambridge Massachusetts, Brand X. Famous economist there, former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund. We were talking about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and he said-his name was Ken Rogoff. You may have bumped into him. He's a very smart guy.

He says, "I think most economists would favor having a tax of any sort on polluters."

I asked him, "Carbon tax?" You know, "Carbon tax?!!??"

He said, "Yeah." He said that whenever he would approach a presidential candidate or some other top leader about this their face, the blood would drain from their face. It's not politically practical, but he said, "We need to raise the money, given the National Debt. We've got to tax something. Why not tax something that we want less of," which is his quote.

What about a carbon tax?

Hofmeister: Well, I was part of the United State Climate Action Partnership when I was the President of Shell, one of the founding companies, which was promoting a legislative framework for a cap and trade system. We debated long and hard about carbon tax versus cap and trade.

We came to the conclusion that capping carbon was essentially a good public policy. Cap the amount of carbon that can be put into the atmosphere and then trade credits. People who could figure out how to use less carbon, through technology, or through investment in non-carbon-producing energy sources could use those credits to trade in the open marketplace and have the incentive of making money over the sale of those credits. With the profit made from the sale of those credits, put more money into more carbon reduction.

I'm a believer that market forces are very powerful and that incentives work far better than disincentives. That's why we're debating the ethanol incentive today. I mean, the Senate that voted against ethanol incentives. There would be less ethanol if there were not incentives to produce ethanol or other biofuels. There would be-if there weren't incentives for wind and solar, we wouldn't be building wind and solar.

So incentives to reduce carbon, to me, are a far better solution than a carbon tax, which has no reward built into it, only punishment.

I sat with Ed Markey, of the famous Waxman-Markey Bill, and I said, "Congressman, I love you, but you're bill is a disaster. We'd better start talking about Plan B because the Senate is not going to take up the Waxman-Markey Bill and you will have wasted all of this time and energy and you will not have anything but embarrassment for having your name on that bill."

He said, "What's Plan B?"

I said, "Plan B, unlike your bill, would take 25 years to implement with a five-year gift period at the beginning. What happens in the five-year gift period is all your opposition in Corporate America retires. They go away. The next generation selected by boards of directors to replace the retirees know the law is there."

So there going to run for office to become the CEO on the basis of what are they going to do about capturing carbon credits. They're going to use their investment plan over many years to change how they do business, and every five years start with a-in the second five-year period make it a 20 percent tax or 20 percent cap reduction. Every five years, another 20 percent.

Over that period of time they completely change the nature in which they do business. At the end of 25 years, you have dramatically reduced carbon and it's all been paid for by trading credits. Everybody's a winner, but you've created a punitive bill that punishes certain industries for just existing. Everybody's going to resist that, especially the special interest lobbyists, and that's what killed it in the Senate.

So he said, "Well, that's interesting, where were you when we were debating the bill?"

I said, "Right here. You never wanted to talk to me about it."

So they really messed up on the cap and trade, and now cap and trade is considered dead for generations. I'm sad about that because I do believe that we should do with we can with our knowledge, or technology and innovation to get carbon waste out of the atmosphere.

Brancaccio: What I don't fully understand in listening to you, though, is where does the pressure come to look at alternatives and develop alternatives if you really want to boost domestic production of fossil fuels as much as possible. It's sort of like, it seems to me, the philosophy of, if we have traffic congestion on a highway, building another lane, what often happens is that more traffic pours into the lane. You don't actually speed up the traffic. You want more domestic production. So where, then, is the pressure to do what you're calling for with alternatives?

Hofmeister: The pressure comes from the preferred alternative, which is advanced by the long-term energy plan. For example, if anybody has never driven a car with a hydrogen fuel cell technology as the power source, I suggest they try to do that. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are so much more fun to drive. They are so much more efficient. They will, over time, be that much less expensive for the lifetime ownership of a fuel cell vehicle, but it would take 20-25 years to put hydrogen fuel cells in mass quantity into the American system.

Meanwhile, we need more oil. Or, we make oil so unaffordable that we completely damage equality in our society. We end up with "energy haves" and "energy have-nots."

I'm very worried that the current method of pricing energy ever higher is going to create that have/have not society, which is going to splinter this country that has based upon equality for all, but there won't be equality for all. It will be inequality for those who can't measure up and who can't afford.

Also, just like the Chinese are going to build 174 new mass transit systems in the next ten years, what's our plan for mass transit? Phoenix has a nice system, but it goes just one line. You can go anywhere you want on that one line, but don't try to go another direction; you can't get there from here.

Brancaccio: You have some very interesting ideas about land use in general that get to an interesting notion of rethinking growth in general. In other words, maybe we could be-maybe we could still flourish without the kind of growth that requires such a fire hose of energy inputs.

Hofmeister: I think the most inefficient use of energy in our economy is this notion that every person has their own castle with their own roof and their own four walls, their own plot of land, with the requirement that the grid be supplied to them wherever they decide to put their home or their castle or their cabin. It is the most inefficient use of energy that we, as a nation, could have ever have imagined and we've done it, and that's how we live.

When you visit China, when you visit Asia, millions and millions of people live not out, but they live up. The land use management in which anybody can build anywhere they want, based upon how much money they have, and they can build as big as they want and as far out as they want, and they will still get electricity from the grid, yes, that's a degree of freedom that we once could enjoy, but there were only at one point 50 million of us, 100 million of us, 200 million of us?

We're on our way to 500 million people and if everybody can live out and about, and we don't do something about land use management in terms of determining our own destiny, we're going to collapse. We're going to need ever more energy that becomes ever dearer.

So I just think there's a time and a place where we need some national discussion and still maintain our democratic principles to put incentives into living up, and living closer.

I mean, even in France, if you look at France. People said, "Well, don't look at France. That's not a good example," but farmers don't live on their farm. They live in the village and they commute to their farm because they know that it's safer, it's more economical to all live together.

If you visit Hong Kong or Shanghai, as I said, people live up, and they're happy. They like their life. So I just think there's different ways of managing energy futures to where we can sustain the planet, sustain freedom of choice, freedom of lifestyle, but with some degrees of sustainability-for the future.

Brancaccio: John, why do you stay engaged in this? You know about our political process, the effects of money in our political process. You write about it. You know about human nature. Why not check out of this debate? I mean, really, you're going to drag this forward? Why would you think so?

Hofmeister: Well, I've got a ten-year plan, and then I'll have another ten-year plan, and I'll keep doing ten-year plans as I've done in the last 40 years, for as many years as I can into the future. It's about caring deeply about how I got to where I got to, and all the learning and the education that took place, and I'm still learning and being at the Global Institute of Sustainability is a chance to learn even more.

Brancaccio: That's your nonprofit.

Hofmeister: No, my nonprofit is Citizens for Affordable Energy. The Global Institute is here at Arizona State. My not-for-profit is all about educating grassroots Americans because I think the more people know, the more freedom they have. The more freedom of choice they have.

When they're locked into a small paradigm, or a very narrow paradigm, then they get very unhappy when things don't work out right, but the more they know, the more options available. I mean, how many people know that we have ten forms of energy, and we'll literally run out of any of them. It's just a question of which ones do we choose to use when, because the earth is bounteous, particularly with wind, solar and tidal movement. A hundred years from now, we may get 90 percent of our electricity from the wind, the sun and the tides.

It's free! Free source! So we move through stages, but the more people know, the more they know, the more they can do, and so I just have a passion about making things better. Whether that comes from being a parent, or a grandparent, whether it comes from working in companies that I think-you know, remember "GE brings good things to life?!"

Brancaccio: Is that what the [voiced over] line was?

Hofmeister: I was part of that whole ten-year period of "we bring good things to life!"

So, to me, it's about making things better. That's what universities do. They make things better and they teach people what they don't know. So the connection here, to try to bring knowledge, my knowledge is liberal arts, social sciences. That's the problem that we have the greatest difficulty with in our culture.

We're good technologists. We're great innovators, using technology, but try to have a common decent discussion between a Democrat and a Republican, [makes noise/heavy sigh]. I mean, global warming, when I was out doing the 50 city visits. We had physical altercations in town halls over global warming. That's how little people know, and that's how intensely they feel about it is, or it isn't, a problem.

We took a security person with us everywhere we went and that person got a workout on a few occasions.

Brancaccio: Was it global warming or your Shell Oil pedigree?

Hofmeister: No, it was the debate in the audience. It wasn't with the company. It was between participants in the town hall.

Brancaccio: Well, let's hope this doesn't degenerate into a fist-fight. It looks like a very well-bred audience here. I want to take some of your questions. I promised to do so. How are we going to do it? I'll repeat the question. Is that how we're going to do it? Are their microphones? Okay, so what you've got to do is keep it a question if you can and also tell me your name and affiliation if you wouldn't mind.

Audience : Hello, my name is Sheridan Bailey. I build solar photovoltaic systems. We're a contractor. My question is, obviously you are passionate about informing and educating people on this very important issue and you mention the political system. So I'm wondering if you've conceived of, or thought about, the forms of political action, or political infrastructure, that would enable-supposing this group were all charged up and said, "Yes, we want to do something," how would we create coordinated political action to achieve those long-term policy agendas?

Hofmeister: That is the whole purpose of Citizens for Affordable Energy. This is a social networking sight. You can Google Citizens For AffordableEnergy.org. The goal of this organization is a mass movement. The mass movement is built around four concepts: more energy from all sources; more environmental protections of land, water, and air; more technology for conservation of energy and more infrastructure to move energy from where it's produced to where it's consumed.

It's the same thing that the Federal Energy Resources Board would do. The idea is, over the course of the next up to ten years, build understanding, knowledge, and awareness, create ambassadors. Ambassadors are local leaders, local articulators. Build out voluntary associations so that in ways in which we, as a people, Democrats and Republicans, right and left, we all need energy, but we're not going to get the energy that we need on the path that we're on.

So before we get into a crisis, let's build the foundation for solutions and to me the solution is ultimately a political solution, created in a democratic way to manage our energy, govern our energy differently than we have till now. That's the whole sum and purpose of this foundation. Change the way we govern energy, ultimately, on behalf of the American people, not through a party system, but through just massive grassroots support.

What will happen is people running for office will take note, "Wow, everywhere I go people want to talk about this. Maybe I better get behind this." Suddenly, we start seeing candidates for office, running on the basis of fixing the energy future of this country as part of their agenda. Then they get the support of those people. Suddenly, we start to get some people in Congress.

We get presidential candidates who pay attention to this idea and so that is how we go about it, but we start it organically. Social networking is the primary tool. It's free. It doesn't cost to be a member. It's not going to cost to be a member. We can ultimately become a force in society.

Brancaccio: I haven't fully surrendered my journalism credential at the door here, so I have to ask, where do you get your money for this nonprofit? Chevron, or one of those places [laughter]?

Hofmeister: Our budget is about-it's less than $300,000 a year, which comes from only two sources, companies that consume energy and individuals that consume energy. It's a consumer-focused effort. We take no money, by policy, from any company that produces energy, no matter what kind of energy they produce.

I've been offered money by energy producers, utilities, solar companies, oil companies, gas companies. I say, "Thank you very much, but we don't want your money; we can't use your money, by policy."

So we don't need a lot of money and, I mean, my friend, T. Boone Pickens, who I admire and agree with his gas plan for the nation, spent $80 million dollars in less than two years on advertising.

I don't think we need that. I mean, we're changing the whole Middle East through social networking. I think we can change America through social networking and the $300,000 a year pays for the IT that we need to do that.

Brancaccio: Question? We'll start there and then you're queued up, someone over here? Tell us your name.

Audience : Jeff Luth; I'm a communication strategist. I fully appreciate the need to produce more oil and gas as a practical matter, in the near term, while we hopefully go down some other paths as well for alternative energy. My question is, why do we need to continue to subsidize that activity of the incumbent oil and gas process? Thanks.

Hofmeister: I was in-I was asked that question in congressional testimony under oath, as a matter of fact.

Brancaccio: Can you quickly explain how the oil industry subsidized it's special leases?

Hofmeister: The oil industry gets certain breaks in the tax code to, for example, write down the costs of a dry well in a very accelerated fashion. It also gets different kinds of tax breaks for certain research and development investments where it can write off the costs of that investment.

So there are a number of tax codes. Some say it's a subsidy. Well, technically, it's not a subsidy. It's in the tax code. I testified in front of Congress that-you know, when the price of oil is above a certain point, the tax breaks are meaningless. They're not going to affect the decisions that would be made running a major multi-billion-dollar business, but they are important to small mom and pop operations who don't have the billions of in flow and outflow that a big company might have.

So you need to be discrete about how you would change the tax code, but you also have to be sensitive to the fact that if gas prices drop, or if crude oil prices drop, I'll be knocking on your door because otherwise I'm going to stop drilling. I'm going to lay people off, but with those tax deferrals it keeps me goin' longer when prices are low.

That's historically why those things were built into the tax code. So I have no problem in the democratic process. If the democratic process says, "We're changing the tax code," okay, change the tax code. It may affect how I make decisions in the future, particularly at a low oil price period, which could occur, but that's one of the products of being in a democracy.

That was a contrary position to some of the other companies, however, so there's no uniform voice on this. There are different points of view, but in terms of the multi-billion-dollar opportunities that I was looking at in those days, I took on a different opinion than some of the other companies.

Brancaccio: The question over here, and I want to give equal opportunity.

Audience : My name's Mark Wilhelm, Green Ideas. We're sustainability consultants. I'm curious about the idea of leveraging the web and leveraging your organization in coordination with GIOS, to essentially develop using a Wiki type of an approach, a 50-year roadmap for energy policy because I agree with you, 100 percent, we're not going to see it pop out of a political [inaudible] we call our government currently. The concept of being able to develop that, what are your thoughts?

Hofmeister: I think that's absolutely the right direction and what we're trying to do is build more involvement by more people because there will come a time in the not-to-distant future where we have to start getting specific about the plans that we would propose in terms of solutions. We're not there yet. We're a new organization. We've been around just less than three years, and so our membership is today still pretty loose, still trying to find our way, but we have to come to that point, at somewhere down the road. Is it in the next year? Two years? It has to happen, so thank you; I've also had others suggest the same thing.

At some point, we've got to get more specific, but we want more engagement in order to do that. So we need a bit more maturing, a bit more debating because I don't propose to have all the answers. Somebody said, "Well, you sit down, and you write the bill and then I can decide if I like that bill or not." Well, I don't think that's good enough. I think there needs to be more democracy involved.

Brancaccio: There, I guess, yeah?

Audience : I'm Chris Gardner. I'm a geologist in the water resource industry. My question is, is sustainability possible with the exponential growth of population?

Hofmeister: To me, sustainability is the tent pole holding up a bigger tent called socials responsibility. To me, social responsibility is what government, what faith-based, what corporate, what NGO organizations should be about, social responsibility. Let's take care of each other. Let's take care of his earth. Let's take care-and the tent pole holding up that big tent is sustainability.

I define sustainability, as making decisions and executing those decisions on the basis that things will only get better, only get better. We inherited, in the late 20th century, or the second half of the 20th century, when most of us came of age in this room, a mess, from our predecessors. We should not hand on that same mess to our children and grandchildren.

The only way to make the earth better is for sustainability to be that tent pole that looks after the totality of social responsibility in its broadest sense. So, yeah, I think we can, with a growing population in the world, if we're at six billion and on our way to eight billion, I don't think we should tell people how many children they should have, but I think we need to find ways that provide land, water, and air sustainability, which means it keeps getting better.

The earth is a pretty miraculous place, and we don't have a substitute for it, so we better take good care of it. I think that with technology we should be able to do that. We can reuse water. We can reuse air. We can keep the land clean and keep reusing it.

Brancaccio: In the center section, any questions here? Yes, what's your name?

Audience : I'm Haley Paul. I graduated from the School of Sustainability last summer and I'm very interested in all of this. So in the interim of not having a master plan, because I don't know if that's going to happen soon, what can Congress do now? Like would they subsidize renewables more? What would you suggest?

Hofmeister: You know, I often think about writing an op-ed that says in the op-ed, "Let's face the facts. The Republicans are married to the Democrats, so do you want a functional marriage or do you want a dysfunctional marriage?"

You know, the nation is going to elect Republicans, and the nation is going to elect Democrats. I think what we haven't done, as voters, is insist that they work together. If they don't work together, nothing's going to happen. That's the reality. That's been the case for the last 40 years, since Nixon said, "We're going for energy independence." They have not worked together.

That's our fault. That's not their fault. It's what we expect of them. Remember, they work for us. So uneducated electorates get what they get. Informed, educated electorates would not put up with the nonsense that's going on among our elected representatives, where the inability to have a conversation about the financial future of the country, the health future of the country, the energy future of the country. It's absurd, but it's our fault.

I don't blame them. They're not under pressure to do anything other than what they're doing. I blame us. So I think it's really, that's why I think grassroots is so critical to ever get a plan, to ever move this forward.

Brancaccio: This side of the room, a question over here, you patient person, right behind the--

Audience : Jerry DeRose, retired financial officer. I was reading recently where Germany and Switzerland are going to be abandoning their nuclear systems. What do you think of that decision and what are your thoughts on that?

Hofmeister: I think it's politically short-term-oriented based upon the electro-behavior of those two political systems. I think that in democracies it's very hard for elected officials to make hard or courageous decisions. So I think they're making populist decisions in the short-term interest of their political careers, more than thinking about the future of their nation. I hope that our country does a better job.

So far, the Obama administration has consistently said we need more nuclear, we need to do the things that make nuclear safer, and so far so good, but words are one thing and actions are another. So it's easy to say those things. It's hard to make those things happen.

I think Germany and Switzerland will both suffer the consequences of abandoning such a powerful source of electricity and they will cause their citizens and their companies probably to pay more for energy than they otherwise would by not having the nuclear option.

Brancaccio: Where is Japan going to get its power in the wake of ramping down its nuclear industry?

Hofmeister: Well, mostly hydrocarbon sources and I think Germany is going to have more hydrocarbon sources. So, you know, with the limited evolution thus far of solar and wind, which are very inefficient and very ineffective by today's design standards and today's known technology, hydrocarbon is that much more powerful. So we'll end up with more carbon in the atmosphere because of their decisions to abandon nuclear.

