Give up the fight and make green easier

At a conference I recently attended, a group entered into a conversation about the obstacles to adopting more resilient practices in the building and maintaining homes.  After sifting through issues ranging from costs to level of education, one of the participants raised an issue that has stuck in my craw ever since….

Those developing new technologies and strategies related to energy rarely shift through the familiar.

I wish I could remember the young man's name, because I would advocate that you follow him on Twitter or read his latest book (if he has one).  I do not believe in single panaceas that solve all our problems, but as I look back at most of the resistance to the practices, behaviors, and technologies presented by those of us looking to make the world more livable for ours and future generations, I notice a prominence of asking people to break with the familiar and embrace change.  If we look at the technological changes that have marked the past century, we can see the thread of this throughout.

Moving from the horse and buggy to the automobile included a car shaped similarly to a typical buggy and the use of the phrase "horse-less carriage".  Yes, there's no horse, but it has "horsepower" and looks otherwise like you parents' carriage.

Motorola invented the cellular phone in the early 1970s, but it took the better part of 25 years to get the devices into widespread use in the US, notably, after home phones had switched from rotary dial to wireless hand-held.

Mention the concept of using radiation to cook food for human consumption to someone in the 1940s when the technology for microwave ovens was first developed, and no market would likely develop.  Flash forward 30 years after nuclear energy becomes a household word, and an oven that cooks in a fraction of the time becomes not only accepted but desirable.

Again, this is not meant to oversimplify the issue.  Each of the above examples carries other factors that needed to come into place before widespread acceptance could occur.  That said, each of them shares the thought that we need the comfort of something familiar to carry us from the past to the future.  As we begin to accept this as a community, we can use the concept to help shape how we move forward.

• Instead of looking to take away the security of utility service from a customer, we should work with utilities to incorporate them into community energy solutions.
• Instead of pummeling consumers with the message that their actions are "horrible and detrimental", we should first focus on developing technology that minimizes waste within the habits of typical consumers.  This plan worked wonders for refrigerators using EnergyStar as the tool to deliver change in the manufacturing industry without changing the end result to consumers.
• Instead of trying to find new and more creative ways to communicate recycling to consumers, we should focus on eliminating non-recyclable material from the waste stream at the manufacturing level.

People will change course when it benefits their life, but generally will need a catastrophe to shake them away from the familiar.  If we seek change without such mind-changing catastrophes, then we need to pursue a course that relies less on changing the behavior of 300 million people, and instead marshall our resources toward overcoming the core issues that make the behaviors detrimental.