What the health care debate and the credit crisis have in common

Did you hear? Barrack Hussein Obama wants to pull the plug on your granny, so he can plug in his hybrid! In the meantime, he’ll make you sit before a Death Panel—to distract you, as he tries to raise Lenin’s ghost at a Kenyan séance led by Witch Doctor in Chief, Jeremiah Wright.

Those hideous distortions pale against what’s actually being floated about Obama and his health care plans. But the recriminations and misinformation aren’t new. For over 100 years, mass hysteria has derailed every president who has tried to reform the insane mess that is our health care system. Both Truman and Roosevelt saw their attempts at universal health care squashed by Red baiting. So it’s not surprising that there’s a nut fringe out there more likely to believe an email forward about covert government conspiracies rather than the numerous fact-checking outlets that have rebutted those myths again and again. That’s our country, and that’s freedom of speech.

And it’s not what’s most troubling about the garish farce that the health care “debate” has become: Rather, it’s that the crazies actually reflect the attitudes of a broad swathe of America. Since June, opposition to health care reform by Congress has risen from 45 percent to 53 percent. There are reasonable, middle class people who hear Obama calmly debunking smears about the Democratic plan and then watch right-wing groups shouting that Obama’s a Nazi—and they say to themselves, You know, I’m with the guys carrying handguns.

How does such mistrust take root? You can blame Republicans for cynically twisting words or you can blame Obama, for not communicating more forcefully or clearly—and for leaving the policy details to an inept and crooked Congress.

But it still doesn’t explain why we’re so unable to deal with the plain fact that the United States spends an inordinate amount of money getting tragically poor results. Or the fact that if health-care costs continue to rise at their current rates, we’ll be spending a third of our GDP on health care in 25 years.

That kind of financial insanity can have crippling effects. You don’t have to mine American history for proof. You just have to look at the consumer-credit crisis we’re living through. There, the ultimate blame couldn’t be laid on greedy corporations alone. We were also at fault, because we all thought that magically, we’d never have to reckon with any long-term costs.

We were the ones who were too happy to take out loans we couldn’t afford; the ones unable to deal with the idea that money should dissuade us from owning what we’ve always wanted—who believed that jeans might be $200, but the happiness they imparted was “priceless.” And we’re now the ones who cloak ourselves in rage when the very prospect of “money” or “cost” gets raised in relation to health care—no matter how broken our finances become, or how clear it is that we have to change.

We lost our minds about debt, buying up houses, cars, and jeans. That mentality lives when it comes to health care. We don’t care if tests and surgeries are unwarranted or ineffective; we just want more. But health care resources, like credit, have to be used wisely.

Geoff Manaugh’s BLDG BLOG draws daring connections between architecture, science fiction, and pop culture—and draws an audience.

If you’ve never visited BLDG BLOG, you should—and this month, the blog has been transformed into a book aimed at both newbies and fans. The premise takes some explaining—the blog is a quixotic, oddball experiment. Geoff Manaugh started it in 2004, when he was working as a non-profit grant writer in Philadelphia. He was devouring science magazines and pop futurism, reading New Scientist and Wired. He had just opted out of a Ph.D. program in architectural history at the University of Chicago. “Architecture writing is hamstrung by academic protocols,” says Manaugh. “The same part of me that didn’t want to stick around for a Ph.D. is the same part that was inspired to create the blog.”

BLDG BLOG posts usually start with architectural history or news, and then take detours through pop culture and full-on sci-fi, as Manaugh noodles on unlikely parallels and indulges in dazzling flights of imagination. (The modus operandi of Jorge Luis Borges comes to mind.) For example, in one recent post, Manaugh turns a bit of history about New York’s telephone companies into a full-on pitch for a plausible sequel to the Ghostbuster’s franchise. Manaugh makes it all sound obvious, if not inevitable. “If I see a link that’s shown up on six other blogs, I’m not going to just describe it,” he says. “But I’ll connect that to an architectural proposal or a story I read as a kid.” It’s not really fiction, per se, and it’s certainly not architectural history—but it’s often more enjoyable than both.

The book’s a bit more ambitious than the blog-to-book adaptations you’re used to seeing—it actually consists of blog posts that have been revised, updated, and sometimes rewritten, to create entire chapters dedicated to a single theme, such as “The Underground” or “Landscape Futures.” “I was trying to create an entire narrative,” says Manaugh. “I didn’t want to produce this A.D.D. thing that would confirm this idea that bloggers can’t put a chapter together.” Indeed, part of the fun is the sheer improbability of the continuity—the chapter on “Redesigning the Sky,” for example, involves a competition to design the most spectacular weather patterns—a spectacle which in Manaugh’s universe comes to overshadow the Super Bowl—and also explores the possibility of using severe weather as a weapon.

