Working For Jobs

If 2011 was the year “collaborative consumption” went mainstream, and 2012 was the year it started to look like a threat to the old guard in the business world, 2013 may be the year that the crazy kids in the “sharing economy” are forced to grow up in a big hurry.

For evidence, look no further than Airbnb, the website that lets us all rent each other’s apartments/tree houses/haylofts for the weekend. A quick gander at the site’s New York City listings last month led the travel news site Skift.com to conclude that more than half of them were in violation of state law.

Airbnb’s response, via its global head of public policy, David Hantman: “We can’t possibly keep up with the law in all the cities.”

But Airbnb’s strategy of pleading ignorance or powerlessness in New York, one of its biggest markets, doesn’t exactly add up: Here the company actively lobbied against the very rule that so many of its users are apparently flouting. The city’s Office of Special Enforcement has already ramped up enforcement efforts, according to Skift, while a New York Times story about an Airbnb renter who suddenly found himself facing $40,000 in potential fines has Airbnb customers shaking in their boots.

It’s cavalier web startup culture smacking into old-school American bureaucracy, and we’re bound to see it play out over and over in the coming year.

“The tech industry is growing up and learning how to deal with the real world,” says Neal Gorenflo, cofounder and publisher of the web news outlet Shareable.net.

Some companies have been less than graceful about it. Uber, the smartphone-powered town-car service that sets up shop in new cities without consulting local officials, is now being sued by cab drivers and car-service companies in San Francisco and Chicago, and faces a $20,000 fine from the California Public Utilities Commission. In Washington, D.C., the company (and its many adoring fans) beat back plans to outlaw the service, and convinced the city council to pass a new law explicitly legalizing it, but it was a rather nasty process.

Driving this type of clash is a sense among some startups that the sharing economy should be immune from government rules designed for companies created in the old model. Arun Sundararajan, an associate professor at NYU’s business school, wrote in Wired in October that reputation systems (Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky calls them “magical”) and the transparency of the web make regulations obsolete:

After all, profit is a much more powerful driver for quality than regulatory compliance. If your last customer — one who has been vetted by others and has built reputation credibility — complains about the hygiene levels of your shared lodging, your future business prospects on Airbnb are pretty bleak.

As an added precaution, Sundararajan suggested that low-cost surveillance cameras could be installed in cars or homes that are being rented — and then he took it a step farther.

Why bother with restaurant inspections, when we could put a camera in the kitchen to spot health violations and leave Zagat and Yelp reviews to “administer” the quality control? Do we even need hotel regulators any more, when we have TripAdvisor to give us instant feedback on cleanliness, service, noise levels, and several other dimensions?

Sundararajan’s proposition seems optimistic. I suspect plenty of web-savvy customers share my trepidation at relinquishing the safety of dinner to the handful of anonymous netizens crazy enough to obsess over an online kitchen livecast. While many of these regulatory battles do smack of governments protecting old industries that are “disrupted” by the new sharing model, there are often good reasons that these rules exist.

Tenant advocates point out that laws against short-term rentals, like the one Airbnb users are apparently breaking in New York City, are designed to prevent landlords from turning apartment buildings into hotels and driving the price of living in cities such as New York and San Francisco even higher than it already is. There’s something to be said, too, for requiring taxi drivers to get special certification for the sake of their passengers’ safety. There is clearly a place for a little policing, albeit under some rules that are written with these new business models in mind.

We’ve seen some smart rewriting of the rules already, as with the laws on the West Coast that allow car-sharing companies to provide insurance for car owners and renters. And now, in San Francisco, which has been the cradle of much of the sharing economy, efforts are afoot to work out a more comprehensive system. Mayor Ed Lee, who was elected with help from tech investors, has created a “sharing economy working group” to look at the issues that arise when these new companies shake up the local business landscape.

“Many players in sharing economy understand that the city is a crucial partner, and understand that city managers really do have a job to do,” says Milicent Johnson, a former Shareable.net staffer who is involved in the discussions in San Francisco. “The unique thing about these companies is that the users run them — and the users are the citizens of the city. The end goal is to do what is best for the city.”

But it doesn’t help that a few of the bigger kids in the sharing scene are being less than forthright about their impacts and infractions.

Airbnb, which claims it’s worth $2 billion, has been cagey about its regulatory issues in New York City and elsewhere. Molly Turner, the company’s public policy director, says Airbnb is “collaborating” with regulators, but wouldn’t provide details. Turner pled ignorance about the report that more than half of the company’s listings in New York were illegal. Responding to the New York Times story in the company’s new public policy blog, Hantman, the global public policy chief, writes only that “New York hosts have generally not been targeted for enforcement.”

Turner points out that in the past two years, Airbnb has created a hosting manual, a “policies” section on its website, a “trust and safety center,” and a “responsible hosting” page. “We try to remind people that there are a lot of things they need to think about when they post a property on Airbnb,” she says.

“I don’t think sharing economy companies are anti-regulation at all,” Turner adds. “The question is what’s reasonable.”

