Beyond Energy Efficiency

I went to an event Thursday, January 17 that was about sustainability and it wan't the worst event I've ever been to... but it definitely had some issues. Some things that were covered were definitely intriguing but there were so many technical difficulties that I just wanted to get up and leave the room.

To start, the event was a webinar, which is fine but set the stage for a whole clusterfuck of issues. The lecturer and her tech geek couldn't figure out how to get their powerpoint to take up the entire screen and after six minutes of listening to them trying they ended up staying on a side-by-side view of the lecturer's view (which showed all the slides) and our view which showed the current slide. In the room where this event was held the presentation was projected onto a wall approx. 20-30 ft from my seat. I have decent eye sight, but it was impossible to read some of the information that was being displayed. Through the forty-minute lecture I constantly felt like I was missing information.

Tech troubles

The techie in our room tried to zoom in on the slide. It worked well and then for some reason she reverted to the small view? She looked at the master computer for a minute and then just sat back down, leaving us with the side-by-side tiny view. Did she believe that there would be something different on each view? I assume she did not have much experience with PowerPoint. I cannot blame her. End of story: I couldn't see the screen and it bothered me to a point where I needed to write two paragraphs about it.

On to the content of this webinar: "Beyond Energy Efficiency: Behavior Change Tactics for the Pollution Prevention Community" presented by Susan Mazur-Stommen (the director of Behavior and Human Dimensions Program at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy). ... what a mouthful.

So Susan's department is concerned with energy consumption and behavior change. They research how people act and how people change how they act. They then apply that knowledge to education and action to change environmental policies in individual companies, organizations, etc. Their mission is "to influence policy in favor of holistic solutions to energy problems" and their goal is "to give people multiple, positive pathways towards an energy-efficient future." Sounds good to me.

Most of what Susan had to say was good. She covered how good policy should respect individual choice, how the way to action isn't making presentations with statistics but instead making concrete examples visible in real time, and how we should bombard people with rules and restrictions. Cool. I agree. But then Susan started talking about how they go about changing policy through community-based social marketing (CBSM). CBSM is "not marketing" but instead a "toolbox."

Tools: Commitment - have people commit in public (like that means anything in private)
           Social Norming - make energy-efficiency sexy and the norm, no one wants to be weird (what if we do, should we then start burning down the rainforests, polluting our water sources, and killing whales? and besides... this kind of sounds like a peer-pressure tactic, which is not really good for anyone)
           Prompts - give people visible specific actions such as "Did you turn off the lights?", don't give them slogans, give them directions (this seemed fun, but bossy, but as Tina Fey says, "Bitches Get Shit Done")

We're lucky we found it. It was tucked away in Research Park.

           Convenience - make it convenient for people to be energy efficient (this made sense but she never really touched how to solve it. for example, she said if the parking lot is far away from the stairs but right next to the elevator, it creates a barrier and people don't want to use the stairs. but how do you fix that? make new stairs? tear down the building and reconfigure it so that there are both stairs and the elevator by the parking lot... that won't change shit)

She talked about behavior change campaigns that utilized all of these tools and how that was the best way to change behavior, then I left.

Afterwards I respected the information given, although I questioned a lot of the tactics suggested. I think that these tactics aren't just for environmental policy but all policy, Susan just applied it to energy-efficiency because that's what she was supposed to do.

More so, I came away from this webinar with a new-found respect for making sure technology works before an event. If I wanted to project a piece for a show and it shat all over my face ten minutes before opening, I would be screwed and it would be my fault. I don't know why they didn't have the powerpoint ready before and I don't know why they gave up at an unacceptable point. It is sloppy and really detracted from the key points we could have taken away from this lecture.


They had cookies and water so it wasn't the worst thing in the world.