Prescriptions for Sustainability
Recently, I had the privilege to hear several experts speak about this topic. They all offered opinions and advice. Some recommendations presented are actionable. Here are some that got me thinking:
(1) Steven Chu, Secretary of the US Department of Energy (DOE): Products invented in America and sold worldwide represent the seeds of our future prosperity.
(2) James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography, Harvard University: It’s not too late to act, but we must not delay!
(3) Robert Kaplan, Baker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School: Leadership in Sustainability requires vision, commitment, alignment, and an action plan with accountability
(4) Richard Lazarus, Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor, Harvard Law School: Enable legislation in the US Congress by:
- Empowering long term interests in the political process
- Protecting courageous states such as California and the Northeastern states in RGGI (including Massachusetts)
- Reducing the leverage of short-term interests and limiting the filibuster rule in the Senate
(5) Christoph Reinhart, Building Scientist and Architectural Educator, Harvard Graduate School of Design: 40% of energy consumption is in buildings, so start by measuring energy use!
(6) Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor, Harvard Business School: Businesses will take action if they combine passion to make a difference with hardheaded realism and creativity
(7) Eric Chivian, Recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, Founder and Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School: Risks of inaction are too great. We need to practice precautionary medicine techniques with the environment.
Secretary Chu spoke at MIT on November 30, 2011. He’s clearly well versed in climate change issues, as well as in energy and cleantech. Also, he’s a very likable person.
I wanted very much to hear a call to action from him – something that he is pushing and something that we can all do to advance the cause of cleantech and minimize our dependence on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, he didn’t offer that. Instead, he spoke about the history of technology and innovation. He touched on the need for the US to be competitive, prosperous and sustainable. Interestingly enough, he didn’t insist on US-based manufacturing, although he agreed that that would add to our strength. He pointed to several examples where the US generated ideas or took ideas from other countries that ultimately turned into competitive advantage solutions for the US. Examples included fertilizer, telecommunications, the automobile, and the airplane.
After his talk I was unsettled; what I believe this country needs is strong leadership from our President. Obama as Chief Educator can drive home the need for clean energy and energy efficiency solutions. He can take Robert Kaplan’s recommendation and set a vision and objectives that the country can follow. For example: set Greenhouse Gas targets. Meanwhile, various states such as Massachusetts are setting targets and achieving them. In fact, Massachusetts was just recognized as the most energy efficient state in the nation! And businesses and universities are taking significant action.
On December 8, 2011 several Harvard professors spoke at a Harvard Thinks Green talk. They all had prescriptions for success. They represented multiple disciplines. Each one had 10 minutes to make a statement. Let’s get them to talk with Steven Chu and others in the US Administration!
At a national level we should set the stage for longer term thinking in Congress, and we should have short and long term environmental targets.
As a marketer, I believe that people are moved by stories. Stories can make the problems and solutions come to life. When people hear stories from and about people like them, they are more likely to buy into the solution.
There are so many great stories out there (possible topics for a future post):
- Sustainability – and specifically energy efficiency solutions – save money
- Businesses that adopt sustainability practices are more productive
- Jobs are being created
- The world is learning to do more with less
- Customers, employees, partners and investors enjoy working with sustainable entities
So, get passionate, be involved, and take action. Making a difference and improving your sustainability is not only is good for you, the environment and your community, but also for the economy!
Beth,
I think we’re in agreement that Secretary Chu is the right guy to (a) help us reduce CO2 80% by 2020, and (b) do it in a way that is economically smart. But I don’t think he’s been able, so far, to sell enough of the country. President Obama can and hopefully his political advisors will turn him loose.
If you had attended all of those talks and been fully satisfied, Beth, I think perhaps that might mean you weren’t fully paying attention. Good thing you were. : )
Part of the problem is that the terms themselves — sustainability / sustainable in particular — are essentially meaningless because they have no commonly understood meaning. Everyone more or less applies their own definitions, shaped by personal, community, corporate, or other local contexts, preconceptions, and biases. (Plus all the excellent points raised by your other commenters. These are maddeningly complex challenges.)
Moreover, while I agree with you that political leadership is desperately needed at all levels, the very real issues we already face in this century — food, water, and energy security; persistent armed conflict; economic stability; severe weather events; virulent and/or drug-resistant diseases; etc. — cannot be resolved purely, or even principally, by political action.
As DARPA Deputy Director Ken Gabriel was quoted at MIT today, “The 19th century was about manipulating energy, the 20th century was about manipulating information, and the 21st century will be about manipulating matter.” [http://bit.ly/rwC0Y0]
I believe the winners of the 21st century may well be those who manipulate matter most efficiently, with the least waste, the least resource consumption, the least toxicity, the least societal detriment, and the least jargon.
In short, the most elegant, profitable, and beneficial. Past centuries were sufficiently forgiving to allow very big successes to be won on the basis of one, or possibly two, of the three. I see this century already shaping up to be much more demanding.