Brancaccio: You've been very patient, your turn. Is there, there's a person right here. Tell us your name?

Audience : Thank you. My name is Caroline addington and started up and with Colonel Bernard Addington who should be in the presidency right now because he was prepared for it all his life. I started something very similar to what you're doing, here at ASU, working on my PhD, in 1983.

We formed a corporation and I spoke about all this technology including the telecommunications in Tokyo in 1985 with the plan. The plan was SPD, sustainable planned development. Another SPD, social political direction, and another SPD, which is important, spiritual planned divined.

So my question is, will this kind of situation, which we have talked about being transformative, work into what you're searching for?

Hofmeister: I think it certainly will because it's about all of the above. I think the difference between today and efforts in the past, in the past we didn't have China. In the past, we didn't have the economic competition for natural resources that we have with China.

China is the US times two, or the US times three, or even the US times four as time moves on, given the population differences between the countries and the potential economic expansion that could occur. The competition for natural resources will either take us into complete and total social collapse, or we will (through cooperative efforts) find a way to share and develop so that as people on earth we figure out our future peacefully, consensually, in the mutual interests of all parts of society.

We haven't done a good job of that in the 20th century, and we're not off to a good start in the 21st century, but we cannot let the lessons of these years gone by be lost on us. So we have to find a way to do that, and I think the ability to talk to each other and the kinds of things that you were working on, there is the goodness side of what we do.

Why, and I don't mean to sound Polly Anna-ish, but from an economic development standpoint, wouldn't we all do better if we're all successful together rather than creating losers by beating others to the punch?

I fear that that would only take us in the wrong direction. So, yeah, I think your ideas from then are universal ideas and everlasting ideas, but we haven't found a way to connect them.

Social networking may be the difference, maybe.

Brancaccio: Right over here, and I have this great rule that has served me well in my little career in broadcasting, which is try to check your facts, don't swear in public, and get off on time. So we're right up against the clock. Tell us your name and fire away with your question.

Audience : My name is Lisa Jackson. I'm an ASU employee, and I think the idea about the energy Fed sounds very intriguing. The Fed has a lot of tools at its disposal to enact monetary policy. What tools do you envision in your energy Fed?

Hofmeister: There are productive tools and there are destructive tools. One of the reasons the Fed is successful, no lobbyists, no special interest money can influence the Fed's decision-making. It's not-it's prohibited.

Similarly, you can sue the Fed, but you'll waste your money. So no lawsuits, and no lobbying. That's how the Fed gets things done, along with expert knowledge and opinion, and good advice from staff and the ten, I think it is, regional banks providing additional advice that local to the regions of the country.

Those are very effective tools and the law provides other tools and what the decision-making authorities are. So I say we learn from that. We create regional energy banks, or not call them banks, but energy resource boards in different parts of the country because the needs are different, no lobbyists, no lawsuits because it would just be counter to what the Feds' purpose is, and that's built into the law, and then the tools in the law to deal with energy supply, energy technology, innovation for conservation, environmental responsibility for the regulatory side of energy, production and infrastructure, where those decisions, once made, are executed by the companies who do what they do.

An expert board that knows what they're doing, I think with a balance of societies interest represented on the board, to me, those are the tools that they could use.

Brancaccio: Well, I want you to know what a privilege it is at Marketplace American Public Media to be able to be the conduit of discussions like this and on the air on a regular basis through the work of my colleagues on the Sustainability Desk and the other work that we do on the program. It's a-these are existential issues. This is one of your major points, and it's important for the media to delve deep early and often on these issues.

I want to thank the Global Institute of Sustainability for being an incredible partner on this project [applause], yeah.

[End of Audio]

Sustainability Series -Talking Sustainability with American Public Media's Marketplace

Sustainability Series -Talking Sustainability with American Public Media's Marketplace

Rob Melnick, Moderator: As many of you know, we bring people in, if you will, from the community, from the world, from the nation to talk about issues of sustainability and this like, at least the one that I have a hand in moderating, will be an interactive event. I'll explain that in a minute. Anyway, I'm Rob Melnick. I'm the Executive Dean of the Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS) in the School of Sustainability.

Melnick: So this is the first time that we’ve talked with people who really communicate sustainability, to the degree that this seems possible, with a very large public. You’ll learn about their listenership and the people they work with and who interact with them digitally.

We have a wonderful opportunity today to ask them questions and to hear their stories. These folks are from American Public Media, and particularly from the marketplace program, which I assume most or all of you have heard. I’m a regular listener and take the information to heart and I think they’re wonderful teachers and do really wonderful work.

We have four people from American Public Media today. I’m going to introduce them very, very briefly. Their vitaes and accomplishments are much longer than I have time for today. Some of their colleagues are here and there will be some events later on as well.

Let me explain the format to you very briefly. I’m going to ask each one of them to give a very brief opening remark. I’ll sort of tee up a question. Then when they’re done I’m going to ask each one of them a kind of a more specific question, given their areas of assignment. Then I’m going to leave it to you because I would like to spend the bulk of our time with you asking questions of these folks because we’ve spent some time with them earlier today and last night and they have just fascinating insights that I think we have not heard anything like before at Arizona State University in the Global Institute of Sustainability.

So, with that fanfare, I’m going to introduce my new friends and colleagues here, David Brancaccio is an Economy 4.0 correspondent for public radio’s popular daily program, Marketplace. You like that, huh, where he covers efforts to make the economy better and serve more people. His special on economical alternatives entitled “Fixing the Future” aired on PBS television last fall.

Next to him is Scott Tong who is a sustainability correspondent covering energy, markets, resources and the environment. For the last—well, ending in 2010, for four years, Scott served as Marketplace’s China Bureau Chief in Shanghai, China. We’ll be talking a little bit more about that, Scott.

Next to Scott, is Adriene Hill, who is a multimedia reporter from Marketplace’s Sustainability Desk. You’ll be hearing about the Sustainability Desk throughout the talks. Prior to joining Marketplace, Adriene worked as an editor and reporter at Chicago Public Radio.

Next to Adriene, is Eve Troeh, who joined the Sustainability Desk reporting team in 2010. Eve has covered the UN Climate Change Conference and follows breaking news on sustainability issues for Marketplace.

So that’s their brief background and I’m sure that you can look them up, Google them and everything else you may want to do, but what I’d like to do is just pose a very broad question and we’ll just sort of go in this order, if you don’t mind. I guess what’s on my mind, and I suspect on the mind of a lot of people in the audience here, is how do you communicate an idea as broad as sustainability?

When I talk to the students at the School of Sustainability, one of the things that they often say to me is, “If we have one more discussion about how to define sustainability my head’s going to explode,” right? Right, you can relate to this. It’s like, “Enough already,” all right, we’ve had it 16,000 times, and yet we still do not have a definition that’s common and let alone a definition that we communicate to the millions of people who are listeners.

So how do you go about this? How do you get your hands around this very complex concept? What’s inside the tent? What’s outside the tent? What’s evolving, etc. David?

David Brancaccio: And if experts, students, and academics can’t agree, how are people listening [laughter] going to possibly agree on this stuff? I suspect many people listen who are sympathetic with some of the values inherent in that kind of coverage, don’t have a good working definition. I’m a bit of an interloper on the panel.

I’m not with the Sustainability Desk. I’m with the Economy 4.0 Desk and guess what? They interlock quite nicely. My beat is about the economy of the future, how we measure it, what are the rules, regulations, and structures that we can put into place so that the economy better serves more people?

The economy is pretty good at serving some people, but it’s not even particularly good at serving most people. So I think we could all agree that wouldn’t it be great to have an economy that doesn’t explode every seven years, which is what it does? Does that sound sustainable to you, a system that explodes every seven years?

So, I’m very interested in applying these principles of sustainability. I think my colleagues are as well, moving them beyond simply, and I guess it’s not simple, but moving beyond just the green connotation and the future of the earth connotation and talk about the future of all of it. That’s a way that you can start bringing some rigor to the idea of what is sustainability?

There’s a kind of market activity, business, capitalism that’s hit and run capitalism. Go in, short-term, do something and leave. That sounds like the opposite of sustainable thinking, doesn’t it? Investment practices, attitudes toward mortgages, derivatives, trading in which you can make a very lightning fast profit but the rest of the world be damned. Does that sound sustainable?

So I’m not inventing this. You are starting to see, in fact, fully embrace—you see people, businesses and community activists applying the sustainable thinking to their work. I’ve been very interested, and I hope to do more coverage about this, about local communities that apply this longer-term thinking, thinking about the future, thinking about where do we want our community to be, not just at the end of the next accounting quarter, but in a year, five years, ten years, and how it might change behavior, how you might run a business.

Maybe you might not outsource some work to say, Asia, because it’s in the short-term cheaper. If that means all the jobs will go away and you end up living in a community that’s just awful. That, again, is sustainability. So that’s how I come at this, and it’s great because it’s a very beautiful, interlocking overlap between the type of work I’m doing and what my colleagues here are doing. Scott?

Scott Tong: Well, we have turned ourselves into pretzels trying to define sustainability [laughter]. In Los Angeles, about a year ago, all of us were at a table and we actually went around and said, “What do you think it means?” We went around and around and we came up with a paragraph, which I couldn’t recite if you asked me.

I think practically speaking, when we’re doing the stories and envisioning stories, it’s not a big barrier because in a radio story you can really tell just a good radio story. You make one point and just tell one thing. The advantage of being a business show is very often we’re doing the story that connects to these energy environment issues where there’s money at stake. So we’re covering—I’m back in the states.

I was in China the last four years. For them, the conversation almost never gets around to the polar bears, but it’s national competitiveness for companies there. I’m not sure China is going to lap the world, but as far as policy to channel human beings and capital, in the same place in the same ecosystem, and to see what happens. So this money has to stay there. It’s very practical in that respect. I think a lot of our reporting connects to that.

I’m based in Washington. I think another area where we do a lot of coverage is policy. As you know, energy is very connected to public policy. So, anyway, we do a lot of stories where policy, depending on your perspective, either promotes something or gets in the way.

I was in Florida. I did a story where we contrasted the Bahamas with Florida. In the Bahamas, which is much more free market, in a certain way, with all of the natural events that have happened there, and the rising seas, I went to look for the property insurance market on the coast. There isn’t one because no one can get insured so most people don’t live there any more. So the market is telling them, “You probably shouldn’t live here,” whereas in Florida, as I’m sure a lot of you know, it’s very subsidized. They do want to promote home ownership right on the water. The big national insurers have all left. They’re not there any more because it doesn’t make sense.

That’s an area where most people, except for politicians would say, “Well, this is a question of public policy,” and whether it’s getting in the way of sending signals, right? Because the signal from the market is, “What are you people smoking?”

I mean, I think money to be made and policy. We do a lot of stories about that, and you know we still manage to do a little naval gazing at our desk about what our mission in the world is, but not too much.

Adriene Hill: I would say, thinking back to that meeting Scott was talking about, where we all sat around this room and really worked hard at what this definition was, the one that stuck with me, although not the one we chose, was “don’t eat your seed corn.” Like at the end of the day, don’t eat your seed corn. Make sure there’s a future for your business, or for yourself, or for the species, or for the planet. Whatever it is, don’t eat your feed corn.

For me, that one sort of sticks with me but one thing I actually like about the sort of amorphous blobby definition of sustainability is that it allows lots of different openings. It allows people to come to these things through lots of different doors.

I was in Idaho for a story I was reporting on this little, tiny community that’s incredibly active environmentally. You’d think it was just a bunch of Liberals and this little community doing all these crazy greeny things, and it wasn’t. It was Republicans, it was Liberals and it was Independents that didn’t want anything to do with the government, but they all came to these spaces of caring about the environment, of caring about the natural world, of caring about their community and these different doors, through these different ways.

That’s something I think is so interesting about sustainability, and the fact that it is a little hard to define. It’s because we can tell stories that appeal to different people and get them there through different doors. So that’s something that I think is kind of an up-shot of not knowing exactly what we mean when we say the word.

Eve Troeh: I think one of the things that I report on is what companies think is sustainable and what cities and states and communities think is sustainable. In a way, my luxury as a reporter is to say, “Well, what do you think it is?” [Laughs] I don’t have to necessarily know what I think it is. I just need to report on what other people are doing that they think is sustainable, what other companies are doing that they think is sustainable.

One of the biggest challenges for sustainability reporting, especially if you’re sitting at a daily news meeting, is well what’s happening today? A lot of times the headline is some place has announced that they’re going to do something by 2050. That’s a hard headline to bring out to the public. It’s a story about something that’s going to happen in the next several decades.

One way to look at it is, “Well, what are people doing now because of what they think will happen in the future?” So it’s not necessarily our role to say what we think will happen in the future, or what we think should happen in the future, but it’s more to look at what certain companies or certain communities are doing because they’ve looked at information, they’ve got particular concerns and this is where they think things are going. That’s where the money goes, that’s where the policy goes, and then that’s where we go.

Melnick: Okay, thanks. So the next 15 minutes I’m going to ask some questions of the panel here, and then it’s your turn. So be thinking of some questions or this is going to be a very boring, but good lunch [laughter]. I’m going to start out of the order that we just went in. I want to ask Scott a question about energy in China.

There are stories, whether or not they’re actually evidence-based, I don’t know about. You know, a coal-fired power plant going up every fill-in-the-blank week, two weeks in China to create enough energy to meet the demands of this growing economy. This is the Global Institute of Sustainability so we think broadly about the globe and it’s challenges. Can we create a sustainable environment with a China that feels that it’s got to grow at eight or nine percent every year?

Similarly, the Brazils and the Indias that are coming behind them that are developing as well, when that requires in China’s case enormous amounts of energy to satisfy both their recreational needs and their industrial needs, etc. Given, at least in China, the fact that they’ve got this enormous amount of coal that they can use, it’s fairly cheap and they know the technology, there’s a disincentive in some respects for them to do some of the things I know they’re doing in renewable energy, etc.

Can we ever achieve some kind of global balance on energy and climate change with a China that’s that voracious, that has voracious an appetite?

Tong: So when I think about it, I have a cousin who, while I was growing up in New York, he was growing up in Shanghai. He works at a factory, a General Motors factory. So, actually, one reason I think GM kept the Buick label as they were tossing a lot of them out, was because Buick really sells well in China.

Melnick: God knows why [laughter].

Tong: It’s their corporate vehicle of choice, actually. There’s the alternative universe of China, I suppose [laughter], but his life is very energy-heavy. He’s got a small motorcycle that he rides around the city. He has two laptops and they’re both kind of sleeker and nicer than mine. His cell phone is nicer than mine. I mean, he has the same life that I have and then you multiply that.

He’s been in the city his whole life. We’ve had 200 million migrants come from the countryside to the cities to kind of live that life. Then there’s another 200 million who are coming along the way. So the energy future is—I mean the leaders in China, they have a choice, but the answer’s pretty clear. Did they want to make sure the energy is there to kind of keep the economy running, growing at eight percent a year, where the average person’s life has gotten better by eight percent every year? Or, are they going to do something to kind of curtail it for purposes of 2050? It’s a pretty easy choice.

I think as far as China, what a lot of people say is with how ever much coal it has, and it’s importing a ton of coal from Australia. That’s one reason Australia’s economy grew 18 years in a row was because of exporting this stuff to China. As you know, it is the game-changer of carbon capture. It’s if they can find a way to take the emissions from these coal-fired plants, capture it, stick it under the ground, which it’s not commercial anywhere in the world now. They’re testing it and putting a lot of money into it. China’s putting a lot of money into it. Without that, I think there are a lot of questions.

Melnick: Eve, we talked earlier. Can you hear me in back okay, Brenda, can you hear me? Okay, Eve, we talked earlier a little bit about corporations. You mentioned corporations and studying business. If this is an unfair question, you can let me know this in front of 150 of my closest friends here. Can you give us some examples of corporations that “get it” when it comes to sustainability, the ones that don’t and what’s the difference?

Troeh: Sure, I can give you examples of people within corporations who I think “get it”.

Melnick: Okay, close enough.

Troeh: Probably the most impressive person I’ve see who has the title of a sustainability officer, or a VP of sustainability, and these are titles which a lot of you, if you’re in this program here at ASU, are probably hoping to hold these titles one day. There are increasing numbers of companies that are hiring those sustainability suites of offices. Those people are rising up in the ranks.

I heard a guy, Tod Arbogast, not an easy—not a radio-friendly name, who is the Sustainability Officer for Avon. He used to be the Sustainability Officer for Dell. He had this amazing presentation on how companies should assess their risk.

Companies, if they want to do sustainability right, need to stay on top of UN policy. They need to stay up on top of domestic and foreign policy. If you sell products in Europe and you’re in the US, then you do care about your carbon emissions because you’re going to be selling in a market where that’s going to matter.

So he was talking about doing this sort of mapping of risk factors and communicating those risk factors for Avon. There are lots of issues for Avon. It’s a cosmetics company, so you might think there’d be things like using all-natural ingredients in their products, or making sure that their packaging is made of post-consumer plastic content or something like that. But the issue he came up with for Avon was deforestation.

Does anybody have any idea why deforestation would be a big issue for Avon? I had no idea. The catalogs. Avon is one of the biggest producers of paper on the planet. They send billions of catalogs around the world every year. They don’t just sell products in the US. They sell products all around the world.

So they decided to make deforestation a key issue for them. That was after extensive consideration of other issues and mapping these risk factors. Some factors they found, “Well, if we talk about the toxic chemicals in our face creams, and how we’ve reduced the toxic chemicals in our face creams, that’s just going to raise more issues than it solves for us,” but we can take on deforestation and we can talk about efforts that we’re doing. We can donate proceeds from catalog sales to deforestation. We can use recycled paper. We can do all these things on that part. So that was very impressive.

One major player in all of this is Walmart. People sort of begrudgingly give Walmart some huge credit for advancing sustainability. They’re really watching their supply chains. They’re not just taking it for granted if a company comes to them and says, “Hey, our packaging is compostable.” We talked about compostable packing. They’re saying, “Well, that’s great, but does that actually—we want more than that. When is it compostable? How much of it is actually going to get composted? We don’t want your compostable bowl if we’re selling it in markets that don’t have a program for managing that material in a way that it will end up making the world a better place, or reducing emissions,” or whatever measure you want to use.

