How do you get people to behave differently?
Sometimes it’s as easy as changing the name of the game. In a variety of experiments
pitting self-interest against cooperation, hearing the name of an economic game in passing had a
profound impact on how people acted, though all the rules and instructions were
the same. When playing the “Wall Street” game people act selfishly 60 percent
of the time, when playing the “community” game this number immediately drops to
30 percent (Lieberman). So how do we change behavior? Change the context.
Saying that people are greedy in a society that
rewards greedy behavior is like saying people consume a lot in a society that
glorifies consumption, not only by individuals but as a political and economic
ideology. Lack of congruency between
economic and environmental goals seems to me to be the number one issue
preventing us from doing something about climate change, and developing that
congruency may be all we really need to do. Remember the story of electricity
use in California over the past 15 years (see my post on “Smart Grids”).
But an important question remains, what type of
pressure is most suited to implementing this change for real Americans?
Scientists tried placing messages on people’s doors asking them to turn off
their A/C this summer and turn on their fans instead. The first message gave a
monetary incentive, saying you could save 54 dollars a month. The second message said you could
be a good citizen and help prevent blackouts. The third message said you could
help save the environment. None of them had the slightest impact on people’s
behavior.
So they tried a forth message. This one said that when surveyed, 77 percent of your neighbors say
they turn off their A/C’s and turn on their fans. And people followed suite.
Social pressure is an extremely powerful force influencing human behavior. The
same thing that causes us all to accept the lives were living is the same force
that can allow us to enact change. One startup company, Opower, has been taking
advantage of this, partnering with energy companies in California to give
people home energy reports comparing their energy use to that of their neighbors
with targeted recommendations for improvement. This has helped save 2 terawatts
of power in 2013 (Laskey).
But we mustn’t forget Jevons Paradox!!! Where
is this saved money going? Because if it’s going towards increasing consumption
then this is all for naught. Taxes,
caps, or regulations must be put in place to prevent growing consumption from
smothering efficiency gains. This leads those studying the rebound effect to
report that while increasing efficiency is important, “it is unlikely to be
sufficient while rich countries continue to pursue high levels of economic
growth” (Herring).
The same goes for alternative energy sources;
“they are only as durable as the contexts we create for them” (Zehner). We know
we don’t want to sacrifice our standard of living, and also that the vast
majority of energy is used by corporations and the government (especially the
military), so let’s talk about solutions to climate change that set achievable
goals which are congruent
with peoples self-interest, and improve people’s well-being.
Women’s Rights!!
Issues of women’s rights are seldom the first
thing that comes to mind when thinking about how to address the problem of
climate change. While it is true that
the entire population of the planet could fit in Texas, it is also true that we
would need many earths for all those people to meet the consumption levels of the
average American. Bartlett from the University of Colorado Boulder argues that
modest growth rates in energy use, material consumption, or population lead to enormous
escalation in short periods of time, citing man’s inability to understand
exponential functions as “the greatest shortcoming of the human race” (Bartlett).
Taking Boulder, an area with fifteen times more
land than people, as a case study, he shows that the growth rate of 2 percent
suggested by the city council would cause the populace to overflow the valley
in a single lifetime. 1 percent growth means a doubling of the population every
70 years, 2 percent means doubling every 35 years, and indeed the world
population has doubled since 1970. But as I pointed out at the beginning of the
section, modern capitalism is to blame for the energy crisis far more so than
population; an American uses more energy in 2 days than a Tanzanian does in a year
(Mckibben).
Although the US doesn’t have an official
population policy, embedded in our taxes and legal system are policies favoring
growth. We need more young people to pay social security for older people
right? In reality children are expensive too. On average in the US they cost
about 200,000 $ by their 18th birthday, and between 100-150,000 $
more if they want to go to college (Machlin and Rohde). Companies also spend
less to replace the pay of caregiving parents and crime rates fall along with
police and incarceration expenditures. With a focus on well-being of people
over special interests, this shift will be difficult but not impossible; it’s already happening
in places like Japan and Germany.
