interviews
Pain Is The Price of Consciousness
by Max Moinian
September 17, 2019
This interview with Max Moinian was conducted and condensed by frank news. Max was the co-editor of our May 2018 issue on Urban Planning.
frank: Hi! Tell us about yourself and Future Earth.
Max: I am Max Moinian, I have a Master's in Urban Design from MIT, and Future Earth is a climate change education platform, right now just on Instagram. It’s a newborn baby I had with Steph Shepherd, who is a total social media and marketing genius. We think our combined brains are good parenting. Good information that is enticing and digestible.
This all happened because mutual friends told us we were both climate change crazy ladies. We met and finished each other’s sentences. She convinced me that more celebrities would engage in environmentalism if the cause was packaged for them. So we tried a rebranding exercise. Make it cool and sexy. Do for the treehugger what Gloria Steinem did for feminism, if you will. But also survey what’s out there and fill in the gaps.
Plastics have suddenly become the environmental villain on social media.
I’m not mad at that, plastics are a gateway drug to environmentalism, but let’s take it a step further and talk about petrochemicals and how the same shit making those bottles is in your activewear and household products, and powering your car and house.
Basically what we're doing is trying to visually represent information we're reading, and make it enticing and clear for Instagram. I'll do the heavy lifting and read through the dense reports, make three-step guides, and report back on Instagram. Everything from science lessons, to consumer and lifestyle tips, ways you can get involved, and movies to watch. It’s imperative to me that we reflect on the psychological, personal aspect about learning about climate change. My own journey was so emotional and I found it hard to find a shoulder to lean on and people to have those conversations with.
Facts aren’t everything. Feelings are facts too.
How did you end up focusing on climate issues?
It's crazy to think that years of Ivy League education, undergrad at Barnard, Master's at MIT, and you know, private school before that – all of it – never touched on the very rudimentary and basic information about climate change that everyone needs to know. It was never presented to us, I read headlines but they never stuck, and somehow I got away with ignoring it all of those years.
via Max Moinian thesis presentation deck
Then there I was at MIT – the grand narrative is how do we design and protect cities from the coming environmental perils? So, sea level rise, temperature rise, extreme weather, pollution, deforestation…. All of it from a policy and design standpoint. I focused on design, so, seawalls and engineering systems to address the consequences of global warming. But what about the causes? Why can’t we start there? Why aren’t we talking about it?
In design studios, we were tasked to protect cities by building things.
We had projection data for the year 2100 without fully understanding what's causing sea level rise in the first place.
It really bothered me. I felt like this world of mobilized urban designers and architects are at the end of a line that starts with the science, goes through technology and policy, and leaves us with a very limited, pathetic toolkit. Real innovation doesn’t happen at the end of the line, you know?
We're still that client-based discipline where you just have to do whatever the client says and not necessarily what you stand for. I busted my ass to get an internship at BIG because I wanted to work on the BIG U. I got disenchanted in three seconds. I remember one night I called my advisor and told him I was morally conflicted.
We were using taxpayer money to protect people, but mostly to protect valuable assets.
To be fair, the opportunities the firm had were completely restricted by policy and bureaucratic nonsense. But I wanted no part in it. He told me I had to make the choice of working within the system to change it, or go full radical. And I guess I’ve been testing the outlaw territory ever since.
via Max Moinian thesis presentation deck
What's the best way to a) begin your personal education in climate change, and b) retain information without feeling constantly overwhelmed and emotionally drained?
I know better than anyone how hard it is to commit time in your life to this topic. I didn’t do it until I had six months to research and write a thesis. I thought, I'm going to devote to learning about climate change now because when else can I do this? I wasn’t worried that climate science had no clear place in urban design. I knew I’d figure out a way to get away with it.
I spent most of those days making a matcha latte, getting back in bed, and reading a book for the morning. Then writing and drawing in the afternoon. It was a glorious time of ultimate brain activation. I loved being isolated in my little academic bubble. Not everyone can do that, not everyone wants to do that, no one has the time. So here’s a cheat sheet:
Step one: start with the basic facts. How does climate change and what does that mean for the future? But also, how do we get data and make projections? What are the main causes? What are our options? Your resource is the IPCC. Don't listen to what anyone else has to say except the IPCC and climate scientists. And don’t be ashamed if you need a refresh on middle school science. There's a textbook version of IPCC reports for young adults that I reference constantly.
Step two: a brief history of how climate science has been politicized. Seeing how the proof and solutions have been muzzled by Big Oil and politics is mindblowing.
It showed me that we are not as dependent on the systems we rely on today as we may think.
It also made me hyper-skeptical but in a good way. I love Naomi Oreskes and Naomi Klein, two badass women who write clearly but also have documentaries and interviews you can watch.
Step three: take care of yourself. It took a few breakdowns for me to admit that I wasn’t invincible and this was seriously heavy shit. It’s emotional, and most people connect emotionally. I've read the facts, I know the projections. But it never registered for me. You know, but at the same time you don’t know.
