Does our future depend on a lone genius or collaborative discovery?

As part of a recent discussion with some friends, we debated whether truly groundbreaking innovation comes from the inspired individual working either alone or in complete control of the process, or whether a group of collaborative individuals can produce better results. It is an interesting dilemma to consider. On the one hand, I have witnessed that in problem-solving situations, groups of students and workers almost always get to a more elegant solution faster as a group than individually. That said, our understanding of motion and higher mathematics comes from Newton. The nuclear age rests on the shoulders of Einstein and Niels Bohr. All of our modern electrical systems owe their existence to Faraday and Tesla. In order to start to understand whether there is an answer to this question, I decided to take a look at some of the most important advances in human history and categorize them as to whether they were the result of a "genius" or whether they came through planned or accidental collaboration. The results are interesting.














I want to note that the list of advances comes from an Atlantic article from the end of last year. I do not hold it up as the singular list, but it contained most of the advances I would have expected. After the top eight, I think that the ordering is somewhat irrelevant, but other than the top ten, my analysis did not pay much attention to order. Also, as I looked into each issue, I did not do a full historiography of the topic, but looked at a source or two to get an idea. If the source unequivocally mentioned a person as the inventor or discoverer, then I took that for now. If the source mentioned several people who input or made no immediate mention of an individual, I took that for collaboration.


As a process story, although some fit very easily into one category or another (such as electricity or the Internet), many required a bit of discernment. Most notably, determining whether something was a true collaboration or a series of work by lone authors. I separated one from the other based upon whether the first, last, or major advancement was of a lone author or resulted from a collaboration (even if it is a collaboration through reading the writings of others). Not surprisingly to me, the top four and six of the top ten were the result of lone geniuses.

Next, for some of the older developments, it was impossible to know if some one individual had invented the technology or made the discovery, or whether it took shape over hundreds of years with the input or many. On the other hand, although people like Bell, Tesla, Ford, and Pasteur had labs or staff that performed functions for them to advance the work, I considered those individual achievements as long as there was no evidence that another participated as an equal in the discovery. Admittedly, these are not exact analyses, but my guess is that any inaccuracy created by the former is matched by the inaccuracy in the latter, and will not significantly affect the overall result.

Lastly, before discussing the overall picture, it should be noted that some of the names mentioned previously: Newton, Einstein, Bohr, and some other geniuses of science and mathematics (Planck, Bernoulli, Clausius, Descarte, Kepler, Kelvin, Hooke) do not appear on the list although their scientific discoveries certainly led in part to many of the listed discoveries.

The overall result is that about half came from collaborative ventures, and about half came from "lone genius" efforts. One one side, it appears that advances of high value - the printing press, green revolution, and communications - all came from works of genius, while destructive ones - gun powder, oil drilling and refining, paper money - came from collaborative work. That oversimplifies greatly because although the green revolution allowed us to feed the world, it also expanded populations greatly - a burden we have yet to understand how to handle. Also, sanitation systems and anesthesia have had some of the greatest impacts on the length and quality of life of anything on the list, and they came from collaborative efforts.

One thing that does strike me is the absence of individual scientific or technological achievement in since around 1950. As populations have grown, and educated, developed populations continue to expand, the "lone genius" has lost some value. We still celebrate Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and even Mark Zuckerberg...but we do so more for their personality than for their individual technical achievement. We see them as the genius among geniuses that garnered the publicity, but rarely do we want to elevate them to the status of a Newton or Einstein.

I wonder if this reluctance is a matter of the time we live in or a reflection on the past. Do we have no more Newtons or Einsteins because they never really existed in the first place...perhaps they are just products of history? Or can a Newton or Einstein not get voice in this modern cacophony where achievements of comfort and entertainment get greater praise than achievements that truly improve quality of life or move science forward. In the past, science was the work largely of the wealthy who had the resources and education to devote time to the endeavor. Since Faraday, we have opened science more to all. In doing so, however, the work becomes separated from those who have the platform to publish and promote.

The ultimate answer to the question has a significant impact on public policy. Should we be providing outlets for those with true aptitude for excellence in science and technology, and give them the freedom to pursue thought and exploration? Or should we continue to funnel resources to large institutions and corporations where collaboration mitigates risk of not finding a solution to a particular problem? We currently have no public policy incentive to develop the next true geniuses, and given that many of the advances that have provided us the quality of life we currently enjoy have come from those geniuses of the past, perhaps we need to think about letting the pendulum (discovered by Galileo) swing back toward cultivating freedom of thought.

