University Place Wednesday Nite @ the Lab Mike Dalecki, "Sustainable Thinking in an Age of Energy Challenges"  UP 443   cc >> Thank you for joining me for Wednesday Nite at the Lab at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. Tonight we welcome Dr. Mike Dalecki from the Department of Sociology at UW Platteville. So we thank him for making the drive tonight. Dr. Dalecki is a professor of sociology whose topic areas include social change, research, methodology, and energy. He teaches the first sequence course in the renewable energy minor at UW Platteville and is part of the team creating a new sustainable and renewable energy system major. His recent presentations have included "Got Energy?" and "The Ethanol Fraud." He received his BS from the University of Wisconsin Platteville and his MS from Texas Christian University and then his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. In addition to his academic pursuits, he is currently the president of the Platteville Common Council, and his interests span beyond energy and sociology in that he enjoys or they include zen, politics, golf, poker, and energy. I'm not sure in which order his interests are. But please join me in welcoming Dr. Mike Dalecki to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. (applause) >> Thank you, Nadia. 

You're probably a little surprised to find a sociologist talking about energy. We should be here talking about Marx, should we not? But energy is something that I've been interested in for a long time. I teach a class in social change. Every year when I teach that class, I try to find a hook to hang that class on. For a while it was the internet, the changes that we were all experiencing from cyberspace impacting our lives. That grew a little stale because those changes are largely finished now, and we just have changes by degree not by the massive kind of alterations to our lives we experienced before. And I was looking for another hook to hang the class on, and I'd been following energy issues for a while and I began to look at what social change might come from changes in our energy supply, our needs, our demands, the prices, the whole bit. And as I began to study energy, I found that I couldn't just understand it from a sociological point of view. I had to know economics. I had to understand history. 

I had to know supply and demand. I had to understand stock markets and futures exchanges and carbon trading and carbon credits and a whole litany of things that are ultimately necessary, I think, to really understand what's going on. So I've moved, in some respects, pretty far afield from sociology into other ways of looking at this that combine a lot of things. The answer is actually everywhere. There are very, very few things that do not impact on our understanding of energy. I teach the first course in our renewable energy minor. We're working on getting a renewable and sustainable energy systems major. Part of that beginning for our students is to expose them to terminology, to give them some kind of understanding of the issues. But it's also about learning how to think differently about not only energy but just in general. And what I'm going to do tonight is give you a little bit of a thumb nail sketch of the kinds of things we do in that class in our attempts to try to get the students to think very different from what they're used to. 

So when I titled the presentation "How You Think About Energy Equals What You Think About Energy," I believe that 100%. What you bring to the question determines, to a great degree, the kind of outcome that you get. And part of what I hope we'll do tonight is maybe find some alternative ways of looking at those kinds of problems. There are three parts to the talk tonight. They are loosely knit but they're all partly how I understand energy and how I think about it. And not everybody will necessarily think this way, will not necessarily resonate with everyone, but it is how I think about energy and how I view energy and think about what's going to happen to us over the next 5, 10, 20 years. The first part deals with values. I'm a sociologist, of course I would talk about some sociology, right? Well, values are an interesting element to our lives. What are values? Values are conceptions of the desirable. Which means that we value things that are important to us, and if that is the case, then we try to achieve those values in our every day lives. 

My mentor at Penn State once said he wasn't quite sure what a value was. In fact, he said it's possible to value pizza and I didn't disagree with him. But values typically are more along the lines of in states of existence that we are interested in. And we try to live our lives in such a way that allows us to realize those values. Tonight we're going to focus on three very important values for Americans, values of freedom, independence, and thrift, and see how those values inform us regarding what the future of energy is and what people are likely to do or not do when it comes to making energy choices. Regardless, what we have to understand from this perspective is that innovations have to fit our values to be successful. We don't adopt innovations, new technology, and new ways of doing things if they're in violation of our values unless we're forced to do that. We can think of renewable energy or sustainable energy as innovation. It's a different way of doing things. We're used to just dumping petrochemicals in our cars, and we're heating our homes with petrochemicals. 

We're used to dealing with all kinds of petroleum products in our every day lives, and we're now looking at alternatives and those alternatives can be thought of as innovations, as something different from what we've done. Innovations, of course, can span the spectrum of new ideas, new technology, simply new ways of doing things. And, of course, renewable and sustainable energy is part of that spectrum. So let's look at renewable energy as innovation and see if we can't come up with a framework here for understanding whether people are more or less likely to adopt new ideas, new technology. Some innovations are headed for success while others are doomed to failure, and it would be nice if we could come up with a scheme or a system that might help us identify what those were. What guidelines can we use to tell the sheep from the goats? Well, there are guidelines, fortunately. One answer is to examine the characteristics of innovations. Every innovation carries with it some characteristics that make it something people are more or less likely to adopt. And we can ask the question then whether those characteristics are going to make that innovation more or less likely to be adopted. What are those characteristics? There are five of them. 

