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Re: Green Illusions, by Ozzie Zehner

PostPosted: Thu May 14, 2020 6:25 am
by admin
Epilogue: A Grander Narrative?

And the people bowed and prayed / to the neon god they made.

-- Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence”


When approaching any large challenge, it is sometimes difficult to know where to start, and in our particular global crisis, nations are finding it difficult to determine who should start. In response to the statistic that China is building more than a gigawatt of new coal-fired power plants every week, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller asks, “Do we demand that the Chinese stop? Do we have the right to do that? Do we have the power to do that?” His answers are even more straightforward, “No, no, and no.”1

Analysts often characterize China as following an unsustainable path compared to the United States, but consider this: One country has a fertility rate below replacement value and an annual per-capita energy consumption equivalent to 1,500 kilograms of oil per year. The other country’s population is expanding and its citizens annually consume over five times as much energy, equivalent to 7,700 kilograms per year.2 When comparing a modestly consuming populace whose numbers will someday be smaller with a more substantially consuming populace growing exponentially, it is not difficult to determine which is sustainable within the limits of a finite planet and which is not.3 Americans are not in a position to preach.


As an alternative to preaching, Thomas Friedman asserts, “I would much prefer to put our energy into creating an American model so compelling that other countries would want to follow it on their own. . . . A truly green America would be more valuable than fifty Kyoto Protocols. Emulation is always more effective than compulsion.”4

Are the first steps in this book sufficient to create such a compelling American model? No. They’re simply a start. Nevertheless, I never intended to write a grand narrative. Frankly, I’m not so sure it would be worth reading if I did. But what if I had attempted to do so? What could I have drawn upon?

I might have launched directly into the gut of environmental ethics, American religion, and knowledge frameworks by quoting Lynn White, who argued in the 1960s: “More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink the one we have.” I could have scripted an impassioned introduction drawing upon writers such as Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva, Joseph Stiglitz, James Lovelock, and Raj Patel.5 And there are the many thinkers featured in the volume Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril to consider as well.6 I could then have tempered their optimism by quoting cantankerous theorists such as, Curtis White, author of The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves and The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature; James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency; Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists; and John Michael Greer, author of The Ecotechnic Future.7 Or I could have featured the more scientific sobrieties of Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, or Fen Montaigne, author of Fraser’s Penguins.8

Alternately, I could have opted for an equally provocative (and ideologically charged) beginning by framing imperialism as the root of our environmental problems and quoting documentary filmmaker Philippe Diaz who claims: “The first resource we took was the land, and when you take the land away from the people, you create the slave. . . . How did these small countries like Great Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium become these huge empires with almost no resources whatsoever? Well, by taking by force, of course, resources from the South.”9 I might have drawn upon any number of historians, anthropologists, and social scientists who maintain that over the past five hundred years, we’ve become more efficient at performing these extractions, primarily through the economic instruments we call privatization, debt service, and free trade (as well as through good old-fashioned force and intimidation). From there, I could have quoted the activist Derrick Jensen, who observes,

Once a people have committed (or enslaved) themselves to a growth economy, they’ve pretty much committed themselves to a perpetual war economy, because in order to maintain this growth, they will have to continue to colonize an ever-wider swath of the planet and exploit its inhabitants. . . . The bad news for those committed to a growth economy is that it’s essentially a dead-end street: once you’ve overshot your home’s carrying capacity, you have only two choices: keep living beyond the means of the planet until your culture collapses; or proactively elect to give up the benefits you gained from the conquest in order to save your culture.10


To extend his affront to growthism, I could have drawn upon insight from Daniel Quinn, Donella H. Meadows, the antics of The Yes Men, and solutions from the multiauthored volume Alternatives to Economic Globalization.11 This approach would have formed a springboard to consider inequality.

I might even have chosen to characterize America as a young dynasty system. I could have started by featuring thinkers who point out that this dynasty system has actually increased prosperity for all Americans, not just the rich. Next I could have featured social scientists who argue that while Americans have traditionally idealized storylines portraying the social and economic mobility among classes, the American socioeconomic system today is actually quite rigid—where and to whom you are born is becoming an ever more accurate predictor of future prosperity. I may have argued that unequal structures of material wealth, power, and dynastic pressure pose distinct challenges to strengthening environmental fundamentals. These themes get fleshed out in Winner-Take-All Politics by Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker, The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Griftopia by Matt Taibbi, and by a wide range of political scientists in the book Inequality and American Democracy.12

Next I could have pointed to those theorists who argue that extreme capitalism cannot coexist with a durable environmental movement. Among them is James Gustave Speth, author of The Bridge at the End of the World, who admits that his conclusion, “after much searching and considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we have today and that long-term solutions must seek transformative change in the key features of this contemporary capitalism.”13 Another moderate voice I could have chosen to highlight is John Perkins, a self-described “economic hit man” who was a gear in this machinery for a decade, a position he describes in several books on the topic. In a recent interview, he insisted, “I don’t think the failure is capitalism, I think it is a specific kind of capitalism that we’ve developed in the last thirty or forty years, particularly beginning with the time of Reagan and Milton Friedman’s economic theories, which stress that the only goal of business is to maximize profits, regardless of the social and environmental costs and not to regulate businesses at all . . . and to privatize everything so that everything is run by private business.”14

Today it is difficult to imagine that through the first hundred years of America’s adolescence the government required corporations to apply for charters detailing how the company served the public good. Every ten years or so, the charters would come up for renewal and if the company’s directors could not prove that the company was serving the public interest, the government revoked their charter and disbanded the company. That changed in the late 1880s, when the U.S. Supreme Court started to treat corporations more like individuals. Numerous thinkers analyze the corporation’s rise from a wide array of vantage points. Among them are Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation; Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine; Carl Safina, author of The View from Lazy Point; as well as many volumes by David Harvey, Sam Smith, Slavoj Žižek, and of course the public intellectual, Noam Chomsky.15 These critiques would have opened up room to imagine new forms of democracy, community, and economy, such as those envisioned in Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale and William A. Shutkin’s The Land That Could Be.16

Instead of negotiating that thicket of leftist thorns, I might have chosen to avoid it by paddling my grand narrative through the varied seductions of technology itself. I could have started by discussing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, cautioning how technological adoration might overcome our capacity to think.17 Or I might have chosen E. M. Forster’s novella The Machine Stops, written over a hundred years ago with spine-tingling premonition.18 I could have moved on to discuss the symbolism of environmental initiatives by drawing on Yanow Dvora’s How Does a Policy Mean?, Charles Lindblom’s Inquiry and Change, and Neil Postman’s books Building a Bridge to the 18th Century and Amusing Ourselves to Death.19 I might have chosen to investigate the interstitial forces between society and technology more broadly, as portrayed by thinkers such as David Nye, Andrew Feenburg, Sherry Turkle, Michel Foucault, and Thomas Kuhn.20 Many others are featured in the edited volume Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future.21 I could even have focused on the specific blend of social, personal, and technological challenges to achieving a truly sustainable energy system. But that excellent book, Sustainable Energy Consumption and Society, has already been written by David Goldblatt.22

In anticipation of those who might say that any grand narrative challenging established conceptions of capitalism, growth, inequality, consumption, and governance is but a dreamy impracticality, I might have gone so far as to quote the stalwart Milton Friedman, who observed: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived— produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”23 On more likely, I might simply have quoted Gar Alperovitz, who reminds us in his book America Beyond Capitalism that “fundamental change—indeed, radical systemic change—is as common as grass in world history.”

And finally, in the epilogue, I might even have attempted to trick you into reading a “further readings” list by couching it in terms of a grand narrative.

§

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this book, please pass it on to a friend, write a review, or send me a note if you’d like me to give a talk at your school, community group, or other organization. You are also invited to enjoy a complimentary subscription of an ongoing series at: CriticalEnvironmentalism.org.

To contact me, visit OzzieZehner.com or GreenIllusions.org.

Re: Green Illusions, by Ozzie Zehner

PostPosted: Thu May 14, 2020 6:31 am
by admin
Resources for Future Environmentalists

If you’d like to be an environmentalist of the future, here are some websites to explore. Just select a theme that interests you and don’t forget to research organizations in your own neighborhood as well—this is by no means a comprehensive listing. I will update and expand this list at GreenIllusions.org. Please contact me if you’d like to add an organization to the list. I also enjoy answering questions and talking with groups both large and small. You can find my contact information, speaking schedule, documentary films, interviews, articles, and more at OzzieZehner.com.

Human Rights: Youth Focus

Advocates for Youth (advocatesforyouth.org)
One by One (onebyone.org)
Save the Children (savethechildren.org)
U.S. Fund for unicef (unicefusa.org)

Human Rights: Poverty and Emergency Aid Focus

American Jewish World Service (ajws.org)
fxb usa (fxb.org)
United Methodist Committee on Relief (gbgm-umc.org/ umcor)

Human Rights: Population Focus

Association for Population Libraries and Information Centers International (aplici.org)
care (care.org)
The Centre for Development and Population Activities (cedpa.org)
Population Action International (populationaction.org)
The Population Institute (populationinstitute.org)
Population Council (popcouncil.org)
Population Media Center (populationmedia.org)

Human Rights: Women’s Issues Focus

Center for Reproductive Rights (reproductiverights.org)
Family Care International (familycareintl.org)
Global Fund for Women (globalfundforwomen.org)
Institute for Women’s Policy Research (iwpr.org)
International Center for Research on Women (icrw.org)
International Women’s Health Coalition (iwhc.org)
National Organization for Women Foundation (nowfoundation.org)
National Women’s Law Center (nwlc.org)
Sauti Yetu Center for African Women (sautiyetu.org)
United Nations Development Fund for Women (unifem-usnc.org)
Vital Voices Global Partnership (vitalvoices.org)

Human Rights: Conflict and Violence Focus

Amnesty International (amnesty.org)
Futures Without Violence (futureswithoutviolence.org)
Human Rights Watch (hrw.org)

Human Rights: Health Focus

Doctors Without Borders (doctorswithoutborders.org)
EngenderHealth (engenderhealth.org)
Guttmacher Institute (guttmacher.org)
International Planned Parenthood Federation (ippf.org)
path (path.org)
Pathfinder International (pathfind.org)
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (plannedparenthood.org)

Volunteering

United We Serve (serve.gov)
VolunteerMatch (volunteermatch.org)
Craig’s List (craigslist.org)

Commercial-Free Livelihood

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (commercialexploitation.org)
Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale (fastfoodmarketing.org)
Center for a New American Dream (newdream.org)
Commercial Alert (commercialalert.org)
Education and the Public Interest Center (epicpolicy.org)
Media Education Foundation (mediaed.org)
Obligation, Inc. (obligation.org)
Stuttgart Jugendhaus (jugendhaus.net)

Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

Wiser Earth Index (wiserearth.org)
Social Edge (socialedge.org)
New Door Ventures (newdoor.org)

Junk Mail and Packaging

Downloadable Junk Mail Kit (stopjunkmail.org)
Junk Mail Resources (newdream.org/junkmail)
Plastic Pollution Coalition (plasticpollutioncoalition.org)

GDP Alternatives

Happy Planet Index (happyplanetindex.org)
European Social Survey (europeansocialsurvey.org)
Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (see Wikipedia entry)
Genuine Progress Indicator (see Wikipedia entry)
Gross National Happiness (gnh-movement.org)
University of Cambridge Well-being Institute (cambridgewellbeing.org)

Reduce Military Spending

Fund Our Communities (25percentsolution.com)
National Priorities Project (nationalpriorities.org)

Eating Vegan and Vegetarian

PETA’s Vegetarian Starter Kit (peta.org)
Happy Cow (happycow.net)
International Vegetarian Union (ivu.org)

Safe Routes to School

Boltage (boltage.org)
National Center for Safe Routes to School (saferoutes info.org)
Partnership for a Walkable America (WalkableAmerica.org)

Walkable and Bikeable Neighborhoods

Carbusters Journal (carbusters.org)
Critical Mass (criticalmass.wikia.com)
park(ing) Day (parkingday.org)
Traffic Calming (trafficcalming.org)
World Naked Bike Ride (worldnakedbikeride.org)

Economic Reform

Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (feasta.org)
New Economics Foundation (neweconomics.org)

Governance

American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org)
The Center for Voting and Democracy (fairvote.org)

Charity Rankings and Philanthropy Resources

Foundation Center (foundationcenter.org)
Tides Foundation (tides.org)
American Institute of Philanthropy (charitywatch.org)
Better Business Bureau for Charities (bbb.org/us/charity)
Charity Navigator (charitynavigator.org)
American Endowment Foundation (aefonline.org)
Jumo (jumo.com)
 

Re: Green Illusions, by Ozzie Zehner

PostPosted: Thu May 14, 2020 7:42 am
by admin
Part 1 of 3

Notes:

Introduction


1. National Highway and Safety Administration, Fatality Analysis Reporting System Encyclopedia (Washington DC: National Highway and Safety Administration, 2011).

2. Daniel J. Benjamin et al., “Do People Seek to Maximize Happiness? Evidence from New Surveys,” Journal of Economic Literature (forthcoming).

3. My review of media and political speech during the rise in oil prices between 2003 and 2008 in the United States shows that media coverage of alternative- energy technologies quadrupled while articles on low-tech methods of energy conservation increased just 25 percent. This is further supported by my study of the language used by politicians and the media to describe solutions during this period as well as by historical accounts of the 1970s OPEC embargo and accounts of the rise of nuclear power after World War II (see chapter 8).

1. Solar Cells and Other Fairy Tales

1. This short rendering leaves out much of the complexity the researchers uncovered, but see Monica Leggett and Marie Finlay, “Science, Story, and Image: A New Approach to Crossing the Communication Barrier Posed by Scientific Jargon,” Public Understanding of Science 10, no. 2 (2001).

2. Barack Obama, interview by Eric Schmidt, November 14, 2008, Google Headquarters, Mountain View ca; Thomas Markvart, Solar Electricity, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 2000), 3–4; Greenpeace, Global Warming Story Tour 2008, Greenpeace, http://us.greenpeace.org; bp, Learn More About Solar, http://www.bp.com.

3. These are drawn from two ongoing author studies of popular science articles published in the New York Times and the three most widely circulated popular science magazines in the United States: Popular Science, Discover, and wired.

4. Markvart, Solar Electricity, 1–3.

5. There are other ways to capture the sun’s energy besides solar cells. Solar thermal plants use mirrors to heat steam or molten salt, which is used to drive turbines, much like a traditional coal-fired power plant. Buildings can be designed to absorb light through their windows to heat concrete slabs or other thermal masses, which in turn radiate their heat during the night; such building techniques are labeled as passive solar.

6. Lester Brown, Plan B 3.0 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 252.

7. Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 159.

8. The world uses about 140,000 terawatt-hours per year. International Energy Agency, Renewables Information 2007 (Geneva: oecd / iea, 2007). Faiman et al. calculate that a large solar collector system can produce two thousand kilowatt-hours per year for every kilowatt of installed capacity, which in turn costs $630 per kilowatt for manufacturing, $850 per kilowatt for solar collector fabrication and installation, $285 for storage batteries, and 0.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for maintenance. Faiman et al. indicate that the actual costs of large systems could turn out to be several times these amounts: D. Faiman, D. Raviv, and R. Rosenstreich, “Using Solar Energy to Arrest the Increasing Rate of Fossil-Fuel Consumption: The Southwestern States of the USA as Case Studies,” Energy Policy 35, no. 1 (2007): 570.

9. Author’s calculation using government data from: Ryan Wiser et al., Letting the Sun Shine on Solar Costs: An Empirical Investigation of Photovoltaic Cost Trends in California (Golden co: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (nrel), 2006); Glen Harris and Shannon Moynahan, The California Solar Initiative—Triumph or Train Wreck? A Year to Date Review of the California Public Utility Commissions’ California Solar Initiative (SunCentric, 2007).

10. Author’s calculation using: (1) an average of 35.5 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of photovoltaic energy produced, based on estimations from Vasilis M. Fthenakis and Hyung C. Kim, “Greenhouse- Gas Emissions from Solar Electric and Nuclear Power: A Life- Cycle Study,” Energy Policy 35, no. 4 (2007): 2549–57; and (2) given that the world uses about 140,000 terawatt-hours per year (see International Energy Agency, Renewables Information 2007); and (3) assuming a thirty-year life span for the arrays.

11. Stephanie Rosenbloom, “Giant Retailers Look to Sun for Energy Savings,” New York Times, August 10, 2008.

12. Bernie Fischlowitz-Roberts, Solar Cell Sales Booming, Earth Policy Institute, January 1, 2002, http://www.earth-policy.org.

13. Janet L. Sawin, “Another Sunny Year for Solar Power,” in Energy and Climate (Washington DC: Worldwatch Institute, 2008).

14. “Clean Technology in the Downturn: Gathering Clouds,” Economist, November 6, 2008; Dirk Lammers, “Good Week, Bad Week for Solar Industry,” USA Today, February 12, 2008.

15. Solarbuzz, “Photovoltaic Industry Statistics: Costs, Solar Energy Costs/ Prices,” Solarbuzz, http://www.solarbuzz.com.

16. Harris and Moynahan, California Solar Initiative, 6.

17. Ozzie Zehner, “Unintended Consequences,” in Green Technology, ed. Paul Robbins, Dustin Mulvaney, and J. Geoffrey Golson (London: Sage, 2011).

18. Kate Galbraith, “Solar Panels Are Vanishing, Only to Reappear on the Internet,” New York Times, September 23, 2008.

19. Save the Children, State of the World’s Mothers 2005: The Power and Promise of Girls’ Education (Westport ct: Save the Children, 2005).

20. Utilities in some parts of the world distinguish between peak and offpeak electrical pricing to reflect this varying value of electricity throughout the day. The more complex “dynamic pricing” adjusts electricity prices in real time based on supply-and-demand metrics. Smart home wiring systems and appliances can work together to minimize electricity use during periods of high demand.

21. Severin Borenstein, The Market Value and Cost of Solar Photovoltaic Electricity Production (Berkeley: University of California Energy Institute Center for the Study of Energy Markets, 2008).

22. Harris and Moynahan, California Solar Initiative, 6.

23. R. D. Duke and D. M. Kammen, “The Economics of Energy Market Transformation Initiatives,” Energy Journal 20, no. 4 (1999); Richard M. Swanson, “A Vision for Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells,” in Department of Energy Solar Program Review Meeting, ed. DOE (Sunnyvale CA: SunPower Corporation [2004: DOE / go–102005-2067], 2004).

24. Gregory F. Nemet, “Beyond the Learning Curve: Factors Influencing Cost Reductions in Photovoltaics,” Energy Policy 34, no. 17 (2006): 26.

25. There are other variations of Moore’s law; R. Martin Roscheisen is quoted in G. Pascal Zachary, “Silicon Valley Gets Interested in Solar Power,” New York Times, November 7, 2008.

26. See Fthenakis and Kim, “Greenhouse-Gas Emissions from Solar Electric and Nuclear Power.” Another study yielded comparable results: Kris De Decker, “De Donkere Kant Van Zonne-Energie: Hoeveel Energie Kost De Productie Van Zonnepanelen?” [The dark side of solar energy: How much energy does it take to produce solar panels?], Low-tech Magazine, December 15, 2008.

27. One kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by coal emits around 850 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour. Natural gas produces about 450 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

28. Borenstein, Market Value and Cost of Solar Photovoltaic Electricity Production, 25.

29. Borenstein, Market Value and Cost of Solar Photovoltaic Electricity Production, 25.

30. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Radiative Forcing of Climate Change (6.3.3 Halocarbons),” in Climate Change 2001: Working Group I: The Scientific Basis (Geneva: grid- Arendal, 2003); Richard Conniff, “The Greenhouse Gas That Nobody Knew,” Yale Environment 360, November 13, 2008.

31. Ray F. Weiss et al., “Nitrogen Trifluoride in the Global Atmosphere,” Geophysical Research Letters 35, no. l20821 (2008).

32. Weiss et al., “Nitrogen Trifluoride in the Global Atmosphere.”

33. Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China,” Washington Post, March 9, 2008.

34. Dustin Mulvaney et al., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Solar Energy Industry,” (white paper, Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, January 14, 2009), 1.

35. David A. Taylor, “Occupational Health: On the Job with Solar PV,” Environmental Health Perspectives 118, no. 1 (2010).

36. Mulvaney et al., “Toward a Just and Sustainable Solar Energy Industry,” 25–26.

37. The DOE reports a total 0.01 percent for photovoltaics and concentrated solar power (thermal) combined. Data published in: Energy Information Administration, “Renewable and Alternative Fuels,” U.S. Department of Energy, accessed November 1, 2010, http://www.eia .DOE.gov/fuelrenewable.html.

38. Masdar City, “Masdar Puts Solar Power to the Test: 22 Leading International Manufacturers of PV Technology Participate in Groundbreaking Field Study in Abu Dhabi,” press release, December 27, 2007, http://www.ameinfo.com.

39. A. Kimber et al., “The Effect of Soiling on Large Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Systems in California and the Southwest Region of the United States” (paper presented at the Conference Record of the 2006 IEEE 4th World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion, Waikoloa hi, 2006), 5, 1.