So Walmart is really cranking down on its supply chains. Now, if you want to sell to Walmart, and you want to get your product on their shelves, you need to show them that you’re going to help them achieve their renewable energy and their sustainability goals. If you can do that, that gives you as a company, a smaller contractor, an edge with Walmart and then there you go.

Staples, I talked to the Sustainability Officer at Staples. I don’t know enough about their actual practices in sustainability, but one thing that was interesting to me was the way that they developed a sustainability department which was they got attacked. They were the target of some environmentalist campaigns against how they were the cause of millions of trees being cut down because of all the paper that they sell to offices.

As a response to that attack, as in sort of looking at this issue, because they were being—you know, people were demanding answers on this issue from them. They came up with some answers but it actually caused them to completely reevaluate the way that they did a lot of things. They created a sustainability department because of that. A lot of companies have that story. They create a sustainability department in response to drastic attacks. They don’t want to get caught with their pants down, basically.

So those are some of the corporate issues I would say. I don’t have anybody I can call out as really being awful on this, but I will say that a lot of companies that do sustainability reports, those sustainability reports are PR. They don’t have negative information in them. They’re just a way for companies to highlight internal issues. They haven’t, in the US, gotten to the point of being very meaningful documents. So when I get, in my inbox, a PR agency telling me, “Look at this company’s sustainability report. Would you want to do a story about this?” It’s like, “No, I don’t want to do a story about your sustainability reports [laughs].”

So I think that that’s the issue. It’s looking beyond the sustainability report, meeting these people, looking around the company and getting a sense of what they’re really doing. You’re not going to find the answer in their own internal report.

Melnick: Okay, thanks. Adriene, I don’t know. This just popped into my head, but I want to know whether or not, because I’ve heard that it’s possible, that the entire world could be fed with organic food supplies. I know you know something about this. Is this true or false, Adriene?

Hill: Well, thanks for asking [laughter]. We talked earlier today. I did a story for Marketplace about a month ago now, about organic foods, and whether or not organic food systems as they are currently in place could in fact feed the entire world as we are sort of approaching 9 billion, and then more people.

Sort of the answer that the experts that I had, and I was also sort of—the peg was this British report came out and said no. With the resources that we have right now, with the technology that we have right now, with the limited water and the limited land, this isn’t going to be the way for it. We can’t do it all organically.

So, yes, no we can’t, but it was quite controversial. We have gotten a ton of letters about it. We have gotten a ton of feedback. There’s an online petition you can sign [laughter]. I won’t give you the URL, but no it’s actually been a really interesting experience.

I think one thing that we’ve learned, and that we really pride ourselves on at Marketplace is not just sort of saying, not going ahead with whatever the common wisdom is, but actually looking at it and addressing it, really confronting it and hopefully starting a dialogue. I do feel like that we did do that in this case, a long, long dialogue, but one we really are thankful for.

I think it also points to one interest of mine which is really sort of the role food plays in being an entry point for people to think about the future, and being an entry point for people to think about climate change, people to think about issues of sustainability, people to really think about what It means for the world. I think food is something—you know, I can’t—my guess is not all of you care that much about solar panels. My guess is that not all of you care that much about even hybrid cars. But my guess is that you all care about food because you have to eat it.

So I think that food is this incredible entry point for us to really start a meaningful dialogue and really have conversations that matter about these bigger issues that are part of our mission.

Melnick: I’m going to ask David the last question before we go to you in the audience. So please have your questions ready.

David, earlier in the conversation this morning, you described what you and your colleagues do as your information designers. It strikes me that what you do in your portion of the world, what Marketplace does and what APM does is really similar to what we do as educators. You’re educating the public and your listeners in a certain way. You’re providing information and analysis and a form of education, and we just take 16 weeks to do it, right? You can do it perhaps more compactly.

What is it about the radio medium that both enables and/or inhibits your ability to teach?

Brancaccio: I was on the New York subway the other day and saw an ad. I think it’s a PSA (public service announcement) and it was riveting. I took a picture of it with my cell phone. It was a picture of 26 packets of sugar all arrayed out so that you could see what 26 packets of white sugar looked like. The tagline was something like, “Congratulations,” and it’s like a kid holding a—not even a Big Gulp, but a normal size soda. It says, “Congratulations, your kid just ate 26 packets of sugar.”

What an incredible, interesting, engaging, memorable instructive piece of information design. This is a group that feels that this is an important public policy issue. I dare say, it probably is, with rates of type 2 diabetes, and so forth, connected to our diets. Someone sat down and used their genius in getting their complex idea across in a vivid way.

That still was a bit of PR. It was probably the New York Department of Public Health, or somebody, I think paid for that. We’re not involved in PR, but we do—we think our job is to take important public policy ideas and not waste your time with unimportant public policy ideas, and figure out ways to communicate them in effective, clear ways so that you can run with them.

There was a question asked this morning about calls to action. You know, you do a story and how come we don’t tell people what to do with the information? We actually cannot do that. It’s not what public broadcasting does. It’s not actually in our mission to tell you what to do with it, or to order you to do something about it, but I think it’s part of our duty as reporters to design stories that are compelling, but that also give you a real clear sense of what some smart people are thinking are options.

Actually, I try never to do stories that end with “and we’re all going to die.” [Laughter] You need to find some human being who has a more positive vision of the future. “If we do this, this and this we could start to nibble away or actually solve these problems,” but an answer more specifically to your question, we have some wonderful assets as broadcasters that our print colleagues don’t have, and even it isn’t as strong in the wonderful multimedia world.

We, in our arrogance, decide what you listen to and in what order, like a seminar leader. When you have students around a table, you decide. In that way, we can hopefully introduce you to ideas that you did not wake up in the morning worrying about, but that perhaps we should all chew on. So there’s that.

The other thing we have in our toolkit, and it’s just a basic one and it’s all part of information design, is the ability to tell human stories. We get real people that hopefully you will like or hate that will be memorable. You remember information as narrative. You don’t remember, unfortunately, as PowerPoint presentations. This is something that people in large organizations tend to forget, but what are the limitations?

The limitations are we cannot demand—although it would be great, right? A foundation once talked to me about coercive information where—have you ever seen the movie “Clockwork Orange,” where the guy is like strapped down to the chair and his eyeball’s propped open? That’s what I’d like to have.

We’re going to take you through 4-1/2 hours of global warming stories, and you’re going to watch it, darn it!

We can’t do that. Why can’t we do that? Well, we can’t do that for obvious reasons, but also your attention span is a lot of competition for your time. It’s a blessing that you spend any time with us at all. So we try not to waste your time, but as Scott was alluding to, a typical public radio piece if it’s effective will introduce you to some characters, introduce you to a public policy idea, show you some options but you’re making a point. You’re not making four, and what issue out there only has one particular facet? They all have multi facets, but you can over time come at issues as we will with the issue of organics in the future.

I mean, what more crucial story is there than the future of our food supply. I mean, it’s something that we need to talk about. You can come with that over time. You can also do multimedia resources, because there will be a portion of the audience that is really hungry for that hint of an option they heard about, and they’ll want to delve into it.

Melnick: It just occurs to me, before we go to the questions in the audience, that maybe a little context is in order. I can ask the panel, but also some of their colleagues, Ben, Joaquin or Angela, can you give us a sense of the size of the audience and the distribution of the work that you do Marketplace, and in your case, David, a little bit different situation, perhaps. So the audience gets a sense of the number of people that you reach and a little bit about the demographics of your audience, just so they have a little bit of context for the discussion. Who can jump in here.

Adair: So Marketplace has three shows, three programs. There’s the PM broadcast, four programs. I’m sorry, four. The PM broadcast which is the evening show. It’s a half-hour. It reaches about 5 million a week. Then there’s the Marketplace Morning Report, which is an eight-minute cast in the mornings. It comes with the 51-59 on every hour. So that reaches another 5 million to 6 million—6-7 million. [Laughter]

Then there’s Marketplace Money, which is a weekend one-hour personal finance show that reaches 600 thousand—775 thousand. They [laughed over]. The new show is the Marketplace Tech Report which is a four-minute program that just launched, I think, maybe a month ago and is—how many markets is it on now? It’s growing [laughter].

Melnick: What about the demographics?

Adair: The demographics, we’re about to undertake a really big market analysis of our own audience. Most of the numbers that we use right now are standard for public radio’s demographic profile. So it’s older. The average age, I think, is late 40s early 50s, higher income, college grads and we refer to it as tastemakers and decision-makers as sort of what the underwriters, when they’re going out trying to sell underwriting, they talk about the public radio audience as being tastemakers and decision-makers. They’re the people who are running things, doing things, starting businesses, voting and things like that.

Melnick: Okay, thanks. So is this yours David? So 5 million people, so almost as many as are enrolled at ASU [laughs], or so it seems when you’re trying to find a parking place around.

Adair: The audiences are fairly separate as well. I think if you take the 5 million from PM, the 7 million from AM and the 775,000 for the weekend show, that rolls up to about, let me think, 9.5 million people total. So there’s some overlap, but it’s also very separate audiences.

So our sustainability stories, when we do a big story like when David went to the Middle East. He was going to do a big series of reports next week. We’re going to put them on PM and on AM, so we reach different audiences at different times of the day with different information that all kind of dovetails together.

Melnick: In the interest of full disclosure and in the unvarnished truth, how many people here listen to one or more of these programs on Marketplace. Good gig now [laughter and voicing over].

Adair: Fifty plus, I’m very rich.

Melnick: Yes, exactly. Okay, so the floor is open. The only ground rules here are two. One, is this is not your opportunity to spend five minutes giving your platform speech. This is for questions for these experts, okay? The second rule is, I get to cut you off if you break the first rule, rather unceremoniously, okay. So, yes. Can you stand up and just introduce yourself? By the way, we’ll have to repeat the questions, I believe, for the video, so if you get a question addressed to you, do you mind repeating it? If it’s to the whole group then I’ll repeat it.

Audience: I was going to—[inaudible0:34:45.5] issue of sustainability. I wanted to go all the way back to the first question about how you define sustainability. I don’t think we’re worrying that much about it any more [0:34:45.5inaudible], you know, how do you define truth, how do you define freedom and justice? Well, you don’t [laughter]. In fact, you can what it isn’t but you don’t have to say what it is. One thing that we have found that’s really important is having a good understanding of how you conceptualize sustainability. What are the components, right?

So is it about systemic thinking? What are the components that you’re really looking at because if you don’t have that, how do you know somebody is doing sustainability out there, aside from what they tell you? So, given that, the two stories that you were talking about food, organics, and the one about Avon. I wonder how far you take the story and what stories you pick because the stories you pick frame sustainability for people. If you’re talking about 9+ million people that are decision-makers and tastemakers, you’re framing sustainability for them. That’s critical if they’re the people that actually are taking it a certain direction.

Melnick: So the question is about framing sustainability and what the concepts are.

Audience: Yeah, how far do you take this?

Melnick: How far do you take the stories because you’re framing it.

Audience: How do you visualize it yourself because if you have a certain conceptualization of it, then you’ve already framed the story in a certain way. That conceptualization isn’t accurate or at least explicit so that the people understand. Then you’re only leading somebody in a direction instead of full educating them.

Melnick: So how does the reporter or the producer frame the story and deal with these issues to frame the stories? The floor is open.

Troeh: I think most sociologists who study journalism are very disappointed at the lack of drama in the decision-making process of how you frame a story. I mean, we at Marketplace, even have anthropologists and sociologists who want to watch our editorial meetings and find out how the news gets made. It’s not as probably dark and scary, or rational and organizationally sound, as you would probably hope that it would be. But, so when that comes to things like story choice and how we’re covering sustainability, that’s why (as Scott said) you make one point in a story.

So we try to diversify our interests across the desk so that we’re covering issues that we think we have a lot of the waterfront covered. So we’ve got a focus on energy. We’ve got someone—we sort of say, “Oh, well, I’ll take that, I’ll take that.”

We’re covering food. I would say that there isn’t anything that we say isn’t sustainability. If someone came to us with an idea we wouldn’t say, “Well, actually, you’re wrong that’s not a sustainability story.” We’d probably be more inclined to figure out how we could take sustainability as a slice of everything, a slice of politics, a slice of corporate earnings, a slice of energy use, a slice of housing, education, you know? When I think of sustainability I think of it as being that interdisciplinary subject that you all think of it as, at the school, as well.

For story choice, for features, story ideas can come from anywhere. Sometimes they do come from press releases, but we tend—we don’t do stories on just one company, but maybe something you get in an announcement in a study will spark your interest. Well, how much is that happening and to what extent?

Something like solar leases, you know, how many people are actually getting these solar leases? What kind of problems do these solar leases cause for a utility company and their planning. I mean, that—something like solar leases would have to be spread out over five or six stories. We’ve done one story on Marketplace, which I did about solar leases, which basically was a two-minute feature on the morning report which was just defining what it is. Then we take it from there.

Often, I think, if you’re in the sustainability community you would be surprised at what turns out to be the story. It’s probably something much more basic than it is for people in the industries that are bringing their story ideas to us. You know, they’re bringing us the latest development and we end up talking them through to something four steps back, and that’s where it is. You know, what you were doing, starting to do two years ago, is what we’re going to be talking about now in the public sphere. So I don’t know if that’s a helpful answer, but that’s one way to look at it.

Melnick: Anybody else want to respond?

Hill: No, I do think that Eve’s point is a good one, though, that sustainability really—I mean, in some ways it’s a lot like money, which is what we focus on in Marketplace. It’s everywhere. Sustainability is a component of nearly every story and many, I guess, stories that you hear. What we can do is take those stories, take those points of interest and look for the sustainability angle. I think sometimes we do that as well, instead of just—sustainability isn’t just greenhouse gases.

Sustainability isn’t just water. Sustainability is really in—there’s a component of sustainability in nearly every story that we tell. I think what we do is sort of look for that sort of creative angle, that sort of brings up this topic people are already talking about sometimes, but then shows people the sustainability side of it.

Brancaccio: You said that the time was done for debating what sustainability means, but I think it actually would inform your question. What definition did you come up with last time you sat around in the windowless room?

Adair: So let me introduce myself. I’m Ben Adair, the Editorial Director of Sustainability Initiatives at American Public Media. Sustainability for us is how we organize our economic activities or society’s present needs so that we—hold on, I’m mangling it now.

Melnick: You did great this morning.

Adair: The coffee’s wearing off. Sustainability means how we organize our current economic activity, so we don’t compromise future generations. So, with economic activities, we’re talking about a lot of different things, right? It’s buying and selling things. It’s resource extraction. It’s public policy. It’s energy. It’s consumer choices.

Brancaccio: Then I’m not in their beat, but for all Marketplace Stories, something that you may not have thought of that some people find confounding, my next question would then be, and who’s the human being that you’d want to listen to their story that evokes this? If it’s a future story, maybe they’re not born yet, so what do you do?

It’s a person who has passion, a person who has invested something of themselves into something connected to what meets the first criteria. That means that the issues are a dime a dozen. There’s a quadrillion issues we could all be covering. It’s not a problem finding them, finding the human being is often more of a challenge.

Moderate: Mick?

Audience: Mick Dalrymple, my question regards, it shows Marketplace, but it’s about the economy. GDP, being that GDP is an exponential function that anybody who has taken algebra knows that it eventually becomes vertical which is inherently unsustainable. Whoever, I think it’s the University of Chicago economist that came up with the definition of GDP. I think he, himself, said it’s a very poor way for people to judge the success of society.

I think it was on Marketplace. I’m not positive because this was the first time that I’d ever heard a national news story saying, “Hey, maybe we should be looking at something other than GDP, but I just—you know, being that it’s a very compact way, it’s a very nice sound byte way, it’s very media-friendly to use GDP, how? If you think it should happen, how do we actually change the way that the media presents, and that people think about, the success of our society with some other mechanism of measurement besides GDP?

Melnick: This is not easy to characterize. You guys are giving me tough questions to put in like four words for the videographer. Is it fair to say that the question is, other than GDP, how can we look at the economics of sustainability?

Audience: Yeah, in a media-friendly way.

Brancaccio: Funny you should ask [laughter]. You know the actor Liam Neeson? When it was “Schindler’s List” year, just before the Academy Awards, he was being interviewed by Barbara Walters. She said, “How does this affect your love life?”

He got annoyed, and he said, “Barbara, it’s not like I go into bars, goin’ up to women and saying have you seen ‘Schindler’s List,’ well I’m the guy!”

Well, I’m the guy! Half of my life right now for Marketplace is that, alternative measures, and trying to popularize them and explore them, because every—it’s not just a single proposed alternative measure that would go beyond GDP, and everybody knows in Bhutan they have thrown out the GDP, actually, which is a rare thing. Most people don’t want to throw out the GDP, and had the Gross Happiness Index, but there’s many different indices. They’re all a really interesting expression of someone who has a positive vision of the future and wants to measure it in an interesting way so that—with the view that you get what you measure, measure the right thing.

It’s crucial. It’s not just an academic discussion about this, now, because if the idea is we’ve just got to keep increasing the activity of the economy or none of us are going to have jobs, and everybody is going to be miserable, we’ve got a problem. We have an energy problem that we’re going to talk about at the thing tonight with Mr. Hofmeister. There’s a lot of challenges involved in the idea that trees have to grow to the sky or we’re all doomed.

So why not ask, because you didn’t wake up this morning going, “I got to increase GDP.” You know, “My life’s not going to be complete unless gross domestic product—.” Right, how many actual students in here? Raise your hand.

Okay, again, with the hands, how many people are concerned about getting a job? Okay, I bet, and I’m not going to ask, but probably that supersedes how many of you are worried about sustainability. You probably are worried about sustainability, but you’re probably more worried about getting a job.

Well, guess what? They’re interrelated, so maybe you could measure jobs as an indicator that’s an alternative to the GDP.

A lot of people like—but it’s an interesting dialogue to have, what is it that you want out of life? Sometimes it gets distorted too much into what makes you happy? That sounds frivolous, and it may be. There’s a lot of important work that we all have to do that doesn’t make us happy.

