January 2009: Backsliding on Energy and the Global Environment?

Energy and climate change. Come January 2009, those issues are what I like to see the Obama White House take on. I will be on a citizen watch to see if he will follow through on his campaign promise to make America a global energy leader.

 

 

 

 

America’s addiction to foreign oil has grown by over 20 percent between 1992 and 2005 and now costs up to $1.5 billion a day. An ever-growing portion of the national wealth is being transferred continuously to oil-producing regimes, some of them volatile, despotic and unfriendly to the US like Venezuela.

 

US carbon dioxide emissions from energy use also increased 15 percent between 1993 and 2005. The effects of global warming are real, and presents serious threats like ever-stronger hurricanes and the sea-level rise that threatens to cause massive damages in US coastal areas.

 

Energy dependence and climate change are threats to US national security. But can the US afford to worry only about itself?

 

In the chapter on “Powering a Twenty-First-Century Economy” of his book, The First Campaign, Garrett Graff proposes that “the US must be a strong international leader on the environment to encourage other nations to follow our lead.”  Promoting environmental stewardship and clean energy, Graff asserts that “”inaction will bring about the end of civilization.”

 

Is that an exaggeration? Probably not.

 

Graff argues that greater energy security on a global scale—including countries like China and India—would lead to more political stability, stronger democratic institutions, and less pressures on the US to send troops “on around-the-world tours to secure oil fields.”  The US can forge that global energy security by leading the development of “clean, renewable, and sustainable sources of energy for the world community.”

 

Less competition, less conflict.

 

Are we all really that interconnected? What if the US abdicated from that role, as it has done during the past decades?  We need not look too far to see the consequences. We are still living through a global financial crisis attributed to the failure of mortgage securities, the banking system and financial market regulation in the US. (And within the next 50 years, we may be heading toward global water wars. Not to mention wars for global fisheries. How will those conflicts embroil the US? As the world’s superpower, it is also the world’s global policeman, like it or not.)

 

Drawing lessons from the success of Obama’s Internet campaign, and given the large number of often-conflictive stakeholders in the energy debate, the Obama White House should launch a national conversation on sustainable energy and climate change using new media and social engagement techniques. 

 

But will it happen?

 

Let us hope so. The current economic slump may be imposing limits to the promotion of clean energy. With people worried about preserving their incomes today, protecting the environment may continue to be considered as a luxury.

 

To watch: how long Obama’s economic team will keep the development and deployment of climate-friendly energy technologies—and the resulting creation of million of new jobs—as cornerstones of the stimulus plan for the US economy.

Micro-Targeting: Resisting and Buying the Obama Brand

           

            In my job as an evaluator at the World Bank, I do quite a bit of tailored data-mining through social database research and stratified interviews. Thus, in principle, I should not have anything against micro-targeting because I am in some sense a practitioner of it. But it does bother me, especially when the data being mined is about me.

 

            “They Have Your Number” writes Garrett Graff in his October 2008 article in The Washingtonian about micro-targeting in political campaigning. “The Catalist database (a political data-mining firm) …contains some 280 million individual records.” In this YouTube video, chief technology officer Vijay Ravindran explains Catalist’s data architecture:

 

 

 

 

The totalitarian specter of Big Brother/Huge Business invading each individual citizen’s privacy is worrisome enough. But it gets downright scary when they use the database to take action with a view to producing a specific result, such as in the 2002 Texas Senate and Colorado Congressional races, when GOP micro-targeters “…even studied the roads Republicans drove as they commuted to work, which allowed the party to put billboards where they would do the most good.”

 

Not only does this smack of commercial opportunism.  There is also something immoral and unethical about manipulating people’s behavior to elicit a self-serving outcome, by obtaining information that people have held in the private sphere precisely because those are areas where they feel vulnerable.

 

And despite the euphemisms, the bottom line is behavioral manipulation. Jeff Navin, managing director of the research and strategy firm American Environics, says that if one can define the “psychological drivers that will help understand the values behind the behavior, you can speak to those values and persuade voters.”  Micro-targeting shares much of the same goals and strategies as marketing and product branding. Navin’s firm, for example, found out in an ongoing survey that Hillary Clinton scored high among voters who also looked favorably on McDonalds, Wal-Mart and Starbucks – all national chains. They therefore concluded that the name Clinton was the most popular national Democratic brand.