But the “shoot first, ask questions later” approach, as Slate’s Matt Yglesias calls it, is still the default for many sharing economy startups. And while this approach served companies like Airbnb in their early stages, it could be dangerous for this budding industry as it continues to grow and spread — not because these industries need regulation per se, but because they’re going to get it one way or another.

“The attitude is that we’ve got a great product and they [regulators] shouldn’t be involved in it,” says Patrick Murphy, CEO of the D.C. lobbying firm 3Click Solutions and one of the organizers of the nonprofit Collaborative Economy Coalition.“But you [sharing economy companies] are a threat to existing industries, and these companies spend millions and millions to protect their market share from each other and anyone from the outside.”

If sharing economy wunderkinds can’t get their acts together and face regulation reality head-on, they may watch their profits decline and lose traction in the battle to make collaborative consumption a societal norm. But the costs to consumers will be much steeper: We’ll all have to go back to renting stuffy hotel rooms and driving our own cars. And that would just suck for everyone.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Living

View full post on Grist

If 2011 was the year “collaborative consumption” went mainstream, and 2012 was the year it started to look like a threat to the old guard in the business world, 2013 may be the year that the crazy kids in the “sharing economy” are forced to grow up in a big hurry.

For evidence, look no further than Airbnb, the website that lets us all rent each other’s apartments/tree houses/haylofts for the weekend. A quick gander at the site’s New York City listings last month led the travel news site Skift.com to conclude that more than half of them were in violation of state law.

Airbnb’s response, via its global head of public policy, David Hantman: “We can’t possibly keep up with the law in all the cities.”

But Airbnb’s strategy of pleading ignorance or powerlessness in New York, one of its biggest markets, doesn’t exactly add up: Here the company actively lobbied against the very rule that so many of its users are apparently flouting. The city’s Office of Special Enforcement has already ramped up enforcement efforts, according to Skift, while a New York Times story about an Airbnb renter who suddenly found himself facing $40,000 in potential fines has Airbnb customers shaking in their boots.

It’s cavalier web startup culture smacking into old-school American bureaucracy, and we’re bound to see it play out over and over in the coming year.

“The tech industry is growing up and learning how to deal with the real world,” says Neal Gorenflo, cofounder and publisher of the web news outlet Shareable.net.

Some companies have been less than graceful about it. Uber, the smartphone-powered town-car service that sets up shop in new cities without consulting local officials, is now being sued by cab drivers and car-service companies in San Francisco and Chicago, and faces a $20,000 fine from the California Public Utilities Commission. In Washington, D.C., the company (and its many adoring fans) beat back plans to outlaw the service, and convinced the city council to pass a new law explicitly legalizing it, but it was a rather nasty process.

Driving this type of clash is a sense among some startups that the sharing economy should be immune from government rules designed for companies created in the old model. Arun Sundararajan, an associate professor at NYU’s business school, wrote in Wired in October that reputation systems (Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky calls them “magical”) and the transparency of the web make regulations obsolete:

After all, profit is a much more powerful driver for quality than regulatory compliance. If your last customer — one who has been vetted by others and has built reputation credibility — complains about the hygiene levels of your shared lodging, your future business prospects on Airbnb are pretty bleak.

As an added precaution, Sundararajan suggested that low-cost surveillance cameras could be installed in cars or homes that are being rented — and then he took it a step farther.

Why bother with restaurant inspections, when we could put a camera in the kitchen to spot health violations and leave Zagat and Yelp reviews to “administer” the quality control? Do we even need hotel regulators any more, when we have TripAdvisor to give us instant feedback on cleanliness, service, noise levels, and several other dimensions?

Sundararajan’s proposition seems optimistic. I suspect plenty of web-savvy customers share my trepidation at relinquishing the safety of dinner to the handful of anonymous netizens crazy enough to obsess over an online kitchen livecast. While many of these regulatory battles do smack of governments protecting old industries that are “disrupted” by the new sharing model, there are often good reasons that these rules exist.

Tenant advocates point out that laws against short-term rentals, like the one Airbnb users are apparently breaking in New York City, are designed to prevent landlords from turning apartment buildings into hotels and driving the price of living in cities such as New York and San Francisco even higher than it already is. There’s something to be said, too, for requiring taxi drivers to get special certification for the sake of their passengers’ safety. There is clearly a place for a little policing, albeit under some rules that are written with these new business models in mind.

We’ve seen some smart rewriting of the rules already, as with the laws on the West Coast that allow car-sharing companies to provide insurance for car owners and renters. And now, in San Francisco, which has been the cradle of much of the sharing economy, efforts are afoot to work out a more comprehensive system. Mayor Ed Lee, who was elected with help from tech investors, has created a “sharing economy working group” to look at the issues that arise when these new companies shake up the local business landscape.

“Many players in sharing economy understand that the city is a crucial partner, and understand that city managers really do have a job to do,” says Milicent Johnson, a former Shareable.net staffer who is involved in the discussions in San Francisco. “The unique thing about these companies is that the users run them — and the users are the citizens of the city. The end goal is to do what is best for the city.”

