Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Have you checked your email today? Your finances? What about your energy use? Alex Laskey thinks that with just a shift in attitude toward our energy use, we can all save a lot.

Laskey introduces an experiment he ran with his team at Opower. People received one of three different messages on their doors about why they should try to save energy:

- You can save $54 this month
- You can save the planet
or
- You can be a good citizen

Which one won? None. No one message showed a marked difference. So Opower added a fourth message: Your neighbors are doing better than you.

That one worked. The locals who heard the message that 77% of their neighbors turned down their A/C, Also turned down their AC, creating a marked difference in energy consumption. As Laskey says, “If something is inconvenient, even if we believe it, persuasion won’t work. But social pressure? That’s powerful stuff.”

Every year in the U.S. alone $40 billion of energy is wasted. Laskey projects that by thinking not just about material sciences but about behavioral sciences, we could save 2 terawatts a year — more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City for more than a year.

We can be doing so much better, says Laskey, starting by tapping into the power of social behavior.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

We all know sustainability is essential to our future, in vague terms. But what does that mean for the choices we make every day? In other words: paper or plastic? For one thing, design consultant Leyla Acaroglu wants you to think beyond choosing a material for your grocery tote. Instead, she encourages us to think about the entire life of a finished product, to think hard about the net impact a product has on the environment. This is life-cycle thinking, not just whether a product can be recycled, but all the parts of its existence: material extraction, manufacturing, packaging and transportation, product use, and end of life. Every step of the way, there’s a way to do something smart to make the most out of the product for net environmental gain.

She introduces (and busts) some myths:

1. “Biodegradability”

This is a word used a lot in marketing, but it’s not what you think. Yes, when a natural material ends up in nature it biodegrades normally. But most of our discarded natural materials end up in landfills, anaerobic environments where the carbon molecules can’t break down and instead release methane, which is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Biodegradability, Acaroglu says, isn’t everything.

2. Fridges

Your fridge is great, but it’s killing the environment. And not just because it requires so much energy to run, but because it keeps things fresh — and keeps getting bigger, so it’s easier to fill with food … that you’re going to end up throwing out. According to Acaroglu, in the U.S. 40 percent of fresh food is wasted each year, amounting to $165 billion. Half of the world’s food is wasted, about 1.3 billion tons per annum. It comes down to the soggy lettuce, kept in a crisper that doesn’t keep things crisp. (In the UK the problem is so bad that there was a notorious Soggy Lettuce Report.) Acaroglu says: Design fridges that help prevent food waste from the start.

3. Electric tea kettles
In the UK, 97 percent of households have an electric tea kettle, and 65 percent of tea drinkers admit to overfilling their kettles, boiling way more water than they need for a cuppa. One day of extra energy use from these kettles is enough to light all the streetlights in London for a night. What we need, Acaroglu says, is not better materials for the tea kettle, but a behavior-changing kettle that helps you boil just what you need.

4. Mobile phone subscriptions
Last year there were 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions; yet only 11 percent of outdated or not-sexy-anymore mobile phones were recycled. In some regions, phones are burned for the gold inside: “it’s now cheaper,” she says, “to mine gold from a ton of phones than a ton of ore.” Acaroglu encourages designing phones for disassembly.

So what’s the answer to paper or plastic? Well, paper pound for pound is more sustainable — but a paper bag weighs 4 to 10 times what a plastic one does.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Ron Finley describes himself as a “renegade gardener,” and he’s here to tell us all about his home, in South Central, or South Los Angeles, as city planners attempted to rebrand the area. Whatever you call it, the truth is that the area comprises liquor stores, fast food and vacant lots, and it epitomizes the stark reality that 26.5 million Americans live in a food desert. Truth is, “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys,” says Finley. “People are dying from curable diseases in South Central Los Angeles. The obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times what it is in Beverly Hills, eight miles away.”

Tired of seeing wheelchairs “bought and sold like used cars,” tired of seeing ”drop-in dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks,” and tired of “driving a 45-minute round trip to get an apple that was not impregnated with pesticide,” he could only come to one conclusion: “This has to stop.”