40. Martin LaMonica, “A Tale of Solar Panels, Snow, and Roof Rakes,” CNET, February 6, 2009, http://news.cnet.com; E. L. Meyer and E. E. van Dyk, “Assessing the Reliability and Degradation of Photovoltaic Module Performance Parameters,” IEEE Transactions on Reliability 53, no. 1 (2004): 83–92; Kimber et al. “The Effect of Soiling on Large Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Systems.”

41. C. Stanton, “Cloudy Skies for Masdar’s Solar Project,” The National, November 12, 2008.

42. Aging effects are not necessarily linear. For instance, module output may decline quickly after installation before entering a period of more stable output or degrade slowly with a sharper production drop-off later on. Some manufacturers claim their cells degrade less than 1 percent per year.

43. Mikkel Jørgensen, Kion Norrmana, and Frederik C. Krebs, “Stability/ Degradation of Polymer Solar Cells,” Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells 92, no. 7 (2008); Meyer and van Dyk, “Assessing the Reliability and Degradation of Photovoltaic Module Performance Parameters.” 44. The more optimistic efficiency scenario is based on numbers released by a solar industry consulting firm and data clearinghouse. Solarbuzz, “Solar Cell Technologies: Thin Film Solar Cells,” http://www.solar buzz.com.

45. Borenstein, Market Value and Cost of Solar Photovoltaic Electricity Production, 19, 20.

46. This observation is based on author interviews, media studies, and DOE reports and corroborated by Borenstein, Market Value and Cost of Solar Photovoltaic Electricity Production, 1, 22.

47. Peter Nieh, “The Cost of Creating Solar Cells: Green Panel Discusses the State of the Silicon Industry” (paper presented at the Always On Venture Summit, Half Moon Bay ca, December 3–4, 2008).

48. Meagan Ellis, “A 3D Solution to Solar Cell Inefficiencies,” Materials World June 1, 2007, 5.

49. From 2008 to 2009, net solar electrical generation dropped from 864,315 thousand kilowatt-hours to 807,988 thousand kilowatt-hours in 2009, according to U.S. Department of Energy measurements. There are other factors that could have produced this drop, so more research would be required to show which part was due to decommissioning. Electric Power: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-923, “Power Plant Operations Report,” table 3, http://www.eia.gov/ cneaf/alternate/page/renew_energy_consump.

50. David L. Goldblatt, Sustainable Energy Consumption and Society: Personal, Technological, or Social Change? (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2005), 90.

2. Wind Power’s Flurry of Limitations

1. repower Systems AG, 5m: Proven Technology in New Dimensions (Hamburg: repower Systems AG, 2004), 13–14.

2. “The Future of Energy: Trade Winds,” Economist June 19, 2008, 6.

3. Economist, “Future of Energy: Trade Winds,” 6.

4. “Case History: Wind of Change,” Economist Technology Quarterly, December 6, 2008, 24.

5. Ozzie Zehner, “Producing Power: The Semiotization of Alternative Energy in Media and Politics,” 2007, University of Amsterdam, http:// www.berkeley.academia.edu.

6. K. C. Myers, “Falmouth Turbine Noise Fuels Debate,” Cape Cod Times, May 14, 2010; Mukund R. Patel, Wind and Solar Power Systems (Boca Raton fl: crc Press, 2006), 82; H. Lee Willis and Walter G. Scott, Distributed Power Generation: Planning and Evaluation (Boca Raton fl: crc Press, 2000), 269.

7. Robert F. Kennedy, editorial, “An Ill Wind Off Cape Cod,” New York Times, December 16, 2005.

8. F. A. Van der Loo, “Mediating Windpower in the Netherlands: The Task Force Windpower Implementation” (white paper, Netherlands Wind Energy Association, Utrecht, Netherlands, 2001, http://www .nwea.nl).

9. Manuela de Lucas, Guyonne F. E. Janss, and Miguel Ferrer, “The Effects of a Wind Farm on Birds in a Migration Point: The Strait of Gibraltar,” Biodiversity and Conservation 13, no. 2 (2004); Frances Cerra Whittelsey, “The Birds and the Breeze: Making Wind Power Safe for Wildlife,” Sierra January/February 2007, 39.

10. Whittelsey, “Birds and the Breeze,” 39.

11. Patel, Wind and Solar Power Systems, 83.

12. K. C. Myers, “faa: Turbines Pose Risk to Radar,” Cape Cod Times, February 14, 2009.

13. National Research Council, Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2010), 140.

14. Robert Booth, “Micro-Wind Turbines Often Increase CO2, Says Study,” London Guardian, March 26, 2007. Geoff A. Dutton, Jim A. Halliday, and Mike J. Blanch, “The Feasibility of Building-Mounted/ Integrated Wind Turbines (buwts): Achieving Their Potential for Carbon Emission Reductions” (in the final report of the Energy Research Unit, Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, 2005, http://www.stfc.ac.uk/).

15. Dutton et al., “Feasibility of Building-Mounted/Integrated Wind Turbines,” 32.

16. As quoted in Dutton et al., “Feasibility of Building-Mounted/Integrated Wind Turbines,” 32.

17. Hugh Sharman, “Why Wind Power Works for Denmark,” Civil Engineering 158 (May 2005): 72.

18. Aimee Curtright and Jay Apt, “The Character of Power Output from Utility-Scale Photovoltaic Systems,” Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications 16, no. 3 (2008): 242.

19. F. Vestergaard, “Bistand til Tyskland” [Aid for Germany], Weekend Avisen, November 4, 2005, 13.

20. Sharman, “Why Wind Power Works for Denmark.”

21. Gerald Groenewald, “Energy Policy: Pumped Up,” Economist January 29, 2009, 43.

22. “Building the Smart Grid,” Economist Technology Quarterly, June 6, 2009, 16.

23. “Wiser Wires,” Economist, October 10, 2009, 71.

24. Energy Information Administration, Average Capacity Factors by Energy Source, 1996 through 2007, U.S. Department of Energy, http:// www.eia.DOE.gov.

25. Based on 2007 wind power generation of 34,450,000 megawatt-hours divided by 16,596 megawatts wind turbine capacity times 8,765 hours per year, or 23.7 percent capacity factor. See Energy Information Administration, Existing Capacity by Energy Source, 2007, U.S. Department of Energy, http://www.eia.DOE.gov.

26. Reliability factors can be 5 percent or lower. So to offset a traditional plant with a 90 percent reliability factor, power operators would require eighteen times the wind production.

27. Leigh Glover, “From Love-Ins to Logos: Charting the Demise of Renewable Energy as a Social Movement,” in Transforming Power: Energy, Environment, and Society in Conflict, ed. John Byrne, Noah Toly, and Leigh Glover (London: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 256.

28. It would require quite a stretch of the figures to say that it has. Though, it is possible. If wind power is either combined with expensive energy storage technologies or distributed widely across a large grid so that when the wind lulls in one place, the grid can take up power from turbines farther away, utilities could increase wind’s reliability factor to some extent. (This has been attempted in Southern Australia with limited success). Such a network will be expensive, however, and its practical feasibility will diminish as more capacity is brought online. For differing views on this issue, see Mark Diesendorf, The Base-Load Fallacy (Sydney: University of New South Wales Institute of Environmental Studies, 2007); A. Miskelly and T. Quirk, “Wind Farming in South East Australia,” Energy and Environment 20 (2009): 1249–55.

It’s perhaps also worth noting that E.ON Netz, a German utility with 7,000 megawatts of wind farms, concluded in their Wind Report 2005: “Wind energy is only able to replace traditional power stations to a limited extent. Their dependence on the prevailing wind conditions means that wind power has a limited load factor even when technically available. It is not possible to guarantee its use for the continual cover of electricity consumption. Consequently, traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90 percent of the installed wind power capacity must be permanently online in order to guarantee power supply at all times.” Also, a report from the Renewable Energy Foundation in the United Kingdom states: “Wind energy cannot replace conventional power stations to any significant degree.” See Tom Quirk, “Australia—Where Too Much Wind Will Never Be Enough,” Science Alert January 22, 2008; E.ON Netz, Wind Report 2005 (Bayreuth, Germany: E.ON Netz GmbH, 2005); Miskelly and Quirk, “Wind Farming in South East Australia.”

29. U.S. Department of Energy, press release, “Wind Energy Could Produce 20% of U.S. Electricity by 2030” (Washington DC: U.S. DOE, May 12, 2008); U.S. Department of Energy, “Comments on the 20 Percent Wind Report,” http://www.20percentwind.org.

30. U.S. Department of Energy, 20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to the U.S. Electrical Supply (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2008), 19.

31. For information on Black and Veatch, see http://www.bv.com. For Black and Veatch contributions, see U.S. Department of Energy, 20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to the U.S. Electrical Supply, front matter and appendix D.

32. U.S. Department of Energy, 2008 Wind Technologies Market Report, (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2009), 37.

33. Nicolas Boccard, “Capacity Factor of Wind Power: Realized Values vs. Estimates,” Energy Policy 37 (2009): 2679.

34. American Wind Energy Association, Wind Web Tutorial: Wind Energy Basics, American Wind Energy Association, accessed December 2, 2009, http://www.awea.org.

35. Author interview with Liz Hartman, wind and water power technologies communication specialist, U.S. Department of Energy, Washington DC, December 14, 2009; author interview with George Minter, director of media relations and communications, Black and Veatch Corporation, Overland Park ks, December 19, 2009.

36. U.S. Department of Energy, 20% Wind Energy by 2030.

37. Range is from 18.5 percent to 25.7 percent. This is obtained by comparing Department of Energy generation reports by the Energy Information Administration (eia) with actual installed capacity. Capacity factors vary from year to year. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2007: With Projections to 2030, http://eia.gov. See also Boccard, “Capacity Factor of Wind Power.”

38. Energy Information Administration, Assumptions to the Annual Energy Outlook 2009 (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2009).

39. A factor of roughly six would probably be the most extreme case, calculated by comparing the DOE’s cost projections (a 200 percent increase in costs) and capacity factors (as calculated from EIA field measurements) with Black and Veatch’s projections that costs will decrease and average capacity factors will be much higher. Broken down, capacity factor differences account for roughly a factor three difference between the two extremes and cost a factor of roughly two, resulting in a compound (multiplied) factor six. This provides a rough estimation of the difference between the extreme-most values, not all value differences between the approaches.

40. U.S. Department of Energy, 20% Wind Energy by 2030, front matter.

41. Author interview with Liz Hartman, U.S. Department of Energy, December 14, 2009.

42. William A. Sherden, The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions (New York: Wiley, 1998); Constance Penley, nasa/ Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 1997); Stephen L. Del Sesto, “Wasn’t the Future of Nuclear Energy Wonderful,” in Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future, ed. Joseph J Corn (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987); Daniel Sarewitz, Frontiers of Illusion (Temple University Press, 1996); Jerome R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).

43. Boccard, “Capacity Factor of Wind Power”; Nicolas Boccard, “Economic Properties of Wind Power: A European Assessment,” Energy Policy 38, no. 7 (2009): 3232–44.

44. Boccard, “Capacity Factor of Wind Power.”

45. Anselm Waldermann, “Climate Change Paradox: Green Energy Not Cutting Europe’s Carbon,” Speigel, February 10, 2009.

3. Biofuels and the Politics of Big Corn

1. Suneeta D. Fernandes et al., “Global Biofuel Use, 1850–2000,” Global Biogeochemical Cycles 21, no. 2 (2007).

2. Dennis Keeney, “Ethanol USA,” Environmental Science and Technology 43, no. 1 (2009).

3. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Energy Consumption by Energy Source (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2010).

4. International Energy Agency, Biofuels for Transport: An International Perspective (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2004); Fred Goricke and Monika Reimann, “Brasilien: Das Nationale Alkoholprogramm: Eine Verfehlte Energie-Investition” [Brazil: The national alcohol program: A missed energy investment], in Der Fischer Oko-Almanach, ed. Gerd Michelsen (Frankfurt: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1982).

5. Aditya Chakrabortty, “Secret Report: Biofuel Caused Food Crisis,” London Guardian, July 3, 2008.

6. Quoted in Robert Zoellick, “The World This Week: Politics,” Economist, April 19, 2008, 9.

7. Chakrabortty, “Secret Report.”

8. Quoted in Joachim von Braun, “The New Face of Hunger,” Economist, April 19, 2008, 32.

9. Christopher B. Field, J. Elliot Campbell, and David B. Lobell, “Biomass Energy: The Scale of the Potential Resource,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 23, no. 2 (2008): 66.

10. Keeney, “Ethanol USA.”

11. “The Farm Bill: A Harvest of Disgrace,” Economist, May 24, 2008, 46.

12. Daniel Lee Kleinman, Science and Technology in Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 17–21.

13. Keeney, “Ethanol USA.”

14. James Bovard, “Archer Daniels Midland: A Case Study in Corporate Welfare,” Cato Policy Analysis no. 241 (September 26, 1995).

15. Energy Information Administration, Status and Impact of State MTBE Ban (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2003).

16. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, Public Law 110–140 (2007).

17. Data on loan guarantees, state tax breaks, farm subsidies, and water subsidies are from Doug Koplow, Biofuels—At What Cost? Government Support for Ethanol and Biodiesel in the United States: 2007 Update (Geneva: International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2007), 16, 17–18, 25, and 26; data on federal tax breaks are from Jesse McCurry, “Cost Segregation Fuels Depreciation Acceleration,” Ethanol Producer Magazine, February 2006; data on research funds are from U.S. Department of Energy, “Energy Department Selects Three Bioenergy Research Centers for $375 Million in Federal Funding,” press release, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Public Affairs, 2007; data on labor subsidies are from American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, Public Law 108–357; “DOE Announces up to $200 Million in Funding for Biorefineries,” press release, U.S. Department of Energy, 2007; information on water subsidies is from the National Academy of Sciences, Water Implications of Biofuels Production in the United States (Washington DC: National Academy of Sciences Committee on Water Implications of Biofuels Production in the United States, 2007).

18. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Final Changes for Certain Ethanol Production Facilities under Three Clean Air Act Permitting Programs (Washington DC: EPA, 2007).

19. Don MacKenzie, Louise Bedsworth, and David Friedman, Fuel Economy Fraud Closing the Loopholes That Increase U.S. Oil Dependence (Cambridge MA: Union of Concerned Scientists, 2005).

20. Keeney, “Ethanol USA.”

21. Keeney, “Ethanol USA.”

22. Paul Rauber, “Corn-Fed Cars: Detroit’s Phony Ethanol Solution,” Sierra, January/February 2007, 42.

23. “Dead Water: Too Much Nitrogen Being Washed into the Sea Is Causing Dead Zones to Spread Alarmingly,” Economist, May 19, 2008, 97.

24. National Research Council, Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2010), 145.

25. “America’s Fuel Campaign,” Growth Energy, April 11, 2010, http:// www.growthenergy.org.

26. Economist, “Dead Water,” 97.

27. The following discussion is based on Matt Johnston et al., “Resetting Global Expectations from Agricultural Biofuels,” Environmental Research Letters 4, no. 1 (2009).

28. Johnston et al., “Resetting Global Expectations.”

29. Cori Hayden and Daniel Sarewitz point to conflicts here. Patent law holds that intellectual property rights must be extended to encompass the whole world. However, the international community expects that developing nations will increasingly rely on a diffusion of technology (technology that they cannot afford). As we witness today with genetic crops, HIV medications, and bioprospecting, these goals may not be compatible. See Daniel Sarewitz, Frontiers of Illusion (Temple University Press, 1996) and Cori Hayden, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

30. David D. Zhang et al., “Global Climate Change, War, and Population Decline in Recent Human History,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 49 (2007).

31. Claudia Tebaldi and David B. Lobell, “Towards Probabilistic Projections of Climate Change Impacts on Global Crop Yields,” Geophysical Research Letters 35 (2008); David B. Lobell and Christopher B. Field, “Global Scale Climate—Crop Yield Relationships and the Impacts of Recent Warming,” Environmental Research Letters 2 (2007).

32. Mochamed Ali, David Taylor, and Kazuyuki Inubushi, “Effects of Environmental Variations on CO2 Efflux from a Tropical Peatland in Eastern Sumatra,” Wetlands 26, no. 2 (2007).

33. Jörn P. W. Scharlemann and William F. Laurance, “How Green Are Biofuels?” Science 319, no. 5859 (2008): 43.

34. Robert B. Jackson et al., “Protecting Climate with Forests,” Environmental Research Letters 3, no. 4 (2008).

35. David Tilman, Jason Hill, and Clarence Lehman, “Carbon-Negative Biofuels from Low-Input High-Diversity Grassland Biomass,” Science 314, no. 5805 (2006).

36. Field, Campbell, and Lobell, “Biomass Energy,” 69 and 65.

37. Jim DiPeso, “Carbon Offsets: Is the Environment Getting What You Pay For?” Environmental Quality Management 17, no. 2 (2007).

38. Field, Campbell, and Lobell, “Biomass Energy”; Scharlemann and Laurance, “How Green Are Biofuels?”

39. “Treethanol: Woodstock Revisited,” Economist Technology Quarterly, March 10, 2007, 16–17.

40. “Very, Very Big Corn: Ethanol and Its Consequences,” Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2007.

41. Wall Street Journal, “Very, Very Big Corn,” 65.

42. Cedric Briens, Jan Piskorz, and Franco Berruti, “Biomass Valorization for Fuel and Chemicals Production—A Review,” International Journal of Chemical Reactor Engineering 6, no. r2 (2008).

43. Frank Verheijen et al., Biochar Application to Soils: A Critical Scientific Review of Effects on Soil Properties, Processes and Functions (Ispra, Italy: European Commission, Joint Research Centre Institute for Environment and Sustainability, 2009).

44. Kelli G. Roberts et al., “Life Cycle Assessment of Biochar Systems: Estimating the Energetic, Economic, and Climate Change Potential,” Environmental Science and Technology 44, no. 2 (2010).

45. Field, Campbell, and Lobell, “Biomass Energy,” 65.

46. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2010 (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2009), 12.

47. Antonio Pflüger, “Potential Role of Biofuels in Future Markets,” in Biofuels Markets Congress and Exhibition (Brussels: International Energy Agency, 2009), 11.

48. Glenn Hess, “Biofuels Are Poised to Displace Oil,” Chemical and Engineering News, June 13, 2006.

4. The Nuclear-Military-Industrial Risk Complex

1. Blaine Harden, A River Lost (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 178.

2. Barack Obama, responding to question during the Oregon Democratic primary campaign (radio station kndo, May 19, 2008).

3. U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Overview, March 25, 2008, http:// www.hanford.gov.

4. Washington State Department of Health, The Release of Radioactive Materials from Hanford: 1944–1972 (The Hanford Health Information Network, 1997).

5. F. J. Davis et al., An Aerial Survey of Radioactivity Associated with Atomic Energy Plants (Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1949).

6. Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, “Draft Memorandum: The Facts and Unknowns of the Green Run” (Washington DC: National Security Archive, 1994).

7. Davis et al., An Aerial Survey of Radioactivity Associated with Atomic Energy Plants, 135 and 7.

8. U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Overview.

9. “Science Watch: Growing Nuclear Arsenal,” New York Times, April 28, 1987.

10. Shannon Dininny, “Hanford Plant Now $12.2 Billion: Estimated Cost of Project Keeps Growing,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer September 8, 2006.

11. Edited for clarity and space, this list is taken directly from the U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Overview.

12. Walter A. Rosenbaum, Environmental Politics and Policies, 7th ed. (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008), 227.

13. U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Overview.

14. Rosenbaum, Environmental Politics and Policies, 278.

15. Matthew L. Wald, “Hazards at Nuclear Plant Festering 8 Years after Warning,” New York Times, December 24, 1992.

16. Matthew L. Wald, “Nuclear Site Is Battling a Rising Tide of Waste,” New York Times, September 27, 1999.

17. John Stang, “New Waste Put into ‘Burping Tank,’” Hanford News, November 15, 2002.

18. Chuck Stewart, Hanford’s Battle with Nuclear Waste Tank sy–101 (Columbus OH: Battelle Press, 2006).

19. Shannon Cram, “Escaping s–102: Waste, Illness, and the Politics of Not Knowing,” International Journal of Science in Society 2 (2010).

20. Rosenbaum, Environmental Politics and Policies, 262.

21. Jim Ostroff, “Nuclear Industry Gears up for Revival,” Kiplinger Business Forecasts, June 10, 2004.

22. Michael Grunwald and Juliet Eilperin, “Energy Bill Raises Fears About Pollution, Fraud: Critics Point to Perks for Industry,” Washington Post, July 29, 2005.

23. Energy Policy Act of 2005, Pub. L. No. 109-58, 119 Stat. 594, 109th Cong. (2005). See also Rosenbaum, Environmental Politics and Policies, 259–60.

24. “Quantum Politics: India’s Nuclear Deal with America,” Economist, September 11, 2008.

25. Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 29–30.

26. Bess, Light-Green Society, 30.

27. Roland E. Langford, Introduction to Weapons of Mass Destruction (Hoboken NJ: Wiley, 2004), 85.

28. Henry D. Sokolski, “Assessing the IAEA’s Ability to Verify the NPT,” in Falling Behind: International Scrutiny of the Peaceful Atom, ed. Henry D. Sokolski (Carlisle pa: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army, 2008), 19–20, 22.

