One Geek, One Earth

Every month at Fuqua, there is a “Fast Break” where we can all hang out and get free coffee and breakfast and listen to someone talk about what they’re doing at Fuqua. This month, it was Professor Gavan Fitzsimons who is a consumer psychologist. He talked about research he is doing about brands and their unconscious affect. In brief, every brand has a personality (Budweiser is fun-loving, DeBeers is serious, etc). And just like how we are unconsciously affected by other people’s personalities when we are near them (we’re often crankier when near a grumpy person or happier when near a cheerful person), we are affected by brands even when we’re just intaking them at an unconscious, unaware level.

How does it work?

The experiment involved subliminally priming people with either the Apple logo (associated with creativity) or the IBM logo (not associated with creativity). There was also a control group that was primed with nothing. Then after they were unknowingly primed, they were asked to a classic creativity test - the unusual uses test, where you have to identify out of the ordinary uses for common objects. The IBM folks were slighly less creative than the control group. The Apple folks were substantially more creative, thinking of more uses. And if they were forced to do something uncreative after being primed and then given the test, they were even more creative. Seeing the brand, even unconsciously, had allowed the participants to interact and be influenced by the brand’s personality.

Why do I care?

We’re flashed with thousand of brands every day on average, so on a personal level, we should probably be paying more attention and try to make sure our radar is up. But how it is relevant to this blog is that I think the green movement should be fighting fire with fire and trying to take advantage of this tendency. For the most part, I don’t think green organizations are interested in marketing themselves. But perhaps they should be. Gather together as like minded groups, come up with a single logo that represents a willingness to support environmental causes. Then start attaching the logo to products that fit with the cause, allowing green companies to use it, maybe promote it with commercials. In other words, establish a brand. And then perhaps in a few years, someone will be walking down the street, see one of these logos unconsciously and recycle their soda can instead of throwing it away. Multiply that to a large scale and that’s how big change happens.

What do you think? Too evil to do? Or instead am I just not thinking big enough?

As a former Duke student and Cameron crazy and now current Duke employee, I only have one word for this: awesome.

If I were to meet a random married couple on the street and ask them if they have differences about how hot or cold the house is, I’d be willing to bet that they do because the odds would definitely be in my favor. Joy and I are no different. I’m pretty temperature insensitive. It needs to be really hot or really cold for me to notice. Joy, on the other hand, tends to get cold easier. So that means that in the wintertime, we would prefer to have the house at different temperatures. So juggling the thermostat comes into play several ways:

1. Setting the overall thermostat temperature. We have a heat pump and I must admit to occasionally getting confused by the non-digital thermostat. If the switch is set to heat and the temperature is set to 80, why does the house only heat to 70? I feel embarrassed at being defeated by a basic piece of equipment, but it is true. I never feel like I know how to set the temperature gauge to get the house temperature where I want it. So Joy ends up being the one to set the temperature, which means she gets to set it higher than I would prefer, both in comfort level and in energy saving level. That’s the benefit of not being an equipment moron, I guess.
2. Lack of an automatic thermostat. The lack of an automatic thermostat hampers some potential energy saving techniques. Joy got an electric blanket for Christmas, Aurora has a heavy winter blanket, and I sleep better when it is colder at night. In theory, it would be nice to have the thermostat turn down a half hour before bedtime and turn back up again a half hour before wake up time so that we won’t freeze when we take a shower (especially since the warm water gets turned off and on in the middle of the shower). But the electric thermostat we bought a couple years wasn’t compatible with the heat pump (I think) and I was a little too worried about electrocuting myself to try it. Now that we’re going to move in 6-8 months, there’s not a lot of point in changing it out. It’ll be something to worry about for the new house.
3. Turning it off when not in use. The new thing we’re going to try is shutting the thermostat off if we’re going to be gone during the day. If we had an automatic thermostat, we could let that handle it, but instead we’re just going to try and remember to shut it off ourselves. We’re out of the house 8am-5pm on Tuesday, 8am-12pm on Wednesday, and 12pm-12am on Friday, so that adds up to 25 hours a week that we could be saving electricity - like having a 6 day week. It is rarely cold enough here in the Triangle that we have to worry about freezing pipes and ours are insulated inside anyway. The hard part will be remembering to do it, since all 3 times, we’re juggling Aurora plus multiple other things as we leave the house. But like any good habit, it will just take repetition.

I’m hoping we’ll see some decent savings out of this and when we move to a new house, we’re going to make sure to get an automatic thermostat in place.