But it doesn’t help that a few of the bigger kids in the sharing scene are being less than forthright about their impacts and infractions.

Airbnb, which claims it’s worth $2 billion, has been cagey about its regulatory issues in New York City and elsewhere. Molly Turner, the company’s public policy director, says Airbnb is “collaborating” with regulators, but wouldn’t provide details. Turner pled ignorance about the report that more than half of the company’s listings in New York were illegal. Responding to the New York Times story in the company’s new public policy blog, Hantman, the global public policy chief, writes only that “New York hosts have generally not been targeted for enforcement.”

Turner points out that in the past two years, Airbnb has created a hosting manual, a “policies” section on its website, a “trust and safety center,” and a “responsible hosting” page. “We try to remind people that there are a lot of things they need to think about when they post a property on Airbnb,” she says.

“I don’t think sharing economy companies are anti-regulation at all,” Turner adds. “The question is what’s reasonable.”

But the “shoot first, ask questions later” approach, as Slate’s Matt Yglesias calls it, is still the default for many sharing economy startups. And while this approach served companies like Airbnb in their early stages, it could be dangerous for this budding industry as it continues to grow and spread — not because these industries need regulation per se, but because they’re going to get it one way or another.

“The attitude is that we’ve got a great product and they [regulators] shouldn’t be involved in it,” says Patrick Murphy, CEO of the D.C. lobbying firm 3Click Solutions and one of the organizers of the nonprofit Collaborative Economy Coalition.“But you [sharing economy companies] are a threat to existing industries, and these companies spend millions and millions to protect their market share from each other and anyone from the outside.”

If sharing economy wunderkinds can’t get their acts together and face regulation reality head-on, they may watch their profits decline and lose traction in the battle to make collaborative consumption a societal norm. But the costs to consumers will be much steeper: We’ll all have to go back to renting stuffy hotel rooms and driving our own cars. And that would just suck for everyone.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Living

View full post on Grist

Back when he was in college, Paul Kearsley was — well, let’s just say he wasn’t running with the cool crowd. While his classmates were doing keg stands on the weekends, he railed against consumptive American culture. When an Industrial Design professor asked Kearsley’s class to create a surveillance system, his peers designed camera networks for prisons and fancy homes. Kearsley devised a system that could monitor a forest, then he set it up and used the data to make recommendations on improving wildlife habitat.

“I was on the outside,” says Kearsley, who lives in Bellingham, Wash. “I’d be asking, ‘Do we need a 2012 Honda Civic? What’s wrong with the 2011 Civic? Do we need more phones? What are the resources going into this? Where are they coming from? Who is this action hurting?’ A lot of the dialog stopped at ‘make it look cool,’ and I wanted to know more.”

Then, after graduation, someone lent Kearsley a 1,200-page tome that changed his life: Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. As he read about a school of design devoted to creating productive, regenerative landscapes and resilient systems that “support life in all of its forms,” he knew he’d found his calling.

Seven years later, he owns not one, but two businesses — one focusing on permaculture design in his hometown, another consulting internationally. Along the way, he’s spearheaded the construction of Bellingham’s community garden, consulted on an eco-village in Costa Rica, and recently returned from Peru where he and a business partner shared permaculture principles with Amazon natives.

We caught up with Kearsley on a recent rainy day to talk about the relationship between ethics and food, intelligent design as he sees it (hint, it has nothing to do with God or Darwinism), and what goes well with venison.

Q. What, exactly, is permaculture?

A. Permaculture is a perspective, not a prescription. It’s how we address problems. My work consists of streamlining things and making more elegant sites and systems that not only meet the needs of the people but also improve the overall ecological health.

Q. Sounds vague … how do you pay the bills?

A. I design landscapes, but unlike a traditional landscape designer, I design systems to save energy and use minimal resources.

Q. For instance?

A. The conventional approach to turning an existing landscape into a garden is to haul out everything that’s there before starting. My business partner and I use a technique called “sheep mulch,” where we smother existing grass with cardboard, manure, straw, and mulch, and build the landscape on that. We’re using waste and cardboard to accomplish what would have been an intensive task of taking away sod or other plants, and we’re leaving the soil biology in its place.

Q. Spreading manure on a garden isn’t exactly rocket science, is it?

A. But creating the garden to operate as a system in conjunction with other systems — like using a rotating cast of animals to work the land in succession before planting — is. Permaculture is more than one specific technique. In every job, we minimize the use of fossil fuels required to build that landscape.

Recently, a client’s garden had a wet spot, and the traditional approach would have been to drain the whole thing and fill it above the water level. That would have required a lot of heavy equipment using a lot of resources to force the land into our notion of how it should be. Instead of that, we decided it made the most sense to expand the existing wet spot and making it a seasonal pond.

