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Framing Embeds Values in Scientific Facts

At the Sustainability Symposium last night (which was nominally about water footprints (PDF) and this paper on the international trade in virtual water) we ended up “off topic” and talking about science communication, public outreach, and how policy gets made. Inevitably it seems like these conversations end up coming back to the issues from Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet‘s Speaking Science workshop that SASS sponsored last summer.

There is huge discomfort for scientists in the fact that the way in which information is conveyed impacts how it is interpreted. The idea is at odds with the scientific ideal of objective facts and communication, but nevertheless it is true. A one liter glass plus 500 ml of water equals what? The glass is half empty. The glass is half full. The glass is twice as big as necessary to hold that much water. The same objective facts, different connotations. Different implications. Different frames. And sometimes, the frame ends up being a more important determinant of the listener’s reaction than the information the speaker intended to convey.

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by atduskgreg

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On the Pareto frontier in salary-vacation space

Dear (Prospective Employer),

Thank you for your monetarily very generous offer of employment! Honestly, it’s not obvious to me how I could spend $X a year, as I am currently living quite comfortably on about one Nth of that amount. Actually, that’s not entirely true; I’m sure I could spend it all if I got a mortgage on a big house out in the suburbs, bought a fancy car with which to commute to work, ate out frequently, and had a few kids I planned to put through college. However, I prefer to live simply in a small home, cook my own meals, bus or bike to work, and I may very well choose not to reproduce. I also prefer, in my all too limited time on Earth, to experience the wilderness that still remains in the world, and the myriad human cultures, cuisines, and languages that have emerged in the last 50,000 years. Those experiences will not come easily sitting in front of a computer in an office park, and they often cannot be had on weekends or whirlwind tours. Thus, I am concerned about the following potential scenario with your offer of employment as it currently stands.

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A Letter to David Bodansky

Hello Prof. Bodansky,

I’m a PhD student in geophysics, and I just finished reading your book, Nuclear Energy. I appreciate the trouble you went to in the book to remain effectively neutral as to whether we ought to be pursuing the development of nuclear power. While I can’t say that the book made me into a nuclear advocate, I am less opposed to it in principle now, and believe that it does represent a potential long term energy solution, albeit one with non-trivial caveats. Then again, that seems to be the case with all of our options at this point.

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What are we doing?

CaltechPhDEatsGarbage — Caltech PhD Students Collecting Food

Just pulled a week’s worth of food out of a Trader Joe’s dumpster. Eggs, blueberries, apricots, chocolate cake, frozen ribs, chicken thighs, lettuce, bagels, breads of every description. We kept a bunch of it. Sorted the fruit into compost vs. smoothie quality, froze the latter. Sent what we couldn’t eat to a homeless shelter with another volunteer. I feel like the more I look at the margin of our society, the more I have to wonder, what the fuck are we doing? How did we get to this place, to this way of being? How can we think that this is okay? One hundred gallons of water for every ounce of beef; ten fossil calories burned for every one we produce as food, and then a third of that food sent to the landfill, while people, only a couple of miles away, are hungry? While whole neighborhoods in South Central LA have no grocery stores, only liquor stores and fast food junk?

Maybe more importantly at this point, where are we going with this? It’s a long way down from here.

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Nuclear Energy by David Bodansky

I just finished David Bodansky’s 600+ page tome Nuclear Energy. It’s almost a textbook, but not quite. I don’t know who the intended audience is really. Other than me. Similar genre, broadly, as The High Cost of Free Parking. A comprehensive overview of a technical topic, for those with a long attention span and no fear of numbers. I decided to read the book because of the recent turn toward nuclear power that some environmentalists have taken. There are many publics that react strongly, and negatively, to the idea, but I don’t trust public sentiment to be rational any more than I can manipulate it. Bodansky did an admirable job of remaining neutral throughout the book, on a topic that almost universally devolves into something resembling a religious debate. As a result of this reading, I’m much more positive (or rather, less negative) about nuclear energy than I was before. I think that my position, which I hope can count as an informed one, now closely resembles that of Ralph Cavanagh, as articulated in this debate with Peter Schwartz hosted by the Long Now Foundation.

