Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
What's the purpose of the Wisconsin Energy Institute?
I think, what was laid out before, a great interdisciplinary undertaking - that's certainly a part of it.
But, I take it as nothing less that to revolutionize the energy system.
That is the goal, the ultimate goal is to fundamentally change how energy is produced and consumed.
And it's hard enough to put diverse life scientists together with diverse forms of engineering,
and come up with a coherent, emergent property that is something bigger than the sum of it's parts.
That's hard enough. So, the empirical question I will ask today is why would you need social scientists?
That's a question I want to ask, and I think it's an empirical question.
Why would you need an anthropolgist? Let's throw that one right out.
Because I think you need to leave open the possibility that the answer is, "you don't."
If you do not have an answer...
If you do not have an explanation for the knee-jerk assumption...
that you need to reach all the way across campus...
without knowing why you're doing it, it will not produce the effect that you want.
So I think that you have to ask the question, "Why would you need an anthropologist?
Why would you need a geographer, sociologist?"
[technical problems]
So, what I'm saying is, that we can render this question empirically.
I'm going to give an example that is outside of the domain of energy.
In the late 1990's, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was interested
in reducing the amount of commercial chemicals being used by consumers on their property.
That's herbicides, pesticides, the kind of stuff that you put on your lawn.
It was being used in quantities 5 to 10 times what was put on the bag...
the analytical chemistry is very clear on what this exposure does to people, to children...
and it's winding up in the waterway.
So, the EPA was trying to revolutionize how you can communicate to people, to citizens,
that they maybe shouldn't use all of those chemicals.
In an actual study we performed, it turns out that people who think that lawn chemicals are bad for the environment,
for their children's health, for their family...
are statistically more likely to use those chemicals than people who don't think that.
So, if you take the spurious correlation, more environmental education actually means more chemical use.
The gut question, then, when you drill down, is what the hell is going on?
Who are these people and what are they doing?
And they were a significant majority of the population of homeowners across the United States.
If you do drill down into the data...and I'm come back to energy in a moment... you learn several things.
One: people are concerned about the value of their property.
They're making microeconomic tradeoffs on the order of ten to fifteen thousand dollars,
and the exposure pathways to certain kinds of mutagenic chemicals in their households,
in large numbers.
And if you consider that twenty-five percent of the land covering Franklin County, Ohio is turf grass lawns,
that is a remarkable microeconomic tradeoff being made around risk decisions.
You can imagine what the implications of this are for driving certain kinds of vehicles,
or embracing certain kinds of technologies, right?
But that explains only a small amount of variance.
If you drill down into the data, what else do you learn?
You learn that people who use lawn chemicals can name more of their neighbors than people who do not use lawn chemicals.
This is an embracing, loving, social practice.
People are exposing themselves to chemicals that are largely unnecessary,
or at least in the quantities they're being used, because they want to feel good about the relationships with their neighbors.
As irrational as that is, it is a structured and patterned behavior.
So what is my point? My point is that the EPA wants to change people's behaviors around an environmentally relavent problem.
Then they need to know the microeconomics of householes,
they need to know the sociology of behaviors within communities,
they need to know the macro political economy of the pesticide industry...and I probably left a few out.
So what are the implications for the Wisconsin Energy Institute?
The same thing holds for energy, is what I want to suggest.
If you want to revolutionize the energy system,
create a sustainable city with a transportation network that looks fundamentally unlike the one we have now,
you are talking about a revolution in consumer behavior and practice,
the way firms and businesses behave and relate to consumers and buyers, and to the way communities relate to one another.
If you think about a microgrid within a community or a neighborhood scale, or a household scale,
you're actually talking about a different kind of moral economy within a household.
You can make all kinds of things available, without any change - fundamental - change in behavior.
So, this map, which I put together in about thirty seconds, by a request by folks here at the institute,
is my notion of at least some of the kinds of political, social, human, and behavioral sciences that impinge on the question of revolutionizing energy.
For example, this building itself is the product of a political event: the relationship with the DOE, certain kinds of funding at the state level.
There's actually a science, believe it or not, that studies this.
Science policy is a reputable field, with journal articles.
They can predict where and when - to some degree of accuracy and inaccuracy -
you'll find floats of capital towards certain kinds of research, certain kinds of investments, and certain kinds of change in the landscape.
Now, are there people who know how to do that on this campus?
You bet there are. Are they studying energy? Maybe not.
Next, you can imagine science communication and journalism.
There's an enormous range of problems. For example, the communication of climate change, the communication of energy needs.
This is a known problem. Are there people who actually study how things are framed - how they're communicated?
And are they on this campus? The answer is yes there are. And are they studying energy?
I don't know that they are.
If you consider environmental perception, or behavior economics.
Behavioral economics is that part of economics that has discovered that people are not rational.
There are behavioral economists on this campus. Are they studying energy? I don't know.
But I bet not.
On the other side, there are the tradeoffs that occur in the landscape between certain kinds of energy choices.
What occurs if you create a biofuels revolution? In the agricultural industry? Tradeoffs between different crops?
Do we study that? Fortunately, I can say we do study that and we study it in the field of energy, at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.
I'm stepping in for Carol Barford, who should be speaking on this occasion.
Science and technology studies - location and optimization.
That is, how and when are those power lines going to be placed?
How do we optimize those kinds of outcomes?
That is both a mathematical problem that could be solved with a computer...
but ultimately it is a political problem, which is related to infrastructural development,
the branching of roads, and the way municipal as well as state government operates and functions.
To revolutionize the energy system in Wisconsin, requires that you need to know all of these things.
To say nothing of land cover change tradeoffs that would spill out from certain kinds of choices.
And finally, those oppositional movements that do not want - the nimbyisms - that do not want something it their back yard.
We can say, "Hey, that's irrational. This is good for everybody."
Those people have arguments, they have ways that they operate, they have politics, they have constituencies, and they function.
Are they predictable? Are them amenable to negotiation? The answer is yes, but you need someone who studies social movements.
You'd need an anthropologist.
To revolutionize energy, and the energy institute,
I would suggest, means a further enormous challenge, which I think we have to take very seriously.
Which is to think about this as a whole campus enterprise for a ten-year moon shot,
to in ten years time, to have revolutionized that grid.
Or in twenty years time - wherever you want to put that goal post.
It's going to have to be a truly full campus partnership around these questions.
And there are people out there who are itching to support this kind of science with their own.
They may not even know they're itching.
But they have the tools at their disposal, if given a problem, intractable and weird enough,
like the one with lawn chemical usage, to bring it to bear on energy relevant questions and problems.
In the absence of that, a revolution in the energy sector will fail.
Thank you very much.