29. Henry Sokolski, ed., Falling Behind: International Scrutiny of the Peaceful Atom (Washington DC: Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, 2007), 14.

30. U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Nuclear Regulatory Commission: NRC Needs to Do More to Ensure That Power Plants Are Effectively Controlling Spent Nuclear Fuel, April 8, 2005, http://www.GAO.gov/products/GAO-05-339.

31. U.S. GAO, NRC Needs to Do More.

32. Gregory F. Nemet, “Interpreting Interim Deviations from Cost Projections for Publicly Supported Energy Technologies” (working paper series 2008-012, Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2008).

33. Interview with Doug Koplow (founder of Earth Track), “Gambling on Nuclear Power: How Public Money Fuels the Industry,” Subsidy Watch, issue 26, August 2008, http://www.globalsubsidies.org.

34. A. V. Yablokov, Facts and Problems Related to Radioactive Waste Disposal in Seas Adjacent to the Territory of the Russian Federation (Moscow: Office of the President of the Russian Federation, 1993).

35. U.S. Department of Energy, Quarterly Progress Report to Congress, 2nd and 3rd Quarters FY2008 (Washington DC: Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, 2008), 5.

36. U.S. Department of Energy, Analysis of the Total System Life Cycle Cost of the Civilian Radioactive Waste Management Program, Fiscal Year 2007, (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management [DOE / RW–0591], 2008), v.

37. Frank von Hippel, “Managing Spent Fuel in the United States: The Illogic of Reprocessing,” in Falling Behind: International Scrutiny of the Peaceful Atom, ed. Henry D. Sokolski (Carlisle pa: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army, 2008), 166.

38. Mark Holt, CRS Report for Congress: Civilian Nuclear Waste Disposal (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 7-5700, rl33461, June 22, 2011), 8.

39. U.S. Department of Energy, Quarterly Progress Report to Congress, 5.

40. Richard A. Muller, Physics for Presidents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 176.

41. National Cancer Institute, State Cancer Profiles (Washington DC: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010).

42. Muller, Physics for Presidents, 103.

43. Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V. Nesterenko, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

44. Other electrical generation was increasing as well, so it’s impossible to determine what portion was due to the increase in nuclear capacity.

45. California decoupled its utilities, and France has a carbon tax to help prevent a return to fossil fuels.

Re: Green Illusions, by Ozzie Zehner

PostPosted: Thu May 14, 2020 7:44 am
by admin
Part 2 of 3

5. The Hydrogen Zombie

1. Jerry Edgerton, “What You’ll Be Driving in 2016,” CBS News, January 14, 2010.

2. Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” boundary 35, no. 1 (2008); Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, “Unraveling the Great Hydrogen Hoax,” Nieman Reports (Summer 2004); Robert Zubrin, “The Hydrogen Hoax,” New Atlantis, no. 15 (Winter 2007).

3. Arnold Schwarzenegger, address to L.A. Auto Show (State of California, 2006), http://gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=4825.

4. National Energy Policy Development Group, National Energy Policy: Reliable, Affordable, and Environmentally Sound Energy for America’s Future (Washington DC: National Energy Policy Development Group, 2001).

5. National Energy Policy, 6–10.

6. U.S. Department of Energy, Toward a More Secure and Cleaner Energy Future for AmeriCA: A National Vision of America’s Transition to a Hydrogen Economy—To 2030 and Beyond (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2002).

7. U.S. Department of Energy, Fuel Cell Report to Congress (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2003).

8. California Hydrogen Highway Network, Hydrogen Production Methods and Environmental Impacts Fact Sheet (State of California, California Hydrogen Highway Network, 2007).

9. Martin Hultman, “Back to the Future: The Dream of a Perpetuum Mobile in the Atomic Society and the Hydrogen Economy,” Futures 41, no. 4 (2009).

10. Dave Levinthal, “Congressmen Lose Big Bucks in 2008, but Still Rank among Nation’s Richest,” November 4, 2009, Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.org.

11. U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Energy and Resources, U.S. House of Representatives, no. 109–261 (2006), 12.

12. Zubrin, “Hydrogen Hoax.”

13. Matthew Phenix, “Leno’s Best Joke in Years: The BMW Hydrogen 7,” wired Magazine Online, September 18, 2007.

14. Sunita Satyapal et al., “The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Hydrogen Storage Project: Progress Towards Meeting Hydrogen-Powered Vehicle Requirements,” Catalysis Today 120, nos. 3–4 (2007).

15. The fate of the Hindenburg may have been due to flammable paint, but hydrogen is shackled to the tragedy.

16. Joseph J. Romm, The Hype about Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate (Washington DC: Island Press, 2004).

17. Mark Jaccard, Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 67.

18. Jeff Wise, “The Truth about Hydrogen,” Popular Mechanics, November 1, 2006.

19. About seven hundred miles of hydrogen pipelines already crisscross the United States, but they cost about $1 million per mile to build. B. P. Somerday and C. San Marchi, “Effects of Hydrogen Gas on Steel Vessels and Pipelines,” in Materials for the Hydrogen Economy, ed. Russell H. Jones and George J. Thomas (Boca Raton FL: CRC Press, 2008).

20. California Hydrogen Highway Network, Renewable Hydrogen Stations in California (State of California, California Hydrogen Highway Network, 2005), 2.

21. Zubrin, “Hydrogen Hoax.”

22. Carmen Difiglio and Dolf Gielen, “Hydrogen and Transportation: Alternative Scenarios,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 12, no. 3 (2007).

23. Proponents argued that catalytic converters employed platinum without such bubbles.

24. Romm, Hype about Hydrogen, 162.

25. Wise, “Truth about Hydrogen.”

26. Webster as quoted in David Snow, “Fuel-Cell Stocks Not Powered Up,” wired Magazine Online, November 5, 2003. For the survey, see John Webster, John DeLucchi, and Alastair Nimmons, 2003 Fuel Cell Industry Survey (New York: PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2003).

27. As quoted in Snow, “Fuel-Cell Stocks Not Powered Up,” and in John Dobosz, “Fueling Speculation,” Forbes Newsletter Watch, October 9, 2002.

28. In 2010 the DOE relaunched a carbon sequestration plan, called Future- Gen 2.0, without the hydrogen component. David Biello, “‘Clean’ Coal Power Plant Canceled—Hydrogen Economy, Too,” Scientific American, February 6, 2008.

29. Office of the Chief Financial Officer, FY 2010 Congressional Budget Request, vol. 3 (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2009), 31, 62.

30. Steven Chu as quoted in David Biello, “R.I.P. Hydrogen Economy? Obama Cuts Hydrogen Car Funding,” Scientific American, May 8, 2009.

31. Robert Zubrin, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil (Amherst NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 23.

32. Hultman, “Back to the Future.”

33. Dvora Yanow states that a policy may “work symbolically through its enactment.” See Dvora Yanow, How Does a Policy Mean?: Interpreting Policy and Organizational Actions (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996).

34. Observation from Edward Dolnick. See Edward Dolnick, The Forger’s Spell (New York: Harper, 2008). This theoretical approach informed by: Robert L. Heilbroner, “Do Machines Make History,” Technology and Culture 8, no. 3 (1967); Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit from Each Other,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987); Thomas P. Hughes, “Technological Momentum,” in Does Technology Drive History? Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994); Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992); Daniel Sarewitz, Frontiers of Illusion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); J. M. Wetmore, “Amish Technology: Reinforcing Values and Building Community,” Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE 26, no. 2 (Summer 2007).

6. Conjuring Clean Coal

1. Richard A. Lovett, “Coal Mining Causing Earthquakes, Study Says,” National Geographic News, January 3, 2007; Christian D. Klose, “Geomechanical Modeling of the Nucleation Process of Australia’s 1989 m5.6 Newcastle Earthquake,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 256, nos. 3–4 (2007); Christian Klose, “Human-Triggered Earthquakes and Their Impacts on Human Security,” Nature Precedings, September 29, 2010; “Coal Mining in Germany: Small Earthquake in Saarland,” Economist, March 1, 2008.

2. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2010 (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2009).

3. Hugh Saddler, Chris Riedy, and Robert Passey, “Geosequestration: What Is It and How Much Can It Contribute to a Sustainable Energy Policy for Australia?” (Discussion Paper Number 72, Australia Institute, 2004), ix.

4. Mark Diesendorf, “Can Geosequestration Save the Coal Industry?” in Transforming Power: Energy, Environment, and Society in Conflict, ed. John Byrne, Noah Toly, and Leigh Glover (London: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 224.

5. Charles Duhigg, “Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways,” New York Times, October 12, 2009.

6. Diesendorf, “Can Geosequestration Save the Coal Industry?,” 227.

7. Margaret A. Palmer et al., “Mountaintop Mining Consequences,” Science 327, no. 5962 (2010).

8. As quoted in the radio news show with Amy Goodman, “Scientists Call for Ban on Mountaintop Removal,” Democracy Now!, January 8, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org.

9. Duhigg, “Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways”; Jeff Johnson, “Energy’s Hidden Cost,” Chemical and Engineering News 87, no. 44 (2009).

10. Laurie E. Winston, “Clean Coal Technology: Environmental Solution or Greenwashing?” (master’s thesis, Ohio University, 2009).

11. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, The Federal Water Pollution Control Act as Amended by the Clean Water Act, http://www.epa.gov.

12. Duhigg, “Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways.”

13. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Notice of Data Availability on the Disposal of Coal Combustion Wastes in Landfills and Surface Impoundments (Washington DC: EPA, 2007).

14. Diesendorf, “Can Geosequestration Save the Coal Industry?” 232.

15. “Dirty King Coal,” Economist, May 31, 2007.

16. John Deutch et al., The Future of Coal: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study (Cambridge MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007).

17. Klaus S. Lackner, “Climate Change: A Guide to CO2 Sequestration,” Science 300, no. 5626 (2003).

18. Diesendorf, “Can Geosequestration Save the Coal Industry?,” 237.

19. “Dirty King Coal,” Economist, May 31, 2007.

20. Walter Sullivan, “U.S. and French Experts Differ on Cameroon Gas Eruption,” New York Times, January 23, 1987.

21. The industry could avoid leak risks by mixing CO2 with widely available minerals to create bicarbonates, though this process is even more costly. See Lackner, “Climate Change: A Guide to CO2 Sequestration.”

22. Paleontologists blame ocean acidity for the mass extinction of the oceans at the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago. Marine biologists fear history could repeat itself rather soon in geological terms.

23. “Climate Change: Sour Times,” Economist, February 23, 2008.

24. Andrew H. Knoll et al., “Comparative Earth History and Late Permian Mass Extinction,” Science 273, no. 5274 (1996); Saddler, Riedy, and Passey, “Geosequestration.”

25. Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2006).

26. Repps Hudson, “Arch Coal Chief Keeps His Focus on Carbon,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 23, 2007.

27. Steven Mufson, “Coal Industry Plugs into the Campaign,” Washington Post, January 18, 2008.

28. Center for Responsive Politics, Annual Lobbying on Mining (Washington DC: Center for Responsive Politics, 2011), access date August 7, 2011, http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/induscode.

29. Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden, Presidential Campaign Fact Sheet, Barack Obama and Joe Biden: New Energy for America (Chicago: Obama for America, 2008).

30. U.S. Department of Energy, Report of the Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage (Washington DC: Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage, 2010).

31. Mufson, “Coal Industry Plugs into the Campaign”; Alice Ollstein, “The War against Mountaintop Mining Heats Up,” Capitol News Connection, September 8, 2010.

7. Hydropower, Hybrids, and other Hydras

1. Bloomberg New Energy Finance, “Selected Press Coverage,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance, accessed August 7, 2011, http://www.bnef .com

2. James Cameron, radio news show interview by Aaron Maté, “‘Avatar’ Director James Cameron Follows Box Office Success with Advocacy for Indigenous Struggles,” Democracy Now!, April 27, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org.

3. “The Ups and Downs of Dams: Small Projects Often Give Better Returns,” Economist, Special Report on Water, May 20, 2010.

4. Richard A. Muller, Physics for Presidents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 340.

5. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Geothermal Energy Production Wastes (Washington DC: EPA, 2010).

6. Bloomberg New Energy Finance, New Energy Finance Summit 2008 (London: New Energy Finance, 2008), 14.

7. Scott L. Montgomery, The Powers That Be: Global Energy for the Twenty- First Century and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 207; Daniel Clery, “Fusion Delayed: ITER Start Date Moved Again,” Science Insider, March 11, 2010.

8. Thermal coolers employ a heated salty brine to recover vaporized refrigerant rather than use an electric compressor pump.

9. Daniel J. Soeder and William M. Kappel, Water Resources and Natural Gas Production from the Marcellus Shale (Washington DC: USGS Fact Sheet 2009-3032, 2009).

10. Rebecca Renner, “Pennsylvania to Regulate Salt Discharges,” Environmental Science and Technology 43, no. 16 (2009).

11. Walter Hang, radio news show interview by Amy Goodman, “Watchdog: New York State Regulation of Natural Gas Wells Has Been ‘Woefully Insufficient for Decades,’” Democracy Now!, November 10, 2009, http://www.democracynow.org.

12. Walter Hang, interview by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!.

13. Most electric car batteries require lithium.

14. Richard Pike (Royal Society of Chemistry), “Electric Car Subsidies Do Not Serve Green Goals,” London Financial Times, April 27, 2009. See also “Highly Charged Motoring,” Economist, October 9, 2010.

15. General Motors, 2011 Volt, http://www.Chevrolet.com/Volt.

16. Pacific Gas and Electric, “Electric Vehicle Charging Rate and Economics,” accessed August 28, 2010, http://www.pge.com.

17. K. Parks, P. Denholm, and T. Markel, Costs and Emissions Associated with Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle Charging in the Xcel Energy Colorado Service Territory (Technical Report nrel/tp–640-41410, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, May 2007).

18. Muller, Physics for Presidents, 305.

19. This observation is adapted from the author’s statement in the Economist. See Ozzie Zehner, “On Far-Right Politicians, Guns in America, Child Benefit, Electric Cars, Swearing, Cleanliness,” Economist, October 21, 2010.

20. National Research Council, Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2010).

21. David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (New York: Riverhead, 2009), 104.

22. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Newbury Park CA: Sage, 1992).

8. The Alternative-Energy Fetish

1. Joe Dumit, “A Digital Image of the Category of the Person: Pet Scanning and Objective Self-Fashioning,” in Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies, ed. Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 1997); Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985); Bruno Latour, “Morality and Technology,” Theory, Culture, and Society 19, no. 5–6 (2002).

2. This chapter was informed by: Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas Parke Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989); Frank W. Geels, Technological Transitions and System Innovations: A Co-Evolutionary and Socio-Technical Analysis (Northhampton MA: Edward Elgar, 2005); Harro Van Lente and Arie Rip, “Expectations in Technological Developments: An Example of Prospective Structures to Be Filled by Agency,” in Getting Technologies Together: Studies in Making Sociotechnical Order, ed. Cornelis Disco and Barend Van Der Meulen (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998); Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, “Crash!: Nuclear Fuel Flasks and Anti-Misting Kerosene on Trial,” in The Golem at Large: What You Should Know About Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); W. Patrick McCray, “Will Small Be Beautiful? Making Policies for Our Nanotech Future,” History and Technology 21, no. 2 (2005); L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); John Rajchman, “Foucault’s Art of Seeing,” October 44 (Spring 1988): 88–117; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).

3. Ozzie Zehner, “The Solar Obsession: Symbolic Performance of Photovoltaic Energy in Media and Politics” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Washington dc, October 28, 2009).

4. D. Hallman, “Climate Change: Ethics, Justice, and Sustainable Community,” in Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans, ed. Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary R. Ruether (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 2000), 458; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Group USA, 2002); Aaron Norton and Ozzie Zehner, “Which Half Is Mommy?: Tetragametic Chimerism and Trans-Subjectivity,” Women’s Studies Quarterly (Winter 2008).

5. D. Cowdin, “The Moral Status of Otherkind in Christian Ethics,” in Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans, ed. Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary R. Ruether (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 2000); Curtis White, The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work (Sausalito CA: Polipoint Press, 2006); Douglas Ezzy, “Old Traditions and New Ages: Religions and Environments,” in Controversies in Environmental Sociology, ed. Rob White (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

6. Karl Marx observed: “Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production, and in changing their mode of production, in changing their way of earning a living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.” Karl Marx, Misère de la Philosophie (Paris and Brussels, 1847).

7. Timothy Weiskel, “Some Notes from Belshaz’zar’s Feast,” in The Greening of Faith: God, the Environment, and the Good Life, ed. John E. Carroll, Paul T. Brockelman, and Mary Westfall (Hanover NH: University Press of New England, 1997).

8. An excellent point made not by me but by Bill McKibben in his introduction to The Greening of Faith: God, the Environment, and the Good Life, ed. John E Carroll, Paul T. Brockelman, and Mary Westfall (Hanover NH: University Press of New England, 1997).

9. Martin Buber, I and Thou (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 11.

10. Traci Watson, “Senate Climate Bill Would Speed Emissions Reductions,” USA Today, September 30, 2009.

11. Daniel M. Cook et al., “Journalists and Conflicts of Interest in Science: Beliefs and Practices,” Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 9, no. 1 (2009).

12. Sharon Beder, “Moulding and Manipulating the News,” in Controversies in Environmental Sociology, ed. Rob White (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 210.

13. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010); Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?” in Climate Change, ed. Joseph F. DiMento and Pamela Doughman (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007); Naomi Oreskes, “You Can Argue with the Facts: A Political History of Climate Change” (paper presented at the Dissent in Science: Origins and Outcomes Workshop, University of California San Diego, March 3–4, 2008). 14. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 1995: A Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva, Switzerland: IPCC, 1995).

15. Oreskes, “You Can Argue with the Facts.”

16. “Poll: Americans See a Climate Problem,” Time Magazine, March 26, 2006.

17. Paul Farhi, “Liberal Media Watchdog: Fox News E-Mail Shows Network’s Slant on Climate Change,” Washington Post December 15, 2010.

18. This became an interest of pollsters starting around 2010. See Gallup Poll, March 4–7, 2010. The sample size was 1,014 adults nationwide.

19. Sharon Beder, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (Totnes, Devon, UK: Green Books, 2002).

20. Andrew Kohut et al., The Web: Alarming, Appealing, and a Challenge to Journalistic Values: Financial Woes Now Overshadow All Other Concerns for Journalists (Washington DC: The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2008), 5.

21. Kohut et al., The Web, 1.

22. Justin Lewis, Andrew Williams, and Bob Franklin, “A Compromised Fourth Estate?” Journalism Studies 9, no. 1 (2008); Steven Woloshin et al., “Press Releases by Academic Medical Centers: Not So Academic?” Annals of Internal Medicine 150, no. 9 (2009).

23. “Save Energy, Save Money, Save the Planet,” produced by Karla Murthy, interviews by David Brancaccio, now, March 28, 2008, http:// http://www.pbs.org.

24. M. R. Levy, “Learning from Television News,” in The Future of News: Television-Newspapers-Wire Services-News Magazines, ed. P. S. Cook, D. Gomery, and L. Lichty (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1992), 70.

25. Beder, “Moulding and Manipulating the News,” 215.

26. Beder, “Moulding and Manipulating the News,” 215.

27. David Domingo, “Interactivity in the Daily Routines of Online Newsrooms: Dealing with an Uncomfortable Myth,” Journal of Computer- Mediated Communication 13, no. 3 (2008); Pablo J. Boczkowski, News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2010).

28. Kohut et al., The Web, 8.

29. Kohut et al., The Web, 15–16.

30. Nikki Usher, “Goodbye to the News: How Out-of-Work Journalists Assess Enduring News Values and the New Media Landscape,” New Media and Society, May 4, 2010, http://nms.sagepub.com.

31. Simon Schama, The American Future: A History (New York: Harper- Collins, 2009), 307–8.

32. Aidan Davison, “Sustainable Technology: Beyond Fix and Fixation,” in Controversies in Environmental Sociology, ed. Rob White (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 136–37. Contains his longer chronology, which I have summarized in the next few paragraphs of the chapter.

33. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 217, as quoted in Davison, “Sustainable Technology.”

34. Schama, American Future, 311.

35. George Heaton, Robert Repetto, and Rodney Sobin, Transforming Technology: An Agenda for Environmentally Sustainable Growth in the 21st Century (Washington DC: World Resources Institute, 1991), vii, ix.

36. Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (New York: Little, Brown, 1999); William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002); Andrew W. Savitz and Karl Weber, The Triple Bottom Line: How Today’s Best-Run Companies Are Achieving Economic, Social, and Environmental Success—And How You Can Too (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).

37. Davison, “Sustainable Technology,” referring to United Nations, “Plan of Implementation,” in Report of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Geneva: United Nations Document a / conf.199/20*, June 18, 1998; reissued 2002), 13–20.

38. Davison, “Sustainable Technology,” 136.

39. Susan Leigh Star and James R Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 393.

40. See, for instance, Loet Leydesdorff and Iina Hellsten, “Measuring the Meaning of Words in Contexts: An Automated Analysis of Controversies About ‘Monarch Butterflies,’ ‘Frankenfoods,’ and ‘Stem Cells,’” Scientometrics 67, no. 2 (2006).