The first characteristic of an innovation that affects the likelihood of adoption is relative advantage. That is, if we're going to have some innovation, some new idea, some new technology, it has to have some advantage compared to the old way of doing things. That's pretty straightforward. We don't usually accept new ideas or new technology unless it does something better for us. Cheaper, faster, more efficient, makes us feel better, whatever it is. The second characteristic is compatibility, and the compatibility we're talking about here is compatibility with existing cultural, social, and psychological characteristics of potential adopters. And if you are like me and you're interested in whether Americans broadly thought of are willing to embrace new ideas and new technology that will help us deal with our energy problems, then you're interested in knowing the characteristics of those people and whether or not new ideas, new technology fit with them. And of course I've emphasized here the one that I consider the most important and that is values. So when we talk about compatibility here we really mean, as much as anything else, compatibility with people's values. The third characteristic is relative simplicity. 

If you have a Rube Goldberg machine, you're not likely to have a lot of people stepping forward to use it. The simpler it is, the easier it is, the better it's going to be. The fourth characteristic is divisibility. This term comes from the history of adoption diffusion research that goes back to the 1930s in which researchers, some of them were at the University of Wisconsin Madison, were trying to find out what they could do to encourage farmers to adopt new kinds of farming technologies, hybrid seeds and so on. Whether that was a good idea or not is not where I want to go right now, but one of the things that they discovered is that a farmer was more likely to try some new hybrid seed, let's say, if they could try it out on a small plot first. That is they could divide up their farmland into a small piece and try it out. If it worked, they'd try more next year. If it worked, they'd try more and eventually adopt it. So divisibility ultimately is try-ability. Can you try it out and go back? If you can't, you're much less likely to choose that as an option. 

And finally the last characteristic we'll talk about here is ease of communication. Can you easily relay the advantages of some new technology or idea to other people? Is it clear what it brings to the table? A new technology, a new innovation really needs to meet all of these criteria in order to have a high likelihood of success. Three examples. You're probably familiar with this one. Anyway ride a Segway in here tonight? All right, excellent. The Segway, I did the Segway in my social change class about seven or eight years ago when it first came out. We looked at this new technology and Dean Kamen said this is going to revolutionize cities, and we're all going to be riding Segways to work. And we said, well, let's look at this and see if we can't understand whether this truly is a technology which is revolutionary or whether it's something else. So let's apply those five criteria for adoption of, characteristics of adoption of new technology to this Segway. The first characteristic, relative advantage. 

Does a Segway bring any relative advantage? It really does not. It's a very expensive device. Anybody priced one lately? $5,000 or more for a Segway. What does it do better than bicycles or feet or motor carts or any numbers of alternatives? Unfortunately it doesn't seem to do very much better than anything else. You can buy a very nice bicycle for $750, and it performs a lot better than a Segway in many respects. So it doesn't seem to have an advantage. For a while the people who were marketing the Segway thought it would be an ideal device for postal workers to deliver mail. Of course if they're walking between mailboxes, that's wasted time. So if they could zip along, they'd be able to have greater efficiency. And the assumption was that they were doing nothing while they were zipping along. 

Well, in fact if you ever watched a postal delivery employee, what are they doing while they'll walking? >> Sorting. >> They're sorting the mail. So they discovered that despite the fact that the Segway looked like a good idea for that, it really didn't gain them much. What about compatibility? It really isn't compatible with people's values. It doesn't meet the thrift value, which is it's very, very expensive and there are a lot of alternatives that are much cheaper. It also looks pretty odd. It's got a certain kind of funny look to it, and people seem, in some cases, to be off-put by that. Relative simplicity. Can we understand it? We hop on, we go. I've been on a Segway, it's not that hard. 

15 minutes you've pretty well got it figured out, you'll have a little stumbling here and there, but it's not that hard. It's pretty clear what it does. Divisibility. Can it be tried? Certainly it can. How many people in here have tried one? That would be a question. I see three or four hands here, but interestingly the people who marketed this, rather than get this out for people to try, expected them apparently to beat a path to their door and that path wasn't beaten down very much. And finally, ease of communication. Can we explain what it does? Well, maybe, if we can tell what it's useful for. In the end, what do we conclude about a Segway as a different kind of, say, transportation for us? Not ready for primetime. And that's a conclusion we reached seven, eight years ago when it first came out. 

And not much has changed, although I'd dearly love to have one because walking from one end of the campus to the other I could use a Segway but not for $5,000. Here's another one a little closer to home perhaps. Mass transit. Let's apply the criteria for adoptability to mass transit. Is there a relative advantage to mass transit over what we're using currently? Well, yes and no. It can be cheaper. Though scheduling inconvenience is a no. It's not clear if it's really better or not. You have to go to specific places, you have to be there at specific times, you have to hope you live nearby some kind of mass transit line. Not clear. 

Is it compatible with American values? As a general rule it is not. It's conflicting with values of freedom and independence. We'll come back to this later. I can see some of you taking umbrage with this a little bit. But wait till we're done here and see if we don't find some kind of understanding. Good, I got your attention, excellent. Number three, relative simplicity. Pretty simple. Hop on, pay your money, go. You can show somebody in five minutes how to do it, it's not that difficult to do. 