 

            But is this invasion really new?  From that first time we ever ventured into the World Wide Web, without which we can no longer survive, we have turned ourselves into prey. Where we go can be researched and our steps can be traced. Besides, most surveys show that people actually like to be discovered and talk about themselves. We may feign intrusion, but we do want to be found. Even if it’s just for 15 minutes.

 

So what do I think about micro-targeting?

           

            I accept, because it’s already here and I do reap some benefits from it. But I resist, because the micro-targeters simply invited themselves in (“Here Comes Everybody!”), it was not my free choice, and I know I am being manipulated.

 

            I resent the fact that, for what should be a noble personal act as electing a President, political campaigning now shares the same ethos as market research and product targeting, branding, packaging, and delivery. But then I just bought the Obama brand.

           

 

New Media on Election Night

 

Political campaigning will never be the same again. The highly successful Obama campaign has rewritten the strategy and conduct of presidential campaigns for the foreseeable future.

 

Obama’s new media team used several platforms in very innovative ways. The use of text messaging and YouTube was only the beginning. Other forms of social networking through the Internet were also harnessed—including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and many others—to research, reach and organize volunteers and voters. Blogging proved to be a very effective way in mobilizing public participation and maintaining active interest in the political process.

 

The use of new media was most effective in raising campaign finance. The Obama campaign’s use of the Internet enabled a huge network of contributors to be built up. Obama’s phenomenal fund-raising success alone should lead any future candidate to think differently.

 

The use of new media was in full display during election night. I listened to NPR radio and surfed several TV channels at the same time. I was also on the Internet tracking several conservative and liberal blogs.

 

NPR Radio periodically announced that it had a Twitter feed where voting problems can be reported. As recent as 2004, this was a much slower process through traditional media. Content from blogs was also being quoted, although I may have missed actual interviews with bloggers since I was surfing continuously through various media sources.

 

Huffington Post carried a Live Blog on election results, where you can enter your name and send questions or comments. It also had links to the Election Maps of MSNBC, Daily Kos, and Google, among others. There were also Live Video Streams of CNN Live and MSNBC, as well as Electoral College Widgets. It was very exciting to have so much information in one place, and be able to contribute content at the same time.

 

Politico.com constantly updated its Election Central. Firedoglake hosted a thread on Presidential results. RealClearPolitics provided an easy-to-read tabulation of projected electoral college results by the half hour.

 

TV graphics also showed a quantum leap compared to only 4 years ago. TV reporters were clearly using Web-based databases to provide touch screen visuals to viewers that drove home very clear messages in short succession. The use of graphs and color-coding for the various states were stunning in their ability to predict how various states may be leaning. The classroom is now in the living room juggling alternative hypotheses for election outcomes. 

 

It was a historic night for me, in terms of Obama’s victory, and discovering the primacy of new media in presidential elections to come.

 

Yes We Can – My Favorite Political Video

 I watched the 10 top political videos on BBC and asked myself the question: which one could potentially change my behavior? If I could vote, which video did the best job in tipping me more in favor of one candidate over the other? 

My favorite is Yes We Can by rapper will.i.am of Black-Eyed Peas. The music video was inspired by a speech Barack Obama gave after the New Hampshire primary. It had more than 11.2 million hits in one YouTube link. In another, it showed 5.8 million hits.

I liked it best and by a wide margin because the music video appealed to some deep-seated region of my brain that is governed not by thinking but by feeling, in the Myers-Briggs sense of the term. To judge situations and arrive at decisions, people either use the thinking or feeling functions, and “those who prefer feeling tend to come to decisions by associating or empathizing with the situation, looking at it ‘from the inside’ and weighing the situation to achieve, on balance, the greatest harmony, consensus and fit, considering the needs of the people involved.” 

The music video appealed to me because it validated my penchant for acting based on gut feeling. According to Ap Diksterhuis, a Dutch psychologist, thorough and conscious deliberation does not always produce the best choice. Although simple choices (such as from among different cafeteria items) can lead to better results after some conscious thought, choices in complex matters—such as electing a President—should be made through “deliberation-without-attention” and left to unconscious thought. 

Marc Ambinder was really saying these same things when he wrote that “…debates aren’t usually won on points. They’re won on valence and visuals. Emotions and body language.”