41. Perhaps my threshold for being convinced by the cornucopians is too high, but I will come back to this in chapter 10. For one famous counterargument, see Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

42. For example, as automotive cafe regulations tightened, drivers opted for larger vehicles, greater acceleration, and more features. National Research Council, Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2010).

43. I use “displaced externality” or “displaced side effects” to describe effects occurring at a different time or location (and therefore can frequently go unseen for some time).

44. Bruce Kochis, “On Lenses and Filters: The Role of Metaphor in Policy Theory,” Administrative Theory and Praxis 27, no. 1 (2005); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); J. Patrick Dobel, “The Rhetorical Possibilities of ‘Home’ in Homeland Security,” Administration and Society 42, no. 5 (September 2010): 479–503.

45. National Research Council, Hidden Costs of Energy.

46. Lawrence Lessig, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

47. Some scholars attribute the term “trained incapacity” to Thorstein Veblen, and while he does evoke the concept, he does not seem to use the phrase itself, which may have come from Randolph Bourne. It is similar to John Dewey’s concept of “occupational psychosis.” Robert K. Merton, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Social Forces 18, no. 4 (1940); Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change (Los Altos CA: Hermes Publications, 1954); Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in AmeriCA: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (New York: Huebsch, 1918).

48. This is a play on Daniel Moynihan’s “There are some mistakes it takes a PhD to make.”

49. Deborah G. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore, Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2009); Robert L. Heilbroner, “Do Machines Make History?” Technology and Culture 8, no. 3 (1967).

9. The First Step

1. Leigh Glover, “From Love-Ins to Logos: Charting the Demise of Renewable Energy as a Social Movement,” in Transforming Power: Energy, Environment, and Society in Conflict, ed. John Byrne, Noah Toly, and Leigh Glover (London: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 261.

2. See Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (London: Picador, 1999).

3. Fossil-fuel prices are exogenous, meaning that fossil-fuel prices will drop (all else being equal) if nations transfer demand to renewables through subsidies, regulations, and so on. In a context without taxes or other measures in place to artificially increase the price of fossil fuels, their demand should grow due to the decreased cost. In this case, alternative energy can spur fossil-fuel use rather than displace it. See also Michael Hoel, “Bush Meets Hotelling: Effects of Improved Renewable Energy Technology on Greenhouse Gas Emissions” (Working Paper 262, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, 2009; this working paper site is hosted by the Berkeley Electronic Press at http://www .bepress.com); Hans-Werner Sinn, “Public Policies against Global Warming: A Supply Side Approach,” International Tax and Public Finance 15, no. 4 (2008); Horace Herring, “Is Energy Efficiency Environmentally Friendly?” Energy and Environment 11, no. 3 (2000); Hans-Werner Sinn, “Das Grüne Paradoxon: Warum Man Das Angebot Bei Der Klimapolitik Nicht Vergessen Darf ” [The green paradox: Why we can’t forget the supply side of climate policy], Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik (Special Issue) 9 (2008): 109–42; Reyer Gerlagh, “Too Much Oil,” cesifo Economic Studies 57, no. 1 (2011): 79–102; Julien Daubanes and André Grimaud, “Taxation of a Polluting Non-Renewable Resource in the Heterogeneous World,” Environmental and Resource Economics 47 (2010): 567–88.

4. William S. Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines (1865; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1906).

5. Rocky Mountain Institute, “Beating the Energy Efficiency Paradox,” Treehugger, July 10, 2008.

6. Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, Climate: Making Sense and Making Money (Old Snowmass CO: Rocky Mountain Institute, 1997).

7. Labor costs are typically twenty-five times higher than energy costs, and labor cost savings can end up dwarfing energy cost savings. Steve Sorrell and Horace Herring, Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Consumption: The Rebound Effect (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 240; Ozzie Zehner, “Light-Emitting Diodes,” in Green Technology, ed. Paul Robbins, Dustin Mulvaney, and J. Geoffrey Golson (London: Sage, 2011).

8. David Elliott, series editor preface to Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Consumption: The Rebound Effect, ed. David Elliott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xi.

9. Simon Schama, The American Future: A History (New York: Harper- Collins, 2009), 359.

10. Sam Smith once said he was a member of the search party. The idea has stuck with me. Sam Smith, Why Bother?: Getting a Life in a Locked- Down Land (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001).

11. Nuclear power and its risks may be a part of our mix for a long time. The resources are very large, especially if processes to extract uranium from seawater proceed as expected.

12. Glover, “From Love-Ins to Logos,” 263.

13. Sohbet Karbuz, “The U.S. Military Oil Consumption,” Energy Bulletin, May 20, 2007.

14. John Grin, “Reflexive Modernisation as a Governance Issue, Or: Designing and Shaping Re-Structuration,” in Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development, ed. Jan-Peter Voss, Dierk Bauknecht, and René Kemp (Northhampton MA: Edward Elgar, 2006); Charles E. Lindblom, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990); John Grin and Henk Graaf, “Implementation as Communicative Action,” Policy Sciences 29, no. 4 (1996).

15. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Consumption, Price, and Expenditure Estimates: State Energy Data System (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2010), http://205.254.135.24/state/seds/.

16. An admittedly narrow assessment. See Gallup-Healthways, “State and Congressional District Well-Being Reports,” accessed July 15, 2011, http://www.well-beingindex.com.

17. David L. Goldblatt, Sustainable Energy Consumption and Society: Personal, Technological, or Social Change? (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2005).

18. Some will disagree, saying my proposals do require sacrifice. And that’s fine (I don’t expect everyone to endorse every idea I propose). For example, zoning changes can spur walkable neighborhoods. Some might consider living in such neighborhoods as a sacrifice, whereas others see it as a benefit. Everyone needn’t move to one to achieve an impact.

10. Women’s Rights

1. Ozzie Zehner, “Population and Overpopulation,” in Green Technology, ed. Paul Robbins, Dustin Mulvaney, and J. Geoffrey Golson (London: Sage, 2011); World Bank and United Nations Population Fund, “Family Planning and Reproductive Health Have Fallen Off Global Development Radar—World Bank, UNFPA,” press release, June 30, 2009, http://www.unfpa.org.

2. The data for infant mortality are similar. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, “The World Factbook: United States,” in The World Factbook (Washington DC: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 2008).

3. Jared Diamond, “Easter’s End,” Discover, August 1995.

4. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2005); Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004).

5. Jared Diamond, “The Ends of the World as We Know Them,” New York Times, January 1, 2005.

6. Albert A. Bartlett, The Essential Exponential! For the Future of Our Planet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

7. From 680 to 2,872 years at present consumption levels to just 205 to 339 years if the population grows at 1 percent. See Albert A. Bartlett, “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” (sixty-four-minute lecture, University of Nebraska, 2002), DVD.

8. David Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Tim Forsyth, Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science (London: Routledge, 2003).

9. David. S. Battisti and Rosamond L. Naylor, “Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat,” Science 323, no. 5911 (2009).

10. N. V. Fedoroff et al., “Radically Rethinking Agriculture for the 21st Century,” Science 327, no. 5967 (2010).

11. Wolfram Schlenkera and Michael J. Roberts, “Nonlinear Temperature Effects Indicate Severe Damages to U.S. Crop Yields under Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 37 (2009).

12. Wright, Short History of Progress, 131–32.

13. San Francisco population: 809,000. World population is growing by about eighty-two million per year. See Population Reference Bureau, “World Population Highlights: Key Findings from PRB’s 2008 World Population Data Sheet,” in Population Bulletin (Washington DC: Population Reference Bureau, 2008).

14. U.S. Census Bureau, International Data Base: World Population: 1950– 2050 (Washington DC: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, 2009).

15. “Zogby Poll: Most Believe Humans Will Someday Colonize the Moon,” May 3, 2007, http://www.zogby.com.

16. As quoted in “The End of Retirement,” Economist, June 27, 2009.

17. This point is made by Bill McKibben, “Waste Not Want Not,” Mother Jones, May/June 2009, 50.

18. Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

19. David Willey, “An Optimum World Population,” Medicine, Conflict, and Survival 16, no. 1 (2000).

20. Jim Merkel, Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth (Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers, 2003), 183.

21. Joel E. Cohen, “Human Population Grows Up,” in A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice and the Environmental Challenge, ed. Laurie Mazur (Washington DC: Island Press, 2009).

22. Joel E. Cohen, How Many People Can the Earth Support? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

23. Cohen, “Human Population Grows Up,” 34.

24. David Pimentel and Marcia Pimentel, “The Real Perils of Human Population Growth,” Free Inquiry, April/May 2009; U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, “The World Factbook: World,” in The World Factbook (Washington DC: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 2009).

25. Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 ad: Essays in Macro-Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2007); U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, “World Factbook: World.”

26. Jim Oeppen and James W. Vaupel, “Broken Limits to Life Expectancy,” Science 296, no. 5570 (2002).

27. Economist, “End of Retirement.”

28. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999); Jonathan Weiner, Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality (New York: Ecco, 2010).

29. Robert Engelman, More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want (Washington DC: Island Press, 2008), 234.

30. Richard A. Melanson, American Foreign Policy since the Vietnam War (Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005), 195.

31. United Nations, Social Aspects of Sustainable Development in the United States of America (Geneva: United Nations, 1997). This information is based on the United States of America’s submission to the 5th Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development.

32. Mona L. Hymel, “The Population Crisis: The Stork, the Plow, and the IRS,” North Carolina Law Review 77, no. 13 (1998).

33. “A Special Report on Aging Populations,” Economist, June 27, 2009, 4–5.

34. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Sierra Club–Ballantine Books, 1968); Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, “Is the Population Bomb Finally Exploding?” Free Inquiry 29, no. 3 (2009): 32.

35. David Brooks, “The Power of Posterity,” New York Times, July 27, 2009.

36. David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2.

37. Henning Bohn and Charles Stuart, “Population under a Cap on Greenhouse Gas Emissions” (CESIFO Working Paper no. 3046, 2010); Walter Laqueur, The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009); Paul Demeny, “Population Policy and the Demographic Transition: Performance, Prospects, and Options,” Population and Development Review 37, issue supplement 1 (2011): 249–74.

38. Henrik Urdal, “A Clash of Generations? Youth Bulges and Political Violence,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2006); Henrik Urdal, “Population, Resources, and Political Violence: A Subnational Study of India, 1956–2002,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 4 (2008).

39. Richard Jackson and Neil Howe, The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2008); Economist, “A Special Report on Aging Populations.”

40. At one time even the White House was open for citizens to walk in and share their concerns with the president or his staff directly.

41. As quoted in Albert A. Bartlett, “Democracy Cannot Survive Overpopulation,” Population and Environment 22, no. 1 (2000): 65.

42. Malcolm Potts and Martha Campbell, “Sex Matters,” Foreign Policy July/August 2009, 30.

43. Steven R. Machlin and Frederick Rohde (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality), Health Care Expenditures for Uncomplicated Pregnancies (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2007); U.S. Department of Agriculture, Expenditures on Children by Families, report released August 4, 2009, available at http://www .cnpp.usda.org.

44. Troy Onink, “The Financial Aid Game,” Forbes Magazine, March 10, 2009.

45. Bartlett, “Democracy Cannot Survive Overpopulation,” 70.

46. Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 378.

47. Statistical Center of Iran, Estimation of Fertility Level and Pattern in Iran: Using the Own-Children Method, 1972–1996 [in Persian] (Tehran: Statistical Center of Iran, 2000).

48. These statistics include unsafe abortion procedures. Mary Kimani, “Investing in the Health of Africa’s Mothers,” Africa Renewal 21, no. 4 (2008).

49. John Guillebaud and Pip Hayes, “Population Growth and Climate Change,” Free Inquiry, April/May 2009.

50. Betsy Hartmann and Elizabeth Barajas-Román, “The Population Bomb Is Back—With a Global Warming Twist,” Women in Action no. 2 (August 1, 2009).

51. Elinor Ostrom, “A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change” (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper wps 5095, October 2009); Emily Boyd, “Governing the Clean Development Mechanism: Global Rhetoric versus Local Realities in Carbon Sequestration Projects,” Environment and Planning 41, no. 10 (2009).

52. Betsy Hartmann, “10 Reasons Why Population Control Is Not the Solution to Global Warming,” Different Takes 57 (2009); Amara Perez, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (Cambridge MA: South End Press, 2007).

53. Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control (Joanna Cotler Books, 1987), 301.

54. Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum and Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, “Taking the Heat Out of the Population and Climate Debate,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 87 (2009): 807.

55. Laurie Mazur and Ian Angus, “Women’s Rights, Population, and Climate Change: The Debate Continues,” Climate and Capitalism, March 7, 2010.

56. Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, 303.

57. Frances Kissling, “Reconciling Differences,” in A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge, ed. Laurie Mazur (Washington DC: Island Press, 2009). Acronyms edited for clarity. 58. B. Segal, “Food as a Weapon: Bucharest, Rome, and the Politics of Starvation,” Concerned Demography 4, no. 2 (1974); “A Special Report on Water,” Economist, May 22, 2010, 17.

59. United Nations, “Afghanistan,” UNICEF’s online database, Information by Country and Programme, accessed March 2, 2010, http://www .unicef.org/infobycountry/afghanistan_statistics.html.

60. Population Council, Transitions to Adulthood: Child Marriage/Married Adolescents (New York: Population Council, 2009).

61. Population Council, State Department Reauthorization Bill to Prevent Child Marriage, Expand Opportunities for Girls (New York: Population Council, 2009).

62. Barry Bearak, “The Bride Price,” New York Times Magazine, July 9, 2006.

63. The lifetime risk of maternal death in Afghanistan is one in eight. See United Nations, “Afghanistan,” http://www.unicef.org.

64. William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin, 2007); Leo Bryant et al., “Climate Change and Family Planning: Least-Developed Countries Define the Agenda,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 87, no. 11 (2009).

65. United Nations Population Fund, “Gender Equality: A Cornerstone of Development,” United Nations Population Fund, accessed July 15, 2011, http://www.unfpa.org.

66. Ehrlich and Ehrlich, “Is the Population Bomb Finally Exploding?”

67. U.S. Census Bureau’s revised estimate is 420 million. See also “A Ponzi Scheme That Works,” Economist, December 19, 2009.

68. Guttmacher Institute, Teenagers’ Sexual and Reproductive Health: Developed Countries (New York: Alan Guttmacher Institute, 2001).

69. Amy O. Tsui, Raegan McDonald-Mosley, and Anne E. Burke, “Family Planning and the Burden of Unintended Pregnancies,” Epidemiologic Reviews 32, no. 1 (2010).

70. Jonathan D. Klein, “Adolescent Pregnancy: Current Trends and Issues,” Pediatrics 116, no. 1 (2005). On depression, see John Guillebaud, Youth Quake: Population, Fertility and Environment in the 21st Century (Manchester UK: Optimum Population Trust, 2007).

71. Klein, “Adolescent Pregnancy.”

72. The statistics indicate 6,396 births to ten- to fourteen-year-old girls, 138,943 births to fifteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and 296,493 births to eighteen- to nineteen-year-old girls. Joyce A. Martin et al., “Births: Final Data for 2006,” in National Vital Statistics Reports (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009).

73. Guttmacher Institute, Teenagers’ Sexual and Reproductive Health: Developed Countries.

74. Guttmacher Institute, Teenagers’ Sexual and Reproductive Health: Developed Countries.

75. James Trussell, “The Cost of Unintended Pregnancy in the United States,” Contraception 75, no. 3 (2007).

76. Unintended pregnancies lead to roughly forty-two million induced abortions and about thirty-four million unintended births annually. Chicago population: 2.8 million. J. Joseph Speidel, Cynthia C. Harper, and Wayne C. Shields, “The Potential of Long-Acting Reversible Contraception to Decrease Unintended Pregnancy,” Contraception 78, no. 3 (2008): 197–200.

77. The Kaiser Family Foundation and ABC Television, The Kaiser Family Foundation and ABC Television 1998 National Survey of Americans on Sex and Sexual Health (Menlo Park CA: The Kaiser Family Foundation and ABC Television, 1998).

78. Guillebaud, “Youth Quake,” 14–15.

79. James Trussell, “Birth Control Is Cheaper Than Unintended Births,” New Mexico Daily Lobo, March 30, 2007.

80. Whitty, “Last Taboo”; Murtaugh and Schlax, “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals”; David Wheeler and Dan Hammer, The Economics of Population Policy for Carbon Emissions Reduction in Developing Countries (Washington DC: Center for Global Development, 2010).

81. I don’t condone this frame, especially the emphasis on “mothers” rather than “couples.” Paul A. Murtaugh and Michael G. Schlax, “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals,” Global Environmental Change 19, no. 1 (2009).

82. Julia Whitty, “The Last Taboo,” Mother Jones, May/June 2010.

83. Assumes preventing 400,000 births annually at 327 million BTU/person/ year. Energy Information Administration, Energy Consumption, Expenditures, and Emissions Indicators, 1949–2008 (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, 2009).

84. Assumes $4,340/installed kilowatt, annual production of one thousand kilowatt-hours output per year per installed kilowatt of capacity (typical New York State output), with panels replaced three times in a human lifespan. Does not include aging degradation, soiling losses, maintenance, repairs, and resource scarcity effects. New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, “Power Naturally,” http://www.powernaturally.org; “Solar Module Price Highlights: November 2009,” Solarbuzz, http://www.solarbuzz.com.

85. Judith S. Musick, Young, Poor, and Pregnant: The Psychology of Teenage Motherhood (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).

86. Guttmacher Institute, Teenagers’ Sexual and Reproductive Health: Developed Countries.

87. Amy Schalet, “Sexual Subjectivity Revisited: The Significance of Relationships in Dutch and American Girls’ Experiences of Sexuality,” Gender and Society 24, no. 3 (2010): 310–11, 325.

88. Save the Children, State of the World’s Mothers 2009: Investing in the Early Years (Westport ct: Save the Children, 2009), 6–7.

Re: Green Illusions, by Ozzie Zehner

PostPosted: Thu May 14, 2020 7:47 am
by admin
Part 3 of 3

11. Improving Consumption

1. Annika Carlsson-Kanyama, Marianne P. Ekström, and Helena Shanahan, “Food and Life Cycle Energy Inputs: Consequences of Diet and Ways to Increase Efficiency,” Ecological Economics 44, nos. 2–3 (2003).

2. Ozzie Zehner, “Unintended Consequences,” in Green Technology, ed. Paul Robbins, Dustin Mulvaney, and J. Geoffrey Golson (London: Sage, 2011); David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (New York: Riverhead, 2009), 38.

3. Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 186.

4. Bess, Light-Green Society, 187.

5. John Elkington, Julia Hailes, and Joel Makower, The Green Consumer (New York: Viking, 1990).

6. Joel Makower, “Industrial Strength Solution,” Mother Jones, May/ June 2009, 60.

7. Scot Case, It’s Too Easy Being Green: Defining Fair Green Marketing Practices (Washington DC: United States Congress: Energy and Commerce Panel, 2009).

8. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond and Briggs, 1973).

9. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss, Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2005), 36.

10. Dale Kunkel, “Children and Television Advertising,” in Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer (London: Sage, 2001); Victor C. Strasburger, “Children and TV Advertising: Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide,” Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics 22, no. 3 (2001).

11. Thomas N. Robinson et al., “Effects of Fast Food Branding on Young Children’s Taste Preferences,” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 161, no. 8 (2007). See also Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2004).

12. Robinson et al., “Effects of Fast Food Branding.”

13. Aaron Norton, interview with the author, February 10, 2011.

14. David A. Kessler, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite (New York: Rodale, 2009); Michelle M. Mello, Eric B. Rimm, and David M. Studdert, “The Mclawsuit: The Fast- Food Industry and Legal Accountability for Obesity,” Health Affairs 22, no. 6 (2003); William E. Kovacic et al., Marketing Food to Children and Adolescents (Washington DC: Federal Trade Commission, 2008).

15. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1994); Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999).

16. Schor, Born to Buy, 83.

17. Valley Lake Girl Scouts, “Free and Fun Field Trips,” www.valley lakegirlscouts.org.

18. Schor, Born to Buy.

19. Douglas Holt as quoted in Schor, Born to Buy, 48–49.

20. Schor, Born to Buy, 100–101.

21. Schor, Born to Buy, 117.

22. Adam Koval as quoted in Schor, Born to Buy, 110.

23. Adam Koval as quoted in Schor, Born to Buy, 186.

24. Author interview used with permission, February 5, 2010. Name withheld by request.

25. In 2009, twelve thousand Botox injections were administered to kids between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. Peggy Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).

26. Keith Suter, Global Order and Global Disorder: Globalization and the Nation-State (Westport ct: Praeger, 2003), 73.

27. Schor, Born to Buy, 167.

28. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899).

29. Hamilton and Denniss, Affluenza, 178.

30. Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2002), 59.

31. From the foreword by Richard M. Ryan, in Kasser, High Price of Materialism, xi.

32. Robert H. Frank, “Post-Consumer Prosperity: Finding New Opportunities Amid the Economic Wreckage,” American Prospect, April 2009.

33. U.S. Census Bureau, Median and Average Square Feet of Floor Area in New One-Family Houses Completed by Location (Washington DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).