Q. That sounds like the path of least resistance. Is that permaculture?

A. Again, permaculture is as much a philosophy as it is a practice. The pond example isn’t radical in terms of land use, but it is out of the box in terms of business. We would have made more money with the traditional solution.

Q. Do you often make business decisions that cost you money?

A. I want to empower clients to maintain and even install their own gardens. I’m literally teaching myself out of thousands of dollars of work, but the bigger goal is to get more people in the community involved.

Q. Sounds great until you can’t pay your mortgage.

A. There are so many yards and so many gardens to take care of that I doubt we would ever have to find a new line of work. If we did, we would become shepherds or carpenters or something.

Q. Permaculture is a matter of “intelligent design,” right? Can you expand on that thought?

A. During school I was using the design process to create poster graphics, children’s toys, sandals, tape dispensers, and digital cameras. I found myself asking, “Why do we need another (insert new product here)?” “Why aren’t we solving (insert economic/ecological problem here)?” After graduating, my focus was to use my design process to develop practical solutions to real problems facing the planet, people, and the processes that direct our lives. It seemed like the intelligent application of the problem-solving/design skill-set.

Q. Do you take issue with technology? My iPhone is elegant and useful.

A. I appreciate “appropriate technology” in the sense of the appropriate use of technology and also technology that can be appropriated — something you could fix or even improve. What’s important is not the technology itself but how it is being used. If you take a bulldozer or a tractor, it could be used to destroy a forest or to set up planting systems to grow orchards.

A lot of modern product design is constantly trying to push a new product across the shelf without questioning the value or need for that product. Most Americans replace their cell phone every year. When I consider the amount of resources that’s taking up, I can’t help but ask, ‘who gave us that right?’ My computer is 7 years old and it still performs the functions I need it to.

Q. Permaculture started in the ’70s as a response to the “Green Revolution,” but it isn’t a particularly new concept, is it?

A. No. When you look at indigenous cultures from around the world, they’ve been doing the permaculture thing for as long as they’ve been people. The alternative is a culture that doesn’t last long.

Q. There are a lot of indigenous cultures that haven’t lasted.

A. Exactly my point. When your systems are out of balance, eventually it won’t last.

Q. Your consulting company, Terraphoenix, just finished a job working with natives in the Amazon. What did you teach them about permaculture they didn’t already know?

A. One of the big issues with the local communities is that water systems full of pathogens are making people really sick. With a few pieces of technology and design principals — separating gray water from streams and keeping pollution and contaminants outside the watershed, introducing a slow sand filter — we taught them how to improve their system and stay healthier.

Q. Would you describe yourself as an environmentalist?

A. Probably, but I don’t fit into the usual definition. I like chainsaws, hunting, and eating meat. On Orcas Island [ed’s note: Kearsley learned the ropes at Bullocks Permaculture Homestead on Orcas Island, Wash.], the deer would come into the fruit groves and it wasn’t unheard of for one of them to end up on a dinner plate near a pile of plums.

Q. How can your philosophy of community and agriculture be extrapolated to an urban environment, where people are “farming” tiny garden plots and vacant lots in the middle of the concrete jungle?

A. In so many cities there are square miles of land that are being neglected or even oppressed, and there’s an opportunity to come together and transform that land from hubs of unsavory activity into a community asset. But on an individual level, people can grow food in their windowsills. Even if it’s just herbs, growing your own food is something everyone should experience.

Q. Give me one example of how an urban farmer could integrate permaculture.

A. Easy: house plants and worm bins. Almost half of what’s thrown away is compostable. I have a worm factory 360. Worms eat garbage and give rich fertilizer for plants, all in a contained system.

Filed under: Food

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In late 2007, Mary Swanders, Iowa’s poet laureate and a professor at Iowa State University, assigned her students a verbatim play about the challenges farmers face.

“I wanted them to learn the complexity of the farming issue, how political, how contentious it is,” she recalls.

Fanning out across the state, the students, many of whom had never set foot on a farm, conducted lengthy interviews with farmers big and small, and immersed themselves, literally, in the agrarian world of livestock, slaughter, and commodity crops, all while gingerly dancing around manure patties.

A student at the time, Rebekeah Bovenmeyer remembers donning a protective white suit so she could see the workings of a hog farmer’s farrowing house. “I never knew such a world existed only 10 miles from our campus,” she says.

Some of the farmers were still feeling the impact of the 1980s, a time when hundreds of family farms were lost to skyrocketing interest rates and corporatization. And many deplored the mantra of then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz: “Get big or get out!”

Back in the classroom, they pulled key elements from the interviews and, as playwrights, began to stitch together the dialogue. Over the winter, Swander, 61, pared it further so the exact words of the vineyard owner and the hog farmer rang true.

The final result was Farmscape: The Changing Rural Landscape, a grassroots play that takes on everything from corporate consolidation to GMOs, climate change, and the rise and fall of the family farm.

A small grant from agricultural “thought leader” Fred Kirschenmann’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University brought Farmscape to the stage. In the five years since it was written, the play has been performed all over the Midwest, at conferences, in community venues, and at large theaters. Once they even staged it in local beauty parlors.