I just met a woman who is an urban planner in Ithaca, New York. She just slogged through this horrible campaign to rezone something to make her community a better place. It involved endless meetings, slogging through getting coalitions together. She was successful. She thinks Ithaca is going to be a better place. It didn’t make her happy, but it needed to get done.

Maryland has a Genuine Progress Indicator. There are interesting development indicators on like a Human Development Index that looks at education, infant mortality, gaps between the rich and poor.

The reason I’m so interested in it besides making the world a better place is that I was the anchorman for the show for all those years. I bought into the whole GDP thing. I feel I personally have something to atone for [laughter].

Melnick: Any other comments on GDP? That’s a hard act to follow. Yes, sir.

Audience: My name is Bill, and I totally agree that—

Melnick: Can you explain what your affiliation is?

Audience: I’m a small business person and I’ve used living healthy and green in my own personal business and my life. What changed me around was reading Al Gore’s first book, Herman Daly’s For the Common Good, if any of you have heard of it, and Paul Hawken with The Ecology of Commerce. I was just absorbed in it. I was so passionate after reading it, but anyways, I—the Civil Rights of the 60s, churches got on board to make the Civil Rights happen.

There was a program on now about a preacher up in Oregon, or Washington State, how he stood in front of his audience that came. He was scared to talk about sustainability and going green. He got a standing ovation.

Science and churches need to relate and we’re only getting a small percentage, let’s face reality. How do we reach out and get churches to jump on board? Due to population and urban sprawl, it’s an issue that’s very sensitive. How can we get the churches to get involved like the Civil Rights, because if we get them on board—some day I knew the colleges were going to talk about this issue and now it’s out there. Now it’s going into the high school level and slowly into the grade schools, but I still said the next thing would be churches. How do we reach out?

Melnick: So this is a little easier to characterize this question. No, but that’s fine, it’s a very good question. As the gentleman pointed out, the importance of churches in social change and awareness. The question is, how do you get churches on board with the thinking about sustainability. I’m sure that this is something that you lie awake at night worried about. What’s the answer from a public media perspective? How do you get the churches involved? Do you think of the churches as an audience?

Troeh: Well, I do think we do think of charity which is a huge part of the churches and the nonprofits that are so powerful in this space are almost corporations in unto themselves. Things like Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund. I mean, these are huge, huge groups that wield a lot of power. There is a lot of passion that we’ve talked about.

I think a lot of it comes back to consumer issues that Adriene covers a lot in that people are sort of saying they want to know what to do. As we said, it’s not our job to tell people what to do, but people do want to be told what to do to make the world a better place.

In terms of that gap there, I mean, American Public Media does have a program called Unbeing which is great at talking about ethical issues and some of the issues in this space.

At Marketplace, I think our way of doing interfacing with the faith community would be more through something like what foundations, charities and faith-based organizations with a lot of power are doing on some of these issues. They do affect some of the poorest people in the world.

When we were in Mexico for Cancun for the Climate Conference, Scott spent some time with some farmers who are already losing the ability to make whatever meager living they make because of climate change. So when you get—when that rubber hits the road with relief work that so many churches do, and they get involved in climate change, I think that that might be the most direct way in through the relief and poverty work that so many churches are involved in around the world.

Hill: The other way is just through creating really interesting conversations and hopefully starting dialogues. I do think if we do really creative stories that get somebody talking over dinner, or somebody talking on Sunday after church, like if people start talking about what they hear on our show, what they hear about sustainability, then the movement—then it goes from there, and it spirals.

So in some ways, I don’t think we sit around and think of like how can we get churches talking about this, but we sit around and think how can we get people talking about this? I think that’s a really—it’s what we strive for in every story we do, is a story that you’re going to go home and you’re going to say, “You’ll never guess what I heard on the radio today.” That’s what we want. That’s a successful story.

Brancaccio: There is this concept of economic justice. That’s something that you can just imagine the person in the pulpit would resonate with them. The way I see it, we need to give them the tools, and her the tools, to be able to sort of—first of all, connect the dots on economic justice issues, but to form their conclusions. It’s not for us to form the conclusions on something as sort of objective as economic justice, but when I joked about the “Clockwork Orange” scenario where you’re strapped to the chair with your eyeballs opened, being forced to consume something?

Actually, those do exist. Book clubs [laughter] where there’s a social sanction if you don’t do your homework, right, if you haven’t read the book, but also church halls and other community groups. It doesn’t have to be religious, where they can say, “We’re all doin’ this on Tuesday, and we’re gonna play some Marketplace pieces.”

I remember the moment I just could have died and gone to heaven. It’s been a bunch of years, and it’s happened since in other contexts, but the example that I remember is Congressman George Miller’s office calls Marketplace from Washington. They say, “Listen, Meryl Streep contacted the congressman and wants your piece from last night because she has 1,000 people at Carnegie Hall tonight. She wants to hear your piece about Occidental Petroleum and a threat of mass suicide.”

You know, Meryl Streep, Carnegie Hall? So, through the magic of digital communications, we got that sucker right to New York. They played it to the captive audience.

So houses of worship can be very important and we should actually be running with our material and saying, “Here’s the people. Look, we’re meeting them. Here’s some of the issues. What are the other issues? What do you think this community’s response should be?”

Melnick: Okay, yes.

Audience: Kate Gallego, community member, and I Chair the Phoenix Environmental Quality Commission. I was wondering if you could talk about when you do a report that includes climate change, if you have the ability on your own to decide how you would characterize the scientific consensus, or if there is sort of guidelines from American Public Media or NPR, and sort what word you use for climate change or global warming. Then, also, the response you get and sort of how your listeners view the scientific consensus.

Melnick: So what are the parameters or limitations on how you define climate change, fair enough for basics? Good question. Scott?

Tong: I, as you know, there’s so much—it’s not about churches, but there’s so much religion over this topic [laughter]. So I guess a couple of times I’ve just gone to what the UN scientists use, the balance of the evidence [dot, dot, dot] and go from there. Beyond that, it is so—I live in Washington. It’s so loaded. People will take this and manufacture it into the fact-free zone of Washington, DC. So beyond that, you know, I just stay with that. I don’t know about the rest of you.

Hill: Yeah, I think it’s a word that can be charged. I mean, it’s something that in-house we have no debates over do we need to characterize both sides. We don’t have—I mean, we all believe in climate change. No one—we never have those conversations, but I think to say climate change has become a political—you know, climate change and global warming are both sort of political “buzzwords.” So sometimes I’ll say, “You know, the planet that is warming because of pollution,” [laughs] you know, and it’s—and I’m not saying climate change and I’m not saying global warming. So then people’s hackles are maybe less likely to go up, and we can go and get on with the story and get on with what we’re actually talking about.

Brancaccio: We haven’t committed to a date yet, on the air, for when the earth burns out [laughter], but therein lies the issue, right? In other words, beyond human beings have had an effect on the world’s climate, which I think that’s what most scientists will agree. You know, how quickly it’s happening and most importantly what our public policy response will be, that’s the one that absolutely we can’t tell you.

We can show you what some of the options are and explore them on the air, but that is a human decision, figuring out how we’re going to weigh today versus the future. If there’s a fault with all the media, ourselves too maybe, it’s this notion that sometimes we don’t explore the idea that—how do I put this? There’s a sense in Washington, in particular, and you must have noticed this, where there’s hardcore believers that the earth is going to burn out in 12 years. There’s the people who are the deniers. If the truth is right, it’s somewhere in the middle, right?

Isn’t that often how public policy works? Some of the worse scenarios could also come true. Those also remain possibilities. We just do not know. So people tend to, somehow psychologically and the media abets this, and sometimes we fall into that pattern of, “It is possible that some of the worse scenarios do come true.” So people need to, when deciding what their public policy response should be and what they should tell their congressman and woman and so forth, they have to weigh—we have to help them weigh the idea that, yes, it’s possible there are scenarios in which the worse effects are, in fact, further off than we ever thought, but the other possibilities are also the case.

Human beings deal with risk and understanding risk very imperfectly. We have a hard time conveying it as well, I think.

Tong: I think the advantage of the business show is that we can talk about how markets react to that risk. Certain sectors are very exposed to their perception of that risk, insurance markets, agricultural markets, etc. So, and I don’t think that we find ourselves very often in a situation where we’ll be taking that head-on. Rather, it’s in many cases there’s money to be made and lost in the marketplace based on how they see their risk. In that way, I don’t think we get stuck on that or how to characterize it too often.

Troeh: We do get comments, though. We get—there are the people who haunt the comment boards who do absolutely not believe in global warming and use our website as their public mouthpiece to espouse their beliefs on the subject. Jonathan Lovelace from Milan, Michigan, are you here? He comments on every single story that mentions climate change, on every single one. So we do get those activists on the other side of things who do not necessarily want any part of this and want a public forum to do that, so there’s that too.

Audience: My name is Yola, and my question is—

Melnick: Yola, you are a student or a community member?

Audience: I’m a college professor and a counselor. My question to you, David, is about cognitive business, an idea that is good but I don’t behave the behavior of my ideas [inaudible 0:57:29.3] on the inside. Sustainability is an idea that is wonderful, it’s a rational idea, and consumerism that is an emotional investment. We are a consumer society. Can you speak to how do we get sustainability to become an idea of passion, because I think there’s a split, and consumerism makes it harder to really buy, with passion, into it.

Melnick: Can you recharacterize this?

Brancaccio: Yeah, the question was about practicing what we preach. Many people would argue that the topics of sustainability are crucially important, so how come we’re not ginning up the passion that we should about this? What might we do to explore that issue?

Audience: And the role of consumers?

Brancaccio: I’ve been actually doing my homework for the presentation tonight where I do a dialogue with Jon Hofmeister, the former president of Shell. I was reminded of some notes that I took in Cambridge, England a couple of years ago that addressed this. It’s difficult stuff.

Economics has recognized this problem that it is much more easy to deal with the here and now because the here and now is concrete. The future is abstract and if you don’t believe that, try to get someone to quit smoking, who is young and started smoking. The idea that in 40 years horrible things are going to happen to your lungs, and you’re going to get operations and chemotherapy and die, they’re aware of it, but they’re like, “I don’t know, it’s in 40 years, stuff happens.”

It’s certainly relevant about climate change, but the idea of boosting your social standing among your peers by looking cool by lighting up a cigarette today is something extremely tangible. Humans are terrible at this. They discount the future amazingly.

I don’t know if I’ll get to it tonight, and I’ll see where Jon wants to also go with some of this stuff, but it’s even reduced to personal finance. Let’s talk about consumer issues. They’ve done experiments, economists, with “I’ll give you 50 bucks now, or I’ll give you $300 bucks in five years,” like for real, they’ll sign a contract. Everybody takes the 50 bucks now.

You have to raise the amount in five years up really high to get them to take the other bargain, completely irrationally high, like it doesn’t make any sense. There’s no return on investment that is that guaranteed that you could do in the regular marketplace that would increase it like that in five years.

People are awful at that. So what is the solution?

Well, smarter minds than me are thinking about this. Among the issues that you may hear more about, moving forward, especially with the debate not just about climate change and sustainability but also about the budget deficit and the national debt, in which there’s going to have to be, it is argued, the reining in of our spending, why not frame everything we do, every public policy decision, every dollar we spend, or every dollar we cut, through the prism of, “What does this do to our children and their children?”

Does it hurt them? Don’t do it.

Now, that of course easily applies to environmental sustainability. Is this going to wreck the earth so that they’re miserable?

Then that’s a little bit more tangible for people. It’s not their future, it’s the people they love. Is that enough to knock this thing home? I don’t know. We’re all, every one of us is guilty of this problem, all the time.

Tong: I think when it comes to energy we often talk about our behavior. You know, we drive so many miles to come to an event, whatever, and then we think about climate change in the long-term. I think that’s an area where we’re actually seeing a response to that, where we might assume that it’s just getting worse, but there are a lot of smart energy people who think energy demand in the US has actually peaked, and it peaked way before Lehman collapsed, that if you measure vehicle miles traveled, the average commute time, the vehicles we buy.

So, arguably, we have responded to the market signals. You know, we hate it when gas is $4.50 but it kind of worked a little bit. So I think that’s the interesting area where we can report on that. You know, sometimes the market provokes adjustments in our behavior where you put a price on something. The fact that’s lost in the gas price debate in Washington is the people who wanted gas to be $4.00, they got what they wanted. It’s interesting to watch how our behavior is actually going to change.

Hill: One other answer to this is really interesting. My colleague, Liza Tucker, actually, was on a panel with a sustainability representative from Nike. She asked a really good question, isn’t the most sustainable thing just to not encourage people to buy shoes? Like we only need one pair of shoes.

The Nike representative had a very smart answer that sort of changed the way I think about this a little. She’s like, “You know, not if those shoes come from sort of a zero-cycle system. Not if those shoes, in and off themselves, are fully sustainable. Not if they came from rubber and leather that was repurposed from other rubber and leather.”

So maybe you say, “All right, we are a consumerist culture. We are going to buy things. You will never convince me to only have one pair of shoes.” How can we make my second and third, and on and on, pair of shoes better? How can we make those more sustainable, and maybe embrace the—you know, admit it, like we like new things. We like shiny things. How do we then make those things better and better choices?

Audience: My name is John Harlow. I’m a former student of the School of Sustainability, [inaudible 1:03:45.8] conference here. You’ve sort of identified that sustainability gathers a lot of problems into this one place that we’ve already had. As you’ve talked about jobs and economic justice, and most recently [background noise over], I’m curious how much the ideas of justice play into the way you prioritize the debate around sustainability, because some of the more prominent environmental issues coming out of the 70s and 80s appear in the debate, sort of with this momentum and then other problems that we had, that are not as prominent as sustainability, sort of fall down.

As much as the zero-cycle shoe is a great idea, so many people are involved in the global marketplace, producing that shoe and the conditions in which they live, the justice aspects of that are often times less prominent than technological or other pieces of the assembly—[fades].

Melnick: Okay, the question, just characterize it as a question real quickly, John.

Audience: How does the justice piece of sustainability, what prominence does it receive from the way you look at how things—sustainability comes as sort of the breadth of human issues? Where does justice come in?

Brancaccio: Luckily for, I think, [interference], it’s only—it’s not the sustainability show. We have other strands of coverage. I think all of us are also fascinated by some of the issues you’ve raised, which is why we’re also trying to do issues—a proposed beat we’re working on it, we have our fingers crossed that we can get the resources together to do this, would be called Wealth and Poverty. It’s about inequality.

That starts to grab all those stories. They’re not disconnected. They could be wrapped into sustainability, but we do feel that there is additional stories to mine. There’s really important issues like that, which is how most people are interacting with the economy, and are there ways to lift them up as well?

A solution that may look environmentally sustainable, but increases inequality and makes more people’s lives more miserable, is that a great solution? So we do more than just what’s specifically under the rubric of sustainability.

Troeh: I think it has a lot to do with how those issues come up in checklists for corporate responsibility reporting, for environmental and social governance reporting. I was in a discussion recently about companies, the trend for companies to increasingly get asked from their shareholders and their boards how they’re doing on sustainability measurements.

Some of the sort of surveys—you know, they need to rank themselves, or they get ranked on how they’re doing on all kinds of things. Some of them are things like, how many women are on the board? When I saw that, I found that was so interesting. I feel like—I mean, feminism or equality of genders isn’t something that, honestly, we talk much about on our Sustainability Desk, but there it is as one of the main measurements of whether this is a “sustainable” company.

That was a measurement that Novo Nordisk uses. They’re a European-based company. Again, I was saying this morning, every time you’re like, “Well, in Europe that’s—.” So many sustainability stories start that way, so there are places that this comes up. Actually, that’s one of the confusing things about defining sustainability is that it does include those social justice measurements as well as emissions measurements.

When you’re talking about measuring the impact that any policy or company is having, it’s difficult because they can emphasize. Everyone can emphasize or de-emphasize whichever of those things they want to. They can emphasize their energy savings, but not tell you that that’s happening because they have eight-year-olds working putting in the solar panels. You know, so there are these trade-offs that can be easily hidden and for true sustainability reporting, you’ve got to look at all of those.

Hill: That’s actually true in food reporting, as well. One of the things, I was talking to a lot of people for this organic story I just did, but one person raised this point that organics only tells you how the land has been treated. It tells you nothing about how the laborers have been treated and often these can be farms that are working on a really slim margin that have a very slim area of profit. In some cases these are farms that can afford to pay their laborers less.

Shouldn’t we have a label for food that means not just, “Hey, we didn’t put chemicals on this land,” but, “Hey, we didn’t put chemicals on this land and we paid the laborers a fair living wage.”

Tong: You mentioned, John, about consumerism and globalization. Did you bring that up? I think we do a fair amount. In my time in China, we did stories about industrial lead poisoning of children, slave labor, selling of babies that went into orphanages that then came to the United States, labor strikes. I think the answer is that it’s one story at a time.

It would be great if we had time to kind of sit around and say, “Well, how about 7.5% of our stories are going to be on this?” I think it’s point one. I think the other point is there may be an American perception to feel sorry for the laborers who make a dollar a day, but having kind of camped out at the factory where they snap together iPhones, it’s like 200,000 people that work in that one factory.

The line to get jobs is really long. Coal mines, you know, horrible conditions in some of the coal mines in Northern China, but for the workers who get to go down to the bottom and incur the greatest risk, they make $3,000 RMV per month. That’s a ton of money.

So, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a given that—I mean, there are people who are chasing this, and from their perspective this is their piece of the global economy.

Melnick: I’m going to finish here because we’re just about out of time. I’m going to ask each one of the panelists to very briefly give a response, and then we’ll close down. Can you tell us one story or one subject in sustainability reporting that you would absolutely, if you were king or queen, that you would work on tomorrow? You know, unfettered, Ben’s listening, Joaquin is listening, very carefully. So, in the confines of whatever happens in GIOS stays in GIOS, right? What would you work on if you could, just one thing, one topic or one story, or one issue or one company, or whatever? What would it be? Eve?

Troeh: Oh, I have to start, I was assuming I’d get to last. I got to go last on the first round. I’m real interested in population issues. I’m very interested in cities and the impact of people moving from rural to urban environments, the impact of people moving to different areas of the US, or different areas of other countries. Migration of people as people compete for resources, look for jobs, try to feed their families and try to become better educated or move up in a society if there’s potential for them to do that. What the trade-offs are of that, what the consequences are of that on the environment, on social structure.