Many countries have managed to cut fertility
rates in half by providing basic fertility information and contraceptives. Of
course high fertility rates are a system of broader economic and gender
inequities. Professor Hartmann argues that bringing population growth down is
basically a matter of focusing on women’s rights and basic human needs (Hartmann).
Also, population shifts will take generations to be noticeable, while
communities will enjoy the benefits of prioritizing women’s rights immediately.
Here in the US we have the highest rate of teen
pregnancy in the industrialized world. That’s 440,000 teen and preteen girls
giving birth a year (Martin et al). American teens are also the least likely to
use contraceptives due to stigmas on teenage sexual activity, high cost, and
low availability (Guttmacher). The vast majority of these pregnancies, along
with half of all pregnancies in the
US are unplanned. The actual number is probably much larger, since people don’t
always want to admit they didn’t plan their pregnancy. These unintended
pregnancies have a direct medical cost of 5 billion a year (Trussell). Meanwhile
the percentage of the total health aid budget allocated to women’s health in
the US has dropped from 30 percent to 12 percent over the past decades (Zehner
188).
Statistician Murtaugh from Oregon State
University claims that one American mother with two children creates the same
carbon legacy of 136 Bangladeshi mothers with 337 kids. He explains that “An
American child born today adds on average 10,407 tons of CO2 to the
environment…6 times more than the mother’s entire lifetime emissions” (Murtaugh
and Schlax). Lowering US teen birth rates alone to average European levels
would save 30 billion KWH annually, while getting that much energy from rooftop
solar would cost 500 billion a year (Zehner 219)! Adopting universal health
care and changing attitudes towards teen sexuality may save us a lot of money
and energy in the long run, while promoting greater utilitarian happiness.
Packaging and Advertising!!
Many of the top paid psychologists in the world
work for ad agencies, preying on consumer’s insecurities and vulnerabilities to
sell more products. 3-5 year olds consistently choose McDonalds french-fries
and branded carrots over the generic versions, even more markedly if they watch a lot of
television (Kraemer). The
money spent advertising
different kinds of foods to kid’s looks like an inverted food pyramid (55
percent soda, candy and snacks, 26 percent fast food, 15 percent cereal, 3
percent dairy, and <1 percent fruits and vegetables) (Zehner 229). Labs used
advanced eye tracking and brain monitoring technology to study how kids respond
to different labels and ads, meanwhile marketing personnel working for these agencies describe a double life,
manipulating children in the name of profit by day and shielding their own kids
from the same ads at night (Koval, 186).
While almost 90 percent of American teenage
girls name shopping as their favorite pastime, studies have shown that advertising exacerbates
anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and other psychosomatic issues (Suter). Conversely
the more materialistic we are the more at risk we are for these diseases (Koval,
167). Perhaps related to this, Americans now spend more time in traffic, work
longer hours and have less vacation, but have bigger houses and more stuff in them, than at
any point in history.
Scientists are starting to call this the work-spend cycle, and economists are
calling the psychological inculcation as disease they call affluenza, or “a growing and unhealthy preoccupation with material
things” (Hamilton and Denniss, 90).
Maybe we just shouldn’t be advertising to
children under twelve, we wouldn’t be the first country to institute such a ban.
In fact, today American
cartoons are the only English language children’s programs in the world that still take breaks for
advertising (Dalmeny). This
is not surprising since the APA has linked advertising to children with
“misperceptions of healthy nutrition habits, parental conflict, materialistic
values, and more positive attitudes towards alcohol and tobacco” and strongly
recommends restricting ads to children (Kunkel et al.). The FTC attempted it in
the 70s but was blocked by powerful corporate lobbies.
