Last Friday I had an idea for a magazine column. I had had a long conversation with Andrew Taggart, a large part of which focussed on some angst I’ve been having over the question of right livelihood. Andrew encouraged me to think a little more clearly about the things that I like doing, feel have value, and I have some skill at. Later in the day, that thought process led me to the idea of pitching a “sustainability fact check” column to some publishers and seeing if I can’t make a little money out of being a pedant and curmudgeon who values reliable data, understands systems science well and statistics reasonably, and cares deeply about sustainability & greenwashing.
In this, I’m most directly inspired by two very valuable columns, from which I’ll have to take care to differentiate my work:
- The St. Petersburg Times’ Truth-O-Meter adjudicates when readers write in questioning claims made by public figures – most often politicians on the campaign trail, of course.
- Grist’s Ask Umbra column is a sustainability advice column, and probably the closest thing in spirit to what I have in mind.
My plan is to cover a much narrower range of topics than the Truth-O-Meter, focussing solely on sustainability issues because that’s what I know enough about to have something worthwhile to say. But I like their focus on simply determining whether a statement is true, reasonable or neither, without straying into advice and with a heavy focus on factual claims that can be shown to be true or false with publicly available data.
I tweeted about the idea, and got a positive enough response that it seems worth a try. Now I plan to write one sample column, for which I’ve set aside a day this week, and if I can come up with something good without having to spend too many hours on it I’ll try pitching the idea.
The kind of topics I want to write about
As an example, I could imagine taking on the “driving is greener than cycling” trope that surfaces from time to time. It seems like quite a good example topic, because it’s a claim that can be made to look plausible by only considering some of the variables, but the intellectual sleight of hand involved can be made obvious by just thinking aloud in a clear way. The only drawback is that it’s a rather well-worn subject, because it seems to pop up and get refuted every year or so.
What I don’t want to wade into
There are topics I don’t want to touch; particularly those where both sides have demonstrably true claims and the adjudication needs a value judgement between them. An example would be the Seattle Steam controversy, which frankly ought to be getting more attention in the local media, but seems to be ignored because the issue is complicated. This involves two true claims:
- Seattle Steam Company claims to be a green energy and heating source. In their own terms, they’re unquestionably right: they burn waste wood that would otherwise decompose in a landfill emitting methane, and district heat and combined heat & power are both much more efficient than isolated thermal power stations. But in the whole system, they’re ignoring some important details.
- The campaign against Seattle Steam attacks their plant for emitting particulate pollution within a densely populated urban area. They are also right, and there are potentially serious public health implications to this. But they ignore the significant global warming reduction from substituting the burning of waste, in a highly efficient way, for coal burned somewhere in California.
The difficulty here is that these competing claims can not be adjudicated by data alone. Somewhere, someone has to make a judgement call about which costs and which benefits are worth more, and there’s nothing that makes me qualified to be that someone.
My request from you
I would love to get some reader suggestions for what the sample column should be about. If I hear nothing, I’ll go ahead and do the driving vs cycling or walking one, but it has already been well covered, so I’d much rather do something a bit more original. I need your help figuring out exactly what, so please share your ideas.
I just want to say I like this idea.
How about the idea that a low-meat diet is more sustainable than a vegetarian one, which I’ve heard touted sometimes (on the basis that some land supports livestock that wouldn’t human-stomachable vegetation.
One thing I would say is that you probably want to frame your top-level criteria clearly from the off, as well as the specific criteria for the case on hand (which I’m sure you’ll be doing: I liked the Steam example for drawing attention to wastage vs particulate pollution, even though as you say you don’t want to adjudicate between the harm of each). For instance, I used the word sustainable above but I’m a little uneasy doing so because the word can have a lot of meanings, like “keep the status quo turning” (which I often don’t want), “keeps going indefinitely, forever” (makes me hesitant in a different way), or “minimises harm to the land base” (compared to what?). It would be good for you to draw out what concerns you are speaking towards with a bit of up-front definition.
Best
Alex
Alex,
Thanks for the comment, and especially for being the first to comment. As I’m sure you can imagine, it was gratifying to see that I wasn’t typing into a vacuum.
I like the vegetarian vs some meat diet idea. I’m trying to figure out if it’s too difficult for the first post, or actually just right. Certainly it’s an advantage that it will be something less obvious than bike vs car emissions, and I find it particularly appealing because it goes against the received wisdom while sounding intuitively quite plausible.