You know, people in Japan, many of the people affected by the Tsunami and the nuclear incident were elderly and they have no family around because all of the young kids have moved to the cities. So things like that, how sort of decisions are made as we become more mobile around the globe, and what the impacts of the decisions are on our sustainability, environmentally and socially.

Hill: Yeah, I think what I’d be really interested in, is taking a look at all of the actions that we take that we believe to be really good for the environment or really good for sustainability for the future, and actually finding out if they are. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about. You know, one idea that I’ve just started researching is local food.

We all, you know, there’s this idea out there that local food is really the best thing you can do for the environment is buy local, but there’s some research that says, “Well, it all depends on what you’re local is.” If you’re talking about tomatoes from Chicago in the wintertime that had to be grown in a greenhouse with piped in heat and piped in energy, maybe those aren’t the best tomatoes to buy.

So I just think to sort of challenge some of these conceptions that are out there and try to, again, sort of start discussions about what we think is true and where we’re headed and maybe make a few people mad along the way.

Tong: Food-related, we’ve talked a lot on the beat about these so-called land grabs in Asia and Africa. I, on one hand, this is these predatory countries with a bunch of money going in to take this territory from the locals. On the other hand, it’s foreign direct investment from one country to the other. We’re perfectly fine having our socks and our petroleum come from another country, you know, that’s the interesting question is if other countries have the arable land and they’ve got the water, so this becomes kind of a virtual water transfer. I mean, it’s a lot more complicated and I imagine there’s a lot of mythology to bust, so I hopefully will get to work on some of that.

Brancaccio: So if I was unfettered and my editors would listen to my story pitch without question, well, that already happens. All those stories are in the pipeline. I just pop you an email and he goes, “A-okay.” In fact, they don’t even edit these things. They go right on the air [laughter].

There’s a million but, just briefly, we have buy local, we have locavores and local buy—you know local food, so the kiwi fruit isn’t brought in at a great carbon footprint cost from New Zealand, local.

What about local 401k? What would happen if our retirement had a bias toward investing in something that nearer rather than further? A lot of things would have to change, our fiduciary responsibilities to maximize the return of investment of those things, but there are people talking about this now. I haven’t done that story yet, and I’m really fascinated by it. So that’s one thing that I would do.

Melnick: Okay, two very quick announcements before I thank the panel. I just want to thank Lauren over here and Karen, Vanessa, and Mindy, who you may or may not know, for helping to put this event on.

[End of Audio]

Using Tempe as a Sustainability Laboratory

Using Tempe as a Sustainability Laboratory

Rob Melnick, Executive Dean: Well you’re here in the headquarters of the Global Institute of Sustainability. Our mission, which is to promote sustainability education, teaching, operations and research throughout Arizona State University; not just in our Institute and School but throughout all four campuses as well as by extension helping community partners, businesses, cities, and non-governmental organizations to prepare for a more sustainable future.

When the former College of Nursing was designated as the place that we would erect the headquarters – basically the Global Institute of Sustainability – we had a choice. The choice was you could knock the building down and start over, or you could refurbish the building to make it more sustainable to kind of practice what we preach. Some of the features that we did when we decided to refurbish this building, the carpet that you’re standing on now in the Global Institute of Sustainability is made from all recycled material. The furniture in here is made from recyclable and recycled materials. The lighting in here is a special kind of lighting that very closely mimics sunlight, so it’s much more hospitable and sustainable on the human body.

We also have sensors in all the hallways and in the offices so that if the office is not used, or the hallway is not used, the lights automatically turn off so we use less electricity. We also generate electricity. On the roof, we have solar panels and we have wind turbines that generate electricity.

The topics people know best and associate with sustainability would be, for example, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and solar energy in Arizona, for example. On the other end of the continuum, sustainability research that’s not typically associated with this term is what we call social transformation. How do people make a change to a more sustainable future? How does society adapt to natural resources shortages and to a crowded hot planet, for example. Social transformation involves sociologists, anthropologists, archeologists, etcetera, so everything in between. Urban sustainability, what are the systems that cities use, transportation, water, waste that make for or don’t make for a sustainable future. We’re doing work in all of those spaces.

What I want to do is empower people to change the world. We like to think that what we’re doing here around sustainability is going to empower and create skill sets for the next generation of leaders that are going to have a real huge challenge on their hands. But it’s going to be the young people – people in college today, the people in elementary and high school today – that can change the planet.

I think Tempe is making good progress to be sustainable, but one of the challenges that every city I work with – and that’s a lot around the world – faces is what do you mean by sustainability? Sustainability is often a mysterious term even to those of us who study it. I think Tempe has done a lot of really good thinking about this kind of stuff, and I certainly think it’s one of the leaders in the valley. So we work with Tempe in particular – rather than any specific project – in particular by understanding Tempe’s problems and trying to identify solutions that exist both within the university, where we have knowledge that could help solve a problem that Tempe has or an initiative that Tempe is moving towards sustainability, or by identifying other cities that have had similar problems and have solved them in the past in providing education, technical assistance, etcetera.

Well I’d like to think that ASU and the city in the future would both continue the ongoing relationship we have where our students can learn, kind of in real time, and at the same time help achieve its goals for sustainability in whatever form that may take. So it’s been really a two-way street between Tempe as a laboratory and ASU as discovery factory, by being able to bring in talent from the outside that we know and you know to bear on the challenges that the city has set for its staff and to benefit its residents.

[End of Audio]

The Intersection Between Justice and Sustainability: Voices and Views from South Phoenix

The Intersection Between Justice and Sustainability: Voices and Views from South Phoenix

This film, produced by ASU School of Sustainability students, documents communities creating visions and strategies for justice and sustainability in South Phoenix. It tackles issues of health, environmental justice, urban history and segregation, food security and neighborhood organizing through the eyes of local community leaders.

Dot Earth: 9 Billion + 1 Planet

Dot Earth: 9 Billion + 1 Planet

Rick Shangraw, Emcee: Look, we’ve got a really interesting presentation, talk today. Almost all of you know Andy. I had a two-page bio on Andy I was going to read, and I’m not going to waste my time. Award-winning journalist, created New York Times in 2007 the Dot Earth Blog. He’s blogging now as you can see.

Andy Revkin: Actually, yes.

Shangraw: I’m sure you are. I’m sure you are.

Revkin: On this.

Shangraw: And he’s somebody that 20 years ago began writing about climate when nobody was worrying about the climate. He was writing about it 15 years ago, 10 years ago. Then five years ago people said, “We must have problems with the climate,” so his colleagues began writing about it. So he’s way out in front. We couldn’t be more excited about him being here. He’s sitting next to and will be going back and forth with Dr. Brad Allenby.

Brad’s a faculty member in the Fulton School of Engineering. He’s particularly in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment. He’s also a Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics, has an appointment in the School of Law also. As many of you know, Brad, he’s done a lot of work, almost considered one of the grandfathers of industrial ecology, spent time as a director of energy and environment at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, was at AT&T running their environment and safety program at AT&T before coming here. He is provocative to say the least, [Laughter] and so looking forward to what’s going to go on.

I also would like to introduce just for a quick second the Honorable Kristina Johnson, who’s sitting in the front row. Kristina is the, most recently, Under Secretary of Energy and is here visiting ASU with her Science Advisor Mark Handschy and we’re glad to have her in the audience also. Thank you, Kristina. [Applause]

So with that, I’ll turn it back over to Rob to start the festivities.

Rob Melnick, Moderator: Let me just say a word about how we’re going to conduct today’s session. It’s going to be a little different than some of the sessions we’ve had in the past that you may have attended, the Wrigley Lecture Series; it’s going to be a conversation. After some fairly brief opening remarks by Brad and Andy respectively, and some kind of responses to one another, we’re going to try to keep that fairly short.

We really want to engage in a dialogue here, and so my job really is to try to bring questions from you into the discussion. I have plenty of questions for them that I’ve got in my mind that I’d love to hear, but I really want to hear from you, so we’ll have a microphone going around and hopefully we’ll be–Mindy will be fleet of foot in doing that. Try to keep your questions–I only ask this–try to keep your questions short and get to the question. Okay. Get to the question.

We have the opportunity to listen to two people who are world-class thinkers on the subject, and so please avoid the editorials, okay, and try to get to the question part of it so we can hear from them and get some discussion going. That would be, I think, the most profitable way to spend this time.

With that, Brad, I’m going to ask you to speak first and to make whatever comments you feel are appropriate for today considering we’re only talking about the future of the entire human civilization and the planet in which we live.

Brad Allenby: Thank you, Rob. First I’d like to thank all of you for being here. Andy, I’d like to thank you for slogging out from JFK, appreciate it. What I’d like to do is I’d like to start with a couple of videos which I think answer the question really as well as anything I could say, so if we could roll the George Washington piece. [Video Playing 4:32-5:32]

And now for our second learned study, could you roll 1984? [Video Playing 5:42-6:41] So a couple of thoughts about those advertisements. The first is if you don’t understand why they were up there, then you probably don’t understand the world that we’re already in. Now, you realize, of course, both of those were the same ad. If you think about it, what they did was take a technology which for many people is iconic for personal freedom and associated it directly with that.

Both of them were heavily understated. The Dodge ad didn’t even mention Dodge, and yet both of them are very potent. I showed my engineering class the Dodge advertisement and they realized it was totally hokey. They realized that it was completely phony, that it was designed to manipulate them and they loved it.

When I was in the Army going through basic training and most of the folks with me were going to Vietnam, there were–the pinups were about half and half. Half of the pinups were what you’d expect from hormonally challenged males. The other half were automobiles–Chevys, Fords. If you don’t understand the appeal of those technologies, if you don’t understand how integrated the human and the technological spheres already are, then you don’t understand the world that we’re trying to deal with. The simplistic solutions that we derive absent that kind of knowledge are going to fail.

I want to suggest a couple of things. The first thing I want to suggest is that what these advertisements indicate is that we’re facing a world that is far more complex than we think it is because the objective pieces that we can get a hold of, the data, the climate change, the artifacts, those are all embedded in culture and psychology. Every problem we deal with is a wicked problem. It involved humans. It involves irrational aspects of our behavior. Unless we know that, unless we’re prepared for that, then the solutions we suggest are going to fail.

I don’t want to start off by being provocative, but let me point out that we have been negotiating climate change for 20 years. Over that period, emissions have gone up every year. That is hardly an encouraging track record. Our idea now is maybe we’ll do geoengineering–take massively powerful technologies and unleash them without much of any idea of what’s going to happen. This does not speak well of purports to be a sentient species.

I want to make some other suggestions too. Look back at those ads. One ad is for automobile technology. One ad is for information and communication technology. Both of them speak to the allure of technology in supporting personal freedom. I’m not going to talk about Egypt or Tunisia or any of that. I don’t have to. What I want to do is suggest something much more basic.

If we really want to manage technology, we need to understand how to manage the relationship that people have with different types of technologies. Is it possible, for example, that I can take the network generation and shift them over to perceiving ICT as iconic for personal freedom rather than automobiles? If I can do that, will it make it easier to change underlying automotive technology in ways that may be more desirable? That’s the kind of thinking I suggest we need to be concerned with.

I’ll conclude by thinking of something that happened to me very recently. I was reviewing an article for the best environmental science and engineering journal in the country, ES&T, published by the American Chemical Society. It was a life cycle study of biofuels. It admitted that there were a number of difficult issues, but it was a life cycle study of biofuels.

This life cycle study ignored completely the fact that if you accelerate the flow of carbon through biological systems, you necessarily accelerate the flow of all the other elements that are part of those systems–nitrogen, phosphorus. We’re having a meeting on phosphorus here at ASU tomorrow. Most people don’t know that the phosphorus cycle is fairly heavily impacted by human activity already. Nitrogen, of course, is badly impacted by human activity.

What are we really doing with biofuels? Something that this LCA missed completely. What we’re really doing is we’re saying we’re going to fix the carbon cycle by breaking the nitrogen and the phosphorus cycle. Again, I suggest to you that if we purport to be a sentient species, we’ve got to begin doing better than that. So I guess I would leave it at that. Andy.

Revkin: Well, boy, that’s a good place to start, not to leave. If we could go to my laptop here, I’m going to just show a couple images as conversation provokers as well. I’m thrilled to be here with Brad who I’d never met face to face, but for years now I’ve been drawing on his brain. Until today, actually, in my mental map, he just was a brain, like this. [Laughter] Like in that Harry Potter scene–

Allenby: You’re saying that’s gone downhill fast.

Revkin: No, no, no. [Laughter] No, no, I feel much better now actually. You know like the Harry Potter movie, the brain’s floating in this aquarium, and I love the way you think. This isn’t a debate really. I think we’re on similar tracks. I’ve come at the issues of our time in the role of communicator. I never even played a scientist on TV. I’m not a scientist. I’m not an engineer. I’ve spent close to 30 years talking to hundreds of scientists and engineers and looking at issues that matter, like climate change, the role of agrochemicals.

One of the first stories I did in the early ‘80s was about–on the environment was about a pesticide called Paraquat that was a great new tool in this kind of agriculture called No-Till Agriculture, which has all kinds of benefits, but there were side effects. Paraquat was poisoning thousands of people a year in developing countries who drank it accidentally. It’s a brown liquid. They would store it in Coke bottles and that’s a bad combination.

I’ve been going at it though from those standpoints, but–and with climate change, which I’ve been writing about since the mid 1980s, I spent the first 15 years exploring climate as a biogeophysical problem. Emissions are rising. These are the possible consequences. These are the possible secondary consequences for nature and for things that matter like water supplies.

It was only the last five or ten years I really started to home in on an element I hadn’t really considered, which was the element I’ve been using personally to explore all these questions, which is my mind, the human mind. On my blog–the reason I started Dot Earth more than three years ago was after several decades of conventional journalism–of talking to people, trying to get a sense of, okay, this is what we know, put that in a paper or a magazine or in a documentary a couple times–I was always searching for definitiveness.

With journalism generally there’s sort of a faux sense often of definitiveness, of clarity. The New York Times front page is black and white, but actually when you stand back from it, it’s really gray if you can’t see the individual letters. I began to realize in, again, the last few years that if I’m not examining, not just being a journalist, if I’m not looking at the whole pipeline–how information matters or doesn’t matter, how people absorb knowledge or reject it based on predispositions–then I’m not really going to get traction. That means I’ve dived into this very ugly arena of cultural cognition.

There’s a website. I encourage you to write down culturalcognition.net, one phrase, which is a place where researchers led by Dan Kahan at Yale are exploring these boxes that we’re in, durable silos really where if you’re in one, you’re going to go out there and reject anything that sounds like global warming from human activities as a dangerous thing. If you’re in the other, at the other end of the spectrum, you’re going to actively embrace anything about the weather that seems to fit in a marginal way that we’re heading into a catastrophe and you’re going to reject anything that gets at the durable uncertainties about climate.

That’s what led me also to shift from conventional journalism to a new role where I’m still writing for The New York Times in an interrogatory way everyday. I’m not telling you–most of the time on Dot Earth I’m not saying what I think. I’m asking questions, like I did yesterday about Egypt’s uprising. I mused on–I said basically this is a great moment to examine some of these issues. Look through the last few days or week of speculation on what triggered the uprising in Egypt. You can find–essentially everyone with an agenda found a lesson in the Egypt uprising.

It was about poverty. It was about a dictatorship. It was about global warming, if you’re climate progress. It was about food insecurity. I raised the point that it’s probably at least partially about technology, about the fact that if you want to collaborate and coordinate massive demonstrations today through texting and cell phones, you have this incredible real-time ability to sort of get a lot of people to do something at the same time, or to think about something.

I want to show you very quickly a couple images. [Image Shown 17:17-18:32] One thing that we need at this time is new ways of thinking about information. You can’t see this very well, but if you go on the blog it’s been there a few times. There’s a British illustrator named Adam Nieman N-I-E-M-A-N created these portrayals of earth’s liquid and atmospheric resources where he took the actual known volume of the world’s oceans and fresh waters and made it into a sphere. That little green bubble on the left there is all of the world’s liquid water.

I’ve sailed across two oceans when I was younger, so I know how big the oceans are. It’s amazing to be in the middle of the Indian Ocean 1,000 miles from land with two miles deep of water underneath you, and it feels utterly beyond measurement. Then when you actually put it into a ball, it’s really small. I think that’s an interesting way to captivate it and galvanize a discussion of anything related to water resources. You look at that. By the way, you can’t even see the fresh water. If you put the fresh water into a sphere at that scale, you wouldn’t see it.

The one on the right, the pink bubble, is all the atmosphere. At sea level pressure, if you took all the air in the atmosphere, put it in a volume at sea level pressure, that’s the global commons. That’s what we have to parse out to 9 billion people in a few decades in terms of who has the right to pollute or not pollute or–and especially with greenhouse gases, that’s a big issue. There’s a new way of thinking and having discourse about climate, energy, water resources that comes from a new way of measuring and conveying knowledge, which is a great thing.

These images will be so dark that I won’t even go there. This picture says something that I think you can see. [Image Shown 18:57-19:42] This is three pie charts. You can see the dark area which is red. This is who has cell phones in the world. At the left it’s 2000. The overall dimensions of the pie are the total number of cell phones. It was 700 million cell phones in 2000, 2 billion in 2005.

As you can see, by 2005 it’s essentially roughly 50/50, rich countries and poor countries. Now it’s three-quarters of the world’s 5 billion cell phones are in developing countries. Three-quarters of the world’s cell phones, 5 billion cell phones, and we’ll be up to having more cell phones than there are people in a few years, are in developing countries. To me that says very powerfully that discourse is the opportunity for both learning and shaping knowledge and spreading ideas is explosively growing. That means we’re at a great moment in our history.

We have this... there’s been this talk of a noosphere–this is the idea of the planet of the mind–for generations. There was a French theologian and a Russian geochemist in the ‘30s who came up with this idea–information will be the sort of global resource–a long time ago. Now we’re kind of inching toward having that potential.