Divisibility, can you try it out? Certainly. Easy to try, you can go back to the old way. So it fits there. Ease of communication? Yes. But it fails on the big one which is number two and, to a lesser extent, on number one which is it's not clear it has an advantage all the time or for everybody and it certainly doesn't seem compatible in many respects with people's values. Conclusion, not ready for primetime. Except, of course, mass transit works well in places where there's extreme population density and you can't have a lot of cars. New York City is a great example where mass transit works well. There's nothing else they can do and they have so much of it that it's actually a pretty convenient form of travel there. What about number three? Hybrid car. 

Is there relative advantage? Maybe. It's certainly a lot cheaper to drive when fuel prices are high but not now. Fuel prices are very comfortable right now. Is it compatible with our values? It certainly is. It does allow us to realize the values of freedom and independence. People want to come and go as they please, go when they want, go where they want, and not be subject to schedules or anything else, and it certainly allows us to do that. And a hybrid car like the Chevy Volt eliminates what's known as range anxiety. If you have an electric car and it only goes 80 miles, you get up to 60 miles, you're worried about being able to get home in time. So the nice thing about these cars from a standpoint of a consumer is that once the battery runs down there's a gas motor that takes over and charges the battery so that the car can continue to run. Relatively simple? We all know how to drive cars, or most of us do, so that's not a big problem. 

Divisibility? Can it be tried? Certainly, that's not a problem. Ease of communication? Pretty much so. In the end though, is it ready for primetime? It's only ready for primetime as long as the price is accessible. And right now with all of the rebates and government tax credits and so on we're talking in the neighborhood of $27,000 for either a plug-in hybrid like a Volt when it comes out or the Nissan Leaf that's coming out very shortly. Generally though it's too pricey. It doesn't seem to work for us. Plug-in hybrids, however, fit American values better than mass transit for most people. There are some additional considerations when we think about whether new technologies are going to work or not. And when I say this, what I'm referring to is whether a new technology is likely to be embraced by people. Or whether or not it's likely to be like this Segway where it looked good at the time but it turned out not to do particularly well. 

As a sociologist, I'm concerned with what technology people are willing to grab on to. If it's jammed down their throat, my feeling is it's not likely be to accepted at all and it's not likely be to useful. I would rather have people running toward technology than having it forced on them, and so I think about this kind of thing in terms of whether or not a technology, an approach, fits whether or not people are having their values realized or not. Economics is a big part of relative advantage. If it's more expensive, for most people there's going to have to be a reason why they would spend the money. I've looked at the idea of getting a Chevy Volt, I've looked at the idea of an electric car, I've looked at a smart car, I've looked at a neighborhood electric vehicle, and I can't make it pencil out. I drive 8,000 miles a year. It costs me 400 gallons a year of gasoline to go those 8,000 miles, more or less. And that 400 gallons at $3 a gallon is $1,200 a year in gasoline at $3 a gallon. Wow, I'm going to have to get some pretty impressive benefits from any of kind of electric vehicle or hybrid vehicle to make it worth turning in my Ford Focus for that kind of thing. 

It's just not there. So most of these things that are new technologies suffer from that problem that they don't have a relative advantage unless gas goes to $20 a gallon or something like that. I had a student in my class last semester figure out how high gas would have to go to make it worth trading his car for a new hybrid and he said $12 a gallon. He figured it out. That was the break even point for him, $12 a gallon. If gasoline is at $20 a gallon, would mass transit have more appeal? It certainly would. Because you would trade the inconvenience, you would trade waiting for the bus or the train or whatever for the $20 that you pay for every gallon. You'd be making money to do that. So there is a point at which we have a new value overtaking the old ones, that is of freedom and independence. At some point, if the price is high enough, we'll go with the lower price. 

So thrift is an important value but it's one that takes a back seat until prices rise high enough. My assessment of the prospects for renewable and sustainable energy in our current social and economic climate, and please understand I'm thinking not just Madison, Madison is an extremely special case at lots of levels, I'm thinking about Platteville, I'm thinking of Richland Center, I'm thinking of Dubuque, I'm thinking of Milwaukee, I'm thinking of Chicago, I'm thinking of a lot of places where I don't see the average person embracing this at all. It doesn't necessarily work for them. Everybody get the reference? Excellent. Second part of the talk, thinking about energy and thinking about it in terms of assumptions. This is a major part of what I teach in the class, that is to get the students to think differently. To not accept things at first glance. Assumptions can blind us to alternatives and solutions that are right there if only you can figure out a way to see them. I have a puzzle that I would like everyone to try. I mentioned earlier before we started my wife is an elementary teacher, and they use a technique with young children called manipulatives, things they can manipulate, blocks and letters and numbers and things and sticks and so on, and so I figured if it's good for four-year-olds, it's good for us. 

