Articles by Clark Williams-Derry

Behavioral science shows that demanding short-term change activates the brain’s fear centers

Taking a cue from my boss, I just finished this article on behavioral economics -- a growing field that explores how, and why, flesh-and-blood humans don't behave like the "rational" profit-maximizers that underpin most economic models. It seems to me there are some lessons here for the theory and practice of social change.

In a nutshell: calling for immediate action to address a long-term problem may prompt resistance from the emotional and fearful sides of our brains; but calling for delayed action may put emotional reactions on hold, and allow for a more sober (and potentially more favorable) response to the issue.

Walking tall tale

Looking for something else, I came across a web page that makes this rather startling claim:

[W]alking actually uses more fossil energy than driving, if the calories burned from walking come from a typical American diet.

The crux of the claim is that the North American food system uses so much fossil fuel -- for manufacturing fertilizer and pesticides, running farm machinery, transporting food from farm fields to stores and homes, powering refrigerators and stoves, etc. -- that producing the food calories to power a one mile walk uses up more fossil fuel energy than a typical car burns in a one-mile drive.

That seemed counterintuitive, to be sure -- but not completely ridiculous. So I spent some time looking at the issues.

As far as I can tell, the web page is probably wrong: walking is more energy-efficient than driving.

However, they're closer than I might have thought.

Beanies and the jets

Get out your propeller beanies, folks. I'm going into full-on geek mode.

On Monday I mentioned that -- despite my family's best efforts to cut back on our CO2 emissions by reducing how much we fly -- the world has conspired to defeat us. Sure, we're flying less, but the rest of our extended family is flying more as a consequence.

One commenter asked if I shouldn't forget all the personal sacrifice folderol, and just work to convince Boeing to build more efficient planes.

Oh, if only it were so easy ...

Just plane frustrating

In a typical year, my family's biggest source of CO2 emissions is -- by quite a wide margin -- air travel. We use less gasoline than a typical American family, but we more than make up for it by traveling long distances to visit our family, scattered around the east and west coasts.

A few years back, I started strategizing about how to reduce our air travel. And I settled on a two-step plan.

• Step one: convince my sister to move from San Jose, CA to Seattle -- which would not only mean that we could see much more of each other, but also save our families at least 8 round trips per year (4 for her family, 4 for mine).
• Step two: give up traveling to see our east coast family for a year, and vacation close to home -- saving at least one cross-country round trip flight for our family of 4.

So this year, we put both steps into action. My sister and her family will be moving into our neighborhood (yay!) and we decided to go car camping rather than traveling to the east coast. We'll be flying a lot less as a result.

But as things have turned out, I'm not sure our plans have saved a single drop of fuel.