Going back to schools that teach

Today is back to school day in our house, and among all the normal activities...finishing summer reading, making sure uniforms fit, figuring out which lunch table to sit at...it's a good time to consider the importance of school buildings to our community, and ways that we can make them even more important.

In many communities, schools already hum from early in the morning until late in the evening. Students go to class, of course, but community groups use facilities for meetings, local youth groups maximize the use of athletic and fine arts facilities when the school does not need them, and in extreme circumstances, schools provide shelter to those displaced from their homes. Schools provide an excellent foundation for sustainable communities, and we have many ways to make them even more so.

• Preserve schools located in community centers. For the past couple of decades, many communities have pushed their schools to the edge of their community because of a combination of the low cost for the land and the larger footprint that modern schools take up. This removes the ability for students to walk or bike to school, as well as losing the embodied energy of the existing school buildings.
• Use the buying power of the school to encourage the purchasing of local, healthy food options. This supports local food systems that provide community resilience, and directly benefits the health and learning opportunities of the students.
• Leverage the long-term position of the school to enter into long-term agreements for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Utility-scale renewable energy provides environmental benefits, but local, community-based systems provide the added benefit of a self-sufficiency that helps in emergency situations. As an added benefit, schools tend to be out of session during the times of highest system performance, meaning that they can export the additional energy to local homes.
• Manage materials in such a way as to minimize how much we dispose of in landfill. Schools use many consumable materials, and have a large, often passionate workforce to help collect and manage materials.
• Create a generation of sustainability natives. Just as children born over the last 20 years are digital natives that have never known a world without computers, students today will never live in a world without the impacts of climate change. These students can then bring what they learn into the community to make life better for all.

One in five people spend some part of their day in a school. The lessons we learn there permeate to all aspects of our life. In order to make these school buildings as useful to our communities as possible, we all need to advocate and support efforts to reduce or eliminate their negative impact on the environment and make them even more self-sufficient.

End the Green Economy

For the better part of the last fifteen years of my career, I have spent much time among advocates of the "green economy": one where we consider the triple bottom line of economic, environmental, and social performance.  This has spawned a whole new language of economic development around the word green including "green jobs",  "green materials", "green practices", etc.  For the most part, the industry has applied these labels in an attempt to convey that certain products or services have more value to a consumer, and therefore, can justify higher costs.  In some cases, these higher costs come from small implementation that has not yet reached scale to create economic advantages, and in some cases, the new strategy or technology avoids producing harms that conventional approaches do which means higher costs.  On the other hand, sometimes, people just want to charge more, and hope that labeling something "green" will motivate people to spend more than they might.  Regardless of the motivation, there is one thing that now becomes clear to me.

We must end the green economy.

By advocating for a green economy, we automatically set up a conflict between the current economy and another one that challenges it.  This sets up a debate where those succeeding in the current economy control the conversation by constantly challenging the new economy (or subset of the economy) and proposing all types of calamitous consequences if we follow this new path.  People naturally resist change and cling to the comfortable, so this line of reasoning has great traction and creates roadblocks to achieving the goals of better quality of life.  Instead of presenting this new economy - rife with unanswered questions about the true implications of full implementation - with its "green" moniker and advocating for wholesale revolution, we should consider a better path.

Those who advocate for a "green economy" out of altruistic reasons seek better quality of life for all.  This means that in making one person's life better by providing access to reliable energy, we cannot reduce the quality of life for another by polluting their community.  For those that advocate on this level, the more desirable plan should focus more on challenging the failings of the current economy rather than presenting a wholesale collapse and rebuild.  The current economy is supposed to distribute resources adequately and fairly.  When it does not, we need to challenge that.  The current economy is supposed to assign all of the costs and consequences associated with a product or service to that product or service.  When it does not, we need to challenge that.  The current economy is supposed to provide clear information to all parties in a transaction so that each may make a rational decision.  When it does not, we need to challenge that.

One of the failings of the discussion of the green economy comes from the instant association that many have with "green" meaning increased regulation.  Although any time we discuss asking more of industry, we often devolve to regulation because of a combination of industry resistance and political posturing, the changes in the economy can come in many forms.  For every significant benefit realized by improving CAFE standards through regulation, we have equal benefit through Energy Star labeling that allows industry to determine the method of performance.  Whereas intense scrutiny of power plant and refinery emissions for toxins has protected waterway and airstreams effectively over the past generations, we have achieved equal successes through market-based forces like cap-and-trade (specifically for sulfur and nitrous-oxide emissions from power plants).  In all of these cases, the most important part of the discussion was not the IF but the HOW.  The current debate on implementing a "green economy" still centers on the IF...we need to move it to the HOW.