I was just reading this Salon article about vampire energy, the energy that appliances pull when plugged in, even turned off. I knew about this already, but it was a good kick in the butt to try and do something about it. The big culprit in my house is the plasma TV. According to that article, when plugged in and not on, it uses roughly 1,400 kWh per year (about $160, depending on where you live). Obviously, every person’s TV will be different. The manual for my Panasonic says it uses .2W in standby condition, but it doesn’t say what the time measurement is. It does use a maximum of 515W at maximum usage. We only really use it for about 5-6 hours a week (the wife and I are plowing through old Amazing Race episodes lately). But there is no reason not to unplug when not in use.

My computer is a bit harder. I turn it off when not in use, but the way it is set up, if I were to unplug it from the wall, the cable modem and router would be turned off. This is bad for two reasons:

1. I suck at networking. I consider the fact that I have a wireless network up and running fairly smoothly a minor miracle. I worry that the more I turn the router on and off, the more likely it is to screw something up in the network. Plus, Joy and I are home at different times during the day and she needs the wireless connection too.
2. We’re on digital phone service through Time Warner, so off with the cable modem equals off with the phone too, and while we don’t get a lot of phone calls, the ones we do get are important.

The other issue in my current house (and something I plan to think about when we move) is that a lot of our outlets are not easily accessible, making it a pain in my rear to constantly plugging and unplugging electronic devices. I don’t want a desire for convenience to get in the way of saving electricity, but I also don’t want to be spending time that I could be using to do other productive things. In the new house, I’m going to try and get Smart Strips in place that shut off the flow of electricity automatically after a certain idle period, so something else will do the work for me. In the meantime, I’m going to leave the router plugged in, the TV unplugged, and most of the kitchen appliances unplugged as well.

Some quick thoughts about some of the interesting articles I’ve read in the last week or so…

A Solar Grand Plan (Scientific American)

This is from the January 2008 issue - I get it free at work from one of my colleagues, so I was reading the hard copy - the online edition of the mag has already moved on to February. But I digress. This is a really neat article detailing how the U.S. could be on a completely renewable energy source plan by 2050 - having 69% of its electricity and 35% of its total energy provided by a massive solar energy farm in the Southwest in those desert areas where the sun shines a lot and contractors aren’t rushing to build residential living. The downside is that it would cost $420 billion to build the infrastructure (including the way to get all this electricity where it belongs) and make the technology cost competitive. Of course, when you realize the U.S. has spent more than twice that amount in the Iraq war, then suddenly it seems doable if you get the right people in power.

Israel Gives the Electric Car a Big ‘Ol Hug (New York Times)

With the blessing of the Israeli government, an American-Israeli entrepreneur teams up with Renault and Nissan to start promoting the heavy use of electric cars in Israel, including checking out the practicality of changing the infrastructure (recharging stations, easy battery recycling, etc). Israel, then,, in some respects becomes a use case for the U.S. that will answer some of the questions about getting the electric car here:

What works well? What are the flawed portions of the plan? What kind of level of adoption will you get from the citizens?

and from local news…

Raleigh moves towards becoming a green city. . .slowly (Raleigh News & Observer)

Raleigh’s City Council has pledged to reduce Raleigh’s fossil fuel consumption by 20 percent over the next five years. Wooo? The story points out that nearby Asheville is doing a lot more, including requiring all new municipal buildings over 5,000 square feet to be certified green by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, rating system. To be fair, Asheville is a much smaller city and isn’t growing at the rate that Raleigh is. But then again, perhaps that is all the more reason for Raleigh to get off its butt and get green before the city is too big to effectively change.

One of the things I’m learning as I start to immerse myself in the green news world is that there are a lot of things that would seem to have an obvious green benefit, but when you look closer, it isn’t such an obvious decision. I had been reading about bamboo and how it was a trendy option for flooring and furniture because it grows so quickly, making it an excellent renewable resource. But then I did some reading at Gristmill and Treehugger and it turns out the choice isn’t that easy. Oftentimes the people harvesting the bamboo are tearing down natural forests to plant bamboo and are using pesticides as part of the growing process. So what seemed like an obviously green choice suddenly requires a lot more thought.

In my case, Joy and I have been deciding what to do about our drinking water situation. Joy drinks a lot of bottled water and I’m planning to move away from drinking a lot of Kool-aid (I really don’t need all that sugar). It seemed like the easy decision would be to get a Brita pitcher. But the decision was complicated by the fact that we’re in a drought. Does the environmental savings from not buying all these bottles of water (that are now being recycled) outweigh the fact that we’ll be using more local water, which is in short supply these days? What I originally thought was going to be an easy decision turned out to be a little more complex. We thought about it for a little bit and decided that the amount of water saved from drinking bottled water was not a particularly high percentage of our water usage, so it was best to go with the Brita pitcher and stop buying the bottled water.