The play is also being published this month as a book from Ice Cube Press, along with commentary on the changing rural environment by a list of prominent thinkers: Kirschenmann, Anna Lappé, Gene Logsdon, and Leigh Adcock.

Farmscape opens with an auction, the auctioneer standing to the side, calling out the names of farm equipment – Massey Ferguson 35 loaded tractor … John Deere sickle mower… Red and white Ford pickup — being sold off as small farms are shutting down. Bidders, who are the actors about to tell their stories, come on the stage one by one, and the auctioneer’s voice can be heard in moments dispersed throughout the play. It’s a stark symbol of the consolidation of farming in the Midwest, and it shapes the entire play.

At the premiere of Farmscape, the students became the actors. Student Jason Arbogast took a plaid shirt of his father’s, cut out the sleeves, and donned a seed cap. He then read the lines of the men he had interviewed.

“When I stood in front of the mirror, my wife, who is a city person, looked at me and said, ‘You look like Eddie Vedder,’” Arbogast recalls. “I told her no, I look liked Jason Arbogast would have looked like if his family had made the decision to farm.”

On stage, a white sheet often serves as the backdrop. On it flashes images captured during the farm crisis of the 1980s by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Dave Peterson. Local musicians often play during interludes and at intermission.

After the play is over, Swander encourages discussion and even courteous disagreement between small and organic farmers and their conventional counterparts. One night, a man in the audience even rose from his seat afterwards to say that the auction scene had been about his family’s farm, before he burst into tears. (Money from the sale enabled him to go to college. Now in banking and finance, he works to aid farmers.)

“Agriculture is very polarized right now,” says Swander. “Sustainable, organic people and conventional people — there’s lots of conflict and the two camps have a hard time speaking to each other,” she added.  “I’ve witnessed an organic farmer and a Monsanto executive talking together in the same room.”

In many ways, Farmscape echos James Adee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the 1941 classic about tenant farmers in the Dust Bowl during the New Deal. Take this snippet of dialogue from an organic farmer:

Joe: Americans expect food to be cheap but that doesn’t make sense as a producer. We don’t serve poor people because poor people can’t afford our food. It’s not quite a downside but it’s frustrating and disappointing to me that there’s not a way for more people to have access to locally grown food.

In the four years since Farmscape‘s debut, much has changed for farming, the student playwrights, and Swander. Initially sympathetic to Nate, the agribusiness executive he’d interviewed for the play, Arbogast has come to abhor companies like Monsanto.

“At first I thought his heart was in the right place. In hindsight, after learning more about Monsanto, I don’t think [the company] is in it for anything but the money,” Arbogast says. “I’ve seen enough of their practices and Nate is not someone I personally want to be associated with.”

With an additional grant from the Leopold Center, Swander launched AgArts, an organization that supports the intersection of art and agriculture, be it through chefs, photography, crafts, or other artistic means. The writer/teacher looks forward to engaging with the issues the play raises on an even deeper level in the future. And she’s optimistic about the next generation of farmers, many of whom want to grow food without growing large industrial monocultures.

She explains, “I don’t think the large farms will ever be wiped out. Instead, the new, young farmers will work alongside them, changing the landscape of the community and city.”

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Big Fan: Simple Energy rewards power-conscious consumers with unlockable achievements. Click to embiggen.

At any given moment, Collin Faunce can see exactly how much energy he’s using in his house. When he turns on the dishwasher, his consumption spikes on the colorful head-up display on his computer monitor. If he and his wife, Erica, set the air conditioning just a few degrees higher, they can watch the dollars spared tick upwards in real time. They don’t have to wait for the monthly bill to understand their savings, and when a gadget siphons away precious energy, the Faunces can immediately identify the culprit.

“After about a week or two [of using the program], I could figure out which appliances were using how much energy and kind of plan accordingly after that,” said Faunce.

Welcome to our gamified future: where energy efficiency competes with Foursquare and Angry Birds for your attention. Winning brings badges and high scores, but it also translates into money saved for the consumer and a smarter grid for everyone.

The Faunces got the display last year when they entered a program hosted by San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) to encourage people to cut down on energy consumption. The utility partnered with Boulder, Colo.-based startup Simple Energy to motivate residents by making a competitive game out of it, complete with prizes.

“You could tell what position you were in relative to everyone else — you could determine if you were going to catch them and pass them,” said Faunce.

Simple Energy develops websites and apps that allow consumers track their energy usage in real time and compete with each other (or themselves) to reduce it. The contest the Faunces won, Biggest Energy Saver, was actually a pilot program in San Diego that proved social gaming applications can help consumers earn an average energy savings of 20 percent — up to 50 percent for top users.

#Winning (at energy efficiency). Photo by Michele Ficara Manganelli

But the energy and cost savings didn’t end when the competition did. “People thought we were going to revert back, but we’re actually saving more and more as time goes on,” Faunce said.