So he started working with the organization L.A. Green Grounds to install a vegetable garden on the 150 ft x 10 ft patch of ground in front of his house, that strip between the sidewalk and the street that the city owns but the resident has to keep up … and was promptly issued with a citation to remove the garden. Then he was served with a warrant for arrest. “Come on, really? A warrant for growing food on a strip of land you could give a f– … care less about? I said cool. Bring it.” Finley, it is clear, is not one to be cowed. The city backed off, a councilman endorsed what he was doing, and the city of Los Angeles is now set to change its ordinance. And why not? “There are 26 square miles of vacant lots in the city,” Finley says. “That’s 20 Central Parks; that’s enough space for 724,838,400 tomato plants. Why in the hell would they not okay this?”

“Growing your own food is like printing your own money,” he says, to applause. Then he tells us why this really matters to him. “I raised my sons in South Central. I have a legacy here. I refuse to be a part of this reality that was manufactured by other people; I manufactured my own reality,” he says. “I am an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. A graffiti artist beautifies walls; I beautify parkways and yards. I treat the garden as a piece of cloth and the plants and the trees are the embellishment of that cloth. You’d be surprised what soil can do if you let it be your canvas.”

“Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city,” he continues. “Plus, you get strawberries.”

One night, he looked outside to see a mother and daughter in his garden at 10:30. “They looked so ashamed,” says Finley. “It made me feel ashamed to see people this close to me who were hungry. This reinforced why I do this. People ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid people are going to steal your food?’ Hell, no! That’s why it’s on the street! That’s the whole idea! I want them to take it and take back their health.”

To date, Green Grounds has planted 20 gardens; 50 volunteers have come to their “dig ins.” The benefits are clear, says Finley: “If kids grow kale, they eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. But if they’re not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever’s put in front of them.” He wants to help the young people he sees, guide the disenfranchised away from a track leading nowhere. As far as he’s concerned, gardening provides an opportunity to take over those communities, to have a sustainable life.

He wants to plant a whole block of gardens, he tells us. “I want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafés,” he says. And for anyone concerned about the business model. “I’m not talking about no free shit. Free is not sustainable. The funny thing about sustainability: you have to sustain it.” The audience loves this. “What I’m talking about is putting people to work, getting kids off the street, about the pride and the honor of growing your own food. We’ve got to make this sexy,” he proclaims. “Let’s all become renegades, gangsta gardeners. We have to flip the script on what a gangsta is. If you ain’t a gardener, you ain’t gangsta. Let that be your weapon of choice!”

Finley knows he has the audience’s attention. He’s not done yet.

“If you want to meet with me, don’t call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit,” he concludes. “If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit. Peace.” A standing ovation.

The speakers who appeared in this session. Click on the speaker’s name for a full recap of the talk:

Creative force Leyla Acaroglu uses innovative design and systems thinking to create positive change.

Renegade gardener Ron Finley grows a nourishing food culture in South Central Los Angeles’ food desert by planting the seeds and tools for healthy eating.

Mouth musician Wang Li mesmerizes audiences with his unique approach to two of the world’s most ancient (and surprising) instruments.

Teenaged science fair winners Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao have discovered a way to break down nasty compounds called phthalates, common to flexible plastics and linked to many health problems.

Energy software maker Alex Laskey helps power companies to help their customers cut down — using data analysis, marketing and a pinch of behavioral science.

Fueled by their deep Afro-Cuban roots, the Pedrito Martinez Group featuring Ariacne Trujillo, have rocketed to the top of New York’s Afro-Caribbean music scene.

Michael Green wants to solve architecture’s biggest challenge — meeting worldwide housing demand without increasing carbon emissions — by building with carbon-sequestering wood instead of concrete and steel.

Allan Savory works to promote holistic management in the grasslands of the world.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

The cofounder of PayPal, Elon Musk has become one of his generation’s most aggressive, not to mention successful, entrepreneurs. As CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and CEO and CTO of SpaceX, his interests clearly lie in transforming transportation and creating an economy built on sustainable energy. Now he takes the TED stage to tell us more.