The main questions I had coming into the book were:

Can nuclear energy be done responsibly?
What would it take for it to scale up meaningfully?
How would it compare in costs and risks to renewable energy sources, if it were done responsibly at scale?

The answers I came away with were that yes, it probably can be done responsibly, and at the scale necessary for it to be meaninful as a long term source of primary power globally. However, if it were to scale up responsibly in the long term, it seems that the associated costs would likely end up being greater than for renewable energy sources. So I guess I’m supportive of having the so-called “nuclear option” on the table, in competition with any other carbon free power source, with the significant caveat that the cost of the nuclear power being considered correspond to a responsible, long term, large scale deployment. The scenario I foresee needing to be avoided is ending up with an unfair comparison, between short-term and/or irresponsible and/or non-scalable nuclear power, and renewables — especially renewables as priced before the solar power industry has obtained whatever economies of scale there are to be had in their niche. One might be able to make a persuasive argument that we need to use nuclear power as a bridge between fossil fuels and renewables at scale, but I haven’t heard that argument made yet.

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There’s no place like “away”

Most things we buy are trash before we even get to know them well. Paul Hawken estimates (Natural Capitalism, p. 81) that only about 1% of the mass which we mine, harvest, or otherwise extract is still playing a useful role in the economy 6 months later. The other 99% is made up of either inherently consumable, unsustainable goods like coal, consumable but potentially renewable goods like food (depending on what we do with our sewage), or just plain waste, cast aside in the course of manufacturing, or “saved for later” in some landfill. Within the waste category, the overwhelming majority of the mass is stuff we never see, like the 20 tons of mine tailings and associated cyanide leachate that are generated in the making of each gold wedding band. In some cases the right category is unclear. Was the 800 gallons of 25,000 year old Laurentide ice sheet meltwater that got pumped out of the Ogalalla Aquifer to produce the cheeseburger Michelle and I split at Lucky Baldwin’s on Tuesday really waste? It was non-renewably extracted, but then mostly evaporated harmlessly into the atmosphere. Of course there’s also all the stuff we normally think of as garbage, that we wheel out to the curb each week. If you live in Pasadena or Glendale, or many of the other cities at the feet of the San Gabriels, that garbage is now in the Scholl Canyon landfill, in the hills just to the west of the Rose Bowl:

Scholl Canyon Landfill

If you lost your virginity at Caltech, this is probably where the condom is today. All the red plastic party cups you ever used at Munth parties are keeping it company, and the styrofoam cup noodle containers and plastic wrappers from your late night Maruchan ramen binges. And the enormous stack of old class notes you didn’t have time to burn or recycle when you left. All the leftover crap from you Ditch Day stack is buried here too. And not just yours, but decades worth of Caltech students. There really is no such place as “away”. If you take a closer look it doesn’t look so bad really:

Scholl Canyon Landfill Closeup

Zooming in, you’ll see only a tiny area of actual garbage, where the trucks were working the day the picture was taken. The rest of the landfill just looks like a construction site, because each night, they’re required to cover the garbage up. In California, about half the time landfills are covered with dirt. The rest of the time, we use what’s euphemistically called “alternative daily cover” or ADC. ADC is anything that you’re allowed to cover a landfill with, that isn’t dirt. In 1989, California passed a law (the California Integrated Waste Management Act, AB 939) creating the California Integrated Waste Management Board, and mandating that all cities in California had to divert 50% of their landfill waste by the year 2000. When you use something as ADC it counts as having been “diverted”, even if you never would have sent it to the landfill before.

Among the things which qualify as ADC are sewage sludge, ground up tires, construction and demolition waste, compost, “green material”, and my personal favorite, the residue of shredded automobiles:

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The Home Economics of Bicycles

Our local NPR station, KPCC 89.3 is doing a story on bicycling, and how it affects home economics in these trying times… These are my responses to their questionnaire.

