Conventional wisdom could be defined as something widely assumed to be true until it’s closely examined.
Last week, as he nixed proposed regulations that would have imposed more stringent air quality standards, President Obama cited, in part, the economic impact of the proposed regulations.
This notion – that we can’t afford to have a clean planet in a slow economy – is classic conventional wisdom. And the best way to combat it is to subject it to a two-question test: Is it true? And does it serve us? (Extra credit if you ask why they want us to believe it.)
The answer to the first question is no – looser regulations do not reduce the costs of doing business. They just externalize them in the form of higher rates of disease and environmental degradation.
But even those who don’t care about asthma rates and ecosystem degradation ought to see that this piece of CW doesn’t even serve business interests in the long run. Because if we’ve learned one thing from Detroit, it’s that you can’t lower and raise the bar at the same time. The big three auto makers spent forty years keeping fuel efficiency standards low. Toyota and Honda spent that time innovating, figuring out how to make cars that people wanted to buy.
If we’re going to tell ourselves stories, let’s tell ones that serve us. Here’s one: higher standards drive innovation, and innovation is the lifeblood of economic competitiveness.
Back in grad school, I was talking with my advisor and frequent collaborator George Forman (the professor, not the pugilist) about the stiff competition for some sort of grant funding.
“But Chris,” he said, “All we need is a better idea than the others have.”
Oh. Right. Forget about the competition. Focus on your best ideas.
I like and respect Bill Nye. But as a communications guy, I have to say: he could have done a lot better job in his interview on Fox this week about Hurricane Irene and climate change.
If you watch his interview with Charles Payne of Fox, you see that Nye starts out well. He nicely handles the questions by explaining how climate modelers do their work. He even forces Payne to admit that he has no idea what’s happening with the earth’s temperature but that, yeah, it probably is a degree warmer than it used to be. It’s terrific.
Then Nye walks right into the trap that Fox had ready for him.
Here’s how it goes: we can’t beat this guy on the science. We know that. So what do we do? We bring in Al Gore to personify the arrogant climate change crowd. It’s a red herring aimed at the emotional brain, not the intellectual brain.
The clip of Gore, by the way, shows why he is such a poor spokesperson for action on climate. Because Al, he thinks the analogy that will help people understand climate change is….racism.
Oh, Al. Do you really want to give the denial industry the gift of being able to say that Al Gore thinks climate skeptics are the moral equivalent of racists? I know: that’s not at all the point Gore was trying to make. But why is he using one of the most sensitive hot buttons in American culture to make any point at all about climate change?
Nye, who had done so well early in the interview, takes the bait. There is simply no way he was going to get anywhere with Gore’s analogy. He should have pivoted right back to the points he wanted to make. But he wades in, and as soon as he chooses to engage with the racism analogy, you can sense him sinking into quicksand he could have easily walked around. It’s not that he didn’t make sense. He did. It’s just that what he said was way off topic.
Policy advocates need to be better prepared for these predictable traps and attacks. When the other side brings up distractions, you bring it back to science and ask them to disprove the evidence. Every single time. Because most of their weapons are diversions and ad hominem attacks.
Here’s how it could have gone.
“Charles,” Nye might have said, “I’m not sure what point Mr. Gore was trying to make, but my point is that when the planet heats up, the oceans heat up. That makes more energy available for tropical storms. Warmer air, meanwhile, holds more water, which is very likely why many parts of New York and New England got 8-10 inches of rain, leading to devastating floods.”
“Someone is going to emerge the leader in solar panels and other green technologies, Charles, and right now China is way ahead of us. They’re not debating, they’re investing. We can debate well-established science or we can kick our oil addiction and invest in green technology that is good for our economy, creates millions of jobs, and reduces our dependance on oil from the Middle East. You’re a business reporter. Which choice do you want us to make?”
The World Bank has just announced that global food prices are at a three-year high. The price of maize is up 84% since last summer; sugar has gone up by 62%.
At a meeting of the Sustainable Food Lab a few years ago, Peter Senge noted that “the global food system produces inexpensive food for the wealthy and expensive food for the poor.” Here’s a slide I made then to illustrate the point:
Growing inequity and decreasing access to food – and water – are creating crises for poor people around the world, as they have for many decades. But with global food reserves at very low levels, and climate change affecting farming, the margin for error is getting smaller. That’s why there’s strong evidence that rising food prices sparked the Arab Spring.
Anyone paying attention knows that the planet has been taking some lumps lately. So the question arises: where does hope come from? How do we carry on in the face of long odds?
In this short clip from an interview I did a while back with Otto Scharmer of MIT and the Presencing Institute, Otto suggests that hope comes, in fact, not from the present but from listening to the future we are trying to create. Have a look.
I went for a long bike ride the other day and stopped at a bike shop I’d never been to before to buy a mirror. Asked a question, got an adequate (if cursory) answer, bought the mirror, and left to assemble it in their parking lot.
And as I did I thought: I am a new customer with a new bike, with more gear to buy, and they made ZERO effort to get to know me. No questions about my bike, or where I was going on it, where I was from, nothing.
Yet, I heard a radio ad for them yesterday. They will invest money trying to get me into the store but will not invest two or three minutes getting to know me. It makes no sense.
And here’s the thing: they sell commodities. Even their nicest bikes and gear can be found in other shops or online. The only thing they can do to become something more than commodity brokers is, as Seth Godin put it, to be more human.
If you’ve been following the news from Washington lately, you know that higher-level thinking skills are all too rare. So it was a great pleasure to be in Tucson last week, working with the Camp Snowball team.
Camp Snowball brought together more than 250 people from around the world to learn more about education for sustainability and systems thinking. Here’s a quick piece I put together while we were still at camp. Many more to come. Sincere thanks to the Waters Foundation for inviting me to be part of this important work.
My client the Rippel Foundation has taken on ambitious and visionary work to improve the delivery of healthcare in the U.S. Right now we spend way more than other countries and rank poorly in health rankings compared to most other developed countries.
I created an animated slideshow for their annual dinner. We’ll be making a shorter version for their web site, but here’s a very short sample. Made in Keynote and exported to Quicktime.
It’s fun working with people who see the potential for real change and who have the vision to bring world-class thinkers together from other fields to help them see the healthcare system with fresh eyes.
Fear and excitement both activate our bodies in similar ways. They make our hearts beat faster, they kick off a flow of brain chemicals, and they produce those familiar butterflies in the stomach.
So what’s the difference? My friend Ross Harwood explained it this way: fear causes us to lean back, while excitement causes us to lean forward. He noticed this one time when he was on a rollercoaster with his daughters. The had their arms raised and were leaning in, screaming with excitement. Ross was leaning back, trying to slow down the car with his body.
Same experience, two different reactions.
I was in an experience a few years ago that really had me on my edge. My habitual response would have been to be back on my heels. But I remembered what Ross had told me and I chose in the moment to lean forward and choose excitement instead of fear.