Fans who’ve offered praise for the book include the filmmaker Erroll Morris and the art critic Lawrence Weschler—like Manaugh, two connoisseurs of strange parallels. To Manaugh, that’s still a surprise. “When I started the blog, I felt like I was doing soething that no one would be interested in,” he says. “It seemed like exactly what people didn’t like, to judge from the market. I’m still not used to having readers.”

But Manaugh’s been in demand: Until recently, he was a senior editor at Dwell; he’s now a contributing editor to Wired U.K. He’s currently writing another book, which he describes as a more straight-ahead journalistic effort but whose premise he’s still keeping a secret. And when we spoke, he was in Australia, leading an architecture class exploring what could be done with Cockatoo Island, in Sydney Harbor, which has at various times been a prison and a girl’s school. “You know, the movie Wolverine was actually filmed here. They’re going to preserve it,” chuckles Manaugh. “So in 25 years you’re going to see sets from X-Men film. It’s kind of a surreal way to preserve it.” One can only imagine.

Hell froze over yesterday, a pig took its tentative first flight—and, in related news, Wal-Mart may have just secured the title of The World’s Mightiest Advocate for Progressive Causes.

That title claim became undeniable with Wal-Mart’s announcement that it’s endorsing the idea of compelling large companies to provide health coverage. Its bedfellows on that deal? The Service Employees International Union and John Podesta, who oversaw Obama’s transition team and heads the Center for American Progress. You got it: Wal-Mart’s allies are a think tank that has taken it to task on living wages, and a labor organization of the sort that Wal-Mart has always sought to quash; the cause is health benefits, which it has so infamously denied workers in the past.

Wal-Mart’s dramatic shift seems to have been brought about by a canny sense of the prevailing winds in America’s political life. As The New York Times pointed out, big companies that have previously balked at providing insurance to all employees sense that some sort of change is coming. To wrangle better concessions, they figure they should link arms with the Obama administration, and come to the negotiating table as soon as possible. Wal-Mart in particular is advocating a containment in rising health care costs—which, incidentally, is a cause that President Obama has been propounding.

The company has never been shy to admit that, when it adopts social causes, the reasoning is less about altruism and more about cash flow. Lee Scott, the company’s outgoing CEO, admitted as much when he first began Wal-Mart’s massive environmental push in 2005. At the time he said, “As I got exposed to the opportunities we had to reduce our impact, it became even more exciting than I had originally thought: It is clearly good for our business …” Scott’s successor, Mike Duke, underscored that commitment last week, at Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Milestone Meeting. “This is not optional,” he said. “It’s not something of the past. This is all about the future.”

Four years on the green bandwagon is, of course a very short time. So what’s been most surprising is the depth and stability of Wal-Mart’s environmental commitment. Already, it has been astonishingly aggressive in using solar and wind power, carbon-neutral building, and carbon-efficiency in shipping. Its stated goal is to operate with 100 percent renewable fuels.

Wal-Mart’s power lies in the fact that it can influence everyone it does business with. Worldwide, the company employs 2.2 million people. It owns a mind boggling 11 percent of America’s $3 trillion retail market. It accounted for nearly 10 percent of America’s imports from China between 2001 and 2006. The line on the company’s business practices has always been that it’s ruthless: Suppliers that don’t meet its purchasing guidelines get fined, and then get dropped with alarming speed. Wal-Mart does this because, thanks to the stores’ low prices, profit margins are tiny, and the only way it can make money is with uncompromising efficiency. For example, Wal-Mart now rates its suppliers based on the energy efficiency of their operations, among other things. If you don’t like it, you don’t do business with the world’s largest retailer. That’s it.

And that’s precisely what makes Wal-Mart the most compelling model today for corporate responsibility. It is the world’s biggest advertisement for the idea of a profitable, aggressively green company. But more than that, the company is proving—in the center of the country, in places far removed from the Democratic power bases on the coasts—that carbon emissions, and now health care, are not purely political causes. No politician could ever hope for that sort of power as an advocate. In the United States alone, Wal-Mart employs 1.4 million—that is, 1.4 million people working under the company’s ruling assumptions. One can only guess at the broader reach of all that green P.R.