Tell the story of how your bicycle is changing your financial picture.

Largely because we choose to bike as our primary form of transportation, and do not own a car, my partner and I have disposable income, even as poorly paid graduate students. We can max out our Roth IRAs (and then some) each year, and still have money left over to rent a car once a month or so, to get up into the Sierras or out into the desert, or to visit family in Santa Barbara. We live comfortably, but frugally, and have no consumer debt. The situation would likely be very different if we had even one, let alone two cars.

In what ways has the price of gas changed your relationship with the bicycle?

I’ve always used a bike as my primary vehicle, so the “high” gas prices really don’t have much to do with my bicycle relationship. Except in extraordinary cases (someone with a long commute and lousy fuel efficiency), fuel costs are not the largest portion of the expense of owning a car. Insurance, depreciation, maintenance, financing, registration, parking tickets, etc. are all significant, but they are “fixed” costs, which you will pay largely regardless of how much you drive, and so most people take them as given, because they assume they can’t live without a car. Most of the economic benefits of bicycling only accrue when you get rid of the car completely, and avoid those fixed costs.

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O Brave New World, Where Are You?

After coming across Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s TED talk recently, and already being familiar with his stunning aerial photography, I was excited to see his film Home, about the Earth, and its dwellers. It is probably the most beautiful film I have ever seen. The BBCs Planet Earth is gorgeous, but Home is far better. Every scene is a piece of art, like his photography, but in motion. I would pay to see it in high definition. The first half hour or so is a kind of naturalistic creation myth: true, but poetic. The formation of the Earth. The rise of the cyanobacteria, and the oxygenation of our atmosphere. The eventual emergence of our own species and the journey we took from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists, to city dwelling, fossil fueled, rulers of the world.

But there it stumbles. While what it says is true, it is not enough. The truth alone is no longer sufficient. The film is blind, or nearly so, to the future that we need to see. It’s too easy, given the truth we have inherited, to envision a dark future. Vague assertions that the solutions are at hand are not enough. He exclaims, and rightly so, that “We don’t want to believe what we know.” For some reason, we are afraid to envision a bright future. Maybe it’s because throughout the 20th century, the bright futures we envisioned often turned dark. Social progress became World Wars and gulags. Technological progress became mustard gas, ICBMs and DDT. Economic progress became the Depression and the disingenuous promise of perpetual growth through the liquidation of our natural capital. I agree that we don’t have time to be pessimists, but fodder for pessimism seems to be almost the only content out there in the environmental sphere. And it’s getting old.

CC by babypinkgrl2003

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What kind of bicycling should Pasadena support?

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 5:36 PM, Sims, Brian wrote:

Zane and Rich,

During our last BMP meeting we discussed the idea of the City sponsoring more biking related events. I was over at Pasadena PD today dealing with my stolen and then recovered bikes and saw this flyer. This is exactly the type of events we were discussing. This also ties in nicely with our BMX track idea.

I certainly don’t see anything wrong with a BMX track as a city recreation facility if there’s demand for it (especially if it means less conflict between BMX riders and those would would prefer that they not practice elsewhere in the city), and it may well be a good Police fundraiser, but I don’t see this kind of event as particularly constructive in the context of getting people to consider bikes as a viable means of transportation within the City, because it focuses on bicycles as a means of sport (over function) and on experts (rather than everyone). Which isn’t to say that bikes aren’t sport — of course they are — but training and competition amongst the elite is very different than active and inherently non-competitive transportation. The Tour of California falls into the “elite” category too: it’s spectation, vs. participation.

photo by Incase Designs on Flickr

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China and Continuum Privatization

We watched a Long Now talk last night, by Orville Schell (currently a fellow of the Asia Society in New York) entitled “China thinks long term, but can it re-learn how to act long term?” His main point was that China is, even to the Chinese, filled with internal contradictions. That both as a nation and a culture, it is to a greater degree than any other nation of consequence in the world, essentially unresolved. To this end, he painted two pictures of China today: first optimistic, and then dark, but both to his mind true.

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