Here’s an oversimplified description of how it works: Simple Energy gets consumer usage data from electric utilities and funnels that through its servers into the mobile and desktop programs it designs. All you need is a computer or smartphone: Once you sign up, your online account or mobile phone app can tell you how much energy you’ve used in the last hour, day, month, etc.

“You don’t actually have to do anything — other than save energy,” said Simple Energy co-founder and CEO Yoav Lurie. “Even if you never come back, you’re still playing.”

If your friends join, you can monitor how you’ve performed against them, too. If you’re using less energy, you’ll score more points and beat them out. As a reward, you can earn badges (a la Foursquare) for reaching certain benchmarks or demonstrating feats of energy-saving skill: How often can you halve your energy use? For how many days in a row?

Lurie thinks the concept is a no-brainer. He points to people struggling to stay healthy: We all know what health-positive habits are good for us, but does everyone get enough exercise and eat right all the time? Both research and anecdotal evidence back up the idea that competition — be it a points system to control your eating habits or finding a workout buddy — make long-term health goals easier to attain. It’s the same with energy efficiency: A lot of people think it’s a good idea to save more energy, it’s just inconvenient or a hassle to do so.

“We’ve always relied on gamification,” Lurie said. “Now it’s just getting more complicated.”

Lurie says utilities nationwide are eager to work with Simple Energy: Some have state-mandated efficiency goals to meet, while others hope to combat energy-use spikes that imperil the stability of the grid, leading to brownouts and blackouts that neither customers nor utilities want to suffer through. So it’s in the utilities’ interest to figure out how they can effectively encourage customers to reduce their energy use and try especially hard to cut back on high-demand days (common in the current nationwide inferno we call ‘summer 2012′).

Eyes on the prize: Some utilities reward ultra-efficient consumers with iPads or cash grants for nearby schools. Click to embiggen.

Some utilities already promote efficiency directly to customers in messages printed on monthly bills, but those aren’t exactly game-changing tactics. Behavioral change requires an effective communication to an engaged audience, and let’s face it: Nobody wants to spend more time talking with their utility than they have to.

“Most utilities don’t have a mechanism for telling customers to lower their A/C,” said Lurie. “Who follows their utility on Twitter?”

This summer, SDG&E enlisted Simple Energy to run the San Diego Energy Challenge: Residents can compete in reducing their energy use to win prizes like gift cards and tablet computers. But the biggest winner will be local schools: When residents sign up for the contest (which is jointly funded by SDG&E and the U.S. Department of Energy) they choose a middle school to earn points for. In the end, the three middle schools with the greatest savings will split a $30,000 cash grant.

Erin Coller, SDG&E communications manager, said while the company runs its own programs promoting efficiency, Simple Energy’s approach is good at getting people actually excited about it.

“It’s not something that’s really top of mind on a regular basis,” she said. The networking and gaming platforms really “increase the level of enthusiasm that people have about their energy use.”

Simple Energy (which also has a program with beleaguered Pepco in the D.C. area) is not the only company using social networking and gamification to promote energy efficiency.

This spring, Opower launched a Facebook app to let friends compare their energy use. Both companies are integrating Green Button data, an industry-led initiative (albeit at the request of the White House) launched in March to increase consumers’ access to data about their own energy use. Using it involves clicking an actual “green button” on utilities’ websites.

Green buttons are hardly riveting, but other energy efficiency startups are employing more distinctive and even whimsical approaches. Leafully, the Grand Prize winner in the DOE’s Apps for Energy challenge, translates energy consumption into carbon impact units anyone can relate to: number of trees purifying the air or number of farting cows in a month, for example. The idea is to make it easy for anyone, regardless of age or maturity level, to understand and have fun with energy consumption.

Gamification is quite the buzzword these days, so is this all a passing fad? It’s possible. But for Simple Energy and potentially Opower, gamification seems like the easiest way to get people to do something they already want to do (use less energy) using tools they’re already excited about (Games. Virtual badges. Facebook!). Nothing more, nothing less.

Simple Energy, now 18 months old, thinks they’ll get it to a point where people in different cities, and under different utilities, can engage and compete with each other. (Right now, you can only compete against others who share your service area.) There are a few obstacles between here and there: How do you create an even playing field across different climate zones, or how will you handicap players with access to abundant hydropower?

Still, cross-country competitions could come sooner rather than later. Lurie said they’ve already spoken with hundreds of utilities who are waiting to see how their current partnerships turn out. “The need is great,” he says.

Coller said it’s too soon to tell if SDG&E will continue or expand their program after this summer, but she made it clear that Simple Energy is a valuable part of the efficiency equation.

And if other users react like the Faunces have, there’s no doubt it can have an impact on individual habits. He doesn’t see his grandparents enrolling in a Simple Energy program, but for people open to new technology, he thinks it’s an easy sell.

“People are competitive and we’re competitive — it’s kind of what helped us win,” he said. And victory brings much more than bragging rights: Since starting the program, the Faunces have saved nearly $2,000 a year on energy costs. With results like that, it’s not hard to imagine everyone wanting to play.