Unfortunately for my choice of examples, as I’ve read a bit more about Seattle Steam it’s started to look like a simpler issue than I’d thought, because the particulate emissions are so tiny that I’m inclined to dismiss them as insignificant. I think people read about a large wood-fired boiler and assume it’s just like so many bonfires, when a properly controlled burn is orders of magnitude less sooty. Come to think of it, this might turn that idea into a worthwhile potential topic….
You’re absolutely right about definitions & criteria. Many of the misleading claims I’m interested in debunking depend on sleights of hand along those lines – most typically being a lot more rigourous about which costs or benefits get included in the accounting for one option than for the other. I will have to be careful not to make the same sorts of mistakes, because I do believe that sometimes they’re innocent mistakes born of confirmation bias.
On the definitions of “sustainable”:
* It’s obvious to me that I don’t mean “keep the status quo turning” in a blog whose title is about the sickness of the world, but thank you for reminding me that it won’t be obvious to people without that context. If I do actually get this published elsewhere, it will need to work in isolation.
* I’m interested to hear more about why “keeps going indefinitely, forever” makes you uneasy. It is my rough working definition, though in a sort of “Platonic ideal of sustainability” sense, because it’s not a plausible goal to ever attain completely.
* The harm minimisation definition should work for this context, because realistically most of the claims I could discuss are relative to something else. If a product or method is promoted as “green”, it always means “greener than an obvious alternative”, so that obvious alternative gives me the comparison point.
Oh, one more thing: how did you replace the generated icon with your own picture?
Being a bit selfish frtaking has appeared in Wales. I know OK t s bad( or so I believe) but have no idea how to explain that it is to someone so any overview in to the merits and harm would be useful
Frogger! Hello, and seeing this reminded me that in my grumpiness with Facebook I forgot to reply to you asking a similar question there. Please accept my apologies – it wasn’t personal at all, just about Facebook.
There’s nothing wrong with being selfish – if anything it’s a good gauge of what readers are likely to be interested in. And it’s thoroughly depressing that fracking’s showing up where you are too. Yet another case of Britain importing the wrong things from the U.S.
Fracking as a whole is way too big a topic for the sort of column I have in mind. It’s also a really important one, and if you’re looking for this information for yourself there are a couple of articles I can recommend:
* Sandra Steingraber’s The Whole Fracking Enchilada is a great overview of just how horrible the impacts of fracking are.
* Since she wrote that, more evidence has come to light of the most visible impact: drinking water so contaminated with methane that it can be lit on fire.
For the column, it could be really interesting to focus on some specific claims being made. Can you think of examples, like pro-fracking advocates trying to reassure the public, or play up the benefits, or anti-fracking advocates scaremongering? I would love to write this about something current and topical like this, as long as I can make it narrow enough that I can actually finish in a day.
Hiya
I actually had some trouble changing it, it was stuck with a photo of me from some years back and I eventually worked it out sometime this summer. I think it is a option on your own wordpress account, which then gets propagated to other wordpress accounts…. have a fish around.
The uneasiness is personal, and relates to the notion that we can find any kind of rate of consumption, model or system that once in place can lock-in and things will just continue unproblematically. I think the world is far too messy and complex for any totalising approach. As such, I’m not in massive favour of a ‘thousand-year approach’ (though I’m not knocking it as one lens to look at things), moreso to a four-odd-generations-down approach and think we’d make a lot of things better just with an immediate approach (eg don’t extinguish this species!)
Ah, I think I see where you’re coming from, and if I understand you right then we agree.
Sometimes we sustainability advocates do talk as if we could just set things correctly today and never have to change them again. That’s a fallacy for at least two reasons: we don’t (and probably can’t) know enough to get anything *exactly right* for today, and we can’t possibly see into the future. But I still think there’s value to optimising this function as much as we can with what we know now, while accepting that whatever we do is provisional and part of long-term resilience has to be a willingness to keep adapting. And somewhere between “don’t extinguish this species” and “get everything right for eternity” there’s a plausible middle way.
I like to think of it this way: we should do the best job we can of not storing up problems for future people. We can’t stop future people from having problems to solve, and that’s not worth losing sleep over, but there are plenty of problems that we can anticipate and therefore have a duty to avoid causing.
