|
  What would you do if you could do anything you wanted and someone paid you six figures to do it? For David Goldstein of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), who won a prestigious, coveted MacArthur Fellowship ($500,000/5 years), that fantasy has become a reality. e-FFICIENCY NEWS interviewed Goldstein to see what he is thinking about, how he is spending his time differently since he won the award in 2003, and what the next few years might hold for him
e-FFICIENCY NEWS: Tell us about yourself -- how did you wind up working on energy efficiency/working at NRDC?
David Goldstein: I have always seen energy efficiency as a great opportunity to use science to improve the environment. I was beginning my graduate school career when the Energy Crisis of 1973 hit and had the privilege of working with Art Rosenfeld and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to focus on the opportunities for implementing energy efficiency that were suddenly presented. California was a great place to work on energy policy in the 1970’s, because political leaders from both parties were looking for new and creative solutions to our energy problems. This new approach included public forums at which NGOs could make a difference by presenting technical and policy analysis. I began working at NRDC as a consultant while still in graduate school, and moved to a full time position in 1980. Working for an advocacy organizations allowed me to do the same kind of research that I had done previously at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and in graduate school, but then to apply the results and use negotiations to realize the recommendations of the research.
e-FFICIENCY NEWS: What were your first thoughts when the MacArthur Fellows were announced -- and your name was among them? (David, to put this in context, please also cover when exactly did you get the news and how -- i.e. did you know before formal announcement?)
David Goldstein: The MacArthur Foundation likes to surprise its new Fellows by telephoning them cold and informing them that they have won the Fellowship. (Candidates are not even notified in advance that they are under consideration!) When I received a phone call on my cell phone from Dr. Dan Socolow, who directs the MacArthur Fellows Program, I had just concluded a meeting with a senior official at DOE, and was in a follow up conversation with a DOE staffer. I almost didn’t answer the phone when it flashed “caller unknown,” but I guess fate intervened and I answered and heard from Dan Socolow. He apparently has a set routine to string awardees along asking seemingly innocuous questions about whether I had heard of the MacArthur Foundation, whether I knew what a MacArthur Fellow was, etc., building up the drama until he made the personal announcement. He then told me that I could not tell anyone about it for 10 days. (You can imagine how hard it was to keep this a secret. The first person I talked to afterward wondered why I looked so happy all of a sudden.) Of course I was thrilled: anyone who has done energy efficiency advocacy knows how hard it is to attract attention for our work, despite its immense impact on the world. I was delighted to be recognized personally, but I felt (and many of the people who wrote to congratulate me in the next few weeks felt) that this was the MacArthur Foundation’s way of bringing more prominence to the whole field of energy efficiency and not just one individual.
e-FFICIENCY NEWS: Since the MacArthur grant, often called the genius grants, do people look at you differently or take you more seriously?
David Goldstein: The real “genius” in the MacArthur Program is that by providing a half million dollar grant, they get people’s attention. The biggest difference in my career since the MacArthur Fellowship is that I find my opinions get taken more seriously by people who would otherwise be skeptical or even dismissive. Presenting a message about energy efficiency as a MacArthur Fellow has meant that policymakers cannot simply dismiss the arguments, as some had done previously, but are more inclined to listen seriously to what I have to say. And the case for energy efficiency is so compelling that once people open their minds it is easier to achieve advocacy success.
e-FFICIENCY NEWS: How has your life changed with this grant -- are you spending your money/time/attention differently?
David Goldstein: The purpose of the Fellowship is to encourage bold and innovative intellectual accomplishments. The money is to allow, for example, people who want to be composing symphonies but are stuck driving a taxi cab to devote their time to what they really are good at. In my case, I have spent the last 25 years doing precisely the kind of work that I wanted to do. I already have had the opportunity to take risks within the field of energy efficiency advocacy. Where the Fellowship has made a difference is encouraging me to look at broader applications of my experience in energy efficiency. I have begun to make presentations on the broader role of energy efficiency and environmental policy as a means of promoting economic development – through encouraging innovation and competition in the economy. This is the theme of a graduate seminar that I taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Energy and Resources Group, last spring and is the subject of a book that I am working on.
e-FFICIENCY NEWS: What have you be learning and gaining from this grant thus far?
David Goldstein: The process of teaching and writing the first draft of the book has brought me into contact with a number of new ideas, studies, and individuals that by and-large support my broader speculation that energy efficiency is even more beneficial than our community has been able to demonstrate so far. I am hoping by presenting this argument explicitly, we can gain more insight into why this is true.
e-FFICIENCY NEWS: What do you plan to do during the remaining time? Have you come up with any new creative ideas?
David Goldstein: At the moment, I plan to continue devoting the majority of my time to “hard-core advocacy” on energy efficiency, but will also continue to explore the broader issues of how the economy works and how environmental protection can make it work better. I think this has, in the best case, the potential to transform the way the political system looks at energy efficiency in particular and environmental protection more broadly and to make the Alliance’s job easier.
e-FFICIENCY NEWS: Why did you get so interested in energy standards?
David Goldstein: I pretty much backed into an interest in energy efficiency standards by looking first at the potential for improving efficiency through better consumer choice. I found that it was hard to implement the more efficient choices in the real world, because efficient equipment and even the supplies you needed for do-it-yourself energy efficiency were hard to find and unnecessarily expensive. I found that years of successful publicity attempts at energy efficiency had no physical impact on aggregate energy consumption, but that standards could achieve the efficiency potential quickly and painlessly. As more time went on, I discovered that properly structured standards – those that set energy performance goals that were not technology-specific – resulted in industries’ development of new technologies or design methods that cost even less than we had predicted and generally produced non-energy benefits that were worth even more than the energy benefits.
e-FFICIENCY NEWS: How do you practice what you preach in your own life from an energy standpoint?
David Goldstein: My electric bills consistently are less than 150 kWh/month for a family of four. This result is achieved from using Energy Star appliances – generally the most efficient available within their class – nearly 100% compact fluorescent lighting, and choosing to live in a more modestly sized home than most people (which is easy to do accidentally when you live in the middle of San Francisco and homes cost almost $1,000 a square foot). Most of my transportation (other than business travel) is done by foot. This is not unusual for people in my neighborhood, where the average rate of car ownership for two-professional-income families of four is less than 0.9 cars per household. So the real energy efficiency choice is to live in such a location efficient neighborhood. We also save indirect energy by spending relatively more money on services (such as live music and theater, hand-made furniture, restaurant meals, etc.) rather than things, and by choosing material goods that last a long time, rather than ones that are thrown out frequently and replaced.
e-FFICIENCY NEWS: What are your views on this country's energy use? On where the world's head energy wise?
David Goldstein: Where we have been successful in pursuing energy efficiency policy, we see new standards reducing energy consumption by 10% to 40% every few years, which results in continually declining overall energy use for that service in spite of growth in population and income. I think that energy models have grossly understated or even ignored the potential for continuous improvement driven by good energy policy (the closest anyone has come to incorporating the concept of continuous improvement was in the NRDC/ASE/UCS/ACEEE study America’s Energy Choices, which showed declining overall energy use in America over 40 years). I am optimistic that one way or another – one way being that the world recognizes that we have to do something serious to avoid drastic climate change consequences, or the other being that we recognize that reduced energy consumption is one of the best ways we understand for improving economic development – that within my lifetime the world can be on a trajectory not merely to lower the growth rate of energy use or stabilize energy, but rather to make continual reductions in global energy consumption.
|