On another front, junk mail in the US accounts
for a hundred million trees each year that must be grown, cut, hauled,
processed, rolled, printed, and shipped to homes across America to be placed
directly in the garbage (Novak). This requires the equivalent energy to of
eleven coal fire power plants running continuously (Ford). Where does it end
up? Perhaps in the ten million square mile island of debris congealed in the
Pacific Ocean.
A full one third of plastic consumption goes to
packaging (Zehner, 252). Meanwhile a third of our waste is packaging (US EPA, 84).
More packaging not only uses more and wastes more upfront, but also creates a
downward spiral, greater shipping energy, greater store/refrigeration size,
harder to get back to your home without the use of a car, more energy to
dispose of waste, etc. In some European
countries companies have to pay upfront for the eventual recycling and disposal
of packaging. Smarter packaging would
save money, benefit everyone other than advertisers, and has been successfully
implemented elsewhere.
Most people are against this waste. In many
industrialized countries you can put a sticker on your mail box to discontinue
junk mail. Introducing such a policy in the US would have a greater energy
impact than all existing and planned solar power combined (Ford). Thwarting
consumer culture starts with dismantling advertising, but ends with creating
attractive social and educational alternatives. For example, in Germany instead
of kids hanging out in shopping malls they go to Jugendhaus, nonprofit assemblages of open-work cafes, discos, restaurants,
farms, etc. organized, operated and staffed by youth.
As I discussed in my previous essay, it is time
to ditch the GDP, whose creator reported to congress in 1934 “the welfare of a
nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income” (Kuznets,
quoted in Zehner, 254). As long as we remain in this productivist mindset, creating these simple and necessary
changes will be far more difficult than it ought to be. The majority
of Americans already
embrace this alternate reality where social benefits are valued over increases
in materialistic wealth; 70 percent say they would be happier with lower
salaries if it meant living closer to their friends (Benjamin).
Bicycles!!
Promoting bicycle infrastructure would provide
urban mobility, bring health benefits, and enhance public welfare, all for far
less than we pay to support the growth and maintenance of automotive
infrastructure. Many global cities have done this and now enjoy cleaner,
healthier, quieter and safer neighborhoods. In America however, biking to school has fallen 75
percent in the last 30 years while child obesity rates have tripled (Hubsmith).
When I studied in Quito and it took well over
an hr to get to school each day, sitting in a dirty, dangerous bus. Every
Sunday they closed one of the main roads in the city to cars, and reserved it for
bikes and pedestrians. I could easily bike to school in half the time. Perhaps
more importantly, it was one of the most enjoyable and liberating experiences of my life.
I wasn’t allowed to take the bike during the week because the roads are extremely
unsafe for bikers; a few years back a Pitzer student was in an accident.
Over a quarter of the trips Americans make are
under a mile, 40 percent are less than two miles, but 90 percent of these are
made by car (Pucher and Renne #1). Less than one percent of trips are made by
bikes. In chilly Canada people are twice as likely to bike, and in some European countries people are 20 times as likely (Pucher and
Renne #2). Steve Miller from the Harvard public school of health explains that
few people have time to go exercise; we need to incorporate physical activity
into our daily routine. He estimates that by biking two miles each way on a
daily commute we could prevent ten pounds of fat accumulation a year, not to
mention the numerous other
physical and psychological benefits associated with exercise (Miller). Another
benefit would be increased mobility for youth and seniors; in Germany 50 percent of senior
trips are made biking or walking (Pucher and Renne #2).
We all know our physical, political, economic,
and social world has been constructed around the automobile, making other forms
of transportation unpleasant, inconvenient and unsafe. While bicycle trips have
increased as accidents decrease in Germany, bicycling in the US remains
dangerous in most areas and use is declining, especially among children.
Students at Bridgewater-Raritan high school students raised money for a bike
rack only to have the plan rejected by the principal, citing safety concerns. Island Park
elementary school principal vetoed a proposed bike path claiming a biker had
been hit recently while walking his bike crossing a street (Zehner 281-282).