And what I'd like to have you all do right now is try to solve this puzzle. But I would ask this, if anyone has seen this, Sandy you've seen this so you're ineligible. If anyone has seen this, please, please, please watch but do not participate because the advantage of this is in people trying to solve it. Here's the nail puzzle. I've scattered around the room, there's three bags there, there's two or three bags here, I've got one up here in front, and one over there that contains a block of wood into which a nail may be inserted and that block of wood's sole purpose is to hold that nail upright in a solid fashion. Sandy, is that correct? >> Yes. >> People are not going to believe this but Sandy has seen this so he's going to verify this. In that bag is 15 nails, one of which is put into the block, and your task is to take the other 14 nails and get them up on top of that 15th nail without them touching the surface on which the block rests. Not touching the block. You may not hold them. 

No rubber bands. No paper clips. No magnets. No artificial forces at all. If you've got telekinesis or something, you're not allowed to use that. So I will get you started, and I'll begin here with the first one. And what I'd like to have you all do. There, there's one. You only have 13 to go. What I'd like to have you do, if you would, is go and find these. 

You have to put them on these areas right there. All we need is somebody to start and everyone else will follow. Anybody want to come up here and do this? It will be much more fun if you do it. >> Do one more. (laughter) >> So here's our puzzle. We've got nails and a block. We put the nail into the block. You're going to have a surface to set this on. Which is why I put them on the side here. You have to have a place to set the block. 

Nadia, you'll have to do it here unless your arm chairs are level. If it's not level, you're going to have trouble doing this. And again if you've seen this please do not. It'd be fun if we can have two or three people do this up front. Bruce, do you get this? (people chatting) So you know this? Excellent. >> What is the task again? >> Okay, you've got the one nail in the block, your problem is to get the other 14 nails up on top there somehow. In fact, if you have any of those other bags, if we have somebody try up front here, that's a great place to do it. I guess we could borrow it. >> Somebody could do it over here so I'm not blocking you. >> Sure. 

>> Somebody want to try it up front? >> Can I get you to turn around? Because that way there's a chance that it might show up. Now remember the nails, the only nail that may touch the block is the one that it's holding up right. >> The only nail that can touch the block? >> That's correct. In other words what you're doing violates the rules of the universe. >> All at the same time? >> All at the same time, yeah. Not one in row, it's all at the same time. All 14 of them up there at the same time. You all got it yet? You folks back there, have you got it yet? >> Use the bag. >> No, you may not use the bag. This always happens every time I've ever done this is everybody wants to invent some new condition of competition. 

>> That's as many as I can do. >> My vision is too bad to do it but my head says it should be done the following way. >> If it goes through here, they all might hear it. >> Oh, I'll whisper. >> Okay.  How are we doing here? We got it figured out yet? Are we struggling? >> It just can't touch this surface? >> The only thing those nails may touch are other nails or the one that's sticking up, that's it.  It's simply illustrating something. >> They have to be on top? They can't be touching the bottom? >> That's right. Get all those nails up on top of the one that's sticking up on the block. >> They all have to be up at the same time? >> They all have to be up at the same time. 

>> Is this a joke? >> It's not a joke. In fact, here's the question this sets up on the screen right here. And this is what I'm glad we had a lot of people trying this here. This is the question of the evening: why can't you see the solution? >> Because of the way --. >> Not it's not necessarily that's the case. Why can't you see it? And Sandy, I say that's not the case because I see people trying other things too. >> Because we don't have hammers. >> You don't have hammers. This is seriously the question of the evening, why can't we see the answer? By the way, I didn't get it the first time either so it's not like I'm some kind of puzzle genius, I'm not. >> Not all the information is there. 

>> Oh, it's all there and it can be done. >> What about my solution? >> I've never seen it done that way. >> But it was a good idea. >> It was potentially a good idea. So the question is why is it that the answer is eluding you? When I see a puzzle, rather than asking myself what's the answer, I ask myself, why can't I see the answer? What is it that's misleading me? Have you all suffered enough? >> Yes. >> The answer to the question, though not the solution to the puzzle, is that you're assuming things about how you might solve the puzzle that prevents you from seeing the true solution. And here we go. >> Oh. >> Oh, everybody goes boo. You have to create a stable structure off the nail and lift it up there and set it on top. 

(people chattering) One of the things that I do with my class is to ask them to specify their assumptions in trying to solve the problem. And Sandy's right, I kind of mislead you a little bit because it's fun. We put a single nail up there that implies what? That they go up one at a time, right? If we put it up vertically, that implies they go up vertically. What if we change those assumptions? Instead of it going up vertically, it goes up horizontally. Instead of one at a time, it goes up multiples at a time. If you can identify what it is you're bringing to the problem, then you can potentially shift those around, and in so doing give yourself a much better chance of actually finding the answer. I have another puzzle for you here. The famous welded bolt puzzle. And I'll pass these around so people can get a crack at them. Sandy has seen this one too so he'll verify it can be done as well. 