34. Jon Mooallem, “The Self-Storage Self,” New York Times Magazine, September 20, 2009; Gail Steketee and Randy Frost, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (New York: Mariner Books, 2011).

35. Frank, “Post-Consumer Prosperity.”

36. Hamilton and Denniss, Affluenza, 90.

37. To find out where you rank, visit: http://www.globalrichlist.com.

38. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Ecco, 2003); Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage, 2007).

39. Laura Novak, “For-Profit Crusade against Junk Mail,” New York Times, September 6, 2007.

40. Jim Ford, Junk Mail’s Impact on Global Warming (San Francisco: Forest Ethics, 2009).

41. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Municipal Solid Waste in the United States (Washington DC: EPA Office of Solid Waste, EPA530- r–08-010, 2008), 84.

42. Jonathan Levine and Lawrence D. Frank, “Transportation and Land- Use Preferences and Residents’ Neighborhood Choices: The Sufficiency of Compact Development in the Atlanta Region,” Transportation 34, no. 2 (2007); Daniel J. Benjamin et al., “Do People Seek to Maximize Happiness? Evidence from New Surveys,” Journal of Economic Literature (forthcoming); Gary Pivo and Jeffrey Fisher, The Walkability Premium in Commercial Real Estate Investments (University of Arizona Responsible Property Investing Center and Indiana University Benecki Center for Real Estate Studies, 2010); Michael Duncan, “The Impact of Transit-Oriented Development on Housing Prices in San Diego, California,” Urban Studies (forthcoming).

43. Henry Samuel, “Millionaire Gives Away Fortune That Made Him Miserable,” Daily Telegraph, February 8, 2010.

44. John Browne, Beyond Business: An Inspirational Memoir from a Visionary Leader (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010).

45. Michelle R. Nelson, Mark A. Rademacher, and Hye-Jin Paek, “Downshifting Consumer = Upshifting Citizen? An Examination of a Local Freecycle Community,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611, no. 1 (2007); Hannah Salwen and Kevin Salwen, The Power of Half: One Family’s Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back (New York: Mariner Books, 2011).

46. Pink argues that traditional systems of monetary reward are harmful motivation killers. Paying blood donors ends up reducing the pool of people willing to give blood. Firms paying large bonuses are prone to reckless behavior and risk taking by managers. Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead, 2009).

47. Hamilton and Denniss, Affluenza, 188.

48. Dale Kunkel et al., Report of the APA Task Force on Advertising and Children (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2004).

49. Martin Caraher, Jane Landon, and Kath Dalmeny, “Television Advertising and Children: Lessons from Policy Development,” Public Health Nutrition 9, no. 5 (2007); Mary Story and Simone French, “Food Advertising and Marketing Directed at Children and Adolescents in the U.S.,” International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 1, no. 1 (2004).

50. Karen Pine and Avril Nash, “Dear Santa: The Effects of Television Advertising on Young Children,” International Journal of Behavioral Development 26, no. 6 (2002): 529.

51. Kunkel et al., “Report of the APA Task Force.”

52. Kunkel et al., “Report of the APA Task Force,” 20, 22–23.

53. C. A. Adebamowo et al., “Milk Consumption and Acne in Teenaged Boys,” Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology 58, no. 5 (2008); F. W. Danby, “Acne and Milk, the Diet Myth, and Beyond,” Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology 52, no. 2 (2005).

54. Commercial Alert, “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” http://www.commer cialalert.org; Schor, Born to Buy.

55. Lawrence J. Schweinhart, “How the Highscope Perry Preschool Study Grew: A Researcher’s Tale,” HighScope, http://www.highscope.org.

56. See http://www.edibleschoolyard.org.

57. Laurence S. Seidman, The USA Tax: A Progressive Consumption Tax (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997).

58. This would require a payment system to help poorer people. Economist Robert Frank recommends linking consumption taxes to economic activity. Frank, “Post-Consumer Prosperity.” See also Jonathan Barry Forman, Making America Work (Washington DC: The Urban Institute, 2006), 146.

59. Virginia Spitler et al., Hazard Screening Report: Packaging and Containers for Household Products (Washington DC: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, 2005).

60. PV probably does not offset coal-fired power production in the United States (see chapter 9 regarding the boomerang effect). But if it did, the nation’s 1,256 megawatts of PV capacity in 2009 (a solar industry estimate) with a capacity factor of 14 percent would produce about a third the output of a single five-hundred-megawatt coal-fired power plant. If we accept Ford’s (2009) estimate that junk mail yields the CO2 of eleven five-hundred-megawatt coal-fired plants with a capacity factor of 73.6 percent (see chapter 2, figure 5), the carbon difference would be greater than twenty-three. The energy impact of “no thanks” stickers would be less than twenty-three but still many times larger than the nation’s photovoltaic impact. See Ford, Junk Mail’s Impact on Global Warming; Energy Information Administration, Average Capacity Factors by Energy Source, 1996 through 2007, U.S. Department of Energy, http://www.eia.DOE.gov.

61. Simon Kuznets, National Income, 1929–32, 73rd Cong., 2nd sess., Senate document no. 124, 1934, 7.

62. Breakdown: 29.4 cents for military operations, 7.9 cents to service military debt, and 3.8 cents for veteran’s benefits. National Priorities Project, Interactive Tax Chart, National Priorities Project, accessed August 8, 2011, http://www.nationalpriorities.org.

63. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, radio news show interview with Amy Goodman on Afghanistan War, “We ’re Acting Like a Latter Day Version of the Roman Empire,” Democracy Now!, December 2, 2009, http:// www.democracynow.org.

64. Author interview, name withheld by request, July 29, 2010.

65. Most would pay for themselves in energy and cash savings.

66. See, for instance, Peter Dauvergne, The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2008), 133–68.

67. Michael Brower and Warron Leon, The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999).

68. Worldwide, about a third of greenhouse-gas emissions arise from land use changes made for ranching and crop production. Susan Subak, “Global Environmental Costs of Beef Production,” Ecological Economics 30, no. 1 (1999); Alex Avery and Dennis Avery, “Beef Production and Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Environmental Health Perspectives 116, no. 9 (2008); Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report ed. R. K. Pachauri and A. Reisinger (Geneva: IPCC, 2007).

69. H. Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (Rome: United Nations FAO/LEAD, 2006).

70. Timothy J. Key, Gwyneth K. Davey, and Paul N. Appleby, “Health Benefits of a Vegetarian Diet,” Proceedings of the Nutrition Society 58 (1999); Fu et al., “Effects of Long-Term Vegetarian Diets on Cardiovascular Autonomic Functions in Healthy Postmenopausal Women,” American Journal of Cardiology 97, no. 3 (2006); Jane Hart, “The Health Benefits of a Vegetarian Diet,” Alternative and Complementary Therapies 15, no. 2 (2009): 64.

71. Ubuntu is ranked one of the best vegetarian restaurants in the United States. It has had two head chefs, neither vegetarian. Annet C. Hoek, Will Novel Protein Foods Beat Meat?: Consumer Acceptance of Meat Substitutes— A Multidisciplinary Research Approach (Wageningen Netherlands: Wageningen University, 2010); G. E. Varner, “In Defense of the Vegan Ideal: Rhetoric and Bias in the Nutrition Literature,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 7, no. 1 (1994); C. R. Gale et al., “IQ in Childhood and Vegetarianism in Adulthood: 1970 British Cohort Study,” BMJ 334, no. 7587 (2007).

12. The Architecture of Community

1. Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 622.

2. James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Touchstone, 1994); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Scott W. Allard and Benjamin Roth, Strained Suburbs: The Social Service Challenges of Rising Suburban Poverty, in the Metropolitan Opportunity Series (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2010).

3. Allard and Roth, Strained Suburbs; Arthur C. Nelson et al., A Guide to Impact Fees and Housing Affordability (Island Press: Washington DC, 2008).

4. Mark C. Childs, Parking Spaces: A Design, Implementation, and Use Manual for Architects, Planners, and Engineers (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1999).

5. C. McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

6. Childs, Parking Spaces.

7. M. McClintock, Street Traffic Control (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1925).

8. “The Connected Car,” Economist Technology Quarterly, June 6, 2009, 18.

9. South Coast Air Quality Management District, aqmd Fact Sheet: Study of Air Pollution Levels inside Vehicles (Research Triangle Park nc: California Air Resources Board, 1999).

10. Alan Pisarski, Commuting in America III: The Third National Report on Commuting Patterns and Trends (Washington DC: Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, 2006).

11. Kalle Lasn, “Culture Jamming,” in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

12. Cristina Milesi et al., “Mapping and Modeling the Biogeochemical Cycling of Turf Grasses in the United States,” Environmental Management 36, no. 3 (2005).

13. Richard V. Pouyat, Ian D. Yesilonis, and Nancy E. Golubiewski, “A Comparison of Soil Organic Carbon Stocks between Residential Turf Grass and Native Soil,” Urban Ecosystems 12, no. 1 (2009): 46; Elizabeth Kolbert, “Turf War,” New Yorker, July 21, 2008.

14. See June Fletcher, “Giving up on the Outdoors,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2007.

15. David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (New York: Riverhead, 2009), 191.

16. See Michael Leccese, Charter of the New Urbanism, ed. Kathleen Mc- Cormick (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).

17. Thomas Sieverts, Cities without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt (London: Spon Press, 2003), x.

18. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, trans. Henry Reeve (London: Saunders and Otley, 1840), 622.

19. Modified “lets” to “rents,” from de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

20. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 622.

21. Simon Schama, The American Future: A History (New York: Harper- Collins, 2009), 304.

22. See Robert W. Burchell, Sprawl Costs: Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development (Washington DC: Island Press, 2005).

23. M. J. Lindstrom and H. Bartling, Suburban Sprawl: Culture, Theory, and Politics (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Susan Okie, Fed Up!: Winning the War against Childhood Obesity (Washington DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2005); Roger Silverstone, Visions of Suburbia (London: Routledge, 1997); Putnam, Bowling Alone.

24. Allard and Roth, Strained Suburbs; Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll, Job Sprawl and the Suburbanization of Poverty, in the Metropolitan Opportunity Series (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2010).

25. Richard M. Haughey, Higher-Density Development: Myth and Fact (Washington DC: Urban Land Institute, 2005); Brett Hulsey, Sprawl Costs Us All (Madison WI: Sierra Club, 1996).

26. Robert Lewis, ed. Manufacturing Suburbs: Building Work and the Home on the Metropolitan Fringe (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).

27. Judson Welliver, “Detroit, the Motor-Car Metropolis,” Munsey’s (1919), 655.

28. Hardy Green, The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).

29. Arthur C. Nelson, Julian C. Juergensmeyer, James C. Nicholas, and Liza K. Bowles, A Guide to Impact Fees and Housing Affordability (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2008).

30. Lindstrom and Bartling, Suburban Sprawl, 110.

31. Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Kiril Stanitov and Brenda Case Scheer, Suburban Form (New York: Routledge, 2004).

32. Curtis White, The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves (San Francisco: Harper, 2004).

33. Owen, Green Metropolis, 1.

34. Owen, Green Metropolis, 3–4.

35. Daniel J. Benjamin et al., “Do People Seek to Maximize Happiness? Evidence from New Surveys,” Journal of Economic Literature (forthcoming).

36. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).

37. Owen, Green Metropolis, 29.

38. Why stairs and not elevators? James Howard Kunstler has said, “Oddly, the main reason we’re done with skyscrapers is not because of the electric issues or heating-cooling issues per se, but because they will never be renovated! They are one-generation buildings. We will not have the capital to renovate them—and all buildings eventually require renovation! We likely won’t have the fabricated modular materials they require, either—everything from the manufactured sheet-rock to the silicon gaskets and sealers needed to keep the glass curtain walls attached.” James Howard Kunstler as quoted in Kerry Trueman, “James Howard Kunstler: The Old American Dream Is a Nightmare,” Grist, March 9, 2011.

39. The 2008 and 2009 automotive bailouts could have provided every American with a bicycle and a comprehensive network of bike paths throughout the entire nation extensive enough to cover 90 percent of all trips. Ozzie Zehner, “Three Visions for Detroit,” Forbes, December 4, 2008.

40. Frances Willard, A Wheel within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, with Some Reflections by the Way (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1895), 11.

41. John Pucher and John L. Renne, “Socioeconomics of Urban Travel: Evidence from the 2001 NHTS,” Transportation Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2003).

42. John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra, “Promoting Safe Walking and Cycling to Improve Public Health: Lessons from the Netherlands and Germany,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 9 (2003): 1511.

43. Steven Miller, “Why Health Care Reform Should Be a Transportation Issue (and visa [sic] versa),” The Public Way (blog), September 14, 2009, http://blog.livablestreets.info/. Countries with more bikes on their streets also have lower obesity levels. David R. Bassett et al., “Walking, Cycling, and Obesity Rates in Europe, North America, and Australia,” Journal of Physical Activity and Health 5, no. 6 (2008).

44. Colin D. Mathers et al., “Estimates of Healthy Life Expectancy for 191 Countries in the Year 2000: Methods and Results” (discussion paper as part of the Global Programme on Evidence for Health Policy, World Health Organization, 2001); National Institute on Aging, Exercise and Physical Activity: Your Everyday Guide from the National Institute on Aging (Washington DC: U.S. National Institutes of Health, 2009).

45. Pucher and Dijkstra, “Promoting Safe Walking and Cycling,” 1510.

46. There were 1,338 cyclist deaths in Germany in 1980 and 425 in 2007. Bundesanstalt für Strassenwesen, International Traffic and Accident Data (Bergisch Gladbach, Germany: Bundesanstalt für Strassenwesen [Federal Highway Research Institute], 2009).

47. There were 1,003 cyclist deaths in the United States in 1975 and 716 in 2008. National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, “Traffic Safety Facts,” in dot hs 811 156 (Washington DC: United States Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, 2009); Pucher and Dijkstra, “Promoting Safe Walking and Cycling.”

48. Deborah A. Hubsmith, Safe Routes to School National Partnership (Washington DC: Testimony for the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, concerning transportation bill safetea-lu, October 7, 2007, 110th Cong.).

49. Hubsmith, Safe Routes.

50. List quoted directly from Pucher and Dijkstra, “Promoting Safe Walking and Cycling,” 1509.

51. Jeffrey Zupan, as quoted in Owen, Green Metropolis, 120.

52. Owen, Green Metropolis, 136–37. For Curitiba, see Richard Register, Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature (New Society, 2006).

53. Daniel Eran Dilger, “Big Disasters: The San Francisco Freeways, a Disaster of Design, Engineering and Planning,” Roughly Drafted Magazine, August 20, 2001.

54. Edward Epstein, “Ceremony Opens an Era of Optimism for S.F. Embarcadero,” SF Gate, March 5, 2008.

55. The Dutch government distributes federal contracts and support evenly across cities rather than favoring just a few large metropolitan areas. This supports thriving mid-size cities, assuring that everyone can live in a walkable village. Even with a national population of seventeen million, the largest city has fewer than one million residents.

56. Jim Conley and Arlene Tigar McLaren, Car Troubles: Critical Studies of Automobility and Auto-Mobility (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009).

57. Economist Technology Quarterly, “The Connected Car”; Frost and Sullivan, Sustainable and Innovative Personal Transport Solutions—Strategic Analysis of Carsharing Market in North America (n748-18), January 18, 2010, http://www.frost.com.

58. David Zhao (research analyst, Frost and Sullivan Automotive Practice), “Carsharing: A Sustainable and Innovative Personal Transport Solution with Great Potential and Huge Opportunities,” January 28, 2010, http://www.frost.com.

59. Zipcar, Zipcar Media Kit, ed. Nancy Scott, accessed July 18, 2010, http://www.zipcar.mediaroom.com.

60. Owen, Green Metropolis, 138–39.

61. Charles Komanoff, Free Transit Plan (New York: Nurture New York’s Nature, 2009).

62. Reid Ewing and Steven Brown, U.S. Traffic Calming Manual (Washington DC: American Planning Association, 2009).

63. Yan Xing, Susan L. Handy, and Theodore J. Buehler, “Factors Associated with Bicycle Ownership and Use: A Study of Six Small U.S. Cities” (presented at the Annual Meeting of the Committee on Bicycle Transportation, Institute of Transportation Studies and Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California– Davis, 2008).

64. Quote updated to reflect name change from Freiker to Boltage. See Nicole Resnick, “Commuter School,” Bicycling, October 2009, 17.

65. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Preventing Chronic Diseases: Investing Wisely in Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, CDC: Chronic Disease Prevention, 2008); U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Healthy People 2010: Understanding and Improving Health (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010), http://www.healthpeople.gov.

66. “Schools,” Freiker, accessed September 25, 2009, http://www.freiker .org.

67. Quote updated to reflect name change from Freiker to Boltage. As quoted in Resnick, “Commuter School.”

68. Bob Mionske, “Legally Speaking—Insurance for Your Bike,” Velo- News, January 17, 2008, http://www.velonews.competitor.com.

69. Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (New York: Wiley, 2008), 3.

70. Christopher B. Leinberger, “Retrofitting Real Estate Finance: Alternatives to the Nineteen Standard Product Types,” Places: A Forum for Environmental Design 17, no. 2 (2005).

71. Christopher B. Leinberger, “Building for the Long-Term,” Urban Land, December 2003.

72. Leinberger, “Retrofitting Real Estate Finance.”

73. Terry Tamminen, Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction (Washington DC: Island Press, 2006).

74. Leinberger, “Retrofitting Real Estate Finance”; Anton Clarence Nelessen, Visions for a New American Dream: Process, Principles, and Ordinances to Plan and Design Small Communities (Chicago: American Planning Association, 1994).

13. Efficiency Culture

1. World Bank, World Development Indicators (Washington DC: World Bank, 2005).

2. International Energy Agency, Cool Appliances: Policy Strategies for Energy-Efficient Homes, Energy Efficiency Policy Profiles (Paris: oecd, 2003).

3. Life span: J. Komlos and M. Baur, “From the Tallest to (One of ) the Fattest: The Enigmatic Fate of the American Population in the 20th Century,” Economics and Human Biology 2, no. 1 (2004). Poverty: T. M. Smeeding et al., United States Poverty in a Cross-National Context (Syracuse NY: Center for Policy Research, and Luxembourg Income Study, Syracuse University, 2001). Air pollution: A. P. Verhoeff et al., “Air Pollution and Daily Mortality in Amsterdam,” Epidemiology 7, no. 3 (1996). Debt: “The Netherlands Country Briefing,” the Economist Intelligence Unit, 2008, accessed March 14, 2011. Obesity: John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra, “Promoting Safe Walking and Cycling to Improve Public Health: Lessons from the Netherlands and Germany,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 9 (2003).

4. For a review, see “Polls, Wealth and Happiness: Where Money Seems to Talk,” Economist July 12, 2007.

5. John Byrne and Noah Toly, “Energy as a Social Project: Recovering a Discourse,” in Transforming Power: Energy, Environment, and Society in Conflict, ed. John Byrne, Noah Toly, and Leigh Glover (London: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 21.

6. Kelly Sims Gallagher et al., Acting in Time on Energy Policy, ed. Kelly Sims Gallagher (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 11.

7. Gallagher, Acting in Time, 11.

8. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 231.

9. Catherine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (New York: Harper, 1856), 259.

10. Rybczynski, Home, 162.

11. See Steen Eiler Rasmussen, “The Dutch Contribution,” Town Planning Review 24, no. 3 (1953); Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Towns and Buildings Described in Drawings and Words (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1969).

12. Aaron Betsky and A. Eeuwens, False Flat: Why Dutch Design Is So Good (London: Phaidon, 2004); Rybczynski, Home, 52.

13. As quoted in Anya Kamenetz, “The Green Standard?” Fast Company, October 2007.

14. David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (New York: Riverhead, 2009), 227–29.

15. Electric vehicles and grid hybrids yield higher damages than other technologies, even given expected technological advancements to 2030, according to: National Research Council, Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2010). Owen, Green Metropolis, 223.

16. Auden Schendler and Randy Udall, “leed Is Broken . . . Let’s Fix It,” August 9, 2005, iGreenBuild, accessed August 8, 2011, http://iGreen Build.com.

17. Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 269.

18. Anton Clarence Nelessen, Visions for a New American Dream: Process, Principles, and Ordinances to Plan and Design Small Communities (Chicago: American Planning Association, 1994); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Owen, Green Metropolis.

19. Harold Wilhite et al., “Cross-Cultural Analysis of Household Energy Use Behaviour in Japan and Norway,” Energy Policy 24, no. 9 (1996); David L. Goldblatt, Sustainable Energy Consumption and Society: Personal, Technological, or Social Change? (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2005).

20. R. R. Dholakia, N. Dholakia, and A. F. Firat, “From Social Psychology to Political Economy: A Model of Energy Use Behavior,” Journal of Economic Psychology 3 (1983); Lawrence Lessig, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

21. Jim Conley and Arlene Tigar McLaren, Car Troubles: Critical Studies of Automobility and Auto-Mobility (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009).