So no easy choices. I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised by that.

Sunday is our regular grocery store day - we normally like to get up early and get to the store while it is still quiet. This time we bought some reusable canvas bags to hold the groceries in, rather than using the flimsy plastic bags. We ended up buying 5 bags - they’re branded with the Kroger logo and are insulated on the inside. For $1.99/bag, that’s not a bad deal. 5 bags ended up not being quite enough - we had a relatively large shopping trip this week - so we’ll need to get 1 or 2 more bags next week. But overall, even putting aside how much more eco-friendly these are, I much preferred the experience using them. They carried more, so less trips taking the bags inside the house, and the sturdy handles made the carrying easier. I highly recommend these things.

We cleaned out the second bathroom yesterday. It was, I’m ashamed to say, pretty hideous. It had been a while since we cleaned it. Rather than whipping out the heavy duty chemical based cleaners, Joy and I decided to try and go with all natural cleaning solutions that we could make up ourselves.

1. For the various bathroom surfaces, we made up a baking soda paste (4 tablespoons baking soda to 4 tablespoons water) that worked very well to clean off the sink and tub, including the chrome on the faucets.
2. For the toilet, 2/3 cup white vinegar in the bowl and brushed it with a toilet brush. Bam! Perfectly clean. Impressive.
3. To get rust off the showerhead pipe, we dipped some steel wool in a mixture made with 1 teaspoon salt to 1 tablespoon lemon juice. This wasn’t as miraculous as the others seemed, but it did remove a good portion of the rust.
4. We cheated on the floors - we swept them and then mopped them using a Swiffer mop. A cheap-o book that Joy bought me suggests cleaning linoleum like what it is our bathroom with an all purpose cleaning solution made with a pint of white vinegar, a cup of water, and 20-30 drops of eucalyptus oil. But we ran out of vinegar and didn’t have any of the eucalyptus oil. Plus, Aurora (my 5 year old) was getting antsy and a bit cranky, so we went the easy, quick solution. We’ll work on getting the all purpose cleaner made up, though.
5. Finally, we replaced the showerhead with a low flow showerhead that Duke gave away as part of their water conservation effort. Now we can start encouraging Aurora to take a shower in her own bathroom rather than making the trek out to ours.

I was very happy about how well the all natural cleaners perfomed and I plan to try and use the all natural solutions for cleaning other parts of the house as well. I may also look into Clorox’s Greenworks line of cleaners. These are 99% natural (and they’re working towards the 100%) cleaning products. They’re going to be more expensive than regular products and probably more expensive than me making my own, but there is also value in supporting a company to produce environmentally friendly products.

Part of changing my habits is also working on changing the family’s habits. My wife is, thankfully, cheerfully on board and willing to help in whatever fashion she can. My five year old daughter (actually, she doesn’t turn 5 until Groundhog Day, but I feel ok fudging the numbers here), on the other hand is a bit of a harder sell. Not because she’s not willing, mind you. Mostly because it can be hard to explain to her why we should do certain things.

For example, she understands pretty well why we need to conserve water - if we use too much, then we’ll run out. But then she wants to apply that logic across the board.

“So, Daddy, if we waste electricity, then we’ll run out of power and I won’t be able to play my computer, right?”

Then I explain that electricity, for the most part, comes from coal burning plants which put pollution in the air, which makes it hard for us to breathe. And she generally gets that. And she understands that throwing stuff away means it gets put in a big pile which keeps growing bigger (“Do the garbage men take the garbage to the big pile? Woowwww. . .”). But even when she understands, she’s 5. And that means she easily forgets because she’s so busy. So she’ll be in the shower and spending forever getting her hair wet. Or she’ll leave her room light on along with her music when she rushes to the living room to do something else. And that’s ok - I don’t expect her to be a tiny little environmentalist, especially when I’m at the beginning of the learning process myself. But I do hope she’s learning a little bit with me that will stick with her as she grows up.

For those of you visiting the site, you may have seen the Green Devil on the right hand side. The Green Devil is Duke University’s symbol to represent their effort to increase their sustainability and work towards a leadership position among universities in environmental awareness.

One of the ways they are trying to encourage this to have employees sign a voluntary pledge that says:

I pledge to become an integral participant in the Sustainable Duke program. I will consider the environmental, social and economic impact of my daily decisions and make every effort to reduce my ecological footprint. I will also share my individual sustainability efforts with others at Duke.

This fits what I’m doing perfectly, so I’ve signed the pledge and will be putting the Green Devil on the website to show that I’m actively involved in the program.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Duke’s sustainability efforts, you can go to the website (which I have now bookmarked) located at:

http://www.duke.edu/sustainability/