And if you would, Nadia, just kind of pass these around. >> Individually? >> I don't have enough for everyone but do the best you can. Maybe one per row or something they can take a look at it. But I'm going to show on the screen here what we have. Here's the puzzle. I'm handing out a bolt here. The bolt has a washer in between the nut and the head of the bolt. And you'll see from the close up there that the nut has been welded to the bolt so that the nut cannot be withdrawn off the end of the bolt. The trick is to manipulate this in such a way that you can get this washer off of here. Since obviously the nut can't be withdrawn. 

They're welded on pretty good. Now, I'll prove to you it can be done. We've got one right here. And I'll just do it down here so you can't see what I'm doing. And there it is. So it can be done. >> Put it back on. >> You want me to put it on up here or down here? >> Down there.  >> Can I play with it? >> Certainly. >> Thank you. 

>> Do we have any engineers in here? The engineers have to take a whack at this, they'll like this. >> Oh, tricky. That is so cool. >> It's not solid, that's right. That shaft is not solid. >> We used to make match heads in between bolts together and then drop it on one and then they'd bang and fly apart. >> You must have been problems for the police when you were a child. Poor man's fire cracker. >> Right. >> What's the underlying assumption here? That the bolt is solid. 

There's actually another one. Can anybody see it? Who's got one of these? Have you been able to unscrew it yet? Try tightening it instead of loosening it. The threads are reversed. (laughter) Which means you can try until you're blue in the face, but you're not going to unscrew that thing unless you use a righty tighty motion. This kind of puzzle is what I use in class to sensitize students to what they bring to problems in terms of how they solve them. So that they can look outside that conceptual blinder that they bring and see if they can entertain new solutions, new ideas, new approaches. A lot of them fail, but you'll never see the new ones unless you take a whack at challenging your assumptions and changing them and seeing what occurs. >> I think somebody raked on this one a little too hard. >> That might have been me. Note how in both cases the assumptions that we brought to the problem blinded us to the solutions. 

There are very much conceptual blinders when we do this. We're assuming it has to be a certain way, and it prevents us from seeing alternatives. I think a lot of this underlies our energy problems in this country right now in that we tend not to look at things the right way. How does this impact how we view energy? I like to think about this is instead of thinking outside the box, thinking outside the gas tank. Everybody remembers two years ago when gas prices were high and shortages worried people. We were all excited about this because it was new and different. The big concern, what can we pour into our tanks to replace gasoline? And if you remember back to the Bush administration and the big ethanol push the whole idea was we were going to find something else to pour in our tanks, weren't we? I don't recall from that era anything else being a major energy impetus or energy policy from the Bush administration. We were going to replace what we poured into our gas tanks. But notice what happens if we define the problem that way. Ethanol had the early lead because it fit our preconceptions, it fit our assumptions that we needed to replace what was in the gas tank with something else. 

And when we do that kind of thing we end up trapping ourselves into a very limited set of solutions. If we open up the blinders, what happens? I'm sure a lot of you are already here. Here are the key questions, much like the questions that we'd ask with the nail puzzle and with the welded bolt, here are the key questions. Are there other ways we can move ourselves around? And when you open it up that way all of the sudden there are all kinds of alternatives that are outside that gas tank. In fact, there's even one more question. Should we even need to? Maybe we should redefine communities or redesign them. There's any number of things we can look at as possibilities if we get away from having to replace a very narrowly defined kind of technology with another narrowly defined kind of technology. What do we have as alternatives? Plug-in hybrids, multiple vehicle usage, electric cars, air-powered cars, hydrogen cars, fuel cell cars. I have a truck, it's a 1992 Dodge Dakota pickup truck. It's mostly brown because that's the color of rust. 

(laughter) And I put 136 miles on it last year. It gets 13 miles a gallon with a good tailwind. I use it when I need to and it sits the whole rest of the time and I drive my Focus for most of the things I need. So we talk multiple vehicle usage, we're talking about people driving only what they need to drive. Possibly mass transit. That's an alternative. Other forms of transportation, other forms of motor power become possibilities. Segways even. Feet. Bicycles. 

All kinds of possibilities when we open up the blinders. How we think then equals what we see. And I'm sure all of you have run across people for whom ethanol is the big answer. All we need is ethanol to work and all our problems are solved. I'm sure you've heard the United States described as the Saudi Arabia of ethanol. Or Iowa described as the Saudi Arabia of ethanol. And as soon as we do that, it relieves us of the burden of worrying about whether it actually works or not because it sounds really good. I did a presentation three years ago called The Ethanol Fraud. I demonstrated that if you used every last kernel of the corn in the United States it could replace, at most, 22% of our gasoline. And, in fact, I think five is a more reasonable guess. 

Because we use 140 billion gallons of gasoline every year in this country. Ethanol isn't as energy dense as gasoline, and even in the most optimistic circumstances, and that's assuming you get ethanol for free and that there are no energy costs in producing it, which is not true, I fudged the deck in favor of ethanol, 22% was it. So how we think equals the kinds of answers that we see. Notice how changing the question from how do we fill our gas tanks to how do we get around changes the options for us. And this in my view is how we increasingly need to look at energy problems which is think broadly, think bravely, to think, I hate the term outside the box, I like to think about it as outside the gas tank, but I mean all across the board. This thinking doesn't just apply to transportation, it applies to everything. And the beauty of this is once you start thinking this way it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities. For instance, what dominates our thinking as to how we heat homes? Those of you who heat with gas I'm sure pay attention to the price of gas. When it goes up we feel bad, when it goes down we feel better. And when it goes up we think about what else we can heat our houses with instead of gas. 