First, he talks about the genesis of Tesla, his realization while still at university that the development of a sustainable energy system is critical to the ongoing existence of humanity — and therefore a problem worth tackling. And while, yes, these cars require being fed by current electrical systems, his belief is that given the inevitability of electric transportation, perhaps Tesla cars will help to kickstart the genuinely sustainable system necessary to support it. “All modes of transport will become electric, with the ironic exception of rockets. There’s no way around Newton’s third law,” he says. “So the question is how you create a really energy efficient car.” In Tesla’s case, the key is to make it incredibly light, with an aluminum chassis and body made in North America. “We applied rocket design techniques to make the car light, despite the large battery pack.”

Musk clearly isn’t going to talk about his recent spat with the New York Times, but he does want to talk about the range of the car. “Customers of the Model S are competing with each other to get the highest possible range,” he says. 420 miles is apparently the record, though he acknowledges that 250 miles on a single charge is a more likely number. But what he truly loves about the Tesla is the driver experience. “The responsiveness is incredible,” he says. “We want people to feel a mind-meld with the car, that you and the car are one. As you corner, accelerate, it just happens. It’s like the car has ESP.”

But Musk isn’t just here to talk about Tesla. Another string to his energy bow: SolarCity, a company harnessing the power of the “giant fusion generator in the sky,” the sun. Why solar? “I’m confident solar will beat everything hands down, including natural gas. If it doesn’t, we’re in deep trouble.” With this company, Musk is attempting to create no less than a giant, distributed utility, leasing solar panels to homes and companies. “Utilities have been this monopoly and people haven’t had a choice. It’s the first time they have had competition,” he says. “It’s empowering.”

And so to SpaceX, a project Musk jokes might well prove to be the fastest way he can lose his fortune. Despite setbacks, they persist, and when he says the goal of the company is to advance rocket technology and convert humanity into a spacefaring civilization, it’s hard to laugh him off. Especially when he challenges us to consider which we’d prefer: Exploring other planets, or confining ourselves to earth and eventual, inevitable extinction.

The real innovation of SpaceX is to build a reusable rocket. The Space Shuttle was an attempt at this, he says, but it took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish a rocket for a flight, at a cost of about $1 billion per flight. That’s not a sustainable business model, and in the past few months Musk and his team have made good progress in designing a rocket that can take off — and land again safely. He shows video of a test, a 12-story-high rocket taking off, hovering at 40 meters, and then magically landing again. The audience is appropriately impressed. Even more so when he tells us that none of the design innovations in the rocket are patented. “Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable,” he says wryly.

As to how he manages it all, he has three tips for would-be innovators. First, work a lot. Secondly, study physics and learn how to reason from first principles rather than reason by analogy. Finally, he says, pay attention to negative feedback, particularly from friends. “That may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that,” he concludes.

This interview with 60 Minutes from June 2012 is well worth a watch:

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Sebastião Salgado has worked as a professional photographer since 1973. And he arrives on the TED stage with extraordinary gentleness and humility. He doesn’t think everyone is necessarily familiar with his work, so he starts by showing some of his incredible pictures, and we watch in silence. The images make for powerful, often difficult viewing. It’s clear that Salgado has traveled the world and shot the stories of so many people who are not regularly given a face. The pictures seem other-worldly; so beautifully staged and shot that it’s difficult to remember that this is real; this is photojournalism.

He starts by telling us some of his story, of being born on a farm in Brazil in 1944. It was a paradise, he says, of more than 50% rain forest that supported some 35 families. They ate everything they produced and were almost entirely self-sufficient. He left the farm when he was 15 years old, to move to the big city to start secondary school and another life, learning about politics and radicalism, becoming a “leftist,” studying to become an economist and, most important, meeting his “best friend all my life long,” Lelia Wanick, later to become Lelia Wanick Salgado, his wife and his companion to this day.

Politics intervened. A rapidly industrializing Brazil became unstable and an untenable place in which to live, and so the Salgados moved to France. It was there that at the age of 30, Sebastião discovered photography, the discipline that was to become his passion, his life. “I lived totally inside photography, doing long term projects.” He shows the audience another series of pictures that are epic in scale. Again we watch, in silence.