22. Inge Røpke, “The Dynamics of Willingness to Consume,” Ecological Economics 28, no. 3 (1999); Gert Spaargaren and Bas A. S. Van Vliet, “Lifestyles, Consumption, and the Environment: The Ecological Modernisation of Domestic Consumption,” Environmental Politics 9, no. 1 (2000).

23. Michel Callon, “The Sociology of an Actor-Network: The Case of the Electric Vehicle,” in Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology, ed. John Law and Arie Rip (London: McMillan, 1986); Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (1986; repr., New York: Routledge, 1998); Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills and London: Sage, 1979); John Law, “On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India,” in Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, ed. John Law (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

24. For detailed analysis, see François Dosse, Empire of Meaning: The Humanization of the Social Sciences (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 11. See also Callon, “The Sociology of an Actor-Network”; Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation.”

25. Latour and Callon include physical artifacts as actors. Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”; Olga Amsterdamska, “Surely You Are Joking, Monsieur Latour!” Science, Technology, and Human Values 15, no. 4 (1990).

26. As quoted in Michael Specter, “Big Foot,” New Yorker, February 25, 2008.

27. Sharon Beder, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green, 2002), 104.

28. Richard A. Muller, Physics for Presidents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 316.

29. Kingsley Kubeyinje and Tony Nezianya, “Delta Communities Protest Neglect: Press for Government Aid, Oil Company Compensation,” in Africa Recovery (Lagos: United Nations Africa Recovery, 1999); Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, “Gas Flaring Disrupts Life in Oil-Producing Niger Delta,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, July 24, 2007.

30. Shell’s leadership informed U.S. diplomats that the Nigerian government had “forgotten that Shell had seconded people to all the relevant ministries and that Shell consequently had access to everything that was being done in those ministries.” Abuja Embassy, “Shell MD Discusses the Status of the Proposed Petroleum Industry Bill,” Wikileaks, October 20, 2009, http://www.saharareports.com.

31. Book talk on October 17, 2010, at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in North Troy, New York; Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2010).

32. The Heinrich Böll Foundation fosters political conversations between Germany and other nations (http://www.boell.org).

33. Vanessa Fuhrmans, “Energy, Insurance Giants Threaten to Cut Investments over Tax Plan,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1999.

34. Hans Diefenbacher, Volker Teichert, and Stefan Welhelmy, “How Have Ecotaxes Worked in Germany?” in Growth: The Celtic Cancer, ed. R. Douthwaite and J. Jopling (Devon, UK: Green Books, 2004), 134.

35. Umwelt, “Positive Effekte Der Ökologischen Steuerreform,” [Positive effects of the eco-tax reform], Umwelt 2 (2002): 94–97.

36. The World Factbook: Germany (Washington DC: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 2009).

37. Umwelt, “Positive Effekte Der Ökologischen Steuerreform”; Stefan Bach, “Wirkungen Der Ökologischen Steuerreform in Deutschland,” [Effects of the eco-tax reform in Germany] in Wochenbericht Des diw (Berlin: Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, 2001), 222.

38. Kert Davies, radio news show interview by Amy Goodman, “Astroturf Activism: Leaked Memo Reveals Oil Industry Effort to Stage Rallies against Climate Legislation,” Democracy Now!, August 21, 2009, http://www.democracynow.org.

39. Brian McNeill, “In Wake of Fake Letters to Congress, Groups Call for Ban on Such Tactics,” Charlottesville Daily Progress, September 4, 2009; Stephanie Strom, “Coal Group Is Linked to Fake Letters on Climate Bill,” New York Times, August 4, 2009.

40. Julien Daubanes and André Grimaud, “Taxation of a Polluting Non- Renewable Resource in the Heterogeneous World,” Environmental and Resource Economics 47 (December 2010): 567–88.

41. Buildings use more energy than any other sector of the economy including the industrial and transportation sectors. U.S. Department of Energy, Building Technologies Program (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, 2008).

42. Ari Harding, interview by the author, San Francisco, November 23, 2009.

43. Steve Sorrell, “Barrier Busting: Overcoming Barriers to Energy Efficiency,” in The Economics of Energy Efficiency: Barriers to Cost- Effective Investment, ed. Steve Sorrell et al. (Northampton MA: Edward Elgar, 2004).

44. Ari Harding, interview by the author. For reference see Ken Haggard, David Bainbridge, and Rachel Aljilani, Passive Solar Architecture Pocket Reference (London: Earthscan, 2009).

45. Half is due to trunk growth that releases upon death. Geoffrey H. Donovan and David T. Butry, “The Value of Shade: Estimating the Effect of Urban Trees on Summertime Electricity Use,” Energy and Buildings 41, no. 6 (2009): 667.

46. New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, NYC Street Tree Census (New York, 2007).

47. Steve Sorrell and Horace Herring, Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Consumption: The Rebound Effect (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 257.

48. For the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability, see http:// www.feasta.org. For the New Economics Foundation, see http:// www.neweconomics.org.

49. Totaling over $10 billion. Robert Alvarez in Matthew L. Wald, “U.S. Drops Research into Fuel Cells for Cars,” New York Times, May 7, 2009. Gallagher et al., Acting in Time, 91–92.

50. Dawn Hibbard, “The Big Chill,” Kettering Perspective, Summer 2009.

51. “A Hill of Beans,” Economist, November 28, 2009.

52. Gallagher et al., Acting in Time, 173.

14. Asking Questions

1. Curtis White, The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work (Sausalito CA: Polipoint Press, 2006), 132; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster 2000); Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009).

2. Robert Socolow and Stephan Pacala, “Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies,” Science 305, no. 5686 (August 13, 2004): 968–72.

3. Tomas Nauclér and Per-Anders Enkvist, Pathways to a Low Carbon Economy: Version 2 of the Global Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Curve, (New York: McKinsey and Company, 2009).

4. Bill Gates quoted in Steven Mufson, “Gates Coming to White House to Appeal for More Energy Research Dollars,” Washington Post, June 9, 2010.

5. This concept could use critique and refinement. I present it to spur thought and look forward to discussing, debating, and discovering more rigorous preconditions. This list measures states-of-being for simplicity but the more important analysis may involve “rates.” A region may fail a top 50 percent test but has instituted changes to move toward it. Here, alternative energy could induce benefits. Eventually, a 50 percent benchmark won’t be useful as more countries fulfill these preconditions.

6. Fatih Birol as quoted in: Economist, “Facing the Consequences,” The Economist November 27(2010).

7. Synthesis of twenty climate models: David. S. Battisti and Rosamond L. Naylor, “Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat,” Science 323, no. 5911 (2009).

8. Wolfram Schlenkera and Michael J. Roberts, “Nonlinear Temperature Effects Indicate Severe Damages to U.S. Crop Yields under Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 37 (2009).

Epilogue

1. Richard A. Muller, Physics for Presidents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 300–301.

2. World Bank, “Energy Use (Kilograms of Oil Equivalent Per Capita),” in World Development Indicators (Washington DC: World Bank, 2010).

3. To be clear, I do not support China’s one-child policy or other democratic subversions. Also, China’s per-capita consumption is growing, but is unlikely to reach American levels. Much of China’s energy footprint comes from energy-intensive industries relocated to their shores from Europe and the United States.

4. Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 176.

5. Bill McKibben’s works include The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989); Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (New York: Holt, 2007); and Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010). Vandana Shiva’s works include Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (New York: South End Press, 2008); Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (New York: South End Press, 2002); and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (New York: South End Press Classics, 2010). Books by Joseph E. Stiglitz include Making Globalization Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) and Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up (New York: The New Press, 2010). James Lovelock’s works include Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2007); and The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Books by Raj Patel include The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (New York: Picador, 2010) and Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (London: Portobello Books, 2007).

6. These thinkers include: Fred W. Allendorf, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, Mary Catherine Bateson, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Marcus J. Borg, J. Baird Callicott, Courtney S. Campbell, F. Stuart Chapin III, Robin Morris Collin, Michael M. Crow, the Dalai Lama, Avner de-Shalit, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Brian Doyle, David James Duncan, Massoumeh Ebtekar, Jesse M. Fink, James D. Forbes, Dave Foreman, Thomas L. Friedman, James Garvey, Norman Habel, Thich Nhat Hanh, Paul Hawken, Bernd Heinrich, Linda Hogan, bell hooks, Dale Jamieson, Derrick Jensen, Martin S. Kaplan, Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, Stephen R. Kellert, Robin W. Kimmerer, Barbara Kingsolver, Shepard Krech III, Ursula K. Le Guin, Hank Lentfer, Carly Lettero, Oren Lyons, Wangari Muta Maathai, Sallie McFague, Bill McKibben, Katie McShane, Curt Meine, Stephanie Mills, N. Scott Momaday, Kathleen Dean Moore, Hylton Murray-Philipson, Gary Paul Nabhan, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Michael P. Nelson, Nel Noddings, Barack Obama, David Orr, Ernest Partridge, Pope John Paul II, John Perry, Rolf O. Peterson, Edwin P. Pister, Carl Pope, Robert Michael Pyle, David Quammen, Daniel Quinn, Kate Rawles, Tri Robinson, Libby Roderick, Holmes Rolston III, Deborah Bird Rose, Jonathan F. P. Rose, Rosmarin, Carl Safina, Scott Russell Sanders, Lauret Savoy, Nirmal Selvamony, Ismail Serageldin, Peter Singer, Sulak Sivaraksa, Fred Small, Gary Snyder, James Gustave Speth, Alana Summers, Brian Swimme, Bron Taylor, Paul B. Thompson, George Tinker, Joerg Chet Tremmel, Quincy Troupe, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Jose Galizia Tundisi, Beth Turner, Brian Turner, Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees, Steve Vanderheiden, John A. Vucetich, Kimberly A. Wade-Benzoni, Sheila Watt- Cloutier, Xin Wei, Alan Weisman, Jack E. Williams, Cindy Deacon Williams, Terry Tempest Williams, E. O. Wilson, and Ming Xu. See Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson, Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2010).

7. Curtis White ’s books include The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves (San Francisco: Harper, 2004); The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work (Sausalito CA: Polipoint Press, 2006); and The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature (Sausalito CA: Polipoint Press, 2009). The work of James Howard Kunstler includes The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Touchstone, 1994); The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005); and World Made by Hand: A Novel (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008). Chris Hedges is the author of Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2010); American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2007); War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002); and Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, 2009). John Michael Greer’s work includes The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World (Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers, 2009) and The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers, 2008).

8. Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); Fen Montaigne, Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica (New York: Henry Holt, 2010).

9. Taken from a spoken interview and edited for readability. See Philippe Diaz, radio news show interview by Amy Goodman, “Filmmaker Philippe Diaz on ‘The End of Poverty?’,” Democracy Now!, November 10, 2009, http://democracynow.org.

10. Derrick Jensen, “The Tyranny of Entitlement,” Orion, January/February 2011.

11. Daniel Quinn’s works include Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (New York: Bantam, 1995); The Story of B (New York: Bantam, 1997); and Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure (New York: Broadway, 2000). Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (New York: Chelsea Green, 2008); Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis L. Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (New York: Chelsea Green, 2004). The film The Yes Men is by Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, Chris Smith, and Dan Ollman. John Cavanagh et al., Alternatives to Economic Globalization (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002).

12. Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010). These thinkers include: Kay Lehman Scholzman, Benjamin Page, Sidney Verba, Morris Fiorina, Larry Bartels, Hugh Heclo, Rodney Hero, Lawrence Jacobs, Jacob Hacker, Suzanne Mettler, and Diane Pinderhughes. See Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, eds., Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publications, 2007).

13. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).

14. John Perkins, radio news show interview by Amy Goodman, “Hoodwinked: Former Economic Hit Man John Perkins Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded—and How to Remake Them,” Democracy Now!, November 10, 2009, http://democracynow.org.

15. Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: The Free Press, 2005); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008); Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World (New York: Henry Holt, 2011); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Sam Smith, Why Bother?: Getting a Life in a Locked- Down Land (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001); Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009); Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New York: New Press, 2002).

16. Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1980); William A. Shutkin, The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

17. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932).

18. E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops (Oxford and Cambridge Review, 1909).

19. Dvora Yanow, How Does a Policy Mean?: Interpreting Policy and Organizational Actions (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996); Charles E. Lindblom, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990); Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985) and Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (New York: Knopf, 1999).

20. David E. Nye ’s books include Electrifying AmeriCA: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990); Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999); and Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007). Andrew Feenburg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010). Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011). Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980); L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1996).

21. These thinkers include: Freeman Dyson, Francis Fukuyama, Stellan Welin, Bill Joy, Robert L. Heilbroner, Trevor J. Pinch, Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, Lawrence Lessig, Bruno Latour, Langdon Winner, George Ritzer, Richard Dyer, Rachel N. Weber, Daniel Sarewitz, Jameson M. Wetmore, Harry Collins, Gary Chapman, Judy Wajcman, Noela Invernizzi, Guillermo Foladori, Roopali Phadke, Bruce Schneider, Torin Monahan, David Elliott, Kristin S. Shrader-Frechette, Michael Bess, and others. See Deborah G. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore, Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2009).

22. David L. Goldblatt, Sustainable Energy Consumption and Society: Personal, Technological, or Social Change? (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2005).