Is Wal-Mart a champion of sustainability in every respect? No. Despite its other good works, no company is as responsible for American sprawl as Wal-Mart is—it has predicated its growth on building stores far from city centers.

But those are contradictions we have to live with. When dealing with problems as dauntingly complex as carbon emissions or health care, there are going to be messy counterexamples to every good deed. Pure-hearted, indie start-ups simply don’t have the power to effect widespread change. The best we can hope for is that the influential corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart are tending towards the light. It’s thrilling when they do.

CORRECTION: The subtitle of this article originally stated that Wal-Mart backs universal health care. In fact, Wal-Mart backs employer healthcare mandates. The text has been edited to reflect the correction.

Can augmented reality technology finally make it easy to do the right thing?

Last week was huge for a young technology called “augmented reality”—and that’s important even if you’re not a nerd, because it should revolutionize the way we approach social causes. Sure, many current examples of augmented reality are trivial, but hear me out.

Augmented reality allows you to see, in real time, data about your surroundings. It’s different from having the internet on your phone—you don’t actually have to look anything up, and you don’t actually have to know exactly what you’re looking for. Augmented reality is more like a having a sixth sense—and a seventh and eighth sense—that makes data a natural, passive part of how you see the world.

So how does this work? Last week, a Dutch company, SPRXmobile, introduced the first-ever augmented-reality browser platform for a smartphone. It’s fairly simple to explain. The software uses two basic features found on smartphones—a compass, and a GPS system. From there, it knows exactly where you are—and, just as important, which direction your phone is pointing. And this is where things get interesting. Armed with that knowledge, SPRXmobile unveiled a rack of applications—including apps to find a nearby ATM, bar, or shoe store; figure out if a company nearby is hiring; identify houses around you that might be for sale; and even research the on-court action at Wimbledon. (Take a second to watch SPRXmobile’s amazing demo video.) So far, the app is only for phones running the Android operating system but it’s coming to the iPhone soon as well. (That’s why it was so important that the newest model, the 3G S, included a compass.)

This makes deep information about your surroundings available whenever you have your cell phone without you having to look anything up. When you let that possibility sink in, augmented reality’s massive promise becomes clear. If you were to boil a number of social causes—from depleted fisheries to carbon reduction—the central problem is that getting the right information to consumers takes so much money and effort. And consumers themselves have to spend too much time translating that new information into action.

With augmented reality you can download a program, and be presented with all of its stored wisdom just when that wisdom is relevant to what you’re doing. It then becomes vastly easier to imagine social causes translating into individual action on a large scale—the effort to learn about those causes and about discern what you should drops enormously when you have a cellphone that does the sifting for you, at the exact time that you need it.

Imagine the following scenarios. You’re in a new city. You’d like to skip on a rental car, and save the cash and the carbon. So you use an app on your phone to find the low-carbon alternatives. It guides you from your current location to the nearest public transit option, letting you know exactly what the schedules are—and, if you’re in a city with “smart” bus stops like Portland, even telling you, in real time, how far away the next bus is. You don’t have to be tethered to the bus station, hoping that things are running on time.

Or lets take another example: depleted fisheries. You walk into a fish restaurant. You point your phone at the door; it knows where you are, and it provides you with a list of fish that are the most environmentally friendly.

That’s just the beginning. Imagine you’re commuting to work, but you don’t have a car, and public transit isn’t an option out where you live. You boot up an app that alerts others in your car-sharing network where you are, matches you with a ride, and leads you—and your potential ride—to a meet-up point. It may sound unreal, but this technology is already being developed by Avego, among others.

Things really start to get nutty when you factor in another technology, QR codes. These function like barcodes that your cellphone can scan. You’ve already seen the codes popping up on shipping labels and such. Phones with QR-reading functionality will follow soon—in fact they’re already common in Japan (of course). When you snap a picture of a QR code, the image directs your phone to download information set by the code’s designer.

What if all the food in your grocery store was marked with a QR code—you could compare the carbon footprints of two batches of produce. Builders could use specialized apps inside a Home Depot to figure out how materials choices might translate to energy savings.

As I’ve written before, convenience is king when we’re talking about making better transportation choices. But that also applies to any worthy cause, if it’s ever to become truly mainstream.

Personally, I’ve long been a pessimist about our ability to meet challenges like climate change. Augmented reality has me more optimistic than I’ve ever been. Granted, it still takes a baseline level of interest for someone to take the time to download an app for a social cause. But compare that effort with what you’d otherwise have to put in to get involved with an issue like fisheries. There’s no contest. Augmented reality is the best chance we have to speed crucial information about our world to the people living in it.