Filed under: Article, Climate & Energy, Energy Efficiency

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By Daniel Klein

Backyard chickens are everywhere. But in many North American cities, keeping a flock of hens is still illegal. We met up with some unlikely outlaws while traveling through Tennessee who are breaking the law by producing fresh farm eggs in their backyards.

Filed under: Food, Locavore, Sustainable Food, Urban Agriculture

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By Marc Gunther

Cross-posted from ecomagination.

What if, in addition to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, we could capture them from the air? That’s the question that prompted Marc Gunther, an author and contributing editor at Fortune magazine, to write the e-book Suck It Up, a Kindle Single. Below is an excerpt from the book on the history of the start-up Kilimanjaro Energy, a private company that is seeking to solve the carbon extraction equation.

Working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the 1990s, Klaus Lackner had numerous interests: the behavior of high explosives, nuclear fusion, and self-replicating machine systems. At some point, he turned his attention to the technology used to capture CO2 from the smokestacks of coal plants — technology in which the U.S. government has invested billions of dollars, with little to show for it. He began to wonder whether it might make more sense to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. So when his daughter Claire asked for help with a science project, he asked her: “Why don’t you pull CO2 out of the air?”

Chemical engineers have known for decades that sodium hydroxide, a caustic base also known as lye, will bind with CO2, an acid, to make carbonates. That’s basically how CO2 is removed from the air so people can continue to breathe on submarines or in spaceships. Claire accomplished the feat by filling a test tube with a solution of sodium hydroxide, buying a fish-tank pump from a pet store, and running air through the test tube all night. By the next day, some of the sodium hydroxide had absorbed CO2, creating a solution of sodium carbonate.

“I was surprised that she pulled this off as well as she did,” Lackner recalls, “which made me feel that it could be easier than I thought.”

Duly inspired, Lackner set off on a quest to design a machine to pull CO2 out of the air. This would seem to be much harder than collecting carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of power plants that burn coal or natural gas, where concentrations of CO2 are about 12 percent (for coal) or 4 percent (for natural gas). Less than 0.04 percent of the air is CO2. Still, in a presentation called “Carbon Dioxide Extraction From Air: Is It An Option?” that he wrote in 1999 with Hans-Joachim Ziock, a colleague at Los Alamos, and the late Patrick Grimes, an expert in chemical processes, Lackner identified an important role for air-capture technology:

While it may be cost-advantageous to collect the carbon dioxide at concentrated sources without ever letting it enter the atmosphere, this approach is not available for the many diffuse sources of carbon dioxide. Similarly, for many older plants a retrofit to collect the carbon dioxide is either impossible or prohibitively expensive. For these cases we investigate the possibility of collecting the carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. We conclude that there are no fundamental obstacles to this approach and that it deserves further investigation.

This remains key to the appeal of air capture: Because greenhouse gases are dispersed around the globe, they can be extracted from the air anywhere. Carbon dioxide spewing from a tailpipe in Sao Paulo or a coal plant in China can be captured by a machine in Iceland or the Middle East, because the atmosphere functions as a conveyor belt, moving CO2 from its sources to any sink. That’s important, because while we can envision a world where most or all of the electricity we use comes from nuclear, solar, or wind energy, or from fossil fuels where the CO2 is captured at the power plant, it’s harder to see how emissions from cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes can be eliminated. The beauty of air capture, Lackner and his colleagues explained, is that “one could collect CO2 after the fact and from any source … One would not have to wait for the phasing out of existing infrastructure before addressing the greenhouse gas problem.” Air capture plants, they wrote, could be located atop the best underground reservoirs for storing CO2, which may be in isolated locations. This fact is key to the business plans of all the air-capture start-ups. In only one regard was Lackner’s paper clearly mistaken — he estimated that the cost of air capture would be “on the order of $10 to $15 per ton,” a target that now looks wildly optimistic.

In 2001, Lackner joined the faculty at Columbia, as chair of the department of earth and environmental engineering. There, he met three men who would help him launch air capture into the business world: Wallace “Wally” Broecker, a Columbia professor and climate scientist who is thought to have coined the term “global warming” back in 1975; Allen Wright, a self-taught engineer who oversaw research at Biosphere 2, an artificial ecological system in Oracle, Ariz., managed by Columbia; and Gary Comer, the philanthropist and founder of Lands’ End.

After Comer sailed through the Northwest Passage on his 151-foot yacht during the summer of 2001, he grew concerned about climate change. By the following spring, Comer had been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and felt an urgent need to do something about the problem. He decided to pour millions of dollars into climate research at Columbia, working closely with Broecker. When Broecker asked him to meet with Lackner and Allen Wright, Comer agreed. Lackner need an investor to start an air-capture company. Wright needed a job because Columbia had severed its ties with Biosphere 2, and he became the company’s first CEO. He brought aboard his older brother Burt, a former Tucson firefighter who was good at building things.