23. Milton Friedman, introduction to Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

Re: Green Illusions, by Ozzie Zehner

PostPosted: Thu May 14, 2020 7:50 am
by admin
Index

actor-network theory, 314–15
advertising: age restrictions on, 246–50; broadcast
media, 230; coal, 125; outlook for, 341–42;
psychological effects, 234–35, 236, 248; public
financing of, 248–49; stifling of competition from,
249; waste from, 241; youth directed, 227–35
affect. See fetishes; semiotics
affluenza, 235–38
Agenda-21, 163
Agent Orange, 268
Agnos, Art, 286
agricultural risks, 192–93. See also food security
aligning interests, 179–83. See also codevelopment,
hydrogen economy example of; congruency
Alperovitz, Gar, 348
alternative energy: futility of, 303, how to actually
increase, 337–38, outlook for, 340–42, preconditions
for, 337–38, public perceptions of, 3–4, scale of
resource, 333
Alternatives to Economic Globalization (Cavanagh et al.),
346
AmerGen, 91
American Association of University Women, 322
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, 322
American Enterprise Institute, 157
The American Future: A History
(Schama), 162, 176, 270
American Jobs Creation Act, 67
American Petroleum Institute, 322
American Psychological
Association, 248
Americans for Balanced Energy
Choices, 131
American Wind Energy
Association, 52
Amphicar, 269
Amsterdam: architecture in, 307;
bicycling infrastructure in,
278–79; comfort of living in, 287;
public transit in, 285
Andreas, Dwayne, 66
anti-tobacco ads, 178
appealing to interests of actors, 178
Arch Coal, 128
Archer Daniels Midland, 66–67,
69–70
architecture: Dutch example,
307; efficiency of cogeneration
systems, 327; leed critique, 309–
12; virtue of simplicity, 307–8.
See also passive solar
Asimov, Isaac, 206–7
Astroturf activism, 322
Atlantic Station, 299
atomic bomb, 83
Attenborough, David, 198
Australia Research Council, 164
Australian coal use, 122
automobile commutes, xvi
automobile fatalities, xvi
Bachram, Heidi, 317
backstops, 337. See also boomerang
effect
Bakan, Joel, 347
Ballard Power Systems, 115–16
The Barbaric Heart (White), 344
Bartlett, Albert, 191–92, 207
bathroom metaphor, 206–7
Bazerman, Max, 329–30
Bearak, Barry, 214
Beck, Ulrich, 145
Beder, Sharon, 317
Beecher, Catherine, 306
behavior: changing, 179;
characteristics of, 182; sacrifice,
178–79
Benatar, David, 204–5
Bergey Mike, 42
Bess, Michael, 92–93, 225–26
Better Never to Have Been (Benatar),
204
bicycling: among seniors, 281,
282; among youth, 281–83;
benchmark, 337; Boltage
program, 295–96; carshare
induced, 290; and climate
change, 339; in Davis, California,
294; dedicated lanes for, 294–96;
designing for, 283–84; health
benefits of, 296; history of,
278; insurance for, 297; policy
priorities, 284; quantity of, 278;
rates of, 279–80; resources,
352–53; safety, 279, 281–82; in
Steamboat Springs, Colorado,
294–95; women’s rights and, 278;
youth infrastructure for, 295–96
Bicycling and the Law (Mionske),
297
bike lanes, 294–96
bioalcohol, 62. See also biofuels
biochar, 78–79
biodegradable plastics, 225
biodiesel, 62. See also biofuels
biofuels: agriculture factors of,
66–67, 70–74; alcohol forms of,
62; Arizona State University
analysis of, 73; in Brazil, 62,
76–77; carbon dioxide impact of,
74; Carnegie Institution analysis
of, 63, 79; coal use for, 69;
criticisms of, 63–64; description
of, 61–63; as electoral elixir,
65–70; energy required for,
70–71; farm subsidies for, 68;
biofuel fertilizer used for, 71–72;
and food competition, 63–65;
future projections for, 79–80;
gaseous forms of, 62; global
resource potential of, 79–80;
global resource availability of,
72–74; greenhouse gas footprint
of, 74–76; history of, 61–62,
65–70; International Energy
Agency assessment of, 79;
Labor subsidies for, 68; land
alteration for, 73–74; Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory
analysis of, 63, 79; liquid forms
of, 62; loan guarantees for, 68;
lobbying for, 66–71; methane
production from, 76; National
Academy of Sciences analysis of,
64, 73; outlook for, 340; outlook
synopsis of, 80; rainforest
endangerment from, 74–76; and
reliance on fossil fuels, 75–76;
research funding for, 68; return
on investment from, 71; riots
related to, 63; solar reflectivity
of, 75; solid forms of, 62; special
interests supporting, 70; Stanford
University analysis of, 73–74;
subsidies for, 67–69; tax breaks
for, 68; University of Minnesota
analysis of, 73; University
of Wisconsin analysis of, 73;
wastewater sources of, 77–78;
water subsidies for, 68; water use
for, 74; World Bank analysis of,
63; yield tables for, 72–73
biogas, 62. See also biofuels
Birol, Fatih, 338
Black and Veatch: involvement in
doe study, 52–60; mysterious
historical data, 54; data
extrapolations, 54
bmw Hydrogen 7, 107, 111
Boccard, Nicolas, 56
Boltage, 295
boomerang effect: American
context of, 333–34, 337; context
variables for, 177, definition of,
172–73; experts’ overlooking
of, 335; hydropower example of,
133–34; nuclear example of, 103;
street congestion example of, 266
Borenstein, Severin, 13–14
boundary objects: clean coal
example of, 132; definition,
164–65; hydrogen example of,
117–20; and interests of actors, 5;
photovoltaics example of, 164–65
bp, 5, 71, 108
branding, 228. See also advertising;
youth marketing
Brave New World (Huxley), 347
Bright House Institute for Thought
Sciences, 233
bro-ing, 230
Brookings Institution, 300
Brooks, David, 203–4
Brooks, Max, 105
Brower, Michael, 259–60
Brown, Lester, 8
Browne, John, 244–45
Brundtland Commission, 163
Buber, Martin, 152
buildings: Dutch example of,
307; efficiency of cogeneration
systems in, 327; and leed
critique, 309–12; virtue of
simplicity in, 307–8. See also
passive solar
Bush, George W.: hydrogen
betrayal by, 116; hydrogen
support by, 107; wind energy
support by, 51
Byrne, John, 302
cafe biofuel exemption, 69
café culture, 288
California Academy of Sciences,
324
California decoupling, 180–82
California Division of Highways,
286
California per-capita energy use,
182
California Solar Initiative, 15
Callon, Michel, 314
Calvinism, 308
Cameron, David, 41
Cameron, James, 134
campaign finance reform, 322,
329–30
Campbell, Martha, 207
cancer coal-related risks, 124
capacity factor: description of,
49–50; routine exaggerations of,
56–57
Cape Wind Project, 39
capitalism: critiques of, 196; support
for, 346–47; well-being and, 333.
See also neoliberalism; Occupy
Wall Street
carbon capture and sequestration:
challenges, 126–31; cost of, 126–
27; description of, 126; energy
required, 126; impact of, 128;
leaks, 127; Obama assessment of,
130; risks, 127–28; storage issues,
126–28
carbon credits, 317–18. See also
carbon dioxide; carbon pricing;
carbon trading
carbon dioxide: oceanic uptake
of, 127–28; responsibilities to
reduce, 176; wedges to reduce,
335. See also carbon pricing;
greenhouse gasses
carbon footprint of childbirth, 219
carbon pricing, 210, 315–18, 322
carbon trading, 210
car culture, xvi, 264; emergence
of, 265–67; and freeway
construction, 286
carrying capacity, 243
car sharing, 289–90
Carson, Johnny, 82
Carter, Jimmy 66, 162
The Cato Institute, 38
Cavanagh, John, 346
cellulosic ethanol: bioprospecting
for, 77; description of, 76;
expense of, 77; Wall Street
Journal analysis of, 77. See also
biofuels
centenarians, 200
Center for the Sociology of
Innovation, 314
The Centre for Policy Studies, 38
Channel One, 251
charcoal, 78–79
Index 
charity resources, 353
Cheney, Dick, 107
Chernobyl meltdown: cancer from,
100; radioactivity from, 101–2
Chesapeake Bay Foundation, 310
Chevrolet Equinox, 107
child development benchmarks, 221
childhood: development
benchmarks for, 221; marriage,
214–16; social construction
of, 228–30. See also youth
advertising
child marriage, 214–16
Children’s Television Act, 249
children’s television programming,
248–49
China: coal consumption in, 122,
343; energy consumption in,
176; lack of carbon pricing,
323; one-child policy, 208; solar
photovoltaic pollution, 18–19
The China Syndrome, 81–82
Chomsky, Noam, 347
Chu, Steven, 116
cities: disadvantages of, 287;
example of, 307; environmental
impact of, 276–78; livability of,
287; recommended projects,
287; village model for, 275–78,
286–88, 402n55
citizen participation, 332
City CarShare, 289
clean coal: expansion of term, 126;
origins of term, 125; rhetoric of,
131–32; symbolism of, 131–32
Clean Water Act, 71
climate change: dilemmas
regarding, 176; nasa findings
for, 156–57; predictions of, 338;
preparing for, 338–39; public
opinion about, 158; risks of, 338;
scientific consensus surrounding,
156–57; skeptics front groups of,
158; skeptics media manipulation
of, 157–58; skeptics of, 156–58
closed-loop production systems,
164
coal: advertising for, 125; air
pollution from, 122; availability
of, 122; cancer risks from,
124; carbon dioxide emissions
from, 122; community health
risks from, 123; cost of, 122;
earthquakes from, 121; fines
to industry, 124; fly-ash from,
123; history of, 122; land
degradation from, 123; landfill
waste from, 124; lobbying for,
124; mountaintop removal, 123;
occupational risks regarding,
123; political donations for,
125–26; protests surrounding use
of, 130–31; resource depletion
of, 192; side effects of, 121–23;
smokestack scrubbers for, 124;
subsidies for, 125–26; sulfur
dioxide emissions from, 124–25;
support from politicians for,
125–26; uses for, 122; water
contamination from, 123. See also
clean coal
The Coal Question (Jevons), 174
codes of judgment, 168
codevelopment, hydrogen economy
example of, 110; in productivism,
151. See also congruency
cogeneration systems, 327
Cohen, Joel, 199
cold fusion. See fusion
colonialism, 345
Columbia River, 85–86
comfort, defining of, 305–6
complexity addressing solutions,
182
compostability, 225
concentrating solar photovoltaic,
139
conflict military spending, 257
conflict resources, 351
congestion pricing, 290–91
congruency: description of, 179–83;
designing for, 243; in diet, 261;
hydrogen example of, 110; in
large systems, 314
Connelly, Matthew, 197, 208
conservation: individual behavior
toward, 178–79, 182; structural
barriers to, 58
conspicuous consumption, 235
consumer confidence, 253–54
consumerism: alternatives for youth
to, 250–51; junk-mail and, 253;
mass media effects on, 237–38;
product durability and, 290;
youth related, 230–33. See also
consumption; ecoconsumerism;
youth marketing
consumption: alternatives for
youth, 250–51; attempts to
reduce, 226–27; backstops to,
173–74; benchmark for future,
337; happiness derived from,
237; harms ranked, 260; mass
media effects on, 237–38; meatrelated,
259–60; outlook for,
341–42; and population growth,
196–98. See also consumerism;
ecoconsumerism
context: importance of, 177; outlook
for, 340–42; reforming, 336
contraception: barriers to, 209;
demand for, 208; misinformation
about, 209; religious factors, 209
Conway, Erik, 156
Copenhagen Accord, 338
cornucopians, 195. See also
economics; neoliberalism;
productivism
corporate charters, 347
corporate responsibility, 164
The Corporation (Bakan), 347
cosmopolitanism, 269
counterfeit political letters, 322
Cram, Shannon, 89
CriticalEnvironmentalism, 348
DaimlerChrysler, 108
dams. See hydropower
Davis ca, 294
Davison, Aidan, 164
dead zones, 71–72
The Death and Life of Great
American Cities (Jacobs), 276–77
Debord, Guy, 149–50
decoupling, 180–82, 327
deferred happiness syndrome, 240
delivery vehicles, 292
Deming, W. Edwards, 15
Democracy in America
(Tocqueville), 270
Denniss, Richard, 235, 246
density of living, 277
Department of Environmental
Conservation, 141
Detroit: collapse of, 273; history
of, 272
Diamond, Jared, 189
Diaz, Philippe, 345
Dickens, Charles, 191
Diesendorf, Mark, 125–26
Index 
dilemmas, 176
diplomacy and climate change,
338–39
disciplines of the future, 332
Disney, Walt, 81
Dole, Bob, 66
Dolnick, Edward, 263
Douglas, Michael, 81–82
downshifters, 244
downward energy spirals, 329
Doyle Research, 232
Dunham-Jones, Ellen, 298
Durbin, Richard, 215
Dutch. See Netherlands
Dvora, Yanow, 347
dynamic energy pricing, 357n20
earthquakes: coal related, 121;
geothermal related, 137
Easter Island, 189–90
ecoconsumerism: claims about,
225–26; history of, 225, 226;
labeling fraud, 227. See also
consumerism; consumption
ecological modernization, 119
economics: disutility for younger
generations, 203; exogenous
prices in, 383n3; gdp and, 253–
56; inelasticity in, 316; leakage in,
176, 317; population and, 202–3;
regulation and, 318–19; resources
for reforming, 353. See also
neoliberalism
The Economist: on ocean acidity,
128; on population growth, 202
Edible Schoolyard Project, 250
efficiency: benchmarks for,
337; in buildings, 309–12; of
cogeneration systems, 327;
cultural norms of, 312–13;
at Department of Energy,
328–30; home characteristics,
311–12; leed critique, 309–12;
limitations of, 174; oversight
of, 329; refrigeration examples
of, 318–19, 329; standards for
building, 309, 324; of trees,
326; unintended consequences
of, 174–75; U.S. assessment of,
303–5; and well-being, 305. See
also boomerang effect; Jevons
paradox
Ehrlich, Anne, 203
Ehrlich, Paul, 203
Einstein, Albert, xv
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 90
elections. See 2008 elections; 2010
elections; 2012 elections
electric vehicles: battery issues
in, 143–44; benefits of, 145;
carbon dioxide impact of,
143; environmental impact of,
144–45; fuel costs of, 143–44;
greenwashing sprawl of, xvi,
145–46; National Research
Council assessment of, 144–45;
pedestrian impacts of, 145–46;
tradeoffs of, 143; unintended
consequences of, xvi, 144–46
Embarcadero Freeway collapse, 286
Energetics Incorporated, 52
Energy Citizens, 322
energy consumption: backstops,
180–81; biofuel potential to fulfill
global, 75, 79–80; difficulty
displacing, 59; factors affecting,
181; fostering happiness, 302;
tiered pricing, 181; underlying
motivators of, 103. See also
productivism
energy footprints of food, 224
energy footprints of products,
224–27
Energy Policy Act, 91
energy reduction: barriers to,
165–66; in media, 153, 158;
patentability, 161; policies
ignoring, 58, 152; predisposition
to overlook, 150–52, 155; taking a
walk with example, 165
energy spirals, 329
Energy Star fraud, 227
energy tax, 323–24
Energy Tax Act, 67
Engelman, Robert, 201
Engels, Friedrich, 191
Entergy Nuclear, 108
environmentalism: dilemmas of,
176; electric car support of,
144–46; fetishes of, 149–52;
goals for, 340–42; historical
shifts in, 163–64; hydrogen
support for, 109; lecturing about
consumption, 243; outlook
for, 340–42; setting priorities
for, 340–42; shift in, 331–33;
suburbanization response to,
264; sustainability movement
and, 163; technological turn of,
162–64
environmentalists of tomorrow,
332–33
environmental justice movement,
209–10
Environmental Protection Agency:
ethanol plant reclassification, 69
An Essay on the Principle of
Population (Malthus), 191
ethanol: blenders credit, 67;
cellulosic, 76–77, 79–80;
subsidies for, 67–69. See also
biofuels
eugenics, 191
Europe. See France; Germany;
Netherlands; Sweden
European Commission, 108
European working hours, 239
expertise, 332
exploitation of children, 232. See
also youth marketing
exponential growth, 191–92
externalities: of automobiles, 267;
of biochar, 78–79; of biofuels,
63–64, 74–76; boomerang
effect of congestion pricing,
290–91; difficulty in assessing,
302; efficiency, 174–75; of
electric vehicles, xvi, 144–46;
geothermal, 136–37; growthism
cycle, 167; hydrogen, 111–14;
hydropower, 134–35; leakage,
317; of monetary policy, 327–28;
national energy consumption
related, 302; natural gas,
140–42; nuclear power, 103; of
photovoltaics, 17–28; problems
defining, 167–68; of solar cells,
17–28; solar thermal, 139;
suburbanization, 273–75; of wind
power, 36–42, 58–60. See also
boomerang effect
extraterrestrial colonization, 195
Exxon, 108
Fatal Misconception (Connelly), 197
Federal Communications
Commission, 247
Federal Trade Commission,
247–48, 318
Feenburg, Andrew, 348
Index 
fertility: global average, 199; in
Iran, 209; Japan, 205; reductions,
208–9; replacement rate, 199
fertilizers, 192
fetishes: cheerleading for
energy-related, 340; in leed
critique, 311; of suburbia, 274;
technofetishism, 331–33. See also
semiotics
First steps: characteristics of,
183–84; flexibility of, 184; goals
of, 183–84
First steps list: addressing complex
population challenges, 220;
approaching population concerns
of poor regions, 214–16;
approaching women’s welfare in
America, 216–20; bicycling for
youth, 295–96; bicycle insurance,
297; carefully shift to energy
(not carbon) taxes, 323–24; car
sharing, 289–90; cogeneration
systems, 327; congestion pricing,
290–91; create a department of
efficiency, 328–30; ditch the gdp,
253–56; eliminate advertising
to kids, 246–50; enable
downshifting, 244–46; from
cars to cafés, 288; from parking
to parks, 288–89; introduce
junk-mail choice, 253; monetary
reform and decoupling, 327;
prioritize bicycle roadways,
294–95; promote volunteering,
246; rediscover passive solar,
324–26; reform zoning, 297–98;
retrofitting suburbia, 298–300;
shift military investment to
real energy security, 256–57;
shift taxes from income to
consumption, 251–52; smart
packaging, 252; social enterprises
for youth, 250; strengthen
building efficiency standards,
324; traffic calming, 292–93;
vegetarianism, 258–61; voting
reform, 328
Fleck, Ludwik, 31
flex-fuel vehicles, 69
Fonda, Jane, 81
food export bans, 213
food security: and fertilizer use, 192;
climate change effects on, 193,
339; population issues involving,
192–93, 213
Ford Motor Company, 14, 108
Forster, E. M., 347
Foucauldian power flows, 162,
180–81. See also codevelopment,
hydrogen economy example of
Foucault, Michel, 348
fox news, 158
fracking, 140–42
framing: of “accidents,” 82; of fossil
fuels as a renewable resource,
107–8; of the hydrogen dream,
107–10, 119–20; of technological
solutions, 171. See also semiotics;
productivism
France: abortion prevalence in, 218;
nuclear ambitions in, 92–93
Frank, Robert, 237, 239
freeways: construction of, 286;
effects of, 286–87. See also car
culture
Friedman, Milton, 346–47, 348
Friedman, Thomas, 311, 344
fuel cells: automotive programs for,
107; lifespan of, 114; limitations
of, 114; platinum usage in, 115
Fukushima meltdown, 91, 101,
102–3
fusion: explanation of, 137; ongoing
projects for, 138; promise of, 138
future of environmentalism, 287–
88, 331–33, 342
Ganal, Michael, 107
gangsta, 231. See also semiotics
Gans, Herbert, 237
Gates, Bill, 336
gdh, 255
gdp reform, 252–56
Geertz, Clifford, 263
General Motors Volt electric car,
143
Genuine Progress Indicator, 256
George Marshall Institute, 157
geothermal: degradation of sources
for, 137; earthquakes from, 137;
limitations of, 136–37; output
potential of, 137; source of, 136;
types of systems for, 136
Germany: bicycling in, 281–82;
birthrate in, 205; eco taxes in,
320–22; resistance to nuclear
power, 91
Gini Coefficient of Wealth
Disparity, 256
Girl Scouts, 230
Global Climate Coalition, 157
Global Spin (Beder), 317
Glover, Leigh, 50
Goldblatt, David, 348
Goodall, Jane, 198, 251
Gore, Al, 315
governance: online resources for,
353
government secrecy: document
ornl-341, 84–85; Green Run,
83–85; Hanford Site, 83–90;
leaked diplomatic cables on
Nigeria, 319; radioactive
dispersions, 83–85
Green Building Council, 309
The Green Consumer (Makower),
226
greenhouse gasses: from biofuels
74–76; from buildings, 324; from
coal, 122; from electric vehicles,
143; from meat production,
260; from natural gas, 143;
oceanic uptake of, 127–28;
responsibilities to reduce, 176;
from solar cells, 9, 17–18; wedges
to reduce, 335
green lifestyle. See ecoconsumerism
Green Metropolis, 275–76
Greenpeace, 5, 322
Green Run, 82–85
greenwashing: Astroturf activism,
322; bp, 160; clean coal, 124–26;
ecoconsumerism, 224–7; leed
critique, 311; solar, 27. See
also ecoconsumerism; fetishes;
semiotics
Greer, John Michael, 344
Griesemer, Jim, 164
Griftopia (Taibbi), 346
gross domestic health, 255
gross domestic product, 253–56
Gross National Happiness, 256
groundwater contamination: biofuel
impact on, 66; in Niger Delta,
319; nuclear related, 83, 85;
photovoltaic related, 18–20
Grove, Sir William, 106
growth: end of, 168; limits to, 163–
64, 166–68. See also economics;
growthism; neoliberalism
Index 
growthism: energy supply and
demand, 172, 175; expectations
around, 167; gdp, 253–56; as a
global phenomenon, 202; policies
spurring, 254; prosperity link
to, 254; self-fulfilling prophecy
of, 167; source of, 151; support
for, 166. See also growth;
neoliberalism; Occupy Wall
Street issues; productivism
Guillebaud, John, 209, 218
Guttmacher Institute, 220
Hacker, Jacob S., 346
Hamilton, Clive, 235, 246
Hanford Site: nuclear waste
descriptions, 86; radioactive
dispersions from, 83–85; shifts in
use, 83, 86, 89–90
Happy Planet Index, 256
Harding, Ari, 324–25
harms of existence, 204
Hartmann, Betsy, 211
Harvey, David, 347
Hayflick Limit, 200
Hays, Pip, 209
health care, 221; funding, 257;
measuring performance of, 255;
resources, 351; universal, 221,
239–40, 245
heat pumps, 140
Hedges, Chris, 320, 344
heemraadschappen, 308
Heinz, 232
The Hidden Costs of Energy
(National Research Council),
167
The High Price of Materialism
(Kasser), 236
HighScope, 250
hip hop branding, 231, 237–38
hipster branding, 231, 237–38
Hiroshima, 83
Holland. See Netherlands
Honig Winery, 27–28
housing affordability, 287, 297–98
Hubsmith, Deb, 283
Hultman, Martin, 119
human rights: benchmarks for, 337;
online resources for, 349–51
Huxley, Aldous, 347
hybrid vehicles, 142–46
hydrogen: automotive support
for, 107; bmw Hydrogen-7, 107;
chicken-and-egg problem, 112;
critics of, 111–15; drafting of pr
for, 108; dubious claims about,
107–8; education campaigns,
108; electrolysis, 113; energy
required to produce, 108;
framing of the, dream, 107–10,
117–20; future of, 120; history
of, 106–7; hoax effect,118–19;
Hydrogen Highway, 108; loss
of political support for, 116–17;
media support for, 105–6, 115;
nuclear industry support of,
109–10; particulate matter, 108;
PricewaterhouseCoopers study,
115; pr tool, 118; production, 106;
public fear of, 112; reforming,
113; space applications of,
107; stock market bubble,
115; storage, 111–12; Sunline
plant, 113; thermodynamics
of, 106; total cost of, 113–14;
transportation limitations, 112–
13; wind and solar production,
109, 113
hydropower: in Brazil, 134–35;
conflict potential of, 135; in
Norway, 134; output in United
States, 133–34; side effects of,
134–35; worldwide production
of, 134–35
“The Ideal” (Tucholsky), 269
imperialism, 345
incrementalism, 183–84, 298, 330
independence perceptions of, 152
Index of Sustainable Economic
Welfare, 256
individual behavior, 178–79, 313
individualism, 327
inelasticity, 316
inequality: and carbon pricing,
317–18; and climate change,
339; and congestion pricing,
290–91; and corporate charters,
347; measuring, 256; natural gas
example of, 140–42; wealthlinked
speeding tickets, 292;
zoning reforms for housing
access, 297–98
infiltration, 230
innovation networks, 314–15
interest, 327–28
intermittency, 43–47
International Atomic Energy
Agency, 95
international coordination, 322–23