In the 1990s, Salgado photographed Migrations, traveling around the world to document just some of the many millions of people who have been uprooted from their homes by poverty, wars and repression. He saw deaths by the thousand–and the work took its toll. He became physically ill himself. Yet when he went to see a doctor, he found out that he wasn’t sick at all.  ”He says ‘You are not sick. What happened was you saw much death, you are dying. You must stop. Stop!’” Salgado agreed. He returned to his home in Brazil–and to the farm on which he had grown  up.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

He began shooting the project, known as Genesis, back in 2004, shooting through to 2009. And while he may have focused on documenting nature, people and humanity are still central themes, as he photographed tribes and people who live far from the so-called advances of the modern world. He shows us some of these images too (below). The ethereal, otherworldly beauty of the black-and-white shots is again extraordinary.

The Antarctic Peninsula. 2005. Iceberg between Paulet Island and the South Shetland Islands on the Antarctic Channel. At sea level, earlier flotation levels are clearly visible where the ice has been polished by the ocean’s constant movement. High above, a shape resembling a castle tower has been carved by wind erosion and detached pieces of ice. Courtesy Taschen.

Salgado is here with a call to arms. We must rebuild our forests, he says, just as he has done on his family’s land in Brazil. The destruction of the rainforest, of redwood trees in California, is unacceptable. It is simply the only way to capture carbon, to create the oxygen the planet needs to survive and thrive. Salgado makes a comparison: if you have a lot of hair, it might take two or three hours to dry your hair. “Me?” he says drily, stroking his bald head. “One minute.” It’s a funny moment, but he’s making a serious point. “The trees are the hair of the planet,” he says.

Brazil. 2005. In the Upper Xingu region of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, a group of Waura Indians fish in the Puilanga Lake near their village. The Upper Xingu Basin is home to an ethnically-diverse population, with the 2,500 inhabitants of 13 villages speaking languages with distinct Carib, Tupi and Arawak roots. While they occupy different territories and preserve their own cultural identities, they co-exist in peace. Courtesy Taschen.

The photographer concludes by showing some breathtaking before-and-after pictures of his farm in Brazil. We see the erosion, the dried soil, the arid landscape of the home to which he returned. And then we see a shot from two months ago, with the forest almost entirely retored. They haven’t managed to plant all the needed 2.5 million trees yet, but two million are planted, with the resulting sequestration 100,000 tons of carbon. It’s an uplifting end to a sobering talk.

An exhibition of 250 images from “Genesis” premieres at the Natural History Museum in London in April, before touring to Toronto, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and Paris. 

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Kicking off the TED conference would be a daunting prospect for most, but Jennifer Granholm has tackled both nastier challenges and less friendly audiences in her time. After all, she is the former governor of Michigan, a state that, as the blurb to her book A Governor’s Story: The Fight for Jobs and America’s Economic Future puts it, was “synonymous with manufacturing during a financial crisis that threatened to put all America’s major car companies into bankruptcy.” TED? For Granholm? A piece of cake–and an opportunity to air her theme of how to foster meaningful innovation at state level, and to lay down a challenge for the assembled TEDsters.

But first, she wants to share three enigmas. First: how do you create good jobs in America? Granholm has a story to share, featuring empirical data from her first year in office in Michigan in 2003. The 8,000-person-strong community of Greenville, Michigan, was about to lose its major employer, an Electrolux refrigerator factory. 3,000 jobs were set to be lost when the company moved its operation to Mexico. “Not on my watch,” said Granholm.

Off she went with her cabinet to convince Electrolux to stay. Proposed incentives included: zero taxes for 20 years! A new factory! The UAW would offer unprecedented sacrifices! Management, she tells us, considered the proposal for all of 17 minutes before unceremoniously rejecting it. None of the incentives made any difference when salaries in Mexico were $1.75 an hour. So Electrolux left, and Greenville’s longstanding manufacturing-based culture was decimated. “All I know how to do is make refrigerators. Who is ever going to hire me?” asked one worker, echoing those from the 50,000 factories closed between 2000 and 2010. It’s a sobering point.

Granholm’s next two enigmas include two minor challenges. First, how do you solve global climate change? Second, how do you do any of this with Congressional gridlock? After all, she jokes, Congress is rated worse than cockroaches, lice, Nickelback and Donald Trump (though better than meth labs and gonorrhea). The audience loves this.