I actually really like that definition of sustainability, “not storing up problems for future people”.
Ooh, this sounds like an awesome project! Random ideas:
– cloth vs. disposable diapers: water use vs. production/disposal costs
– organic vs. conventional farming: add’l land (& energy?) use per ton of food vs. pesticides, whatever else
– ditto with farming locally vs. in super-arable places: land/energy use vs. transportation costs
– electric hand dryers vs. paper towels: energy use vs. production/disposal costs
– recycling plastic: worth it or no? and what’s with compostable plastic?
– solar power: worth the costs of manufacturing solar panels? if not, what would it take to get there?
– wind power: what are the ecological costs?
However, I think for most topics — at least the kinds of topics I can think of — you will run into judgment calls like the one you’re trying to avoid. I believe policy folks deal with these by assigning dollar values to everything; that comes across as creepy, but it really does help to put all your valuables on a common scale. In my opinion, the best thing you can do in the case of judgment calls is to lay out your assumptions for your reader before making the call — and perhaps illustrate three decisions/outcomes with different valuations for the resources involved. (With infinite time and resources it might also be sort of cool to have an interactive web doohickey with slider bars so people could see, e.g., how much water would have to cost to make paper towels a better bet — or whatever.)
Oh, I definitely second the cloth vs. disposable diapers suggestion. (Especially because diapers have to be washed in *hot* water, and most people genuinely have no idea how much energy that takes.)
Water heating in itself might be a good one to take on, come to think of it. Simply showing people how to figure out the impact of heating one gallon of water to warm, hot or boiling, and how many gallons get heated to what temperature when they take a bath, leave hot water running,, run the dishwasher, etc.
Of course “heating a gallon of water” can have dramatically different impacts, depending on the systems in use… are you heating via solar, gas, electricity? If electricity, did it come from coal or wind, etc.?
Back to the diaper question, I imagine the impact of laundering could vary dramatically from place to place, and depending on whether everyone does their own or it’s done by a central service.
There are so many moving parts, it’s hard to come up with a “one-size-fits-all” recommendation. What would be slick would be a full-scale simulation that could be tailored to each individual’s situation. In fact, I think the “reduce it to the economic elements” tactic has been the historic version of that simulation, the best we could do with the computing power we had at the time (say, pencil on paper). Now we can actually build those simulations and blow away the now obviously inadequate reductionist techniques of the past.
I’m very much in favour of giving people information to empower them to make sensible decisions given the particulars of their situation. I’d caution against overcomplicating a tool like this, though, because too much complication can be more paralysing than empowering. I’m not quite sure if that means “let’s build the model but keep it a bit general by default, with the detail buried in an ‘advanced’ tab” or “let’s stick to more reductionist guidelines, and just give people pointers to where they can find the greater detail”.
I like all of these topics, but I’m also mindful of the need not to just duplicate what Ask Umbra does. The diapers question, for example, is an excellent one that she’s come back to a few times – this is the most recent that I remember. In fact, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that my biggest challenge will be to differentiate this enough that I’m not just the less funny cousin of that column.
Comparisons tend to really come down to what values we place on each alternative’s costs, so your idea of working through a range of values and the outcomes is spot-on. I’ve seen Ask Umbra do that pretty well, as in her attempt to put the paper vs plastic debate to rest already. She doesn’t actually lay out the working in quite the way you’re describing, but I suspect that for the typical reader her approach is clearer.
Hrm… the more I look at this the more worried I am that I’m just duplicating something that’s already being done well out there. I’m not sure if I should put more thought into addressing this, or just try to pitch to outlets that don’t overlap too much with Grist, seeing as many people seem not to have heard of that column. Actually, I should probably do both of those things.
Thanks, Eldan (and thanks for the pointer to Ask Umbra — I had not actually heard of her before)!
My pleasure! Also, there’s one other pointer I forgot to mention the other day. The OECD recently launched a super cool wellbeing indicators website:
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/
The thing I love about it, which seems relevant to your earlier comments, is that you can choose how the various elements are weighted to produce an overall score, and see countries’ ranking change based on your stated priorities.
[…] Sunday I trailed the idea of writing a sustainability fact check column, and this is the pilot. The topic is one of the many that Erin was kind enough to suggest, […]