Michael Pawlyn’s pioneering designs mimic nature’s closed-loop systems to help us thrive in extreme resource scarcity.

Most “green building” solutions are actually obvious: extremely good insulation, smart ways to use natural ventilation, and, perhaps, ways to reduce water use or recycle water. If you want to get fancy with it, throw in a solar panel or two; add on a couple of smart energy meters.

But what’s next? What’s the future of green, after we address those basics outlined above?

The architect Michael Pawlyn has created some of the world’s most intriguing answers.

Pawlyn spent 10 years at Grimshaw, one of the country’s largest architecture firms, helping lead its sustainability efforts. In 2007, he founded his own firm, Exploration Architecture, dedicated to one single idea: to create buildings that mimic biological processes. Rather than being lone structures that suck resources from the grid, they’re embedded in closed loops of resource management.

Perhaps the best example: Pawlyn, working alongside inventor Charlie Paton and engineer Bill Watts, recognized that by joining two cutting-edge technologies they could create a facility that would bring water and arable land to the Sahara Desert. The so-called Sahara Forest Project, which Pawlyn has been developing for the last few years, would be powered by a concentrated solar power plant. There, a field of mirrors concentrates the sun’s rays into high-intensity light that’s then used to generate steam, which in turn powers an electricity-generating turbine.

That’s where things get exciting.

Some of that electricity generated would be used to power a Seawater Greenhouse, which Paton invented. The electricity would be used to pump cold seawater inland, to the greenhouse. There, fresh air passes over tubes housing that seawater; the interaction condenses fresh water from the air, which can then be used to grow biofuels and rehabilitate the surrounding desert.

It’s not ridiculous, not at all. The Seawater Greenhouse already exists, and it generates five times more fresh water than required by the plants inside. Meanwhile, concentrated solar plants are going up across the world, and they’re twice as efficient as photovoltaics. But the ingenuity lies in realizing that by lashing these technologies together, we create something close to a “free lunch”: clean electricity and clean water, through a self-sustaining processes. That basic idea should sound familiar; closed-loop interdependence is the bedrock of the natural world.

“I first came across closed-loop systems as a teenager studying biology in school,” writes Pawlyn over e-mail. “It seemed so elegant, but far removed from the workings of manmade systems. Twenty years later, I started to realize that mimicking the remarkable efficiencies of ecosystems was possible.” He insists that the economics make sense. He points out that mainstream economists have consistently been wrong about the environment—for a long time, they dismissed the idea that ecosystems had economic value, although they clearly do. (Just witness the wreckage left by Katrina, which would have been been lessened if the Mississippi River’s wetlands hadn’t been decimated.) If the true carbon cost of buildings were factored into their budgeting, green buildings would become common sense.

The change that really needs to be wrought, argues Pawlyn, is in the timescale over which we make decisions about our building: “Many are now realizing that, by taking a longer term view, it is possible to create buildings, communities, and businesses that are better for people, profit, and the planet.”

Watch video of Pawlyn explaining the Sahara project:

Top image courtesy Exploration Architecture.

Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras are cataloging the world’s weirdest places to foster a new age of curiosity.

An enormous concrete dome that seals off the crater left by an atomic blast. The ancestral home of a nearly forgotten Kentucky family, which had four children born with bright blue skin. The hiding place of a memoir written by an infamous 19th-century fugitive—and bound in his own skin.

They’re all real places you can visit. And they’re all collected at Atlas Obscura, a new website which aims to be a “compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica,” founded by Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras.

You know Foer’s family: His brother, Franklin, edits the New Republic; his other brother, Jonathan Safran Foer, wrote some books you might have read. The youngest Foer is hyper-successful as well: Later this year, he’ll publish Moonwalking with Einstein, a chronicle of the time he spent competing in the National Memory Championships (he won). Thuras, a film editor and budding graphic novelist, co-founded one of the best antiquarian sites on the web, Curious Expeditions. The two of them met through Foer’s own site (which is on hiatus), The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, and began working on the Atlas Obscura not too long after.

Obviously, they both share a fascination with the world’s moldiest, weirdest corners. But the sensibility, if anything, is ancient, harking back to Wunderkammern, or Wonder Cabinets—personal collections of bizarre and mythical artifacts, which became a fad among rich men in 16th century, and eventually evolved into the first modern museums. GOOD asked Foer and Thuras a few questions about the Atlas and the insider’s tours they plan on offering of some of the places it includes.