How can we replace it? The usual answer seems to be to find cheaper alternatives. Heat pumps, burning biomass, meaning woodstoves, geothermal, something like that. And I've always been struck by the narrowness of this as the answer to how we heat homes. There are other ways to think about it. Getting it in, keeping it in may be better than getting it in cheaply. What if we changed our assumptions? What we started building houses designed not to lose their heat in the first place? We can do that. Super insulation. Eight-inch thick walls. R-60 to R-72 in the attic. Triple and quadruple pane glass, none of which is on the north side of a house where it never gets any heat gain from the sun. 

Tight houses, very tight. The majority of heat lost in an average house is lost to air infiltration not to insulation deficiencies. That's why your homes in the winter, if you have a leaky house, are so staticky and so dry. Because that dry outside air is brought in, it's heated up, which makes it even dryer, and that's why you feel the house is dry and why you have the static electricity that you do. So you make them really tight. But when you make them really tight, what's the problem? They're too tight. Which means you need to ventilate them. You have to have some kind of ventilation, and so you begin to use things like heat recovery ventilators. I have one in my house. It raises 20-degree air to 60 degrees, 68 degree inside air. 

That's 83% up. And it does it through a special kind of technology called a Lossnay core which transfers some water vapor between the air stream, and the water vapor carries a great deal of heat energy and so it works very well. It's fascinating thing and it's fabulous and it works. These are technologies that are only apparent to us if we stop thinking about how we're going to get more cheap heat, and instead thinking about maybe how to prevent the heat from leaving in the first place. I think it makes more sense to try to keep the heat in. Now in fairness, this is not something that always works because in older houses very difficult to tighten up for a variety of reasons. Very, very tough to do. But if we're building houses, shouldn't we be thinking about this kind of thing? It strikes me that perhaps we should. It won't work in all cases, but I believe it's a better way of thinking about the issues. Here's another example of what I consider to be reasonably decent thinking. 

GM has noted that about 78% of all drivers don't drive 40 miles in a day. Some of you commuted in here more than 20 miles, well that's not the case for you. But most people don't drive 40 miles in a day. I don't. So GM said, why not build a car that takes advantage of this? So they have built the Chevy Volt which will go the first 40 miles on battery and then the gas engine will take over to provide electrical charge for the car if you need to go beyond 40 miles. Is it the answer? I don't know. But I tell you what, I sure do like the thinking on it. The thinking seems much better. Because they're thinking about how people use things and thinking how to avoid the pitfall of trying to make every car for everybody. We don't all need cars that go 300 miles on one tank of gas. 

We need some other alternatives. The third part of the presentation here involves thinking about energy and how it involves more than assumptions. And I want to come back in this part to the thing about Madison and mass transit and try to make a peace perhaps with some of you who saw maybe a little bit of negative thinking in the earlier part. And that is thinking things all the way through when we look at technologies. Not just to say hey this is a great new thing, isn't it great? I'm sure all of you have had people say, hey, have you seen this new technology, it's going to be great, it's going to solve all the problems. When's the last time that happened? That's right, we haven't had one of those yet, have we? We need to ask what the final consequences of our ideas will be. In other words, not just to solve an energy problem but to ask what the unintended consequences are and ask whether it's worth that. We know the problems with ethanol by now. Ethanol contributes to groundwater depletion. I've met homeowners who are very concerned because their wells go dry and they have to drill deeper and they have no idea when that's going to end. 

It contributed to high food prices. Of course the price of corn collapsed after ethanol plants went bankrupt and all that demand disappeared. There's odor for people who live near them. It upsets markets. It creates higher cropland prices. There are all kinds of unintended consequences with the focus on ethanol. What about the no coal and no nuclear argument? People say let's get rid of coal, it's dirty. Let's get rid of nuclear, it runs us lots of risks. Well, I'll entertain that. If we do that, what will we unplug then? In 2008, it's the most recent data that I can get from the government websites, coal provided 48% of our electricity, nuclear provide 20%. 

That's 68%, that's two-thirds of our electricity comes from those sources that we probably prefer to do without if we could. How many people are willing to unplug two-thirds of their appliances in order to achieve this? Mass transit only works particularly well in areas of high density. I've talked to people over and over who say mass transit is the answer. Not in Platteville it's not. Not in Richland Center. Not in a lot of places it's not. But if everybody says it's the answer, then what have we done? We've done the same thing that the ethanol policy has done which is we've forced out all the other possibilities that we might consider. I'm sure everybody knows this. How many new technologies have really panned out? Back in about 2003 I ran across an article in Discover magazine about a company called Changing World Technologies that was employing a technique called thermal depolymerization in which they used heat and pressure to squeeze or somehow recreate organic molecules into petroleum. It creates, in the way they did it then, a very nice number two light fuel oil. 