How do we do that?  It starts by demanding more of the current economy.  We should pepper our leaders - both industrial and political - with questions about performance.  Why do people in West Virginia have to suffer the negative effects of coal ash dumping in order for people in DC to get power?  Why can companies spend millions of dollars lobbying against technologies such as rooftop solar that compete in the marketplace, while avoiding making required changes in their power plants to reduce emissions?  Why do industries not have the requirement to maintain the atmosphere, waterways, and earth at the same level of natural state as it was before their operations?  Why should an employee accept endangering their life for reasons unrelated to the job they do?

The time has come to turn the debate from one about "why a green economy?" to "why the current economy?".  Over the past several decades, we have seen quality of life gains plateau or even recede. While other countries continue to grow across classes, we see the large portion of our population less well off now than they were twenty years ago.  Those of us who advocate for the results of the green economy know that it will not only improve our quality of life, but produce a more stable economy.  In order to get there, though, we need to drop the conversation that puts us on the defensive, and instead make the advocates of the current way of doing things defend their system.

Friday Five: May 9, 2014

The recent National Climate Assessment contains warnings not of impending issues, but rather concerns that some of the major causes of climate change are already upon us.
Climate change is already causing asthma. Cancer too.
"The National Climate Assessment, which hundreds of scientists helped put together, warns that the effects of global warming aren’t some far-off possibility. They are happening right now, here in the U.S. Those effects include all the familiar problems: drought, wildfires, extreme weather, and sea level rise. But they include something else: Threats to public health."

In addition to the direct health concerns, we will have to adjust the way and location in which we grow the crops that underpin our sustenance and our economy.
Our alarming food future explained in 7 charts
"Richard Cruse, an agronomist and the director of Iowa State University’s Iowa Water Center, has found Iowa’s soils are currently disappearing at a rate as much as 16 times faster than the natural regeneration. According to the National Assessment, days of heavy rain have increased steadily in Iowa over the past two decades, and will continue doing so."

We continue to learn that nuclear and natural gas are not the "bridging fuels" we once thought them to be, and that we would find a more cost-effective plan would focus only on efficiency and renewables.
The rising cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant
"The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it. And decommissioning the plant—constructed early in the 1960s for $39 million—cost $608 million. The plant’s spent fuel rods are still stored in a facility on-site, because there is no permanent disposal repository to put them in. To monitor them and make sure the material does not fall into the hands of terrorists or spill into the nearby river costs $8 million per year. That cost will continue for an unknown number of years. David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that even without the ongoing costs of monitoring and security, the average reactor now costs about $500 million to deactivate."

New technology can offer a potential way to mitigate some of the water issues we face due both to climate change and to inherent challenges due to consumption.
UCLA researchers unveil a better way to treat brackish water
"The system treats water at a cost of about $1.50 per 1,000 liters, said Cohen, who has installed desalination technology on U.S. military vessels. By way of comparison, bottled water costs about $1 to $3 per liter."

In the information economy, we no longer need to hold onto outdated and extractive business models, but can use information to link local businesses in a way that taps into the power of aggregated risk management while preserving the personal relationships that truly define a society.
The socio-economic power of renewable energy production cooperatives in Germany
"Energy cooperatives have turned into important supporters of renewable and decentralised energy structures, due to their strong growth since the year 2006, their participation in local renewable energy projects and their democratic awareness. The cooperative form of coordinating local renewable energy projects applies to a decentralised energy system that is managed by many smaller firms - a system concept that is preferred by the majority of German citizens. However, there is not enough knowledge to understand to what extent this organisational form is able to unify a broad group of actors in promoting a renewable energy system (societal power) and to gather capital for elaborating renewable energy supply structures (economic power)."

Happy Friday!

Without regulation, we might have Metropolis

A large portion of the building market these days centers around three types of structures: hospitals/health care, universities, and high-rise residential.  Among the potential market sectors, these have the most capital on hand, the most demand, and the greatest buying power.

And they still mostly do the bare minimum when it comes to human health.

As long as we continue to develop new buildings that require fossil energy inputs, someone’s life will suffer to provide comfort to another.  If three of the most well-capitalized market sectors cannot choose to build in such a way as to alleviate this condition, then the market will not ever achieve a socially just outcome on its own.  The best we can hope for, with no other intervention, is a world where one class of people has comfortable, life-supporting infrastructure, and another class deals with the impacts of that lifestyle.

We have the knowledge and ability to change this.  We know how to design buildings so that they use only the energy naturally occurring on the property.  We have technologies that eliminate waste and instead recycle nutrients into another process.  We developed transportation technologies and strategies that nearly eliminate the negative impacts of the energy use.