GOOD: How did each of become so consumed by hidden places? How, or why, did you come by your antiquarian sensibility?

Dylan Thuras: I grew up in the Midwest, which has a disproportionate amount of oddities to population (serial killers too). Something about all that flat land I think. When I was about 12 my family went on a road trip, and we saw a place in Wisconsin called the House on the Rock, a huge complex packed with curiosities, including the world’s largest carousel. Those Midwest oddities began my fascination. When I met Josh, I began pursuing them actively.

Joshua Foer: I’m pretty sure it happened in college. One summer, when I was 19, I spent two months driving all over the lower 48 states trying to find all of the most bizarre places in America. It was an incredible trip, but it was also a real pain in the ass. They’re hard to find. I had a half dozen guidebooks open on the passenger seat of my car, each of which was good but not great. That’s when I realized that there needed to be a single online resource where people could share their knowledge of these sorts of obscure places.

G: What do you think they reveal about the people that created them? Could you highlight some favorites?

JF: One thing we focus on is that the sites be real, concrete, places you can go and see. We tend to shy away from things like ghost stories or paranormal sightings, unless there is something concrete there. The should also have a good history. You don’t need to gild the lily. The world is a strange enough place. Look deeply, and you’ll find weirdness all around. The main criteria for the Atlas is that a place ought to inspire one’s sense of wonderment. Michel Foucault gave an interview once in which he said that he said that he dreamed of a “new age of curiosity.” When Dylan and I get drunk enough to start pretending that the Atlas Obscura has some sort of grand mission, that’s pretty much what we have in mind: to help people realize how weird our world is. We want people to go out and explore it.

DT: The people that created the places in the Atlas Obscura span from 19th-century doctors to crazed loners to governments. Each place is like a puzzle piece, revealing things about its creator and the larger world. Those odd outliers lend a great sense of history. 

Favorites places? I have a soft spot for “The Gates to Hell,” a 328-foot wide hole in the Turkmenistan desert that has been on fire for 38 years, ever since it was set ablaze by Soviet miners to stop a natural gas leak. I also love the scale of Jim Bishop’s Castle, which Jim built and is 16 stories high and has a fire-breathing dragon—in the middle of Colorado. But the places in the Atlas are like my children, I love them all!

G: Joshua, you say the world is a “strange enough place.” A lot of sites like yours try to resuscitate a Wunderkammer sensibility. Why now? Why is it vital today?

JF: Those blogs—BoingBoing, Neatorama, Oddee, Dark Roasted Blend, Curious Expeditions, the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society—clearly share an aesthetic sensibility with the wonder cabinets: namely, things that are singular and rare, and challenge our normal understanding of how the universe works. That’s definitely a major part of what the Atlas Obscura aims to be.

DT: That’s tough. It’s difficult to understand the moment you are in. Josh hit the nail on the head when he mentioned the “new age of curiosity.” There is still a lot out there to be discovered. We are just beginning to understand the world. In 2005, scientists found the largest bioluminescent area in the world, a patch of ocean the size of Connecticut known as “The Milky Seas.” This kind of thing fills your heart with a real sense of excitement.

There is also, in this wunderkammer sensibility, a reconnection with nature and craftsmanship. The Atlas Obscura, Curious Expeditions, steampunk, cabinets of wonder, a Victorian design sensibility, even in pop culture with movies like “Night at the Museum”—it all flows from a growing desire to reengage with the past, with nature, and with objects that have personality and craftsmanship to them. It’s a response to the impersonal face that consumerism, science, and technology has worn over the past 15 years.

G: So tell me more about the tours that you guys are going to be doing. What’s on the agenda? Will tour-goers pay for them? How are you choosing the venues?

JF: The plan is to get a bunch of like-minded people together in various cities around the world, to visit some of the places in the Atlas Obscura. We’re going to be setting up tours of museum back rooms, visits to private collections, and meetings with interesting people. The first place we’re going to try this is in Philadelphia, sometime at the end of the summer. From there, it’s on to Paris, London, Vienna, Boston, Rome, Tokyo…wherever we can get a critical mass together.

DT: I suspect our tours might appeal to people who wouldn’t normally go on tours, but who might come because we’ll be showing them places that they wouldn’t get a chance to see otherwise.

G: So this’ll be free for anyone that can pay their way? Or are you guys setting this up as a business?

JF: We’re still figuring all that out. I assume we’ll charge some nominal fee so that we can cover our costs and Dylan can get a better hairpiece.