Comer agreed to invest $8 million in a start-up called Global Research Technologies (GRT), which would be run by Allen Wright and headquartered in Tucson. In 2004, GRT set up shop.

The company stumbled at first. As Lackner explained it to me, air capture is a multi-step process — a chemical absorbent first has to bind with CO2, after which the CO2 needs to be separated from the absorbent and compressed into a liquid to be sold or stored. “The hard part is getting the CO2 back off,” he said. GRT’s first absorbent was sodium hydroxide, which effectively captured CO2. But the bond between them was so strong that separating the CO2 required a great deal of energy. In 2007, after testing other absorbents, GRT had devised a new air-extraction technology that uses a plastic resin that bonds with CO2 when dry and gives it back when wet. This was hailed as a breakthrough in a company press release quoting, among others, Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia. “This significant achievement holds incredible promise in the fight against climate change,” Sachs said. “Thanks to the ingenuity of GRT and Klaus Lackner, the world may, sooner rather than later, have an important tool in this fight.” It would be later rather than sooner. In 2008, Wright was replaced as CEO by William “Billy” Gridley, an investor in the firm and a former managing director at Goldman Sachs.

Two years later, GRT pivoted again. The company moved to San Francisco, renamed itself Kilimanjaro Energy, and brought on a new CEO, Nathaniel “Ned” David, a serial entrepreneur and venture investor. The company’s new name reflected its goal: To harvest CO2 from the atmosphere and use it to make transportation fuels with a much lower carbon footprint than gasoline or diesel. “We’re going to try to make fuels, while simultaneously saving the snows of Kilimanjaro,” David said.

Of course, Kilimanjaro first must solve the technology issues associated with air capture. They are not trivial. The company’s technology has yet to exit the lab: David and his staff of fewer than a dozen people are currently designing machines that will be exposed to wind currents that will push air past large flat filters until they are loaded with CO2; the filters will then be lowered into a closed, humid chamber where the trapped CO2 will be released from the filter, generating air with a 5 to 10 percent concentration of CO2. This enriched air requires further processing to create a stream of nearly pure CO2 that can be liquefied for enhanced oil recovery — a final step that is turning out to be harder than anticipated. “Most of our technical risk is in the future,” David acknowledges. “We have not solved all the problems.”

Filed under: Article, Climate & Energy

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By Jess Zimmerman

New iOS app “Waking Mars” is a game about gardening, botany, and ecology, which sounds boring — especially if you’re about my age, and your primary school teachers tried to get you to learn about ecosystems via some clunky games with Oregon Trail-level graphics where you controlled the number of fish or ducks or some shit and then watched the population spiral out of control. That? That was boring. THIS IS RAD.

(Full disclosure: The designer/company founder is a friend of mine, which probably obligated me to buy the thing, but did not obligate me to stay up until after 1 a.m. playing it.)

The concept: You’re an astronaut exploring caves under the surface of Mars. The caves are full of “zoa,” which are sort of plants and sort of creatures and sort of a really useful Scrabble word, and each type has particular defense systems, reproductive habits, and ways of interacting with other life forms. Some of them hurt you, some of them heal you — but more importantly, some of them kill and eat other zoa, and some make other zoa grow and flourish. So your underground gardening isn’t just increasing the amount of life on Mars; it’s also setting up self-sustaining, symbiotic ecological systems.

[Y]ou need to observe each creature and figure out its diet, its relationship with other organisms, its reaction to different chemicals and the way it reproduces. Some plants spit seeds, others jettison great bubbles of water, and some toss explosive fruits. There are animals that asexually reproduce, and there are carnivorous plants that munch on the game’s aliens.

Getting through each room requires you to put these elements together and solve an organic puzzle where all the different parts are moving, interacting and — half the time — eating each other. By planting seeds and herding animals you can experiment with different pairings, find symbiotic relationships and exploit food chains. It’s about carefully setting up self-sufficient ecoystems that steadily increase in biomass, even while you’re not around.

Human influence on Mars is kind of a mixed bag, just like it is on Earth. You have the chance to restore ailing ecosystems and establish robust new ones, but you can also end up with gardens that cannibalize themselves. I really can’t think of a more engaging way to bring home the idea of ecological balance.

But I better go play it just a leeeeetle more to make sure I’m right. See you in three hours.

Filed under: Living

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by Ashley Braun.

Everyone knows that children are the most renewable—though not necessarily cleanest—form of energy. Which means if this LEGO City Public Transport Station weren’t made from little bits of plastic, it would be just about the perfect toy for wee mass transit advocates-to-be.

Will exposing kids to LEGO buses and trams (rather than Hot Wheels) foster little urban planners who will be racing to build transit-oriented communities and not a Ferrari? Maybe not. But a kid can dream, right?

After all, the little kiddos can also add wind turbines to their LEGO livable communities. The next step is for the toymaker to add separated bike lanes to the city streets, and then they’ll be complete.

Via The City Fix.

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