And the kinds of, you have no idea what they were putting into this. Guess what they were putting in there? Turkey guts. Turkey guts from a Butterball turkey plant. And they determined they can use tires. They can put tires in this thing and they get the oil back out of tires. Anything that's organic they can get oil out of. And I read this and I went yes. I'm thinking to myself we've got decentralized production, we've got the ability to take waste streams that otherwise are not very useful to us and recover them. There are a lot of interesting things here. So 2003 I'm pretty excited. 

2005, they're having trouble. How many of you have heard of this? Sounds really good in theory, doesn't it? And what they described in 2003 as it's a lovely oil, in 2005 they discovered they were having feed stock problems that you have to have very, very specific feed stock that's very consistent because the temperature and pressure regime necessary to get the kind of oil out they want varies by feed stock. You now know everything I know about this so don't ask me any questions. I just know that they need a very, very consistent feed stock, and they were having great difficulty doing that. And now, by the year 2008, now they're having trouble. There are people complaining about the smell, and they're looking to go overseas and see if they can't get permits to do it there. And what seemed very promising back in 2003 is null today. Anybody ever heard of jatropha seeds? A promising alternative to soy beans or any other kind of oil seeds from which we squeeze oils that could create biodiesel, but not a lot of people have heard of it. I saw the article. This is the next big thing. 

This is the answer. This is what we're going to fuel our diesel trucks with. How many of you are fueling your diesel truck with jatropha seed oil? Oops. We tend to accentuate the positives, ignore the problems. There are very specific growing conditions these seeds need. There are all kinds of conditions that are necessary for feed stock. It's not that easy. In fact, what's most fascinating to me about all of this, remember I'm a sociologist, is what the average person thinks about these things. Because I believe that what that person thinks is going to drive their behavior and ultimately is the behavior of 310 million people that is going to drive our energy needs and our energy solutions for the next 50 years assuming we're still around in 50 years. How many of us can be experts on every issue? I know probably more than average about energy. 

Probably what I would term a fair amount. But there's an awful lot I don't know about some things. I know relatively little about the healthcare debate. Somebody in here might know a great deal about it or some of you might, but when it comes to healthcare reform, I'm pretty ignorant of that. If this talk tonight was about healthcare reform, I might come to find out what was going on but I certainly wouldn't know much. Those of you who are here, I suspect have a far above average understanding of energy. The fact that you're here suggests that to me. It also suggests to me that you folks are not typical of the average person at all. That, in fact, you have an interest in this, you're trying to find more things out and so on and so forth. Are you typical of the average person? And I mean not in Madison. 

What's the old saying about Madison? We'll get to it in a minute. 80 square miles surrounded by what? >> Reality. >> Reality, that's right. So this is the thing with the mass transit. Mass transit works in Madison because it's Madison. It doesn't necessarily work in other places because those places don't have the advantages Madison has. >> My sister-in-law doesn't even recycle. >> Yeah. We can't expect most people to think like we do. Not that they can't. 

But how many issues can you be an expert on at one time? I'm lucky to at least know something about energy, but I don't know very much about healthcare reform. I try to keep up with what's going on in the United States and Korea. But I know about what everybody else does which is what I read in the newspapers and see online. There's a whole lot that I don't know very much about. So to expect everyone out there to have the same level of knowledge that you folks have I think is unreasonable to the extreme. Most of them are probably not as well educated as you are. They're not as interested in keeping up. They're not as naturally curious as you are. You bring with you a whole lot of interesting characteristics that the average person may not. Now they're interested in their things too, just not this. 

How much of our perceived need for renewable and sustainable energy resonates with the average person? I think you can get a little bit of a hint of that by asking what people think about global climate change. What reactions do you see people have? As soon as there's a cold snap, what do they say? Whatever happened to global warming, right? And of course all the people who have ever talked about climate change said, among other things, that we can expect there to be more variation and wilder swings in weather as a result of climate change, assuming that's happening. Have we had any of that lately? We don't hear them say that. But if it gets cold, that's it, the end of global warming, we're done. Because people who have that view are not seeking out as full of information as they can find. As we're going to find out, they tend to seek out the things that match their biases. I don't believe that much of this resonates with people. People, the media, they respond to price and little else. Remember two years ago when the price of gasoline was so high, do you remember all the big honking cars by the side of the road with for sale signs in their windows? Do you remember that? Maybe they weren't around here. Maybe everybody's got small cars here, I don't know. 

But around Platteville, my God, every block there was a car for sale. GMC Suburban. Big Jeep. Big truck. Everybody wanted to sell them in order to buy something that wouldn't eat them out of house and home. Where are those today? >> They're driving them. >> They're driving them. That's right. That's right. People did a lot of things two years ago when they got pushed by price. 