Manipulating matter (or any significant human endeavor) starts with telling stories, as you rightly suggest. We need to be telling factual, compelling stories about elegant, profitable, and beneficial solutions. In the interest of making those stories take hold and begin to reshape our reality, I’m okay with leaving “sustainability” out of the lexicon.
Keep telling great stories!
Harvard usually fails to impress.
Three things:
1) It is too late, and resilience or adaptation to climate change impacts should come to the forefront in discussions of “sustainability”,
2) Reliable, small and safe nuclear power plants (not the 40 year old giant clunckers that abound)should be the focus of Chu and MIT etc.,
3) Manufacturing based in China is almost exclusively based on coal electricity and results in production of PV technology with high embedded CO2 equivalent emissions, so its long overdue that we routinely perform independent life cycle assessments of PV products.
We are not moving fast enough with resolutions. I am amazed as the number of vehicles on the road with only one occupant. Better green mass transit is badly needed. Corporations must extinguish their old ideas and accept the practice of telecommuting, which is a win win for all (less cars on the road, improved morale and the savings in corporate real estate taxes and maintenance cost. I can go on and on, but the bottom line is that we are not moving fast enough and our children will suffer the consequence of our timid behavior.
Thanks, Beth. Keep pushing and don’t let up. This is a battle for our future.I liked the message of Mr. Kaplan, “Leadership in Sustainability requires vision, commitment, alignment, and an action plan with accountability” but I would add “passion” to his list. The meaning of the work commitment has been diluted by our driveling politicians. We should not be afraid to demand and expect nothing less than full blown acceptance of the import of a sustainable future.Seek to carry the mantle of a survival-oriented culture. Not a culture of consumerism, or of excess or of growth.
Beth,
I really enjoy reading this post and you are so right about that , when people hear stories from and about people like them, they are more likely to buy into the solution. thank you for been part in the renewable energy solution, we need to work together in community and make a strong positive climate change, having in mind that we can’t wait any longer we must begin the action now. avoid depletion of natural resourses. sustainability is the way,
thank you,
Manuel.
It’s easy to let the enormity of the sustainability problem create paralysis. At World Energy we are big believers in not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and are daily helping our clients buy and use energy in smarter ways. A good recent example? We helped Bayer MaterialScience secure 20% renewable energy for their Sheffield, MA facility as part of an overall electricity buy that also saved them over $200,000. Saving on electricity cost while increasing commitment to renewables. That’s powerful, and the good news is it is happening often and across business sectors. Here is another example: http://bit.ly/tE5Omz
What about the sustainability of powering 137 million U.S. passenger vehicles with gasoline derived from oil? The United States is now importing 60 percent of its crude oil and that figure will rise to 100 percent in about 11 years. What is the plan from the Department of Energy to address that problem? For more information, please see
http://www.jheversonconsulting.com/blog/2011/03/15/reduction-of-foreign-oil-consumption-using-electric-vehicles/
Dr. Jeffrey Everson
Good, thoughtful post Beth. Thanks.
As the ranks of the already activated grow, I cheer along…but how to elicit behavior shift in those whose ‘frames’ won’t naturally accept sustainable thinking? This is where the stories you advocate may be a best first step. Deniers converted? Skeptics turned believers? As likely as policy change, and perhaps sooner realized, may be an acknowledgement among these targets that “if my short time horizon won’t let me support sustainability NOW, I will at least avoid action that will make it costlier and harder to do later…when it actually WILL need to get done.” Fundamental awakening, through stories, will re-jigger frames to accept truths that will otherwise continue to bounce back rejected and unbelieved.
Outside of the green, energy efficiency, sustainability communities, there is not enough awareness of the impact possible. If you save a kilowatt, that’s 2.5to 3 kilowatts you do not have to generate. There is for sure a lack of forceful leadership by those politicians and corporate leaders who can best raise the bar.
Felice, Eric, Fran Mark, Rich: you have each mentioned the political theme. This got me to thinking…
Many governments worldwide tend not to take an integrated approach to local, regional and global Resources challenges.
Example: Water. Water issues span the agendas of ministries and agencies responsible for water, agriculture, urban development, and environment. How do they communicate with one another? How often? Do we as voters pay attention to their interactions, which are or should be a matter of public record?
Another example: Land. It spans the jurisdictions of agriculture, forestry, interior, energy and environment at the national agency level, while at the provincial and district levels, even more agencies are involved.
Internationally, still more private aid agencies are weighing in.
However well intentioned these myriad groups may be, integrating and aligning their parallel and sometimes competing agendas is not often seen as a priority.
Here is a fundamental disconnect in the USA: we are empowered to democratically elect our President, Congress, Senate and dogcatcher. We are not, however, invited participants in agency appointments. Those are typically appointments curried and distributed by elected officials based on factors that may include campaign debt and influence swapping. Can you spell Blagojovich?
If we as voters paid attention to the agency appointments made by our elected officials (hello, C-SPAN), brought them into the light of day (like a thousand Arab Springs), educated ourselves about such candidates, and got vocal about candidate options, just maybe we will make progress in fomenting this badly needed political alignment.