But as Brad said, we also have to look inward and see it’s not just about sharing information, it’s about self-recognition. How do we, facing complicated problems–like how to minimize conflict on a crowding planet, how to minimize risks of contributing to long-lasting global warming and sea level rise–if we don’t look inward and recognize how we as human beings, for the moment, have limited capacity to deal with some kinds of problems with the wicked and even super-wicked qualities that Brad alluded to, we’re not going to get there from here.

One thing I love about Brad’s title here is it’s Engineering and Ethics, which means you can’t really move forward with one or the other in this century. I wrote on my blog today that each of those things alone is insufficient. If we all take on the attributes of the Dalai Lama, and who’s an omnivore by the way, he’s not a vegetarian, and the attributes of Lester Brown and we’re still 9 billion people seeking decent lives, you can’t get there from here without technology. But technology alone is insufficient as well without some new sense of values on how to share those bubbles that I showed you a few minutes ago. That’s a good place to stop and start to ponder some things.

Moderator: Okay. Let’s have just a brief reaction, Brad, perhaps to Andy’s remarks and then vice versa for just a moment and then we’ll start with some questions, okay?

Allenby: No. I think Andy got it right, as he usually does. The part that’s interesting is if you look at some of the figures Andy was showing, what we are not doing well is understanding how rapidly change is undermining virtually all of our operating assumptions. You assume that China is behind the United States in terms of educational quality. That’s not the case. Leading areas of China like Shanghai are in fact well ahead of what we do in the United States in terms of educational quality, according to the latest international surveys.

We assume that people in developing countries don’t have access to the same kinds of information flows that we do. Certainly not in the same way, but that cell phone indicator shows that they’ve got plenty of access and they know how to use it. I think that Andy’s points are very well taken.

It gets even worse because, of course, one of the differences between past periods of radical change–and we’ve had them. The railroad was one such. One of the differences is that in this period of change we are far more than before able to make the human part of the design space. If you think about the world of the past, it was humans changing the world for their benefit. Now you have a situation where that arrow goes both ways. Humans may be changing the world, but we can also start to redesign ourselves in deliberate ways.

The question that has already risen, and which I leave you with, is “is there anything about the human that is not contingent, anything at all?” Because if you think there is, you’d better start paying attention now because it’s being undermined. We’re developing drugs that can change your memory. We’re developing tools that will, taken altogether, enable possibly radical life extension.

People who are working on this at Harvard and Stanford talk about the individual that’s going to live to 150 with a high quality of life already having been born in this country. What does that do to virtually every assumption we make about sustainability if we start to have a population of rich, wealthy people–with money to spend and consumption that they want to do–that lives to 150? Who gives? Do we live to 150 at the expense of people in other countries that are already dying at 45 on average? What kind of equity are you going to have in a world like that? Andy.

Revkin: Well, there, too, you get–I still feel overall optimistic about this, despite all of these foreboding questions. One reason I think I feel that way is that the gap between–there’s still a glaring gap between the absolute richest and the absolute poorest–but because in part of things like that cell phone graph, we’re poised right now to have information and knowledge and insights matter in places that couldn’t reach that information, in a faster way than it was ever possible.

I’ve already got in my head a map charted out from–I don’t know if anyone saw the story in The New York Times in December, a great piece about a woman in Kenya in a rural village who was tired of going into town and getting overcharged to charge her cell phone battery periodically at a ridiculous rate. So she invested $50.00 in a solar panel for her roof and put it up and started charging her cell phone at home. She had a light that her kids could do their homework by, and their grades were going up. She then opened up a little business in her home charging other people’s cell phones because she had a surplus of energy, and now her neighbors are putting her out of business because they’re buying rooftop solar panels.

Now, these solar panels are completely uneconomic at the scale like to power Phoenix. Again, we already have them. But in a special situation like that there’s an outsized value, even that small costly amount of energy is transforming life in that village at a runaway pace. It’s infectious.

That says to me, okay, you got a kid with a cell phone and a light to study by, an LED bulb, in rural Kenya. You have open-university kinds of portals now so that anyone virtually with access to the web can study at MIT or Arizona State, so you have this potential right now poised. The academic community can be a very powerful–we were talking about this at breakfast–can be a very powerful engine in facilitating the globalization of having access to the kinds of information that foster innovation and prosperity.

Now, that won’t happen on its own. Well, it is happening on its own in that little village, but I think it can be greatly ramified and amplified by things that we can all do right now, so I’m kind of like–I’m okay with where we’re at, even though there’s a very daunting sense of the future right now.

Moderator: I’m going to start the questions and then I want you to be thinking of your own questions and I’ll call upon you. Mindy, you’re going to be running around with the microphone, right? First a very quick one because Andy just actually answered the question I had for himself already, which was on a scale between optimism and pessimism as we ramp up to 2045, where do you stand? You said you’re an optimist. Maybe in between we have guarded optimist and guarded pessimist. Brad, where do you stand? Are you optimistic about our future? Do you think we’re in trouble beyond repair now?

Allenby: I guess I would say I don’t think that that’s really a valid question. [Laughter]

Moderator: Thank you, Brad. Where was that in the script– [Laughter]

Allenby: I knew you’d like that.

Moderator: –that Brad embarrasses Executive Dean? Yes.

Allenby: No. In the sense that–in the sense that I think both optimism and pessimism imply a level of knowledge about the future which I am completely incapable of. I do think that the world that we’re facing is awesome in the original sense of that word. It has the potential for extraordinary events.

The generation of students that sit in front of me now in class are going to see things that no generation of human history has ever seen and that we have only dreamed about in science fiction. It’s going to be extraordinary, but it’s going to be very, very dangerous. High risk, high reward; a very, very challenging and interesting world. Optimistic or pessimistic, I’m just in awe.

Moderator: I want to ask one question for both of them and then I’ll open it up. You actually touched on this, Andy, a moment ago, and that is we think a lot here about how you get the information knowledge scholarship exported from the university. How do you get it applied? Many of the people in this room, faculty, students alike, and many of you are colleagues across campus, deal with aspects of sustainability on a daily basis in teaching, research, and things like that.

With the possible exception of the formal technology transfer system that universities have, universities are not particularly good at presenting their knowledge, presenting their information, communicating as we were talking about last night, Andy, to the decision makers. How do you export this rich understanding and knowledge and discovery of technologies–but not just technologies, but the social dynamics and things like that, that are not widgets and cars or computers–to the decision makers who actually have to apply these things to solve the problem of sustainability? How do we get over that bridge? How do we get from here to there?

Because my experience at least is that decision makers, whether they’re city or state or they’re private or public, look to universities for these solutions, but often we’re not forthcoming with them in a way that they can understand or use them. How, in your opinion–what are some good ways perhaps that we can, we as university, members of a university and a knowledge community–can we export some of this knowledge so that it gets applied to problem solving?

Revkin: It’s a wonderful question. It presumes that decision makers matter. [Laughter] I do think they matter in some ways because they apportion resources. The Federal Research and–the Federal R&D budget–actually, can I quickly show a slide that’s relevant? While I’m pulling up the slide, I’ll say that there’s evidence–I think the thing that the academy can do best is to make the case that information and that science particularly and that inquiry matter.

Part of what has to be conveyed is that failure matters because we’ve kind of like–if you leave it up to the conventional politics to determine how to apportion a finite R&D budget, for example, you’ll always do it based on things other than that reality, that if you really want an advance society, you have to let a lot of things bloom and fail to have some not fail.

[Image Shown 31:46-33:24] Just to give you a rough sense of where we’re at with energy inquiry in this country–and this chart you don’t need to see the details; basically Sputnik is at the left and the end of the stimulus package is at the right–this is a graph of 50 years of scientific inquiry as funded basic R&D money from the federal government. The private sector money is different. It’s had a downward trend overall.

What you see in yellow is the space race, so back in the–you know, Sputnik went beep, beep, beep and we really had a moment as we were saying this morning, ‘cause it was truly an existential kind of moment. We cared a lot and we had several tens of billions of dollars a year expenditure on R&D related to space. That all kind of faded away.

The upper band, the dark purple, is health, medical research. Not building hospitals, but studying cancer. There’s a lot of questions about whether that was effective. A lot of it failed. Maybe that was all misappropriated, but it was misappropriated because it shows we care about health so we spend a lot of our R&D money on health.

Energy is the green band in the middle that you can sort of see. It looks like a python that swallowed a tennis ball some time in the 1970s. The tennis ball, of course, was the energy crisis. We went from it being a tiny portion of our R&D budget to it being a slightly less tiny portion. Then it fades away and it’s a bipartisan slumber party, as I described it on the blog, on energy ever since.

I think the scientific and academic community, it focused on these issues, can make a pretty compelling case that, hey, society, if you are about energy, setting aside the climate question, that’s how much we’re interested in energy right now. It’s not a hard point to–not a hard thing to make.

Now, one last related image is this is the entire R&D budget of the country. [Image Shown 33:43-33:53] All of that stuff fits in the red at the top there. The rest is military R&D. We spend about $80 billion a year on military Research and Development now. I don’t think this means we need to rob the Pentagon of some of that. I think the Pentagon already is shifting toward understanding that its R&D should be focused on some of the same issues that we’re talking about here, so I think shifting priorities is important, not necessarily taking things away entirely.

That graph is like–for me, it’s kind of like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the movie where everyone kind of keeps building the same shape. I keep showing this over and over and over again.

Moderator: Well, Brad, while you formulate your answer, I wanted to publicly thank Andy for not saying that‐

Revkin: My water went away.

Moderator: It’s over there on your chair in the back.

Revkin: Oh, yeah, thank you.

Moderator: For not saying I asked a dumb, irrelevant, and unviable question [Laughter] as someone else did, but you go right ahead, Brad.

Allenby: I think Andy’s first statement is important. Do decision makers matter? More subtly, how do they matter? Where do they–how many degrees of freedom do they really have to make decisions that impact the way these systems flow? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I think it’s a lot less than we usually think it is.

On the role of academia, I think that the usual position that most academics take in a discussion like this is that if only the public and decision makers were smart enough to listen to us, we would provide that utopia for which they yearn.

In fact, I think that–and I should point out that this is my opinion only and not that of Arizona State University–I think that academia’s badly broken. I think that we have too many people that are living too far in the past, teaching too much information that’s already migrated to the net and is commonly available. I think that the challenge that academia faces is trying to learn how to teach wisdom in a world that’s gone from information scarcity to information overload, as I think Andy has shown very well.

I think frankly we do a pretty bad job of it. Part of the reason we do a bad of it is that there are very few people in academia that are willing to admit how badly we’re performing right now. I guess that’s my response.

Moderator: Fair enough. Let me open this for questions and I want to once again appeal to you to ask a question. Okay. Yes, sir. Is the microphone coming over? Here, do you have it? Use this. Do we have a second mic?

Audience Member: You started out by speaking about the ethics-technology nexus and how ethics is really necessary. The way you framed it was anthropocentric or the discussion has been anthropocentric. I just was wondering why that was framed that way, when we talk about biocentrism, ecocentrism, why the anthropocentric framework?

Revkin: This is a great and important point. I started to explore this question about two years ago when I interviewed Ed Wilson. Again, I’ve talked to him for a very long time about biology and the broader conservation ethic and his concept of biophilia. I think the reason we’re focused on the human element within all that is because what we need is what I recently called on the blog anthropophilia.

We have been for too long looking at the biological system as something out there. We usually look at us with kind of a shame on you or woe is me kind of approach to the human element in that picture rather than looking at us more dispassionately and regarding ourselves–embracing our nature essentially as part of this larger system. When we say anthropophilia meaning–well, anthropophilia to me is kind of the idea of looking at ourselves as part of this larger system and really integrating that, concretizing that reality.

It comes with being aware of how we work and how we fail and how our brains work and how we tend to end up in compartments in society and we have our politics that won’t get this right. We have our traditions that lock us into approaches to knowledge that in some way we recognize aren’t working, but how do we kind of break through those barriers. I think that’s why we’ve been both focused on the human element.

Again, I think the capacity to innovate is there. The capacity to modulate our behaviors has to incorporate the natural–the reality is, as I said with Wilson–he spoke of Wilson’s Law. I wrote a piece. It’s easy to find. Just Google for Wilson’s Law and you’ll find it. That if we just focus on kind of the geophysical system and carbon and we kind of engineer a solution and disregard the natural elements, we’ll fail. If we focus on sustaining a thriving biological system with us in it, most likely we’ll get the geophysical things more right and still preserve the integrity of the planetary systems. I think for me that’s why we’re focusing on the human element. I don’t know what Brad thinks.

Allenby: I guess the reason that the initial focus is on the human element is primarily I think because the human element is at this point impacting and shaping many of the natural systems: carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, biodiversity, et cetera. To focus on the human element for me does not imply that there is necessarily something better or good about that as opposed to ecocentrism or biocentrism. It’s simply recognizing that right now the human element is having an impact across all of these systems.

Raising one level above that what I would say is any ethical system that enables me to view the world in a coherent manner is necessarily partial. What I would say as an overall positioning statement is that whether you choose a particular form of human ethics, pick your poison–deontological or utilitarian, whatever you want; whether you chose ecocentrism, Leopold’s what is good for the ecosystem is... choose whichever one you want; the precautionary principle–they all have some element of validity to them, but they’re all partial.

If you’re really going to work with a complex system, you need to be able to integrate across different and even mutually exclusive ethical systems. That’s a skill we’re not good at because we equate that with relativism, which I don’t think it is. We can go into that in some detail if you want later. My point would be that I think any particular ethical system is necessarily too limited to fully explain the world that we’re already in, including the anthropocentric ethical system.

Moderator: Next question.

Audience Member: With regard to the anthropophilia, right, you have the human species and the human individual, so kind of you could refer to one or the other. I think I read somewhere that some people attribute the renaissance to the impact on the European human species of the Black Death and–

Moderator: Can everybody hear?

Audience Member: With regard to what’s an ethical response to kind of the climate debate, should we seek to postpone the catastrophe in which case it will be really big or should we seek to cause it to happen sooner so that it will be easier to manage?

Revkin: This has come up many times in my conversations with people on these issues. Dan Schrag who is now on PCAST, the President’s technology and science committee, and who’s a Harvard I guess I’d call him a polymath now on these issues. He’s focused a lot on energy as well as on his climate history stuff.

Years ago I had a conversation with him which got to this question of there’s two options facing climate to push the change you would need in emissions as we head toward 9 billion people seeking decent lives. One is to magically build public will, to have a higher cost on carbon emissions sufficient to drive everyone to change their habits and investments in technologies. The other is to push really hard on the technology. Those are two variables. The pace with which we address carbon would be determined by the two. He’s looking at that.

It’s really pretty clear we’re not going to do it with public will, especially when you realize that nearly all of the emissions that are coming, the new emissions are coming in China and India, and they want energy. They’re very happy for us to pay for getting the carbon out. Then you say, well, okay, we’ll just innovate our way.

He knows we’re kind of not capable of that as well, and so what he says is the scientific and academic and intellectual community needs to be–have the plasticity to develop the tool kit and the intellectual capacity, what Bill Gates calls the communal IQ, so that you’re ready, so that you’ve got the capacity to ramp up in ways that can get at the problem as public will perhaps changes because of some clarity that would emerge amid all the frozen fountains in Phoenix that this really is an issue. I think he’s got some–you know, that’s got some merits.

Allenby: So playing off what Andy said, I think that what I would argue is that the constraints on climate change are very clear and very powerful and most of what we proposed to do essentially ignores the existing constraints. I mean, the Kyoto Protocol has not worked for 20 years.

Geoengineering, even if we’re stupid enough to implement it at scale, is not going to work the way we think it is. No powerful technology is only going to operate on one small part of the Earth’s system. It just doesn’t happen that way.

That doesn’t mean that we’re hopeless though. To use an example out of industry, when the Montreal Protocol was being discussed, the electronics industry in the United States was faced with having to get out of using CFC’s at a fairly rapid time pace. We did so, and we did so because we had a lot of options on the shelf. A lot of technology options, some management options, some product redesign options, but there was a lot there. Wasn’t used, wasn’t commercialized, but it was available, so we got out pretty quickly.

Then because this is the way the Senate works, the Senate decided we ought to get out of lead in two years, in solder. Couldn’t do it, didn’t have the options. We had no technology that would substitute for lead-based solder in electronics, certainly not at scale.

Now, what that tells me is that if we really are serious about being ethical about climate change, we–I don’t think you’re going to stop the Kyoto process, so you might as well continue it. It’s locked in right now. I think you want to do what you can to avoid geoengineering, certainly at scale. You can certainly develop a lot of options that would give you the ability to adjust in ways that may have a portfolio of impacts that is manageable, and we don’t do that.

Let me give you an example of one sample technology: meat in factories. For those of you that, like the Dalai Lama, are omnivores, cows are a really, really ineffectual way of making steak. I mean, they are just not what an engineer would come up with. [Laughter] Cow produces 50 kilograms of methane a year. Cows are just really, really inefficient, so you make the meat in factories.

Now, think about what that would do. That would mean that the land that we are now using for cattle, for pigs, for chicken–something like a third of the grain production in the world goes to produce meat–that would be freed up. That would give you an enormous area of land to be able to begin to do, for example, biofuels without doing serious damage to some of these other cycles. Factory produced meat might be a really neat geoengineering technology.

Now, some of you here probably run cattle and your immediate response is, “What the flip?” [Laughter] It’s actually not that, but this is being recorded. The answer that this gives is a more realistic answer. Nothing we do is going to be without cost, so the question becomes how to balance the cost and benefits in an option space with a portfolio approach I think gives you the best opportunity to do it pragmatically. But we don’t do that, particularly in climate, because the discussion’s too polarized right now.

Moderator: I want to ask a follow-up question about Kyoto since you brought it up. One of our previous Wrigley speakers, some of you may have been here for Cynthia Rosenzweig, who works with NASA and also with the city of New York, came here and gave her reflection on her time in Copenhagen during the talks which were by any measure a disaster. She said that what was hopeful though was the fact that while the Kyoto talks were going on and Obama was there and other people were trying to make headway and didn’t, that the Mayor of Copenhagen convened a group of Mayors. They made a great deal of progress.