Now Granholm points us to an Obama administration policy that did cause massive changes across the country — the “Race to the Top for Education.” This $4.5 billion proposal prompted competition among 48 states and caused many voluntary changes across America. The price of entry was that governors had to raise their college standards–and Granholm wonders if we couldn’t do the same kind of thing with clean energy.

After all, $1.6 trillion has been invested in that sector; but most of that has not been in the United States. Couldn’t a similar prize competition prompt real action? When the President is calling for 80% clean energy by 2030, couldn’t the states take on that challenge instead? And could the prize be the same $4.5 billion budget afforded to the education prize? The figure is, after all, a rounding error on the federal side. 

“Each region has something to offer,” Granholm details. ”Iowa and Ohio could lead in wind energy. The sunbelt could produce solar energy for the country. Jerry Brown could create a solar cluster in California. Every region of the country could do this.”

“If you create a competition, it respects the states, it respects federalism,” she adds. “And both Republican and Democratic governors love to cut ribbons; they want to create jobs. It fosters innovation at the state level.”

So how do we pay for it when Congress can’t agree on anything? “Go around them,” she says simply. And now, her challenge. “What if we created a private-sector challenge to the governors?” she asks. “What if several of the high-net-worth individuals or companies here at TED decided to band together to create a national competition to the governors to have a race to the top?” The audience giggles, but a smattering of applause shows that they’re paying close attention. “What if it all started here at TED? What if you were here when we figured out how to crack the code to create good paying jobs here in America, to create an energy policy, and create an energy strategy from the bottom up?” More applause. There’s a sense in the room that this could really happen.

“If you’re impatient, as I am,” Granholm concludes, “You know our competitors are in the game and eating us for lunch. We can get in the game or not. We can be at the table or on the table. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to dine.”

In this talk from TEDxJerusalem, TED Fellow Adital Ela shares her journey in sustainability. While traveling in India, she came across a chai vendor who sold his tea in small, clay cups that patrons could use and then simply toss on the ground when they were done. These cups didn’t create any waste, because it was earth returning to earth. This sparked a question for Ela: “How can products, like people, come from dust, and return to dust?”

Ela held this question in her mind for 10 years. Her exploration of it led her across many Middle Eastern countries on a mission to make products out of compressed earth and agricultural waste. A self-proclaimed designer-gatherer, her title is as organic in nature as her found materials.

Ela’s first product for her line, Terra by Adital Ela, was a stool made from dirt heaps that construction sites had dumped in the forest. Upon sharing this innovation with her father, she learned that she wasn’t the first in her family to make use of the earth this way. Her Iraqi grandmother had made her own oven from dirt turned to clay. This solidified Ela’s mission: to combine her heritage with the science of production for ultimate sustainability.

Making a Terra stool creates no pollution. It requires no energy and uses only local and organic materials. If a stool is no longer useful, the owner can simply leave it in the garden and let it deteriorate back into the earth. Or they can add water and mold it into another functional object.

But these stools are only the first step for Ela. She wants to teach this technique for making objects to others. This means not only selling Terra kits, with recipes and molds. She is also preparing to launch a pilot program in Jerusalem of Terra workshops, which she hopes will spread in a franchise-like manner, Eventually, she wonders: could this be a source of income for income deprived communities?

Read more about TED Fellows and their fascinating projects here » 

TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built specially for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, two new playlists are available: Animals that amaze and The end of oil?

Animals that amaze
At TED there’s a certain species of speaker who is absolutely devoted to all kinds of weird beasts and bugs. We call these creatures “obsessive speciologists.” Watch this playlist to see them in action, talking about everything from apes that write to octopi that disappear. See animals that amaze »

The end of oil?
Everybody wants to know: Can we find a renewable energy source and wean ourselves off of oil? Visionaries try to answer the question by offering up solutions like kite turbines and new takes on nuclear fusion. Hear from Bill Gates, Justin Hall-Tipping, 14-year-old nuclear reactor builder Taylor Wilson, and many more. Watch talks from The end of oil? »