But the market alone will not bring these into wide acceptance.

For at least a decade, we have had vehicle technologies that improve miles per gallon by twenty to thirty percent at almost no additional cost.  It took a projected change to the CAFE standards to force vehicle manufacturers to incorporate those technologies into their current offerings.  We will see the 2025 target for average fuel efficiency by the year 2020 because we already knew how to make it happen, we just needed a push.

The same is true for buildings.  If today, we established in law that any new building built in 2025 had to use no fossil fuel energy sources for its operation, we would easily achieve that by 2020.  This would happen for two reasons.  First, many designers and builders already know how to make this happen, and the investors who want to gain first entry into the market will find them and make it happen.  Second, everyone else will know that any building they build in the next decade will eventually have to compete with a building that has no energy cost.  Even though energy costs fill a relatively small portion of an organization’s budget (5-12%), that difference creates enough competitive edge to change the market.

I do not want my children living in a world like the movie Metropolis (or for those who are a little younger, The Hunger Games).  I want everyone to have an equal chance at high quality of life, and I want no one to have to suffer because of the comfort of another.

We know better, and should expect better.

Friday Five: March 14, 2014

All the arguments about climate change and carbon dioxide emissions ignores another great challenge of fossil fuel pollution, and one that industry has yet to find an adequate solution for: fine particulate matter.  The unburned, solid carbon creates a whole host of health issues, and left unaddressed, it will continue to plague us.
New research shows air pollution might make you bad at your job
"What they found was that every 10-microgram per cubic meter increase in PM2.5 levels decreased worker productivity by 0.6%, as measured by the number pear boxes packed by each worker. Since workers were paid piecemeal, this translated to a decrease of roughly 41 cents per hour, per 10 micrograms of PM2.5."

The urban pollution caused largely by automobile emissions, but also by industrial activity and building heating, leads to consequences that affect our nations poor and people of color at rates higher than that of other population groups.
Dyin' to live: Biggie Smalls and the silent killers in urban America
"Cancer and heart disease are still the top causes for premature deaths in Brooklyn today. Environmental factors have long been suspected as possible causes for both. The National Cancer Institute conducted a study in the 1990s in Long Island (just north of Brooklyn) to examine the role of environmental factors in the high breast cancer rates in that area. The researchers found a “modest increase” in cancer risk due to exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), cancer-causing agents formed mostly from burning fossil fuels. A 2008 study found a link between PAH exposure and heart disease, and concluded that “chronic environmental stress is an important determinant” in cardiovascular disease risk."

Over the last several years, I have called for a planned, stable transition from utilities of infrastructure to utilities of service.  In order for utilities to survive, they have to make that transition, and it looks like in the nations on the forefront of renewable energy, that transition has started...to a point.
The future of large German utilities: It's already here
"If I would have written this paper two years ago and included the following, I would have called it utopia. Nobody would have believed it. But this unbelievable story actually happened. These four large German utilities decided to become 'green.' This can be seen from their recent advertisements, which show that all of the four major German utilities are 'solarized.'"

Making change that has lasting economic impact requires correctly identifying the value of the improvement and working that into the business plan of those developing, improving, or refurbishing.  Many homeowners and developers avoid improvements with long-term benefits because they cannot monetize those in the present.  A system that correctly values the improvements - and holds developers especially accountable for their performance - provides the proper incentive to make choices that improve quality of life. 
How to help appraisers fairly value home energy efficiency improvements
"Nothing works in the appraisal process unless high performance homes are consistently documented. Right now, the majority of home appraisers use Fannie Mae’s Uniform Residential Appraisal Report to provide opinions on the market value of a given property. But, this form lacks an adequate section in which to document energy efficiency features."

Economics can produce poor decisions.  The economics of developing, maintaining, and decommissioning nuclear energy do not really work, and the risk of catastrophe only exacerbates the point.  That said, in a nation whose economy depends on a fixed level of energy cost, it is tempting to go back to it...even when it has already damaged your country and its people.
Nuclear power in Japan: Start 'em up
"The sense of urgency is driven, first, by the mounting costs of doing without the nuclear plants. One by one, nearly all reactors were shut down in 2011-12. Utilities fired up conventional power stations to make up for lost electricity generation. But the cost of importing extra oil, coal and gas has been all the steeper with a weak yen. The trade deficit has climbed, along with electricity charges, particularly for businesses. Should nuclear plants be left idle, the programme of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, to revive the economy could be in doubt."

Happy Friday!