And as soon as the price dropped, there went the motivation, didn't it? Why not? Because the price is reasonable today. We've grown accustomed to gasoline from $2.50 to $3, we've learned to live with it. The next big hump, by the way I don't think it's $4, I think it's $5. I think that's where we'll see people panic again. We've gotten used to $4. We can deal with $4, can't we? It will be $5. I spend a lot of time listening to people who don't always think like me. I found that if I'm lazy I can find myself seeking out sources of information that agree with me, that reflect my biases. And that's not good for thinking at all. So I catch myself doing that every once in a while and I will go and find alternatives. 

I'm in the ivory tower, I imagine many of you are or live nearby. Who are the people that you hang out with? Who are the people that you spend time with? Probably people who think like you, right? That's just natural. I'm a sociologist, I would expect that of you. How many of you hang out with people who don't think like you? Probably not so many. So I have to find myself from time to time getting out of that comfort zone and going and finding things that are against my beliefs, my biases and so on and so forth. Anybody look at their Drudge Report everyday? I do. You all know who Matt Drudge was? Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and he's been living off that ever since. Matt Drudge is a very, very, I'm not sure I'd call him conservative because I don't know what that means anymore. Conservative means you scream when you don't like what's going on and then you spend like crazy when you're in power. But he's got that very, very right wing kind of approach. 

I want to see what people who want to read Matt Drudge, and he's got all kinds of links and stuff on his website, I want to see what they think by reading what they're reading. I look at all kinds of different forums on the internet. There are all kinds of weird things on the internet. I look for them, I read them, I try to figure out what people are thinking. It's not a scientific survey. I'm trying to get a sense of what's out there. Anybody spend time drinking coffee at a smart table? Do you all know what a smart table is? Excellent. I'm a rural sociologist by trade. In every small town there's a cafe, and every small cafe like that has a smart table. It's where the farmers come in and have coffee. 

Sometimes they call them chapter 11 tables for the bankrupt farmers. I have a smart table at Country Kitchen every morning. A lot of them are my friends. In fact, I count them all as my friends, but they come from all kinds of different walks of life. And I listen to what they're thinking. What are they picking up on the news? What's their view of the world? What are they thinking of? I see them as kind of sort of a microcosm of the world. That they're giving me some pretty interesting views of what an average person might think. Platteville's not the whole world, I understand. But I use that along with these other things to get a sense that in fact the whole world is not what we see here tonight, me included. That's not what the world is. 

The world doesn't necessarily see things the way we do. I ran into that this morning where we had a discussion about energy. We ought to do this, we ought to do that. And I don't say much sometimes because it doesn't do any good, but it informs me. And now of course we have this part at the bottom, my favorite comment about Madison. Madison a unique place. It is one of the coolest places in all the world. We have a an incredibly large population of educated people, well-read people. People are relatively affluent. This situation in Madison allows certain things to happen that are relatively impossible elsewhere. 

People have the social capital here and the personal capital to do things that people lack in other places. And when we see it done in Madison, we say, wow, look at the recycling or look at our mass transit. If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere. I would beg to differ. We might be able to do it in some places, but I guarantee we can't do it everywhere. And I would suggest that we probably can't do it most places because those places don't have the people, the social capital, the personal capital that we have in Madison. So mass transit works here. It works because a lot of people are dedicated to this. >> It doesn't work here. >> It doesn't work here, well, okay. 

But you have it. We don't have it in Platteville. We're not going to get it either. >> (inaudible) >> A lot of people would like to get around. It's three miles from one end to the other. There's not a demand for it. You can't make it work. You can't. And a lot of places have that. There's another problem with mass transit which is kind of outside the scope of this talk, but what's happened in the last 70-75 years as we became a car culture, what happened to our cities? We depopulated them, didn't we? We became a suburban culture that is not in the least bit set up for mass transit. 

So we have that big problem too. So when I see mass transit is the answer, I'm imposing kind of an overlay on it saying A, we're not set up to do. Madison can do it, New York can do it, some cities can do it, but a lot of places cannot. We have an interest in this topic, most people do not. Most people will not, in my view, generally respond to reason unless it aligns with their self-interest. Anybody who's watched television news lately probably has a sense of what I'm talking about. They will, however, respond to price. Almost everyone will. Price, because it activates the thrift value, is what is needed to overcome the other important values like freedom and independence. This is kind of a funny place for a sociologist to end because the more I've learned about energy, the more I find myself thinking like an economist, God forbid. 

(laughter) But the more I've learned about energy, the more I've discovered I need to know things like supply and demand and understand demand curves and understand exchange rates and understand how the value of the dollar relates to the price of oil and ultimately the price of gasoline. The more I've studied energy, the more I keep thinking I should go back to school and learn more about economics because it sure seems to matter. When I look at this as a sociologist, I end up in the place that says that the only thing that will solve our energy problems is price. Our system is too captured by special interest. Our political system is broken. We no longer have the will to compromise. We no longer have the will to do anything except squabble it seems. I wish the price of energy would go up and go up a lot because then we would have solutions. Until and unless it does, I'm not holding my breath. (applause)