One group who deals with these issues is Safe
Routes to Schools. In a pilot program
they have seen a 64 percent increase in walking to school, 114 percent increase
in biking and a 91 percent increase in carpooling. Despite this they receive
only .2 percent of the US department of transportation’s safety budget. In
California, for every dollar
that gets spent on Safe Routes, 7 are spent
on solar cells (Zehner 283). You can guess which is more effective in combating
climate change and reducing CO2 emissions. Meanwhile students hold bake sales
to get bike racks while the solar industry receives billions in public funding.
Some US cities have already started to
prioritize biking. Davis California has built 50 miles of bike lanes since 1966
and people have begun to
commute to work and school with the same frequency as Europeans. Steamboat
spring Colorado is another example, where studded tires and an extra layer of
clothing allow people of all ages to access the city’s schools, college,
library, grocery stores, post office,
and hot springs. Another inspiring example comes from a school in Boulder which
has started a program called “Boltage”. Students receive radio frequency
identification tags to track their trips, calories burned and gas saved, all
while competing to earn prizes. Expanding programs like this could help cut
into many forms of public spending, including 76 billion dollars a year due to inactivity,
40 billion due to vehicular air pollution stemming from the first few minutes
of a drive when the engine is cold and empower youth to use their bikes as a
form of transportation for other activities as well (Zehner 294-296).
Stop Subsidizing Energy and Cars!!
Let’s think for a second about some of the ways
we subsidize some of the greatest producers of climate change with our tax dollars…
We invest in the military for security right?
We invest in the military for energy security. For each tax dollar you give to
the government, 41 cents goes to the military. Less than 7 cents goes to
education, environment, energy, and science combined (National Priorities
Project: Interactive tax chart). We can’t afford safe bike routes around
schools and universal health care because we have a limited concept of energy
security constrained by vested corporate interests. In reality, these
humanitarian projects would do a lot more towards securing our future than a
new flight of bombers or tanks. This video gives a humorous take on the
travesty of wasted military spending. http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/5i4rmi/tanks--but-no-tanks
When money flows from tax payer dollars into
the military industrial complex it has negative repercussions for our
environment in two discreet ways. First of that money that could be flowing
towards something socially responsible or ecologically beneficial is instead
going to produce energy intensive weapons, the vast majority of which are
entirely unnecessary in terms of our defense. Secondly, this money is being spent to
procure even more energy resources. This means taxes that go to support the
military are massively subsidizing the cost of our energy. Think the war in
Iraq. What do we do with cheap energy? We consume more of it than we would
otherwise. Exploitative labor practices abroad also lead to an artificially low
price of goods, which again results in increased consumption.
We spend hundreds of billions of dollars in tax
payer money each year to subsidize cars. We’re talking about pollution,
building and maintaining roads (since 2000 we’ve build enough new lane miles to
circle the earth 4 times! See video bellow), medical costs associated with
accidents, traffic police, military protection of oil fields and supply lines,
etc. This is not to mention parking, in which tax dollars go to reserve and
maintain some of the most valuable and potentially useful real-estate in the
country, in case we may at one point wish to store our cars there. These subsidies
are unjustly paid for by all taxpayers, whether or not they drive a vehicle.
One group of activists seeks to challenge this misuse of public space by
turning parking spaces into PARKing spaces one day a year, complete with trees,
picnic tables, and art exhibits (Parkingday.org).
Americans spend an average of 45 hrs a month in
their cars, and one workweek a year in heavy traffic, costing some 3 billion gallons of
fuel and 80 billion dollars in lost time (Pisarski). Since 1925 we have been
aware that increasing street size or adding more streets does not help decrease
traffic. However removing streets can sometimes do just that. Braess’s paradox
explained this phenomenon some 40 years later, showing that new roads often
decrease rather than increase the efficiency of a network. The inverse is
exemplified by traffic restriction of Broadway st in New York City, which led
to overall traffic improvement. http://www.pbs.org/america-revealed/teachers/lesson-plan/3/
To maintain our quality of life we may
sometimes need a car, but we shouldn’t have to own one to reap the benefits of this mode of transportation. Car
sharing could save the average user between 2 and 5 thousand dollars annually,
while allowing you to take a truck one day and a sports car the next (Pisarski).