The report that subsequently came out from the Mayor’s conference that was going on at the same time as the Copenhagen Conference among Nations was Cities Act while Nations Talk. Now, since Copenhagen there had been Cancun and I see Dan Bodansky, Professor of Law and also a faculty member of the School of Sustainability, was there. Some progress perhaps was made there, but certainly was not the end all be all.

My question is this, Brad, you said we should continue the Kyoto–from that platform we should continue the talks because even though they failed and we continue to do them. Would it maybe be more sensible to say, look, nations are not going to agree on this stuff, China and India are just not going to give in and we should work at a sub-national level to start thinking about how to put together a global patchwork or quilt, if you will, to solve this problem perhaps at a city level, especially since the world is urbanizing so much?

Allenby: I’m not sure that any kind of approach that depends on a political imposition of meaningful climate change controls is ever going to work. I think that–not directly. I think the Kyoto Protocol is going to continue not because I think it’s a good idea, but because it’s locked in. There’s too many institutions and too many people that have devoted too much effort to Kyoto and that process. It’s simply not going to stop.

Directly it won’t produce anything. I mean, directly I think climate change negotiations are fairly ineffectual. Indirectly what it does is it maintains the visibility of the issue which ripples it across complex systems in ways that we really don’t perceive yet. Andy was one of the exceptions, but after Copenhagen, there were a slew of headlines about how the world had failed and climate change controls had failed, which was ridiculous. Copenhagen had failed and most people knew it was going to.

What had not failed was you didn’t change the way that different people adapt. I defy you to pick up Time or Newsweek–is Newsweek still published? [Laughter]

Moderator: On-line I think, yeah.

Revkin: On-line, yeah. Okay.

Moderator: I'm not sure.

Allenby: Or the Economist and not read an article about climate change. Companies talk about it. NGO’s work on it. The public cares about it. Some pro, some anti, but at least they care. What you have done is you have developed a potential in the system for adaptation that is occurring at levels that we don’t think about explicitly. I think we’re doing a fairly effectual job systemically of adaptation. I think that we perceive very little of that.

Revkin: On that, I’ve been writing about climate diplomacy since before it existed. Unfortunately–I can say unfortunately. I was at the first meeting in Toronto in 1988, conference on the changing atmosphere, that kind of led to the–preceded the framework convention and then have been following it ever since.

As you say, I don’t throw it out. I don’t think we need to throw out the whole thing. The framework convention on climate change which was negotiated in ’92 enshrines some basic fundamental pledges, that the emitting countries owe some obligation to assist poor, unempowered countries to deal with what will be their challenge first, which is adapting to coastal change and to climate change. That’s what you’re going to see. The one thing that’s going to remain concrete in these meetings is who pays how much to who in terms of compensating for the impacts of climate change.

The thing that the meeting is useless at is the whole issue in the late 20th century, the presumption was that the climate problem was a pollution problem. We were kind of successful with the Clean Air Act. We were successful with CFC’s as you heard. We just apply that new model to CO2 and we’ll just restrict and have a market and all will be well. It’s clear now, what’s been very slow for the community to agree is that that model does not apply to the energy system.

In fact, there was a young journalist. I was in Cancun and a guy named Alex Kirby was there on a fellowship. One night we’re having a beer in this ridiculous hotel and he turned to me. He was like 23. He was new to this whole subject. He said, “So wait a minute, so they’re trying to engineer the economy to engineer the climate.” And he went, “Oh, my God, that’s so ridiculous.” I said, “You know, you’re right.” Actually I quoted him later on Dot Earth because he really crystallized that that old model doesn’t apply, there’s too many reasons why it doesn’t apply.

Going forward, what I’ve been pitching is the idea, and I’m not the only person saying this, that having a climate–considering issues like development, development assistance, technology partnerships with climate as one of the filters, just as we do for socially responsible investing, we have climate-responsible investing, making it an obligation when you’re–if the World Bank is going to invest in a bridge or a dam in the Congo, it better well be resilient enough a project considering what could come with climate change. It’ll be something that’s reflected in many different realms of how people in countries interact.

The idea that we’ll have a climate-centric agreement that will be the thing that will be the changer of the energy system I think has gone away and it’s a healthy thing.

Moderator: Next question. Yes. Do we have a mic?

Audience Member: [Inaudible 54:25]

Moderator: Could we get a mic? Okay. Clear enough.

Audience Member: Human species has done a wonderful job of setting aside evolutionary forces and manipulating them for our own benefit over the past 12,000 years, more extensively over the last [inaudible 54:41]. But don’t you think [inaudible 54:44] in other words, there’s a self correcting–

Moderator: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Audience Member: –that’s hurting [inaudible 54:58] is the way we were created and the way we were evolved [inaudible 55:05].

Moderator: I suspect people could not hear fully in back. Can you repeat a little bit of the question?

Allenby: Andy, do you want to go ahead?

Revkin: Well, the way I–I’ve addressed this question recently, and the way I’ve put it is, can we prove that we are something other than bacteria on a plate of agar. So far I don’t think we’ve really shown that we have the capacity in a big way–at least with energy and possibly with some of the other basic elements like phosphorus–shown the ability to use this intelligence we’ve got to modulate our behaviors in anticipation of these big risks.

We don’t yet–science has kind of delineated that for us there is an edge to the Petri dish. That’s kind of what has happened these last 25 years or 30 years or so when things like climate and phosphorus and nitrogen. We so far seem to still be just like bacteria on a plate of agar and will self–sure.

The way I framed it in a post I was just looking for is can we kind of seek peak us before we hit peak everything. Right now peak everything you hear whatever, pick your resource, and I think it’s still an open question. Can we manage kind of a soft landing or are we stuck with letting natural selection kind of do it? That debate goes on. I don’t know–actually we were talking about this too. I can’t remember how you’d consider that question.

Allenby: Well, I think it’s–I mean, first, there’s the obvious point that if you hit the edge of the Petri dish, you fall off the edge. The real question is, are there ways in which we adjust that are not picked up in say the biological models, by say technological evolution? Clearly the number of people living on the planet right now would be impossible to maintain at anywhere near the current level of population with a hunter/gather technology set. You probably couldn’t do it with an agricultural technology set. You need the technology sets that we’ve got now. Do they have other impacts? Absolutely they do. Figuring out how those play out is a lot trickier than it really sounds.

There tend to be two kinds of Kool-Aid involved in this particular discussion. One kind of Kool-Aid says there are limits to everything and we’re just consuming too much, therefore we’re all going to die. The other Kool-Aid says it doesn’t matter, economics always works, substitution works, we’re not only going to live, but we’re going to live wonderful lives.

I think both of those are statements of faith rather than defensible in terms of the data and the history that we’re aware of. I think the reality is technology changes, we change, resource use changes as part of those patterns. Right now our challenge is to try to understand these integrated, natural, human built systems in better ways so that we know what’s actually going on, but I think right now we don’t. I think this is another area where scholarship is pretty pitiful.

Revkin: By the way, just quickly, this is an arena again I think where the way we communicate, the way we convene, the way we teach–to get an accurate understanding, looking behind those kind of headlines or summaries–has to really evolve. One reason I migrated from the old model of journalism–and I still do it once in a while; I do plan on trying to write a book again someday–to this discourse that’s on Dot Earth is I’m trying to find a way to foster in people an awareness of the complexity that is hidden when you have public discourse that’s mostly undertaken from the edges.

In fact, I did a post recently. I kind of was bemoaning that Obama didn’t mention climate change in his State of Union Address, but not for the conventional reason, which is just to kind of fight the fight against those other guys. I think he could’ve articulated that climate matters. What you’ve heard a lot of is very loud proclamations of definitiveness from many people over many years. There is stuff that’s really robustly understood that is hidden by that kind of ping pong match that’s our public discourse.

So let’s all as a community go forward and address what we know and what we don’t know, to embrace the reality that there’s many aspects of the system we don’t know. Like the fact that there’s a fountain frozen near my hotel here this morning, even as we’re warming the world, but he can’t do that.

Actually I said I know you can’t do that at the State of Union Address, but you better do it in a speech sometime this year, otherwise we’ll just be locked in this kind of–and that’s just the microcosm of this broader opportunity I think that the academy has as well to build–and I see it as implicitly being buildable on-line, a new way of engaging on these fundamental questions of sustainability. How many people is too many? Rather than doing the traditional debate, do a non-debate. What do we agree on? Not fighting the fight to see who wins or loses the argument based on logic, which again in the midst of real uncertainty you can’t really win. I think there are ways to do that.

Moderator: Any questions?

Audience Member: Good morning. I had a question. We talk about stakeholders and decision makers that affect the planet and we talk about governments and we talk about academia. We talk about corporations to some extent as well. My question is related to what role should corporations have? Because in noticing the first commercials that you put up there and trying to create desires within each of us, what role do corporations need to play in the fight for sustainability? Given the significant changes in the geopolitical landscape over the last ten years and what’s going to be forthcoming, what risks are there in them being in the game at all as they work in a more global way?

Revkin: I think corporations, it would do them well to recognize the importance of fostering education. I don’t mean that in the simple way that universities should have blank checks written by more and more companies, but I do think that they can help build the case that we don’t have the intellectual capital, the intellectual infrastructure that we need to have a smooth ride as a country or a world in the next few decades. That’s something that’s important that they should be a part of fostering.

Whether that takes the shape of what IBM is doing with its smarter planet initiative or what many other companies like it are doing is another question. I think one thing that has to kind of be examined in the policy arena is the power of companies in Washington to torque how things get done. That I don’t think is going to change ever. Capitalism is fundamentally rapacious. When the boards of companies are talking about their fiduciary responsibility, I would love to think that they could redefine fiduciary responsibility to have a broader–literally have a broader definition so it’s not just about making more money.

That won’t change until people–the populous more generally–has a broader sense of obligations and the ethical imperatives that come with where we’re at as a species. I don’t think corporations are going to change. I do think they need to recognize intellectual infrastructure’s not there and help make the case that that can be built out more.

Allenby: Yeah, actually Andy’s absolutely right. I would love to see corporations be a lot pushier about the failings of academia. It’s very, very hard to get academics, particularly tenured academics, to understand how badly they’re performing. If corporations could help a glimmer of light enter into that medieval mindset, they would validate their existence.

That said, I think–with all due apologies to my colleagues. [Laughter] That said, I think corporations have an interesting relationship with society at this point. The idea that corporations should be responsible for sustainability is an attractive one because they’re so powerful and because they control much technology.

The danger of it is that corporations, once they become responsible for sustainability, are not very good at it. I mean, if a corporation is bad at doing economics, they find out. That’s what Chapter 11 is for. If a corporation is bad at doing sustainability, then that’s a much more difficult kind of challenge to hold them to.

Having been on the corporate side, there’s an additional challenge that comes up. It sounds as if corporations should be able to respond to sustainability. The problem is everybody’s got a different idea of sustainability. When I was at AT&T we were dealing with a German rating organization for sustainability purposes. We were doing great until they found out that we provided service to the American military. Then they rated us as a don’t-buy because we were assisting the American military.

Now, not only did this ignore sort of views which might’ve taken a different perspective, but it made it very difficult to follow this line, this line, and this line. There’s the idea that everybody agrees with what sustainability is. That’s a very useful fiction. It helps us all get along. We don’t scream at each other. But the fact is we don’t.

As a corporation when you’re getting hit with questions about do you do this, do you do that, do you do this, it’s very hard to know whose agenda you should privilege, particularly if you’re a big corporation. Because if you privilege somebody’s agenda, you’re swinging a lot of weight. Is that your role in society? Should you really, for example, swing a lot of weight towards an antimilitary campaign by a German NGO? Is that your job as an American corporation? It’s not as easy as it sounds superficially.

Revkin: Yeah, the idea that Wal-mart by fostering better practices in its supply chains is going to have the world of 9 billion people living decent lives by doing that is kind of a fantasy. Wal-mart is selling consumption far more than it’s selling LED light bulbs. I think the idea that a corporate world will be the thing that changes this I think is kind of fantasy.

But I’m not anti-corporate because that overall–Matt Ridley has written a book called The Rational Optimist that I encourage you to read, whether you agree with it or not, because it builds the case that commerce essentially–global commerce, the history of commerce, interchange, exchange, trade–is the main thing that has caused the human species to have its innovative capacity multiplied far beyond anything we know of in nature. That trade again, trade being commerce and business, is something that’s fundamentally important.

Moderator: There was a question over here.

Audience Member: The London Geological Society I think in the last few decades has talked about the anthropocene era from sort of a biocentric and ecocentric perspective, how human culture is reorganizing the geological systems. Now, I wonder what you would all think about–it seems what we’re speculating about is a geological transition toward–the way I would like to see it is in say 100 years in the future the London Geological Society will look back and consider this period a greater–a transition from the lesser anthropocene to the greater anthropocene. And so I wonder what the role of the university and maybe emergent businesses in your minds and things like that are in a larger project of a epochal geological transition.

Revkin: I’m taking notes because I’m going to tweet that later. That’s great. [Laughter] I wrote a book on global warming that came out in 1992. I wish I knew Greek better back then because I posited that we were–at that time I wrote that we were entering the anthrocene instead of anthropocene, and so I could’ve beaten Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize winning chemist, to the punch on using that phrase to describe–

Allenby: Isn’t that a type of coal?

Revkin: Huh? It is actually, but, again, I wish I had known my Greek roots of words better. That’s a great–I like the idea of just delineating two phases of the human era of planetary domination. I think in a way–yeah, and, again, as the other question, the–what I wrote, again, gets back to this idea of whether it will be a conscious thing or whether it will just be there because we kind of hit the wall and then you’ll see this trace of our decarbonization being enforced on us because we lose the capacity to burn coal and we become a much tinier species, so that still is the question. Will that be a conscious transition or one that’s enforced upon us by the systems? That’s the question to me.

Allenby: Yeah, so a couple of thoughts. I use the anthropocene all the time when I write because it’s such a convenient way to express the state that we’re at now where humans really do impact if not dominate many elements of natural systems, maybe not in terms of overall volume, but certainly in terms of critical dynamics.

Here’s the question I have about that term. The anthropocene is used as if this were the human era. Now, if you look at geologic time, humans haven’t been around long enough to be a human era–

Revkin: That's true.

Allenby: –much less the anthropocene, the last what 20 years, so it’s not clear to me whether the right model is that we’re the human era or the right model is that we’re the human meteor at the KT boundary. I just don’t know which one it is. That said, either we’re going to hit the wall or it’s going to become a much, much more human world.

This question came up earlier with elements of nature. There’s a lot of nature “that’s out there,” but it tends to be preserved because we’ve designed it into our institutions and our systems. The Florida Everglades is what it is and will be what it will be because we decide to do it so that it becomes a part of a human system. It may have a lot of nature in it. It’s far more complicated than we understand, but it is preserved to the extent it is as part of a deliberate design choice that we make. That’s a very different kind of world than any that we have known up until now. It puts a lot more responsibility–ethical, moral, and rational–on us.

Audience Member: In tweetable terms, it seems like what you’re saying as long as we focus on education and on research we’re going to figure it out whether we come up with solutions that are going to prevent the problem or when the problem comes to us we’re going to have options for people. But then I hear that education’s broken and then I hear this and then I get–it kind of gets you more and more scared about the things that are fundamentally broken. What are the things we can do to make sure that we’re educating people right? How is that part going to change? Are we going to take away tenure? Is that going to solve the problem? What kinds of things can we do?

Allenby: It’s a start. [Laughter]

Revkin: Yeah. Well, we were talking about this at breakfast a little bit too. Why don’t you dive in a little bit on your model? You had a–

Allenby: All right. Yeah, so think about education the way it is now and–okay. Again, I am not speaking for ASU. [Laughter] Think about education the way it is now. It’s a batch processing model, right? We take in students. They sit in front of us for X weeks. We certify them and we ship them off to the next manufacturing station. It couldn’t be more manufacturing.

Now, the problem is that as cognitive systems change–and that’s what social network is doing; that’s what Google is doing–as students change cognitively, what you end up doing is you end up with a longer and longer stretch between the leading edge and the trailing edge. We get people at ASU that haven’t had a lot of experience with computers and we get people at ASU that are digital natives, that have grown up and live with and in social networks. Those are very different people. They have very different educational needs.

Now, the way we teach them is we bring them in and we do batch. That’s not good enough anymore. What we need to do is develop serious personalized education that relies much more on hyper-volume spaces that students go through at their own pace, that have enough AI in them to be able to know when students have matched performance requirements of that particular module. You say, “Whoa, that doesn’t work.” Sure it does. World of Warcraft does it all the time. [Laughter] How do you get to a new level? Don’t give me this “it doesn’t work.” It doesn’t work for academics because we’re very poor at thinking about anything but the way that we taught people in the 1950s.

Revkin: I agree.

Allenby: I think we can do–[Laughter] I think we can do better.

Revkin: Of course, I moved out of journalism to academia to become effective. [Laughter] I’m not on a tenure track, so I feel good about that. I do think there’s great–there is huge potential and new ways. I have a feeling they’ll shove aside the old way of doing things whether it wants to–whether it wants that or not–because, again, just building that case again, kid in rural Kenya, cell phone, in three or four years that’ll be a smart phone, access to the web, watching a lecture by Brad Allenby from rural Kenya.

That kid can be like a guy named Alex Ezeh, who I met at a population conference a year ago in Berkeley who was in–he lived Zambia. He was a kid growing up in a village where several of his brothers and sisters had died already. His father was freaking out, sent him to live in a town with his uncle. He went to school. He went to college. He got a Ph.D. Now he’s the leading African analyst on population and development trends in Africa.

I think there’s a huge potential now to take–for that achingly lacking part of the humanity, I’m sure a billion or so people, who are willing to educate themselves, who have the capacity to become innovative and part of the global intellectual infrastructure–and to get them at least some of what we have here in spades that we just take for granted. Again, I think there are models that that’s going to happen. I’m going to try to make it happen myself and I know others who are interested as well. I think the model will then swamp everything else.

One last thing though, we were talking about the other things that’s at risk here is what we’re transitioning from, as Brad was telling me this morning and earlier, the era of information scarcity where you owned it and you sold it, that’s going away in the face of an information abundance where I think how do you have a business model to maintain either a school or a newspaper in a world that looks like that is a challenge. That’s a different question.

