The Prius Effect, Take 2

The universe works in interesting and often synchronous ways. After I posted the last entry I picked up Donella Meadows book “Thinking in Systems,” which I’m about halfway through. Amazing book; I highly recommend it. The passage I read last night was about a neighborhood in Holland where all the houses were alike except for one thing – some had their electric meters in the front hall for all to see, while the others had meters in the basement. These were the kind of meters where you can see the little silver wheel spinning faster the more energy you use. Not surprisingly, the houses where people could see their energy consumption used about a third as much energy as the ones with the meters in the basement. This was way before Priuses - the story took place in the early 1970s!

It makes me think we should pass a law that requires putting electric meters inside the house where everyone can see them. With current technology it would be easy to not only have them show energy use, but give you an hourly and daily summary. I can’t imagine we really need to have meter readers going around manually reading each meter, but if we do, a redundant system would still be worth it. As it stands now, I bet most people don’t even know where their meters are!

The Prius Effect

I recently heard a report on NPR about 25 high schoolers in San Francisco who were given cell phones as a way of reducing their environmental impact! You might ask yourself, “how can a cell phone reduce someone’s carbon footprint?” You would think all that talking, talking, would produce more carbon dioxide, not less, especially if you count the heavy breathing created by teenage sexting.

But these phones had something that most mobile communication devices don’t – a built in sensor that takes a reading of your movement speed every 30 seconds and determines how much time each day you spend immobile, walking, riding a bike or traveling by car. At the end of the day you can calculate how your transportation choices have affected the planet.

Brilliant! It’s the Prius Effect in a new application.

If you’re not familiar with the Prius Effect, a quick sidenote. I may or may not have coined the term - I haven’t heard anyone else use it – but I’m surely not the first to recognize it. When I got my Prius nearly two years ago I was only getting about 37 – 40 miles per gallon, which is less than advertised. I started watching the consumption gauge to figure out what was wrong and presto! My mileage improved to about 45 mpg. The constant feedback of how my driving was affecting my mileage changed my driving habits. It became a game and now I’m much better at it – if I’m paying attention I can get around 50 mpg.

This is what systems thinkers call “a negative regulating feedback loop,” which is a high leverage way to change a system, in this case the system being the car and its driver. A thermostat which keeps your house at a desired temperature is a simple example of a negative feedback loop. So is a hangover!

As Dana Meadows wrote in her seminal article “Places to Intervene in a System” (Whole Earth, Winter 1997) “The ‘strength’ of a negative feedback loop depends on the accuracy and rapidity of monitoring, the quickness and power of response and the directness and size of corrective flows.” In the case of the Prius, the monitoring is constant, while the power of response and the size of the corrective flow both depend on the driver’s ability to optimize fuel flows.

This year at Greenbuild (the world’s largest green design conference), there were literally dozens of examples of the Prius Effect being applied to buildings. Most of them were some variation on gauges that show energy consumption - for each room in a hotel, for example, or the overall building in an office lobby. The gauges tell building users how their habits are affecting energy use, just like the Prius consumption gauge. Lawmakers are currently discussing requiring energy labels on buildings, so that future tenants would have that information as part of their selection criteria.

Ankrom Moisan, where I work, uses Building Energy Modeling during the design of a building to measure how various design strategies will decrease the building’s energy consumption – another example of a regulating feedback loop.

At their best, negative regulating feedback loops positively change behavior. The more we recognize the Prius Effect, the more creatively we can apply it for the betterment of the planet. How about garbage cans that tell you the weight of your weekly refuse? Product labels that tell you how much energy was used in their production?

I’d love to hear from you, dear readers, about other possibilities.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

So which is it?

I often lay awake at night and listen to the wind howling outside my window in a key I’ve never heard before. The weather is just plain weird and if you’ve lost your job, your house, your savings, these are bleak times. We’re all worried about global warming and terrorist attacks and whether the Dow will ever recover.

But even in the darkness I find myself surprisingly optimistic. As hard as it is for many of us, everything is moving in the right direction and things are happening that I could only dream about a few short years ago. The consumer driven society we built was not sustainable. It had to end for us to survive.

Think about it. Because of the drop in consumption, factories are slowing down or closing and Green House Gas emissions are actually declining. People are driving less, saving lives and further reducing emissions. Americans are starting to take the long view and savings rates are going up for the first time since the 1950s.

Companies are reducing people’s hours, forcing them to have a better balance between work and life. Of course if you are struggling to pay your bills on a reduced pay check, you may not enjoy your time off. But our priorities are getting realigned whether we like it or not. Instead of buying stuff, we are spending more time with each other. We’re slowing down and our quality of life is looking up.

Here in Portland a lot of people have been walking or taking mass transit to work for years. But since the crash, the brigade of bicycles riding across the bridges into downtown every day has grown to epic proportions. I recently saw a caravan of bikes pulling small trailers loaded with sofas, lamps, tables, dressers and clothes. Friends were moving someone into a new house, getting exercise and maintaining a zero carbon footprint at the same time! Only in Portland.

Everywhere you look the new paradigm is taking root and people are digging it.

The Party's over!

At long last the Republican party is over!

The orgy of self-indulgence and self-importance ended in the darkest hours just before dawn. The house of cards in which it took place collapsed in a windstorm of change and public outcry. All inside were lost. Only a select few got to enjoy the party favors, but we all got hammered and now we’re nursing an excruciating collective hangover.

How did this happen? How did the Republicans go from running the country (into the ground) to running for their political lives?

Well, of course: they were victims of the paradigm shift.

The Republican philosophy of “every man for himself” was at odds with the reality that we are all in this together. As Sim van der Ryn recently put it, “we are moving from the Me Generation to the We Generation.” Republicans didn’t understand that; they saw the world as basically frightening and full of "the others." Fear was both their response and their primary tactic for maintaining power. Ironically the more they looked at the world as hostile, the more hostile it became. What you see is what you get.

But Hope>fear, as the Obama bumper sticker so succinctly points out, so let the Republicans cower in the corner while the rest of us move on.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m celebrating the end of a regressive and misguided ideology; I don’t have anything against Republicans as people. We need them. I would love to see an invigorated Republican philosophy; after all, Teddy Roosevelt was a Conservative Republican. Maybe if Republicans looked to him for inspiration instead of Karl Rove or Rush Limbaugh they might be able to enter the national debate with some relevant and useful ideas.