Since you have to pay upfront when you use the vehicle rather than in some distant future, drivers are more likely to carpool
or use alternatives, and have been shown to spur a 50 percent increase in
public transit, a 25 percent increase in walking, and a 10 percent increase in
cycling (Zehner 290). The vehicles can then be stored at neighborhood hubs with
better access to alternative fueling options. This would simultaneously allow
us to take back roadside parking lanes for bicycles and wider sidewalks with
trees.
Zoning laws force planners to reserve space for
garages in new cities and suburbs, even if they will never be used. This would
make most downtown areas illegal to build today, and causes low density areas
that are difficult to navigate by foot or bicycle. Turning some of these
garages into small efficiency rentals would allow teachers, students, service employees,
social workers, and many others to
live in the city, closer to where they work and with easier access to all their
basic necessities without the use of a car. A truck bringing tightly packed
with food bringing it to neighborhood outlets is far more efficient than many
hybrids driving with a few grocery bags each (Zehner 297). While the suburb
sprawl we live in is comfortably familiar, when asked to choose between
pictures of walkable communities and suburban sprawl American’s chose the
former (Leinberger).
Food and shelter!!
In addition to supporting population growth,
our taxation policies also support greater consumption. For example, public
school funding is linked to housing prices, if you want to go to a good public
school you have to move into a bigger house in a fancier neighborhood. In
addition to a luxury taxed levied on the highest levels of consumption
affecting only the wealthiest 1 percent of the population, an energy tax could
be implemented to make the price of goods reflect the entire cost of their
energy side effects. A tax on raw energy sales would filter down to ensure a
consumption tax appropriately adjusted to an items carbon footprint. Identifying the almonds at the store with the
lowest energy footprint could be as easy as checking the price tag (Zehner 319).
For every day Americans don’t eat meat they
save 100 megatons in CO2 emissions. The UN recently determined that livestock
production leads to more human linked greenhouse gas emissions than all of the
planets cars, trucks, buses, trains, and airplanes as well as the rest of the
world’s transportation infrastructure combined. It also accounts for more land
alteration than our entire suburban sprawl and more water pollution than all
domestic water and sewage combined. Meanwhile vegetarians enjoy lower obesity,
blood pressure, cholesterol as well as risk of heart disease and stroke, the
greatest cause of death the US. Meanwhile, 40 percent of all food is wasted,
accounting for 300 million barrels of oil annually (Thieme).
Another good example of our culture of waste is
our grass lawns, which take up more land than all our wheat, corn, and soy
production combined. They also cost
about 40 billion dollars a year, require 35 million pounds of pesticide a year,
and accounts for full third of the domestic water supply (Pouyat et al.). The
purpose of the lawn is of course to be cared for, and to show off for your
neighbors. Few people spend any time actually using their lawns as anything more than a
display piece, glorifying the natural landscape it is in fact smothering.
Government and Corporations!!
We all know our government has a lot of
problems. For one thing our monetary system requires economic growth. Banks
make loans that have interest, so the overall value of goods and services must
rise at least in tandem. Inflation must increase, the economy must grow.
Decoupling an energy companies profits from its production is a small step, but
other groups are investigating a more comprehensive monetary reform to address
these issues (New Economics Foundation).
One important first step would be to enact
voting reforms. Abandoning the Electoral College and moving to a national
popular vote would be an important first step, image if Gore won the
presidency. Another would be to allow voters to pick their 1st 2nd
and 3rd choices, along with campaign finance regulations. Energy
expert from Harvard university Max Bazerman explains…”money corrupts the
potential for an intelligent decision making process on energy policy. Well-funded
and well organized special interest groups have disproportionate influence on
specific policies…by simply donating enough money to the right politicians they
effectively turn congress away from making energy wise decisions”(Bazerman
quoted in Zehner 329).