International Energy Agency, 122
International Protecting Girls by
Preventing Child Marriage Act,
215
intrinsic rewards, 245
Issa, Darrell, 110
iter fusion reactor, 138
Jacobs, Jane, 276–77
Japan: forestry history of, 190;
nuclear power in, 91; solar cell
data from, 30
jaywalking, 292
Jeep Treo, 107
Jensen, Derrick, 345
Jevons paradox, 174, 180
Jevons, William Stanley, 174
job sharing, 240
Jordan, Chris, 197
journalism: business pressures on
reporting, 158–61
journalistic objectivity, 154–56
Jugendhaus, 251
junk mail, 241–42, 253
junk mail online resources, 352
Justice (clothing brand), 230
Kaizen, 14
Kalamazoo, xvii
Kasser, Tim, 236
Keeney, Dennis, 69
Keller, Hellen, 187
Kendall Foundation, 159
Kettering University, 329
Kissinger, Henry, 213
Kissling, Frances, 212
Klein, Naomi, 347
Kolbert, Elizabeth, 345
Koplow, Doug, 98
Kucinich, Dennis, 257
Kuhn, Thomas, 348
Kunstler, James Howard, 344,
400n38
Kuznets, Simon, 254
labeling efficiency standards,
318–19, 324
labeling fraud, 227
Index 
Laboratory of Populations, 199
Laffitte, Pierre, 314
Lafontaine, Oskar, 320–21
land alteration, 260
Langer, Charles, 107
Lasn, Kalle, 267
Latour, Bruno, 314
Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, 59
Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design, 309
leakage, 176, 317, 338
leed critique, 309–12
Leer, Steven, 128–29
Leinberger, Christopher, 300
Lemmon Jack, 81
Leno, Jay, 111
Leon, Warron, 259–60
Letterman, David, 65
Levittowners, 237
life expectancy, 200
life extension, 200
life satisfaction, 245–46
The Light-Green Society (Bess),
225–26
Limited Too, 230
limits to growth, 163–64, 166–68,
196, 202
Lindblom, Charles, 347
livability, 287
lobbying coal industry, 124
Loftus, Kathy, 10
Loma Prieta earthquake, 286
Lomborg, Bjorn, 8, 195
London congestion pricing, 290
The Long Emergency (Kunstler), 344
Lovelock, James, 344
low-income housing, 277
luxury tax, 251–52
The Machine Stops (Forster), 347
Makower, Joel, 226
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 190
Marcellus Shale, 140–42
marketing. See ecoconsumerism;
youth marketing
Marshall Fields, 230
Marx, Karl, 191, 320, 379n6
Masdar City, 20–22
materialism, 236. See also
ecoconsumerism
Max Plank Institute, 200
McCollum, Betty, 215
McKibben, Bill, 344
McKinsey and Company, 335
Meadows, Donella H., 345
meat production, 259–60. See also
vegetarianism
media coverage: alternative energy
in, 355n3; balance of opinions
in, 154–57; corporate ownership
of, 154; expert opinions in, 156;
online publications, 160–61;
reaction to oil shock, 150–53;
status quo bias of, 155–56; study
of energy articles, 150–54;
understaffing in, 159
Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes and
Conway), 156–58
Merkel, Jim, 198
Merrill Environmental Center, 310
The Middle Mind (White), 344
militarism resources, 352
military spending, 256–57, 352
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 301
Millennium Cell, 115–16
Miller, Steven, 280
Mionske, Bob, 297
mixed-use financing, 299–300
Mond, Ludwig, 107
monetary reform, 327
monoculture plantations, 210
Montaigne, Fen, 345
Moore, Kathleen Dean, 344, 411n6
Moral Ground (Moore and Nelson),
344
More, 201
Moyers, Bill, 206
mtbe, 67
Muller, Richard, 100
naacp, 322
nannyism, 318, 322
narrowing, 323, 335
National Boys and Girls Club, 230
National Corn Growers
Association, 79–80
National Energy Technology
Laboratory, 108
National Mining Association,
129–30
national nanny, 247
National Parent-Teacher
Association, 230
National Renewable Energy
Laboratory, 143
National Research Council:
definition of externality, 167–68;
electric vehicle study, 144
natural gas: as a bridge to nowhere,
140; versus carbon dioxide
production, 140; fracking, 140–
42; and water contamination,
141–42
Natural Resources Defense
Council, 51
Nelson, Michael P., 344, 411n6
Nemet, Gregory, 15
neo-colonialism, 345, 367n29. See
also neoliberalism
neoliberalism: critiques of, 345;
nannyism and, 318–19, 322;
patents, 367n29; support for,
346–47; well-being and, 333
Netherlands: dyke construction
in, 308; home design in, 307;
imperialism of, 345; mediumsized
cities in, 402n55;
neighborhood design in, 307–9;
quality of life in, 301
networks of innovation, 314–15
neuromarketing, 232. See also
ecoconsumerism
New America Foundation, 192
Newcastle earthquake, 121
New Energy Policy Development
Group, 107
New York City: as an ecotopia,
276; tree census, 326
Next Generation Nuclear Power
Plant, 110
Nieh, Peter, 24
Niger Delta, 319
nimby, 37–38
Nonproliferation Policy Education
Center, 95
Norton, Aaron, 228
Norwegian hydropower, 134
nuclear armament proliferation,
92–96
nuclear power: burner reactors
for, 100; carbon footprint of, 97;
carbon mitigation costs for, 97;
early years of, 90; economies of
scale, 97–98; environmentalists’
assessments of, 91; movie about,
81–82; framing, meltdowns as
accidents, 82; French history of,
92–93; peacetime vs. wartime,
92–96; public perceptions of,
Index 
81–82; resurrection of, 90–91;
safety record of, 82; subsidies
for, 97–100; taxpayer risks of,
103; total cost of, 98; waste
management, 86–90
Nuclear Suppliers Group, 91–92
nuclear waste: compared to
naturally occurring radioactivity,
100–101; development of,
90–96; dumped in ocean,
98–99; geothermal-related,
137; management activities,
96; natural gas–related, 141;
quantities of, 99–100; recycling/
reprocessing of, 100; risks of,
96; stored at Hanford, 86; Tank
sy-101, 85–90; tracking of, 95;
unpredictability of, 88
nudges, 330
Nye, David, 348
Obama, Barack: coal support, 130;
halting Yucca Mountain facility,
99; hydrogen defunding, 116;
solar support, 4; tire inflation,
152; unaware of Hanford, 82;
wind energy support, 51
objectivity in journalism, 154–56
Occupy Wall Street issues:
campaign finance reform, 322,
329–30; decoupling, 327; ditch
the gdp, 253–56; monetary
reform, 327; productivist porn,
150–54; reform zoning, 297–98;
two economies, 272–73; voting
reform, 328; well-being, 333.
See also economics; housing
affordability; inequality;
neoliberalism; public space;
women’s rights
ocean acidity, 127–28
oecd, 337–38
Office of Population Research,
218–19
oil embargo of 1973, 35
oil scarcity, 168
open-work, 251
Optimum Population Trust, 198
Oreskes, Naomi, 156
Our Common Future (Brundtland
Commission), 163
overconsumption harms ranked,
260. See also consumption;
ecoconsumerism
overpopulation: renewed interest
in, 203; as a symptom, 215. See
also population growth
Owen, David, 275–76
Pacala, Stephan, 335
Pacific garbage patch, 242
packaging, 242, 252–53
palm oil, 74
parking: emergence of, 266;
inequitable burden of, 281;
subsidies for, 288
park(ing) program, 288
parklets, 289
passive solar, 29, 324–26
Patel, Raj, 344
patentability of energy mechanisms,
161–62
peace requires bravery, 257
peaker power plants, 13, 43
pedestrian: history, 265–66; risks,
145–46. See also walkable
neighborhoods
Perkins, John, 346–47
pg&e, 143
Phenix, Matthew, 111
philanthropy online resources, 353
photovoltaics. See solar cells
Pickens, T. Boone, 36, 52, 57
Pickett, Kate, 346
Pierson, Paul, 346
Pike, Richard, 143
Pink, Daniel, 245
plastic waste, 252–53
plugging leaks, 303–5
plutonium: enrichment, 83, 85;
missing quantities of, 95;
tracking of, 95. See also nuclear
waste
polder model, 308
political donations, 125–26, 129–31
poor regions: risks to, 243; women’s
rights in, 210, 214–16. See
also inequality; neoliberalism;
Occupy Wall Street issues
The Population Bomb (Paul
Ehrlich), 203
population control, 191, 210–11. See
also population growth
population growth: among rich
consumers, 196–97; association
with prosperity, 202; dilution
of political representation,
206; early theories of, 190–91;
economic consequences of, 202;
exponentials, 191–92; figures,
195; forecast unreliability, 197,
216; global, 194; global peak, 197;
life extension impact on, 200;
modification of, 199; momentum,
199–200; official policy on,
201; optimum, 198–99; policy
interventions on, 200–201; risks
of, 213; stigma about discussing;
201, U.S. estimates of, 192, 216;
value of life and, 206
population reduction: benefits of,
206–7; conflict and war and,
206; crime reductions as a result
of, 206; defense of, 187–88, 208;
fears surrounding, 202–5; history
of, 208; risks of, 205
population online resources, 350
positional wealth, 237
posterity, 203–5
Postman, Neil, 347
Potts, Malcolm, 207
poultry production, 259–60
poverty resources, 350
power (influence), 162, 180–81
Pratt, Robert, 159
preconditions for energy
technologies, 337–38
Price-Anderson Act, 90
priorities, 334–36
Priypat, 102
production vs. production, 155, 334
productivism: alternatives to, 332–
33; codevelopment of, 151, 165,
167; environmental policy, 163–
64; institutional process of, 58;
origins of, 150–51; outlook for,
340–42; and patent implications,
161–62; political support for,
162–64; profit motive of, 154,
161–62
promises: for clean coal, 131–32; for
fusion, 138; for solar cells, 4–6,
26–28, 30
Public Citizen, 322
public opinion: climate change,
157–58; preference for walkable
communities, 300; proximity to
friends, 276
public relations: automotive
industry, 143–44; climate change
Index 
skeptics, 157–58; coal industry,
125, 131–32; electric vehicles, 143,
146; influence on media, 159
public space: congestion pricing,
290–91; parking takeovers, 288
public transportation: Curitiba
model, 285; density of locale,
284–85; effects on children,
250–51; history of, 265; success
factors for, 284–85
quality of life survey, 256
Quantum Technologies, 108
questioning goals, 178
questions about the future, 334
Quinn, Daniel, 345
Rabeder, Karl, 244
radiation, 100–103
radioactive waste: geothermalrelated,
137; natural gas–related,
141. See also nuclear waste
ranching footprints, 259–60
Rapa Nui. See Easter Island
Rasmussen, Steen Eiler, 307
ratchet effect: of alternative
vehicles, 146; benchmark for
avoiding, 337; challenges of
addressing, 171–75; of cheap
power, 333; of comparative
consumerism, 237; of
suburbanization, 270–72
Reagan, Ronald, 346–47
redd, 210
Rees, Amanda, 273
refrigerators, 318–19, 329
regulation: of building energy
consumption, 324; outlook for,
340–42; utility of, 318–20
reliability factor, 49
Renewable Energy Consulting
Services, 52
Renewable Fuels Association, 70
reproduction selfish project, 204–5
research vs. production, 336
resources, 349–53
retrofitting suburbia, 298–300
risk society, 145, 171–72, 327–28
Robbins, Tom, 133
Roberts, Kelli, 78
Rockefeller, David, 65
Rocky Mountain Institute, 175
Romm, Joseph, 114
Roots and Shoots, 251
Rosenbaum, Walter, 90
Rostand, Edmond, 121
Royal Dutch Shell, 320
Running the Numbers (Jordan), 197
Rybczynski, Witold, 305–6
sacrificing sacrifice, 178–79
Safe Routes to School, 283
Safina, Carl, 347
Salazar, Ken, 130
Sale, Kirkpatrick, 347
Save the Children, 221
Schalet, Amy, 220–21
Schama, Simon, 162, 176, 270
Schor, Juliet, 231–35
Schroeder, Gerhard, 321
Schumacher, Fritz, 227
science and technology studies. See
actor-network theory; boundary
objects; codevelopment;
congruency; Foucauldian power
flows; framing; risk society;
self-fashioning; semiotics; social
construction of technology;
trained incapacity; unintended
consequences
Scrooge, 191
secrecy: document ornl-341,
84–85; Green Run, 83–85;
Hanford Site, 83–90; leaked
diplomatic cables on Nigeria,
319; radioactive dispersions,
83–85
Seidman, Larry, 251
self-directed learning, 250
self-fashioning, 149
self-organization, 182
semiotics: clean coal, 131–32;
clean energy spectacle, xvi;
conceptions of public space,
265–66; conservation, 152;
electric vehicles, 144; energy
reduction, 152; energy spectacles,
149–50; future visions, 168–69;
gangsta, 231; hydrogen, 119–20;
nature and natural, 223–25; news
coverage implications, 159–60;
nuclear power, 81–82; parroting,
342; production vs. reduction,
149–52, 303; solar cells, 3–4, 165;
wind power, 58–60
Seuss, Dr., 223
shale gas, 140–42
Shiva, Vandana, 344
The Shock Doctrine (Klein), 347
A Short History of Progress
(Wright), 193
Shutkin, William A., 347
side effects. See externalities
sidewalks: café culture on, 288;
emergence of, 265–66; expansion
techniques, 293
Sierra Club, 38–39, 51
Sieverts, Thomas, 269
Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, 19
silo effects, 26, 335
Simon, Julian, 195
Sinclair, Stephanie, 214
skyscraper maintenance, 400n38
Small is Beautiful (Schumacher),
227
Smart Fuel Cell, 115–16
smart grid, 47–48
smart growth, 192
Smith, Sam, 347
smokestack scrubbers, 124
Snowe, Olympia, 215
social construction of technology:
ethanol example of, 65–71;
hydrogen economy example of,
119–20; solar cell introduction to,
5–6, 30; wind power example of,
54–60. See also codevelopment,
hydrogen economy example of;
semiotics
social enterprise, 250–51
social enterprise resources, 352
Society of the Spectacle (Debord),
149–50
sociology of science and
technology. See actor-network
theory; boundary objects;
codevelopment, hydrogen
economy example of;
congruency; Foucauldian power
flows; framing; risk society;
self-fashioning; semiotics; social
construction of technology;
trained incapacity; unintended
consequences
Socolow, Robert, 335
solar cells: aging degradation of,
22, 359n42; as greenwashing,
27; in California, 9; California
Academy of Sciences use of,
324–26; carbon credits for, 17–
Index 
18; Chesapeake Bay Foundation
use of, 310; cornucopian visions
of, 8; costs of, 9, 10–12, 24–25,
356n8; durability of, 20–24;
economies of scale of, 10–11;
efficiency of, 22; expectations for
cost reductions, 10–12; form of
misdirection, 26–27; greenhouse
gasses from, 9, 17–18; harms of,
25–28; heavy metals in, 19–20;
history of, 7; hot water, 29;
installation limitations of, 12, 21;
installed cost of, 11–12; inverters
for, 22, 24; junk-mail comparison
to, 253; learning by doing, 14–17;
limits to harnessing, 8; in media,
6, 22; and Moore’s Law, 16–17;
overheating of, 22; photovoltaic
concentrating systems, 139;
in poor nations, 12–13, 28;
power intermittency of, 44–45;
purported benefits of, 5–6;
rebates for, 27–28; soiling of, 21;
subsidies for, 10–11, 27–29; theft
of, 12; timing advantage of, 13–
14; toxins in, 18–20; transmission
limitations of, 12–14
solar thermal: desert ecosystem
health, 139; passive 324–26;
rooftop units, 140; subsidies,
139; system descriptions, 139;
transmission limitations, 139;
water consumption, 139
solutions. See First steps list
Solyndra, 11
spectacle, 149–50
Speth, James Gustave, 346
sprawl: electric vehicle
involvement, xvi, 145; public
disapproval of, 300
Star, Susan Leigh, 164
steady-state economy, 182
Steamboat Springs co, 294–95
steam engine, 174
Stein, Gertrude, 331
Stein, Herb, 196
St. Elizabeth’s Day Flood, 308
Stern, Todd, 322
Stiglitz, Joseph, 344
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 306
straw-bale homes, 264
streets: history of, 265–67
suburbanization: budget problems
of, 272; as colonialism, 264;
cosmopolitanism, 269; and
effects on children, 250; history
of, 263–73; maturation of,
274; profit motive of, 271–72;
ratchet effect of, 270–72;
retrofitting, 298–300; and school
relocation costs, 272; and turf
grass, 268; utopian visions
of, 269; visualization of, 263;
Zwischenstadt, 269
sulfur dioxide, 124–25
Sunline, 113
superpests, 192
sustainable development policy, 163
sustainable growth, 192
Sweden: child advertising ban, 248;
cogeneration, 327; school biking
reforms, 250
Switzerland: earthquake from
geothermal, 137; speeding ticket
costs, 292
symbolism. See semiotics
symptoms vs. sources, 335
Taibbi, Matt, 346
Tank sy-101, 85–90
taxes: automotive, 285;
consumption-based, 251–52;
drivers vs. bicyclists paying,
316; energy-related, 252,
323–24; gasoline, 285; spending
breakdown of revenues from,
256–57; wealthy residents share
of carbon, 324
Teatro Zinzanni, 286
technofetishism, 331–32. See also
fetishes
technological determinism, 331–33
technological optimism, 195
technological turn, 162–64
technology, social construction
of: ethanol example of, 65–71;
hydrogen economy example of,
119–20; solar cell introduction to,
5–6, 30; wind power example of,
54–60. See also codevelopment,
hydrogen economy example of;
semiotics
technology in environmental
policy, 163–64
technology studies. See actornetwork
theory; boundary
objects; codevelopment,
hydrogen economy example of;
congruency; Foucauldian power
flows; framing; risk society;
self-fashioning; semiotics; social
construction of technology;
trained incapacity; unintended
consequences
teen pregnancy: and abortion, 218;
causes of, 218, 220–21; crosscultural
comparisons of, 216–17,
220–21; parental role in, 220–21;
rates of, 216–19; and religious
implications, 220–21; risks of,
217–18; solutions to, 221
teen sexual health, 220–22
Texaco, 108
Texas: how many people can fit,
194–95; per-capita energy use,
182
thermal coolers, 140
thorium, 93–95
Three Mile Island: nuclear
meltdown, 81–82; relicensing, 91
Tocqueville, Alexis De, 270
Toly, Noah, 302
toxins: solar related, 18–20; traffic
related, 267
tradeoffs, 335–36
traffic: benefits of, 291; congestion
pricing and, 290–91; emergence
of, 265–67; freeway construction
and, 286; time spent in, 267,
271–72; toxins within, 267
traffic calming: justification for,
292; sidewalk expansion for, 288;
strategies for, 293
trained incapacity, 168
trees, 325–26
triple-bottom-line accounting, 164
Trussell, James, 218–19
Tucholsky, Kurt, 269
tuition costs, 207
Turkle, Sherry, 348
Twain, Mark, 3
20% Wind Energy by 2030 (doe):
environmentalists’ support
for, 59; findings in, 51–60;
methodology of, 54
2008 elections, 126, 129–31
2010 elections, 130
2012 elections, 130
Index 
UK Royal Society of Chemistry,
143
uncertainty: working with, 176–77
unicef, 230
unintended consequences: biochar,
78–79; biofuels, 63–64, 74–76;
carbon taxes, 316–18; clean coal,
131–32; congestion pricing,
290–91; efficiency, 174–75;
electric vehicles, xvi, 144–46;
fertilizers, 71; geothermal,
136–37; growthism cycle, 167;
hydrogen, 111–14; hydropower,
134–35; leakage, 317; monetary
policy, 327–28; national energy
consumption, 302; natural
gas, 140–42; nuclear power,
103; outlook for, 340–42;
photovoltaics, 17–28; production
vs. production comparisons,
155; sacrifice, 178–79; solar cells,
17–28; solar thermal, 139; traffic
signals, 292; wind power, 36–42,
58–60. See also boomerang
effect; externalities
Union of Concerned Scientists,
259–60
United Nations Food and
agriculture Organization, 260
United Nations Millennium
Development Goals, 209
United Nations Population
Conference, 209
United Nations Population Fund,
216
United Nations World Summit on
Sustainable Development, 164
universal health care: availability,
221, 239–40, 245; funding, 257;
measuring performance of, 255;
resources, 351
University of Washington, 329
unorganized coordination, 314
unplanned pregnancies, 218–19
urban density, 277. See also
urbanism
urbanism: cafés and, 288;
delivery vehicles and, 293;
disadvantages of, 287; Dutch,
307–9; environmental impact of,
276–78; and jaywalking, 292;
leed critique of, 309–12; and
livability, 287; necessary projects
of, 287; retrofitting suburbia
for, 298–300; village model of,
275–78, 286–88; and zoning
reforms, 297–98
urban planning land use, 276–77
Urdal, Henrik, 206
U.S. Census Bureau population
estimates, 194–95, 216
U.S. Department of Energy: biofuel
forecast, 79; Hanford secret
documents, 83; hydrogen support
by, 108; responsibilities of, 328;
and radiation releases, 85; U.S.
impermanence, 96; wind energy
reports by, 51–59; and Yucca
Mountain repository, 99
U.S. Green Building Council, 309
U.S. Department of
Transportation, 283
utopianism: alternative energy, 169;
hydrogen, 119; suburbanization,
268–69
Veblen, Thorstein, 235
veganism online resources, 352
vegetarianism, 258–61
vegetarianism online resources, 352
village model, 275–78, 286–88,
402n55. See also cities
visions of the future, 168–69.
See also promises; fetishes;
utopianism
Volt electric car, 143
voluntary restrictions, 164
volunteering, 246
volunteering online resources, 351
von Braun, Joachim, 63
voting reform, 328
Wald, Matthew, 88
Waldermann, Anselm, 59
walkable neighborhoods:
benchmarks for, 337; carshare
effects on, 290; and climate
change, 339; college campus
as, 276; consumption backstops
of, 182; history of, 265–66;
independence of children in,
250–51; and jaywalking, 292;
leed critique of, 309–12; online
resources for, 353
Warner, Carolyn, 61
Watt, James, 174
wealth: extraction as source of 243,
324
Webster, John, 115
wedges, 335
well-being: and corporate charters,
347; efficient housing and, 311–
12; energy efficiency and, 305;
outlook for, 340–42; prioritizing,
334–36; regulation and, 321; Wall
Street model, 333
Welliver, Judson, 272
What’s Mine is Yours (Botsman and
Rogers), 290
White, Curtis, 344
White, Lynn, 344
Whole Foods Market, 10
Wikileaks, 319
Wilkinson, Richard, 346
Willard, Frances, 278
Willey, David, 198
Williamson, June, 298
wind energy: benefits of, 32–34;
capacity factor of, 49–50; carbon
footprint of, 40–42; compressed
air storage for, 46; in Denmark,
45–46; detractors of, 36–40;
global capacity of, 36; harms
of, 59–60; history of, 34–36;
intermittency of, 43–47; media
coverage of, 36; outlook for, 340;
profit potential for consultants
of, 57; and pumped storage, 46;
and reliance on fossil fuels, 42;
required to replace coal, 49–50;
storage options for, 46; and
windiest locations, 47
wind turbines: bird and bat
endangerment by, 38–39; and
blade toss, 36–37; building
mounted, 41–42; distortion of
radio waves by, 39; geographic
constraints of, 37, 40, 55; icing of,
36–37; impact of roadways for,
40; noise of, 36; scale of, 32–33;
shading effect of, 55; visual
impact of, 37–38
wind turbine syndrome, 36
win-win policy. See congruency
Woodrow Wilson Center, 160
work: flexibility, 240; future of, 332
workforce aging, 202, 205
work-spend cycle, 238
World Resources Institute, 108
Index 
World Summit on Sustainable
Development, 201
Worldwatch Institute, 10, 51, 80
women’s rights: benefits of,
211–12; bicycling and, 278;
harmful practices, 215–16,
220–21; malnutrition and,
210; measuring success of,
210–11; physical violence, 210;
prioritizing individual rights,
211–13; property inheritance,
215–16; public service, 215–16;
requirements for improving,
213–14; online resources for, 350;
risks of dislocation, 210
Wright, Ronald, 193
yards and yard work, 268
The Yes Men, 345
youth marketing: adverse effects
of, 234–35, 248; attempts to ban,
247–48; bro-ing, 230; celebrity
endorsements in, 233–34;
comprehending bias of, 228;
elimination of, 246–50; and
exploitation, 232; gangsta, 231;
history of, 230; infiltration of,
230; intensification of, 228–33;
international comparisons of,
246–47, 248; neuromarketing,
232; and obesity, 228–29;
practitioner interviews, 233–34;
psychological effects of, 234–35,
248; resources, 351; and schools,
251; spying, 231; steps to ban,
249–50
Yucca Mountain nuclear waste
facility, 99
Zehner, Ozzie: childhood, 31;
power plant job, xvii–xviii; in
Amsterdam, 279; hybrid car
project, 142–43
Zipcar, 290
Žižek, Slavoj, 347
Zoellick, Robert, 63
zoning land use, 276–77
zoning reforms, 297–98, 299–300
Zubrin, Robert, 114, 117
Zwischenstadt, 269