Applying behavioral economics to climate change

Behavioral economics never ceases to fascinate. Some selections from a Seed magazine piece on how people might trick themselves into more climate-friendly behavior:
(from Seed via BoingBoing)

• The Last Experiment § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
  

• • If human beings were the perfectly rational creatures imagined by classical economists, we would have done something about climate change by now. But the central insight of behavioral economics — the once heretical but now ascendant paradigm in economics, particularly following the 2002 Nobel Prize awarded to one of its founders, Daniel Kahneman — is that humans aren’t fully rational. All sorts of cognitive limitations prevent us from being so, and behavioral economists have spent much of the past decades discovering, describing, and naming our many mental shortcuts and biases, and ascribing our various irrational tendencies to their effects. Ben Ho’s particular interest is in how people’s feelings of guilt and altruism can be leveraged to reduce their carbon footprint, and he presented his findings at the November conference in a talk he titled “Using Behavioral Economics to Save the World.”
  • Early in Ho’s presentation, he mentioned a book called Nudge, written by the behavioral economist Richard Thaler...the Obama administration nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In their book, Thaler and Sunstein coin a term: choice architecture.
  • They argue that because the way in which we are presented with information changes our response to it, the best choice architecture gently steers us into the salubrious behavior that more thoroughly rational beings would choose.
  • Nudge describes a simple but astonishing experiment along such lines: Residents of a community were shown how their energy use measured up against the communal average. If they consumed more than the average, most reduced energy in the months ahead. If households saw that they consumed less energy than their peers, however, their energy use actually rose, except when the frugal households were given the merest of rewards: a smiley face on their bill.

Posted from Diigo.

NOAA Head Jane Lubchenco On Ocean Policy : NPR

Follow this link to listen to Jane Lubcheco's interview on Science Friday. She's got it together.

• NOAA Head Jane Lubchenco On Ocean Policy : NPR

  tags: ocean, climate change, green

  • What is on the horizon for the U.S. role in ocean management? Jane Lubchenco, newly-confirmed administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), discusses her top priorities for ocean policy — from forming a National Climate Service to ending overfishing.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Green Issue - Batteries Not Included - NYTimes.com

Highlights from The New York Times piece on swapping batteries stations for electric cars. It's one solution to the problem of recharging electric car batteries, which can take long time. This could really work.

• The Green Issue - Batteries Not Included - NYTimes.com

  tags: nytimes.com, green

  • Agassi never regarded himself as a particularly ardent environmentalist. But in 2005, he attended a meeting of young global leaders at the World Economic Forum at Davos where they discussed the question “How would you make the world a better place?”
  • After giving it some thought himself, he ultimately decided the answer was: By ending the world’s addiction to oil, which would mean finally getting people to drive electric cars. Hybrids, he argued, were a half-measure. Alternative fuels like hydrogen or natural gas or bio­fuels weren’t going to be readily available anytime soon. Only electricity fit the bill. It is plentiful, already widely distributed and can be generated from extremely low- or zero-emissions sources like solar or wind farms.
  • As he crunched the numbers, what really struck Agassi was how lucrative a business like this could be.
  • Powering a car by electricity — even relatively expensive “clean” energy like wind or solar — costs far less than powering it by gasoline.
  • The Tesla all-electric sedan, for example, uses about 1 cent of electricity per mile. A comparable gasoline car uses 16 cents of gasoline per mile.
  • And with the United States market for automobile gas at roughly $275 billion, Agassi figured that a company controlling a world network of charging stations would become so profitable so quickly that it could subsidize its customers’ electric cars, much the way mobile companies give out free phones to people who sign two-year contracts.
  • Within months, he had acquired crucial political and financial backing for Better Place. Peres’s support helped; the president wanted Israel to be the company’s first test market, and Peres began working as an icebreaker inside the government, getting skeptical politicians to begin designing tax incentives and cheap debt to finance the firm.
  • Then one day, he and an automotive engineer were chewing over an impractical method for quickly replenishing batteries. The engineer wondered aloud: Wouldn’t the fastest way to charge an electric car be to simply replace the battery?
  • It was, Agassi says, his “aha” moment. The auto industry’s conceptual error, he says, is in regarding the battery as a built-in component of the car, like a gas tank. Instead, you could think of the battery as more analogous to gas itself — an entity that goes in and out of a car as needed, owned not by the driver but by the company that sells you the fuel.
  • Think of the problem that way, Agassi realized, and the recharging company could refill its customers’ cars using battery technology and the existing electric grid without making any radical new technological innovations. The solution to electric cars lay not in re-engineering the battery but in re-engineering the car.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Standardizing our language for climate change

These are quotations from the following link:

• Bowman Global Change spearheads efforts to establish unified climate change language

  • Bowman agrees with the National Research Council that scientific understanding of climate change has outstripped society's capacity to use the knowledge. Bowman says the solution is to adapt scientific communication to make the science behind climate change comprehensible to non-experts. "Simplifying the complex science and translating the scientific language allows all members of society – both policy makers and consumers – to confront the climate crisis and make informed decisions. We need to put the science in the hands of the people," says Bowman.
  • ...urge scientists to establish a single frame of reference for atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and rising global temperatures. Standardized measurement will provide the public with consistent reporting on these critical parameters, reduce confusion, and help decision-makers to base their sustainability choices on accurate science.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.