Allenby: Yeah.

Moderator: We have about five minutes left. I’m going to ask the last question. Brad, how do you really feel about how academia’s doing? [Laughter] You don’t have hold back. It’s okay. You’re among friends here.

Allenby: Well, people who were friends.

Moderator: Yes, right. Seriously, we have about two minutes for each response here. A lot of the people in this room and a lot of the people in the ASU community, if you will, are studying sustainability in one form or another. What advice would you like to give the students, whether they’re undergraduates or graduates in this room and beyond, about the one experience that they really should have if they want to go out in the world when they get their degrees, whatever they may be, and have a positive impact on the future of this planet? What is something they must do or learn in your opinion?

Allenby: You want to go first, do you want me?

Revkin: I think he asked you first. [Laughter]

Allenby: Yeah, so you want the bumper sticker, right? Don’t drink the Kool-Aid, seriously. Everybody is going to try to give you something that is going to guide your belief system that will tell you what to think whether it’s a capitalist or an environmentalist or a Democrat, Republican, Tea Party. Everybody’s got Kool-Aid to sell. The problem is that in a sufficiently complex world, if an issue is simple enough to be dealt with through Kool-Aid, it’s simple enough that it doesn’t matter.

All of the stuff that we’ve talked, education reform, climate change, biodiversity, evolution of technology and humanity, none of this stuff lends itself to Kool-Aid. The problem is everybody, including your professors, wants you to drink the Kool-Aid. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Revkin: Actually, what I would do is build on that and say don’t get paralyzed by argument, by the fact that we don’t know, and by the fact that you’re faced with a confusion of too much information and polarization. I think that the great opportunity now is to reclaim constructive discourse and not blaming the edges, but embracing the richness of the human community, which will always have edges and where unfortunately passionate people at edges of arguments always dominate discussions. Have you ever been at a party or any other venue where that’s the case?

I think when you–self recognition, and when I mean self I mean recognition of Homo sapien’s shape is something that lets you look at all that paralysis and still wake up in the morning and say, “Let’s get busy.” That I think is a prime–to have that reflective moment, “Oh, my God, here it goes again,” but not to be paralyzed by it, and to realize we live right now at this unbelievable point of opportunity.

It’s like asymmetric warfare. I mean, the same thing that tragically al-Qaeda proved is capable–the potential is there in constructive arenas as well–to create models to demonstrate success and unconventional means and to become the next Wikipedia, which would be a pretty powerful thing.

I still can’t believe Wikipedia only is like 30 employees.

Moderator: Yeah, it’s amazing.

Revkin: Anyway, that shows you, again, it doesn’t take an IBM or an AT&T to do this.

Moderator: On behalf of ASU and the Global Institute of Sustainability, I want to thank you for listening in and participating in the conversation between Andy and Brad, and please join me in thanking both of them today.

[End of Audio]

Sustainable Phosphorus Summit

Sustainable Phosphorus Summit

Sustainability Plus Me

Sustainability Plus Me

Converting Sunlight into Electricity

Converting Sunlight into Electricity

The Rightful Place of Science – Neal Woodbury

The Rightful Place of Science – Neal Woodbury

DNA and Nanotechnology

DNA and Nanotechnology

Gila River Indian Community – Sustainable Cities Network

Q. What influenced your community’s focus on sustainability?

Joseph Manuel: Well, at the core of our belief as Native American Indians, we are concerned about the environment, and we want to be able to save resources.

Casey Turgeon: As Lieutenant says, it’s always been part of native culture, but above all it’s the right thing to do. As he said, when we run out of natural resources, we’re out.

Q. What is your most recent sustainable design project?

Joseph Manuel: This fire station is the latest project that we’ve done. As dollars are tight, and this economy is tight, they've brought down the cost – the total cost of the facility.

Casey Turgeon: Over the past two years, we’ve had small projects that stand alone – solar projects – and we’ve grown really rapidly over the two years. This fire station we’re just finishing, it’s one of my larger projects, and this is the end of the evolution so everything we’ve learned, we can put into this one project. Our plants we used are all native to this community – mesquites and palo verdes. We’ve placed them in the bottom of retention areas to help perk out the water so we have less standing water, less problem with mosquitoes, but it also waters the plants.

The solar lights in the parking lot, we have 11 poles off the top of my head and about 12 fixtures. They’re all stand-alone solar, off grid, run on a deep cell 12 volt marine battery, and they are dusk-to-dawn applications. They will run on that battery power for up to four days with little to no sunlight. Moving into the building, we have polished concrete floors throughout. They don’t have volatile organic compound off-gassing. The smells you smell – your new home smell when you walk in – that’s volatile organic compounds. That off-gassing is all noxious and toxic stuff. You spec out those, and it makes it healthier for the people who live in the building and the people who visit the buildings.

We also have natural daylighting. They are passive solar daylighting. They’re an actual 14-inch tube, and there’s a small dome on the roof. It harvests natural sunlight, tunnels it in, and a diffuser disperses it. Again, the entire building was thought for low maintenance, low operational costs and longevity, and that all fits into sustainability.

Q. How are you deploying solar lighting?

Joseph Manuel: The Turnkey Subdivision lighting is solar.

Casey Turgeon: We knew we needed street lights because the community had zero street lights, and there was a safety concern. People could not exercise in the evening. It provided many things for the community. It was designed as a full electrical system, and we looked into solar and that was one of second projects we did solar. That project actually had an up-front savings of $30,000 because we cut out all the trenching and everything.

Joseph Manuel: I was concerned that they would be somehow messed with or destroyed somehow, but that hasn’t been. It’s working real well at night, it’s lit up, and we know that it’s not a cost.

Q. How will your projects make a difference?

Joseph Manuel: We’re going to save in terms of operating costs for utilities and so forth.

Casey Turgeon: For the community, I think we tried to take everything into account. The fixtures are full cut-off fixtures so we keep with the dark sky ordinances out here. As the community, they can enjoy the stars forever. The materials we put into the buildings will definitely help the community members and employees stay healthier, longer, but overall, as a community, it will help reduce operational maintenance and reduction in costs, and that’s a huge help to any community in these times right now. Globally, I think everybody has to do the little part that they can, and we’re just trying to do our part here.

Q. How does the Sustainable Cities Network make a difference?

Casey Turgeon: For me, I found Sustainable Cities Network about the time really tuning in and keying into the sustainability movement. For me, it was a huge help. Networking with peers, other communities; see what they’re doing, share what we’re doing. Like I shared at the last Sustainability Cities meeting, all of my best ideas are borrowed ideas, and I think everybody should borrow from each other.

Q. What is the sustainability challenge that concerns you most?

Casey Turgeon: Mine is energy consumption; those numbers just baffle me – buildings using 70 percent of the world’s energy consumption, and we’re building commercial buildings. So taking that into account, I personally really focus on the energy savings.

Joseph Manuel: We live next to a metro area, and we know there’s a lot of pollution. We didn’t make it, but it’s here and we have to deal with it too. And we’re doing that as best we can.

[End of Audio]

Sustainability 2011-2021:
Local, Regional, and Global Implications

Sustainability 2011-2021: Local, Regional, and Global Implications

Beyond Green Jobs:
The Next American Economy

Beyond Green Jobs: The Next American Economy

Q&A with Dr. Matt Fraser

Q&A with Dr. Matt Fraser

Q: What triggered your career focus on sustainability?
When I was an undergraduate, I was studying chemical engineering; studying about petroleum refining and chemical manufacturing and things like that. I realized that I wanted to focus more on the natural environment; the chemical reactions that are occurring in the atmosphere and how things are transported throughout the atmosphere.

At some point, I started to realize that no matter how environmentally conscious we were, if we didn’t address the insatiable demand that we have for energy and for water and for manufactured goods, we could never be sustainable. No matter how environmentally benign or environmentally conscious you are, if you have an insatiable demand, that just can’t be sustained. So, at some point I started thinking what is the long-term trajectory? Where are we going with our water systems, with our energy systems, with our manufacturing systems and what is the longer-term future for our society? That really focused my—triggered my focus on sustainability.

Q: What are your two most important sustainability-related projects?
The first is our outdoor air quality work. We do a lot of work understanding the source of ambient air quality and the pollution in the outdoor environment. This is one of our ambient air quality samplers. What these samplers do is they pull air through a filter. That filter collects the particles that are suspended in the atmosphere. The reason that we do this is we want to take the particles that are suspended in the atmosphere, collect them on the filter, return that filter to our laboratory where we can do a series of detailed chemical analyses to figure out what the chemical composition of these particles is. Now the reason that we do this is understanding the chemical composition is vital as far as determining what the original source of those particles was. So if we want to reduce the ambient particles in the environment, we figure out what sources are contributing and then we go and control those most important sources. This type of work is vital for environmental regulators to understand which sources should be controlled and to develop effective control strategies.

Q: How does this research affect real world problems?
One of the reasons we are most concerned about these particles is obviously if they’re in the ambient environment, people are going to breathe these particles in. When you breathe these particles in, they interfere with your respiratory system, they can trigger asthma attacks or worsen existing respiratory disease, and they also give an additional burden to your cardiopulmonary system. They lower your lung function which makes your heart work harder to pump oxygen throughout your body, so it’s a real health concern and controlling these particles is very important towards human health.

Q: What is your second sustainability-related project?
The second project deals with indoor air quality. With a lot of focus on energy efficiency retrofits, we want to understand what the effect of energy efficiency retrofits is on indoor air quality and health. What we’re doing is looking at the before and after air quality in a building that is undergoing an energy efficiency retrofit. Because often these retrofits seal the building envelope keeping the hot air out and the cool air in here in Phoenix, and so it’s important to understand whether those retrofits trap indoor sources of air pollution.

What we’re doing is we’re measuring indoor air quality at an apartment complex for seniors, and we’re concerned about seniors because they are some of the more vulnerable members of our population to environmental burdens. What we’re doing is we’ve done sampling in 72 different apartments at a senior apartment complex before the energy efficiency retrofit. The retrofit is going on now. And we’re going to do indoor air quality sampling after to see if sealing the building envelope affects the indoor concentrations of pollutants. At the same time, we’re most concerned about the health of the seniors and so we’re working with the College of Nursing and Health Innovation here at ASU to do a health survey which will be administered again before the retrofit and after the retrofit so we can figure out what link there is between indoor air quality and their health, and whether the building retrofit has had an impact on health.

Instead of using the big noisy pumps that we use for ambient air quality sampling, we’re using these portable sensors, and we’re deploying these at different locations throughout the apartment complex to figure out what the indoor and outdoor concentrations of pollutants are.

Q: How will this project affect policymaking?
It’s vitally important to understand the role of energy efficient retrofits on indoor air quality. For example, right now, in the Global Institute of Sustainability, we are working with the city of Phoenix on a $25 million project funded by the Department of Energy to promote energy efficiency retrofits, so we have to better understand the role of energy efficiency and sealing the building envelope on indoor air quality because it will directly affect residents’ health.

Q: What sustainability challenge concerns you most?
When I think about sustainability challenges, the one that I’m most concerned about is climate change. When I think about climate change, you immediately think of our energy systems because our energy right now is linked to fossil fuels, and we need to have energy to continue to provide a better livelihood for people across the globe. But climate change is more than just energy and the atmosphere. It’s also the other systems such as water and our food systems and how we build our cities. All these have to be adapted in the future to mitigate climate and that’s what concerns me the most.

[End of Audio]

Plant Biology Students Experience Engrained

Plant Biology Students Experience Engrained

Dr. Elinor Ostrom – ASU Professor & Nobel Laureate

Dr. Elinor Ostrom – ASU Professor & Nobel Laureate

Arnim Wiek: Lin, thank you very much for agreeing to have a little interview here in the preparation of the International Conference on Sustainability Science in Rome in June. We have structured the conference along different streams, and I’d like to chat a little bit with you about three different challenges we try to address here.

Elinor Ostrom: Good. Good.

Arnim Wiek: The first one is – and all of them I have kind of selected to make it kind of relevant to also with what you’ve been working on in the field of sustainability science and governance issues. The first one is everybody knows you have been working very, very extensively on local governance issues – on the local level and getting a good sense for how people self-govern and self-organize.

Elinor Ostrom: May self-govern.

Arnim Wiek: “May,” yes exactly. May self-govern natural resources and the interactions between societal demand on the one hand side, and natural capacities on the other hand. My question is – we have one stream that is focusing on global governance.

Elinor Ostrom: Uh huh.

Arnim Wiek: The big question I think that is circulating in our field for many, many years is how do we use your insights from the more local/regional level for insights on the global level?

Elinor Ostrom: Well one of the big insights we have, going way back to our study of metropolitan governance and urban services, is that it is rare that there is just one level that is the level for everything. So, if we take metropolitan governance first, what we showed is that while there were some services better performed at a big metropolitan area, there were many others that were better performed at a smaller or medium. Vincent Ostrom and Charlie Tiebout and others developed the concept of polycentricity: multiple units at different scales that had developed – potentially, if it was a polycentric system – ways of working together, and that’s never perfect, but at least ways of doing so.

Well if you think about a polycentric approach to global warming, then I think we can start using some of the lessons. Some people don’t know about the earlier work, but the lessons of polycentricity are that if you can organize some things at very small and medium and large and find ways of getting them to relate, you could usually do a lot better. Global warming, I argue, has been misconceptualized. It’s been looked at as you, an individual, you produce something, and it goes oom! [pointing upward] only. Well, that’s wrong. So the pollutants that you –when you drive, your car is producing pollutants – some of them are local.

You're finding that you have a lot of money being paid for gas. Well that’s family. Your health isn’t as good as it could be if you biked. That’s you, so individual, family, local. If we can find more ways of encouraging those things; not that you are going to solve – by solving some of the local and regional – are going to solve global, but it has an impact.

What we need to be doing is the innovative programs around the world that are working on it – and there are – understand how they work, enhance the probabilities others will do it. To some extent, we challenge our national leaders, “Okay you guys, there are ways of doing this and move on.” We need the global, but we just wait for it.

Arnim Wiek: Right, right, right.

Elinor Ostrom: Bad.

Arnim Wiek: Yeah, don’t wait.

Elinor Ostrom: Don’t wait, move and then push to get the global as well.

Arnim Wiek: Yeah and this is on the – this is on the causing side as well as the effect side right? I mean when we play out and say, “How does this actually impact on the local level?” It is again tangible and people can relate to it.

Elinor Ostrom: Yeah. They found, for example, they’ve done a recent study on the impact of metropolitan pollution efforts in metropolitan areas where they have substantially reduced pollutants. Some of the life long – the average expected life is two to three years more. Well, that’s a fairly substantial thing for a big population.

Arnim Wiek: Yeah. Yeah.

Elinor Ostrom: So that also reduced global problems, but so it’s how we think of it differently.

Arnim Wiek: Right. Excellent. The second stream we are concerned about, I think not only in this conference, but also in our emerging field of sustainability science is that we have defined this field already a decade ago as a strong problem-oriented field. So we are concerned about how do we address problems? The point is that there is quite some debate about that we are getting better and better in understanding and analyzing these problems.

The question is: at the same time sustainability science is encouraged to make a strong contribution to the solution of the problems, how do we bridge this gap between getting very, very rigorous understanding of the problems to actually creating strong solutions for these problems? Some might argue this is not really in the domain of science of any longer. This needs to be then policy domain, but some might argue well this is actually still in the science domain.

Elinor Ostrom: If they’re not linked, we’re in trouble and so part of our problem is how we link science and policy. So, not all policy scientists are going to do all of the hard work on the biophysical side and vice versa, but if we don’t develop communities that can communicate with one another, then we don’t make anything other than progress on one. And I will argue that you won’t have progress on the policy if they don’t understand the problem.

Further, we won’t make much progress if we think there’s a single solution, and so part of our problem is how do we study a variety of efforts that were successful or failed.

Arnim Wiek: Right.

Elinor Ostrom: Failures are very important to study because what we may find that successes have eight variables and failures have six of the eight but not two.

Arnim Wiek: Yes.

Elinor Ostrom: We are dealing with complex problems and complex solutions, and we need to understand the complexity of both.

Arnim Wiek: We have another stream in our conference. It’s focusing on education for sustainability. We have a PhD seminar and special stream on sustainability and education. The question that is kind of circulating in our field is how can we teach a field that is still in development? What are kind of the critical challenges we need to overcome in order to strengthen our field and to develop a strong position our students can gain from?

Elinor Ostrom: Well, partly, you need both to be training students in the diverse sciences, and no one student should learn everything. But then what are the fora for discussions where there’s respect across disciplines and getting that community – that’s a sense of community that we’re struggling with issues that people who are just disciplinary aren’t. In order to do that, we’re going to have to learn a little bit more about some of these questions. Right now I have some of my students really looking into GIS and remote sensing because I think being able to do over time and spatial and temporal in the same analysis is very powerful for us.

This is very technical, so not all of my students need to do this or are interested. They’ve got to be fascinated; but around our seminar tables, we’ve discussed some of the assets of GIS and remote sensing enough that people are beginning to understand some of the lessons that they can learn. They don’t have to do it themselves, but they’ve got to respect what they can get from that form of analysis: and that is, it takes a while just to develop that but that’s the kind of community you need to be developing. We need all of us.

Arnim Wiek: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Great. Thank you very much Lin for sharing some of your thoughts related to this conference with us.

Elinor Ostrom: I wish I could join you for it, but – [Laughing]

Arnim Wiek: Next time.

Elinor Ostrom: Yes, that would be nice.

[End of Audio]

NASA Scientist on the Future of Climate Change

NASA Scientist on the Future of Climate Change

ASU’s Laboratory for Algae Research

ASU’s Laboratory for Algae Research

Chinese University Models Facility After Decision Theater

Chinese University Models Facility After Decision Theater

Energize Phoenix

Energize Phoenix

Solar Arrays: Phase One

Solar Arrays: Phase One

Nitrogen Research

Nitrogen Research

Sustainability House at Barrett

Sustainability House at Barrett

Traffic Noise, Birds, and the Urban Environment

Traffic Noise, Birds, and the Urban Environment

CAP LTER Studies a Flood Basin

CAP LTER Studies a Flood Basin

My Sun Devil Story

My Sun Devil Story