Until then, it’s a shell game, and shame on us each and all for not speaking up.
I’m thinking of changing the name of my blog (1SocialClimate) to “Bloggers Without Borders”.
Regards to all,
Ed
@socialclimate
Beth – great post. I agree that at the intersection of politics, policy, innovation and finance lies the greatest opportunity we have to enable a game-changing future. Indeed, we NEED the game to be changed. Businesses are forging ahead with sustainable inititatives because they make good financial sense, but having more support from our government by supporting these good ideas in a non-partisan way would get more people on board who are sitting on the sidelines.
Keep up the good work,
Rich Goode
It is increasingly apparent that change must come from grassroots and not the top. Too many leaders are walking around today as if they had a lobotomy. Or else, they are afraid to use their heads and their good senses. Species across the globe have tapped in to the pulse of the planet and are adjusting their lives to new conditions. We can see the future in the crystal ball, yet we choose not to act. We also look through a monochromatic lens. We have not gotten beyond a concern for saving energy when we are about to use up all our drinking water. We do not deserve to come out of recession. Economic boom without green will be an immediate planetary bust.
The messages from all seven talks are right on the money. I agree that it is disappointing that Sec’y Chu is not issuing a specific call to action. We certainly need to hear one from him and President Obama.
I also agree that stories are powerful motivators.
What story would you like to tell? I’m all ears.
There is a lot to gain from not wasting the energy we are already consuming. Businesses have been pooly served by the engineering community, but changes are taking place right now that can make a big difference to operating costs and the environmental impact. Still change is hard and some companies have to take the lead. This is not easy to do in a deep recession.
Just like going to the doctor, the consultants should start by looiking up the tail pipe of every process – i.e. the stack of the powerplant!
I totally agree that the President needs to be more pro-active as Educator in Chief. He needs to forcefully and widely promote the benefits of moving rapidly toward renewable energy sources. He needs to correct dire predictions about job loss as we move away from an oil economy (for example, incorrect numbers quoted by Trans-Canada’s CEO on jobs resulting from the building of the Keystone XL pipeline: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70021.html).
I also think it is urgent that the President educates Americans about the risks of doing too little too late to address catastropic climate change vs. the risks of taking significant immediate steps toward cleaner energy (possible economic loss, but certainly improved health and energy independence).
Anyone support a Change.org or Whitehouse.gov petition?”
Cut and paste missed the first paragraph – sorry.
Insert this before:
Beth – your post is great – and I agree with the general course of action it lays out.
There is an assumption though, that well-intentioned and reasonable people can put their heads together and steer the course of change in this country to make progress on the pressing problems presented by climate change. Furthermore the need to do this is assumed to be driven by self-interest, in
that we’re ultimately going to suffer much more if we don’t act, and that there are real and immediate benefits to acting now and promoting clean energy development. This is of course true, but if these reasons were enough to spur people to action – then they were also true many years ago and we would have already acted before now – when the dangers of inaction are now much more apparent.
Your post mentions disappointment with Energy Secretary Chu’s statements, and the lack of leadership on climate – illustrated most recently in Durban by the flaccid positions of US climate envoy Stern. How is it that even those who know that there is a problem and seemingly have the power to put solutions in place – have avoided doing so? President Obama has shown that he is not a leader so much as a negotiator – someone willing to make compromises for the good of the country. However this willingness to engage with the GOP has failed miserably in the face of intransigence. The problem is that even if there were some movement on a national energy policy that promotes clean energy and contemplates some kind of cap and trade program (originally a GOP proposal), compromises such as these does not get us to the kind of action that changes the course of catastrophic climate change.
The most important thing that we can do now, is to look at the main causes of entrenchment in our political process. The following paragrah is an excerpt from a recent edition of “The Climate Post” published by The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University:
“There has been an increase in climate skepticism in the past year and a growing reluctance to say anything about climate, especially among Republicans. The turning point—argued the National Journal’s cover story, “Heads in the Sand” — was the 2010 Supreme Court decision that lifted restrictions on campaign spending and boosted so-called super political action committees (super PACs) that can take unlimited funds.”
The quoted article from the National Journal shines a light on one of the main factors in our collective inaction in this country, and it does not bode well for our future that the GOP is nearly unified on the position that climate change is a hoax. Recently the Pope joined the ever-louder chorus from around the world calling for significant actions coming out of the talks in Durban. This further illustrates how out of step with reality the US is on climate change and energy policy.
I would suggest that before we put our energy into policy and technology-based solutions – of which there are many wonderful examples and more every day, we turn our attention to the real problem, that keeps any of these initiatives from becoming actual solutions. That is our broken democracy, which allows for corporate influence to dictate the status quo – day in and day out.
Great, thought provoking stuff! We are so plagued by short term thinking to the detriment of the environment, society, the economy, business, etc.There’s no evidence that politicians think beyond their next elections. Not only is it short term but also old thinking. This is not your grandfather’s or great grandfather’s world but we keep trying to apply those ancient to current problems and they don’t cure!