Why We Must Defeat Prop. 23, the Green Jobs Killer

Published October 6th, 2010 in Miscellaneous | No Comments »

I don’t usually write about politics in this blog, but there’s a proposition on California’s November ballot that would be so damaging to green, sustainable, and clean tech businesses, I just have to speak out: if you’re a California voter, please vote no on Prop. 23, aka the Dirty Energy Proposition.

If passed, Prop. 23 would essentially repeal AB 32, California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. (Technically, it would suspend implementation of AB 32 until unemployment reached 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters—but that has occurred only three times in the last 40 years, and it’s highly unlikely to occur in the next several years.) Prop. 23 is funded largely by Texas oil companies that don’t want to clean up their act in the state or face competition from clean energy sources. The companies and others have engaged in a long-term, multipronged effort to delay, repeal, or disable AB 32 (we covered this back in March, before the proposition qualified for the ballot, in the newsletter we produce for the California Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition).

Prop. 23, their latest effort, is a cynical and dishonest effort portray AB 32 as a job killer. UC Berkeley researchers Carol Zabin and Lisa Hoyos do a good job of explaining why that isn’t so in their op-ed in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, “Setting the record straight on AB32 and jobs.”

The real job killer is Prop. 23—if it passes it will stall California’s clean energy and clean tech sector, which is growing 10 times faster than the state’s economy as whole and enabling California to attract 67 percent of clean energy venture capital invested in the United States. (Get even more facts on the Stop the Dirty Energy Proposition website.) Prop. 23 will also lead to increased air pollution, threatening public health.

But the effects of Prop. 23 would extend beyond California and its sustainable businesses, bad as its results for our state would be. The passage of AB 32 spurred other states to adopt climate regulations and it jump-started the Western Climate Initiative. It also put pressure on the federal government to at least consider climate legislation, an uphill battle that almost certainly will be lost if California backs off its commitment. And if the United States continues to do nothing, other major greenhouse gas emitters will follow suit, leaving us in an ever-deepening climate crisis.

Many of us feel helpless in face of climate change and environmental disasters. Here’s something positive and incredibly easy you can do: vote NO on Prop. 23. And tell your friends.

Getting Energy Efficiency Out of the Granny Panties Zone

Published May 28th, 2010 in branding, communications strategy, sustainability | No Comments »

Why don’t energy efficiency technologies and strategies get people as excited as a Tesla roadster? On the face of it, duh. It’s the brains of it that make it a head-scratcher.

As the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy reported last year, economic data and the historical record suggest that “energy efficiency investments can provide up to one-half of the needed greenhouse gas emissions reductions most scientists say are needed between now and the year 2050″ and “investments in more energy-productive technologies can also lead to a substantial net energy bill savings for the consumer and for the nation’s businesses.” In other words, energy efficiency is probably the single most effective greenhouse gas reduction strategy we have, and it saves you money. What’s not to get excited about? Are people that distracted by bright shiny objects?

Yes, we are. Advocates have been lamenting the unsexiness of energy efficiency for some time: it’s the granny panties of the green economy. Many see the solution in language—what we need is a new term, one less evocative of slide rules and more inspirational. I’m all for motivating, send-the-right-message language—that would typically be my go-to solution. But I think what we need here is something more physical.

Energy efficiency faces two obstacles that strike me as more serious than its nerdy name: invisibility and implausibility. The beauty and the downfall of many energy efficiency measures is that they work in the background, without anyone being aware that they’re happening. And the potential savings from these measures often inspire skepticism more than any other reaction—remember how President Obama’s campaign opponents mocked him for suggesting proper tire inflation as a way to save gas?

People think that if a solution like that really were effective, it would already be standard practice—someone would have told us about it already. That assumption ignores the powerful forces of inertia and the culture of heedless consumption (most Americans haven’t worried much about saving energy because we haven’t had to—even the simplest strategies are easily missed if you’re not looking for them), but it’s powerful nonetheless.

I suspect that we need to make energy consumption a thing: people need to be able to see it happening. It has to come out of the background and be made concrete through web interfaces, dials, beeps, texts from your tires, whatever. That might compromise design simplicity (another efficiency value), or even slightly reduce energy savings, but what’s more effective—a theoretically perfect solution that few use, or something a bit too tricked out that gains mass acceptance?

It may pay to remember that out of sight often means out of mind.