Buildings and Trees!!
Building efficiency standards are a big deal.
In some areas buildings consume 80 percent of all electricity. Could efficiency
standards do the same for buildings as they did for refrigerators?
Unfortunately LEED ratings give points for flashy green wash items rather than for actual energy impacts,
which is mostly determined by factors like passive solar, air movement systems,
and of course trees, which can reduce the carbon footprint of a building by up
to a third (Butry).
They also make oxygen, consume carbon dioxide,
fix nitrogen, distil water, accrue solar energy as fuel, make complex sugars,
create microclimates, change color with the seasons, self-replicate, etc.
According to the New York City tree census, the price tag for a mature oak is
about 90,000 $. However the cities trees also save 28 million in air
conditioning, 5 million in air filtration, 36 million in storm water absorbtion
and .75 million in carbon dioxide absorption. For every dollar NYC spends on
trees they get back 5.60 in benefits (New York City Department of Parks and
Recreation).
The European Example:
Europeans typically work 35 hr weeks with 8
weeks paid vacation a year. They have smaller houses and consume less than Americans
in almost every category, but consistently rank happier in psychological
studies. Doctors in Europe stress preventative medicine can be seen quickly and
even make house calls, but the per capita medical spending is less (Zehner 239).
The Dutch, for example, use less than half our
energy, have less poverty and air pollution, lower, debt, extremely clean tap
water, lower obesity rate, and a higher standard of living. Could it be they’re
not happier in spite of their lower energy use but because of it? The future of
how to implement carbon taxes and environmental regulations has been documented
in European history books (Zehner 301).
Germany imposed an ecological tax reform
including higher taxes on energy intensive products like gasoline and
electricity. This not only increased rail use, carpooling, and other more
efficient means of transportation, it also reportedly led to the creation of
60,000 new jobs, while offsetting 7 million tons of CO2 by 2002. A
comprehensive energy tax could be an important step for the US, but it would
also require international agreements to prevent polluters from shifting to
places without such regulations (Zehner 321).
Conclusion
Although I hope that one day all our power
comes from “renewable” sources, creating more energy will not solve our energy
crisis, or as some are calling it, our consumptions crisis. In a country like
ours with problems in efficiency, suburban sprawl, growing population, and
focus on material consumption, alternative forms of energy production will do
little to address the problem; in fact they may even do more harm than good,
leading us to the false premise that we can continue living in such an energy
intensive manner.
Here are some goals that Ozzie Zehner points
out to help us reimagine the social conditions of energy use,
1.
The
US consumes less energy per capita than the average OECD nation.
2.
Lower
wealth gap between rich and poor, universal health care, low murder rates, teen
pregnancy, incarceration, etc.
3.
Cars
and buildings should be more efficient than the average OECD nation
4.
Top
fiftieth percentile for walkable and bikable communities
5.
A
growing energy tax to stifle rebound effects
It goes without saying
that all forms of energy production have their
environmental and social impacts. Should environmentalists be involved in any
time of energy production while these important issues discussed above remain unaddressed? Or should they
serve to as watchdogs of power production companies regardless of their method.
Solar panels may be sexier that women’s rights, consumer culture, walkable neighborhoods,
zoning, military waste, zoning, health disparities, citizen governments,
economic reform etc but they won’t do anything but produce power, which can
only help us given the right context. Ultimately clean energy is less energy.
Zehner claims building up our alternative
energy stockpile in our current social, political, and economic climate is akin
to trying to build a bigger sand castle to withstand the rising tide. The
problem is that many of us are asking the wrong question. The question is not
whether “American society has the technology to construct an alternative energy
nation, but do we have a society capable of being powered by alternative energy”
(Zehner 342).
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