DT: It’s very important, my hairpiece. As for tour itineraries, I think it is best to leave them shrouded in mystery for now. But from what we have planned so far, they will definitely be unique in the world of tours.

Catacombs photo by flickr (cc) user AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker

Why the problem of fixing our buildings is so vague—and what we can do about it

We’re hardwired to address the smaller problems that we can see, rather than the big ones that we can’t imagine. There’s no better—or more important—example of that problem than the current debate over energy use.

I’d wager that if you polled even well-informed citizens, they’d rank fuel efficiency as the number one problem we face, in trying to reduce carbon emissions. And I’d bet that, if in this very column you’re reading, I went on to talk about all the ways cars are destructive to the environment, not a single person would respond: But how important is that, really?

But the plain fact, as Mother Jones points out, is that buildings, in the electricity they use to run and the materials they require to build, are responsible for nearly half of our nation’s carbon footprint. Transportation? Twenty-seven percent. So it’s safe to say that while transportation is crucial, we can’t solve our carbon problem if we fail to address the energy we use in our buildings.

And yet the fuel efficiency of cars dominates headlines and op-eds, while discussions of carbon-neutral electricity—when they happen—treat it more like something that’s nice to have rather than the single biggest problem at hand. Why is that?

Cars and transportation grab our attention because there are so many numbers, and so much concrete evidence of the problem in front of us. We can grouse about the SUV idling on the curb; we can curse Detroit and its hidebound, handout-loving executives; and we can easily see the anemic fuel efficiency of American cars. We pay for it every time we see the dollars scroll past at the gas pump. The problem therefore seems much more urgent, because it’s much more real and immediate.

Compare that to the electricity you burn at home. It’s created far away, beneath smoke stacks you never see or smell. The energy you consume at home is nothing but a line item that arrives in the mail, once a month. All of the intermediate processes occur in an opaque infrastructure dreamland. At best we have a vague sense that we should be doing better.

To be sure, there are ways being created to address those problems: That’s the point of the so-called smart grid you keep hearing about, and the at-home, real-time energy monitoring it would make possible. Alternative energy is rising in our consciousness—even if it seems particularly prone to green-washing from BP and the like. What’s missing is a way for us to do something about it in our own buildings. Mass solutions there are hard to imagine because, unlike our cars, our buildings aren’t the product of a few manufacturers. They’re the product of the building industry, one of the most diffuse and least coordinated imaginable. How do you get so many millions of people and businesses to change themselves at a meaningful scale, and fast?

So far the basic approach has been familiar. Take the Clinton Climate Initiative, which just announced that it’s partnering with local governments and property developers in 16 community projects, based in over a dozen cities around the world. This may sounds terrific, but it leaves me cold because these sorts of top-down efforts often trickle down to nothing. It’s easy to build one green building with solar panels and grey-water recycling. What’s harder is convincing everyone else to do the same. That’s the real work, and that’s what has to happen to make an actual impact.

And that’s why the 14X Stimulus Plan is so interesting. Santa Fe-based architect Edward Mazria, who heads Architecture 2030, proposes that instead of directly funding building renovations, we incentivize them, through the $6.3 billion in energy-efficiency grants that’ll begin flowing this June.

As Mother Jones reports, cities would offer homeowners and private business the chance to refinance their buildings at a lower interest rate, with one caveat: The more your interest-rate goes down, the more efficiency upgrades you have to make. Architecture 2030 estimates that a family paying six percent on a $230,000 loan could install a $20,000 system of solar panels and save $425 a month.

The “14X” name came about because Mazria estimates that for every stimulus dollar spent on his plan, $14 in economic activity would be created in the building sector and beyond (a compounding effect that’s well-documented for incentive programs). Every $1 would also generate $3 in federal taxes, and $1 in local taxes. And, according to Mazria, if you simply spend $3.2 billion building green infrastructure directly, you create 49,486 green jobs. But if you spend it on 14X’s interest-rate based incentives, you create 692,800. Maybe those numbers are high, but that’s about as close to a magic bullet as you’ll ever get in public policy.

Banks, the Department of Energy, and a slew of mayors are already excited about the plan. You can actually sign a petition supporting it here.

With any luck, it’ll make the solutions to our building problem as utterly concrete—and as unavoidable—as the fuel efficiency of the car you drive. But moreover, it should serve as a template in how we think about solving the biggest problems we face—and nothing less.

Eleni Gabre-Madhin knows that efficient markets can save lives.

In 1984, she was an undergrad studying economics at Cornell when a famine struck in Ethiopia, her homeland. Researching the unfolding tragedy for a paper, she stumbled on an alarming, seemingly impossible fact: Even as 1 million people in the country’s northern reaches starved to death, there were grain surpluses in the south. But there was simply no way for grain growers to know exactly where their grain was needed. Food was rotting in the fields.

“Lives could have been saved,” she says. “It was really just an unrecognized market failure.” In the following two decades, she’s tried to solve that problem. The fruit of her effort, the Ethiopian Commodities Exchange (which she spoke about at TED, two years ago), just began trading last year, and the process of setting it up will soon be recounted in two outlets: First, in a chapter of Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, which comes out next month.

And second, in The Market Maker, a Wide Angle documentary that airs on PBS, on July 22.

The Ethiopian famine exposed a problem endemic to Africa. Abroad, centralized markets grade and standardize commodities such as grain, so that they can be easily bought and sold—that was the original purpose of the Chicago Board of Trade, when it was founded in 1848. But without such a market, African traders do business only with familiar connections rather than distributing their goods to whomever needs them most.

Gabre-Madhin uncovered those dynamics through years of field research, in transaction-cost economics. “Instead of studying prices like most economists do, I studied the bottlenecks,” she says. “That got me into the heads of the traders, and attuned to the risks and costs of moving grain in African countries.” In Ethiopia and across Africa, she realized that everyone would be better off if the market were formalized so that every trader had better information about supply and demand, much like commodities markets across the world.

After finishing her Ph.D. in 1998, she spent the next four years trying to publicize her ideas, without luck. And that’s when another famine came along, in 2002. Again, Gabre-Madhin noticed a surplus the year before, of 300,000 tons of grain. Prices collapsed, and farmers stopped investing in plantings. They didn’t save either: No central market meant no trade futures, like we have in the United States—that is, options to buy commodities in the future, which create incentives to save harvests. By the next year, a famine was looming. The shortfall? Three hundred thousand tons of grain.

Fortunately, famine was averted when international food aid flowed in. Thanks to public activism in the 1980s, such as Live Aid, the international community has been more vigilant about famines. But the disaster got Gabre-Madhin noticed. “The country asked, What happened? We did all of these things since 1984, and we have this famine again,” she says. At a World Bank conference, the Ethiopian Prime Minister sat in for one of her talks, and he made market development a priority. As a result, Gabre-Madhin moved to Ethiopia to build the ECX in 2005.

Since then, the ECX has rapidly won over traders, but that explosive growth has made for grueling work. The Market Maker picks up the story at a turning point last December when, at the government’s behest, the ECX expanded to include coffee—a crop that has an almost spiritual importance in Ethiopia, while also accounting for 50 percent of its exports, at $500 million a year.

For her part, Gabre-Madhin has had to proselytize for her grand vision while tackling vanishingly small details: In one crucial scene, she arrives at a newly opened coffee exchange warehouse, and—doctorate be damned—duly gets to work, documenting leaks in the ceiling. Details like these are now Gabre-Madhin’s biggest challenge. “Getting people to understand is one problem,” she says. “But getting them to adapt even when they understand is the biggest challenge.”

UPDATE: The name of the documentary, originally The Exchange, has been changed to The Market Maker. The text of this piece has been changed to reflect the new title.

Photos courtesy Yemane Tsegaye, ECX, and flickr user (cc) mrflip

Trying to limit your environmental impact? Buying “eco-friendly” stuff doesn’t help.

Before attending trade shows flogging “green” products, I set my B.S. detector to 11. That habit was reinforced recently, when I attended a small show in New York, featuring the big boys of consumer electronics—Nokia, Sony, Samsung, and the like. I came to a stand offering green credit cards, which award one ton of carbon offsets for every $1000 you spend. That may sound good, but I had to ask: How does that conversion rate compare to regular cards that give you cash or frequently flier miles? How much value are you getting for your money?

“1 ton.”

But what’s that ton worth? How much does it cost?

“Carbon offsets range in price, from $8 to $12.”

But doesn’t that get to how much money you guys are taking for commission?

“The value is probably comparable to what you’d get otherwise. And it doesn’t really matter what it costs, for people that care about green.”

On her first point, the woman was wrong: Frequent flier miles are worth about $20 for every $1000; cash back programs range as high as $50. On her second point, though, she was right. “Green” consumers probably don’t care. And one symptom is the ubiquity of worthless green products—from solar-powered doodads to green furniture. Very few of these “sustainable” products actually reduce your carbon footprint—and carbon is really the absolutely chief issue we should care about, not some nebulous idea of eco-friendliness.

The green credit card really exemplifies the problem. It encourages you to buy more, and salves your conscience with the promise that every purchase is helping the planet. It feeds the pernicious idea that we’ll be okay if we just buy new stuff.

But being “green” is chiefly about your behavior and daily habits, not what a given product is made from. A LEED-certified house in the suburbs isn’t green. You’d probably do better with a smaller place, closer to work—if you cut your commute in half, you’ve basically done the same thing as doubling your gas mileage and staying put. A sofa made from sustainable woods? It’s still better to buy antiques. Green computer? That’s a starting point, but not if you just end up replacing it in two years. Buy a better one that’ll last you longer and take care of it—in time, computers can run 40 percent slower; there’s software that will clean one up like new, making it last longer. The list could go on.

Granted, greenwashing isn’t necessarily malicious. It’s an unavoidable fact, which stems from how much uncertainty there is in the market today. We’re just now figuring out what exactly a “carbon footprint” means. For example: 90 to 95 percent of the carbon emitted while making a computer is indirect—that is, it doesn’t come from the materials themselves, but rather the supply chain that produced the parts. That has radical implications for how we consume, which the market doesn’t acknowledge because there’s really no way to sell a product aimed at keeping you from buying less crap.

I’m not advocating that everyone become a miserly shut-in. But there is another approach, as we wait for clearer guidelines about the carbon costs attached to what we consume, on a day-to-day basis. Of course, check off the big boys on your list of carbon sources: How efficient is your car? How weather-tight is your home? Is it close to work? There are solutions to each of these problems that don’t involve ditching what you already have. For other big purchases, don’t be afraid of spending more, if it means something that will last longer or retain some resale value. The merits of a green product should be the last thing you consider, and only when what you already have is truly spent.

Let’s rethink taxes so people feel good about chipping in.

A carbon cap and trade program sounds great in theory. By giving companies allotments for carbon emissions, which they could then trade, you’d create a market for green innovation. Companies would have incentives to slash carbon, since they could sell those savings to heavy polluters as credits. Conversely, heavy polluters would have to pay to keep operating as usual—also giving them an incentive to cut carbon.

But many people think it’s a bad idea. They argue that cap-and-trade is both complex to administer and easy to abuse—Europe’s scheme, for example, has plenty of critics. Better to simply tax carbon emissions, the thinking goes—it’ll be simpler to implement, and create incentives for efficiency.

Too bad it’ll never happen. For politicians, raising taxes is the equivalent of playing Russia Roulette with a fully loaded gun. Cap-and-trade schemes persist exactly for that reason—a carbon tax would never pass in the Senate.

But we can design our way around that problem. As the New York Times Magazine recently reported, behavioral economists have found that simply describing an idea as an “offset” rather than a “tax” makes Republicans much more likely to accept its merits. That study took place in a lab, though. In the real world, filled with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, a tax by any other name is still a tax. (Cap-and-trade is, you guessed it, being labeled a tax.)

They’ve been able to vilify taxes so easily in part because there’s so little innovation in tax policy design. Using the lessons of behavioral economics, couldn’t one counter them by designing a tax policy that makes people rethink their interactions with the government?

For example, we could put a tax on carbon, and let business choose among several options for how that money will be spent, whether it’s solar power, tidal generators, reforestation, or even returning the money to average citizens. If people know exactly where their money goes, they’re less likely to resent a tax—ahem, offset. That’ll give them an ownership stake in those programs, and provide them with something to market. (A business could boast that “In 2010, we invested $100 billion in new carbon technologies.”)

Behavioral economists are producing an ever-expanding body of research on these elective tax systems and their relative appeal. “When you give people a specific objective, it makes new ideas much more palatable,” explains Dan Ariely, author of the excellent book, Predictably Irrational. (You can buy the new, revised version of the book here.) It’s called the victim effect: People don’t give money to vague causes like starvation. But if that same cause has a face attached to it—such as a particular starving child in a particular village—fund-raising is far more likely to succeed. Carbon “offsets” tied to specific causes that payers can choose would take on a similar dynamic. “Governments tend not to get the taxes right because their design makes the whole dynamic negative,” says Ariely. “But you can make things interesting and bring taxes to the center of civic life.”

We don’t have that today. Taxes are a burden, to be cheated through clever accounting or lambasted by politicians eager for an easy slam-dunk. If we’re going to change that culture, we’ve got to create ways for people to feel invested in the system. That’s going to require a creative approach to tax policy design that respects human psychology.