Because my capacity to imagine what two degrees of warming looks like is low. Because this is the most daunting, helpless topic possible.
This is the equivalent of the atom bomb. This is the environmental narrative of our time, and it's really hard to do anything when you know that the problem is so far beyond your little self, your community, your country. It's the entire world, with no silver-bullet solution, and no end in sight, and that's fucking scary.
Yes, it really is.
One time, when I was in the depths of knowing too much, like borderline depression, I was sitting with a professor who will probably never know how much she means to me. As I was talking I think she could just tell something was not right, and she put her arm on my shoulder and said, "Honey, you need to read some Rebecca Solnit." So I bought this book Hope in the Dark and I've gone back to it maybe five times already. It was the hug that I needed. I needed to know that there are people that know more than me and they are still fighting. And I needed to see that they had happy normal lives, or at least appeared to.
Another game-changing book is Living In Denial by Kari Norgaard. The psychology of inaction. She says,
"Pain is the price of consciousness. To be conscious in the world today is to be aware of vast suffering and unprecedented peril."
No one wants to feel like that. Everyone has a threshold, a cap to how much of those kind of feelings you can harbor. And we're all maxing out on our personal issues, our family, our life. You know, millennial burnout or whatever.
Who wants towillingly experience that much pain?
Right.
To exist is painful enough.
Sometimes I get pissed off watching people go about their day, nonchalant, like parked with the engine running, A/C blasting with the windows down, watching TV on their iPhone. And I feel like this person doesn't care. And I’m almost jealous at how simple life seems to be in their mind, so guilt free and chill. But to Norgaard that's actually really difficult to do: “Apathy is the mask of suffering.” It's really hard to suppress all those existential thoughts and feelings, but because it's so much harder to actually deal with them, we lean towards denial.
Being hyper-aware is a massive burden. I've never sought out therapy in my life – I just started seeing a psychologist who specializes in climate anxiety. Being an activist and educator means I’m committing to VIP care for my mental health. Because that is my MVP!
As Solnit says, “Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism.”
interviews
Energy Access Is The Foundation Of True Democratization
by Shazia Khan
February 13, 2019
This interview with Shazia Khan, an environmental lawyer, expert in off-grid clean energy solutions, and founder of EcoEnergy, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Can you tell me about your background and how you came to this work?
I'm a Pakistani-American. I visited Pakistan a lot as a child, and speak the language, so I have a lot of personal ties there. My professional background is as an environmental lawyer. Energy is my area of specialization. I started my career at the World Bank, but had this idea in my mind, even when I was in law school. How do we take something like energy access and make it a priority for the private sector? Which is often times the group that has the resources to make the changes that need to be changed. What can you structure to create incentive for them to get involved and support a social mission or goal?
The idea came in 2001, but since then so much has changed. This concept of social enterprise and entrepreneurship, which didn't have a name back then, started to evolve in a really beautiful way. A lot of companies in the private sector, and a lot of investment firms, decided that a triple bottom line, including an environmental and a social impact component to their investment decisions, was important. For whatever reason, it's important to them, whether it's part of the PR campaign, or whether it's genuinely important to them, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that some resource dollars are now being allocated towards social impact projects.
While I was at World Bank, my boss's boss was working on the Inga Dam Power Project. The World Bank decided they were going to increase their renewable energy portfolio by 20%. They started by building huge hydropower plants all over the world. The Inga Dam Power Project would have the ability to electrify all of Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they put it in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was and still is, quite conflict ridden.
Even if somehow the energy that was generated wasn't all diverted for industrial or commercial purposes, how was it going to trickle down to people living off the national electric grid? Would there be an incentive to electrify those people? The way energy access has unfolded in the West is through government subsidized programs. There's been grid expansion so that anybody, no matter how remote, within the country, will be electrified. But emerging economies and frontier markets don't have the money to do that. So what can they do? One thing they can do is leverage technology. Mobile technology has made a lot of things possible that weren't possible 20 years ago, certainly not 50 years ago.
I started thinking about, is there a more grassroots approach to electrification, and does it have to be as expensive as it is now? Does it have to be that a power plant has to be built, it has to cost millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars, and then need to be very labor intensive? Even after the fact, the costs are so high, is the customer whose been connected able to pay for that service? Maybe not. I run across people all the time where power lines go over their homes in rural Pakistan, and they choose not to be connected because it might cost them $60 or $70 a month. The reason it's so expensive is because they're having to cover the cost of building that infrastructure.
What we do is called distributed solar. It's taking small solar home systems and putting them on the roofs of homes and small businesses. Some people are like, "That's cute, but it's not a long term solution. You really need to wait for the infrastructure for the grid connectivity."
That's really antiquated, and as soon as people found that cellular phones were actually much more convenient and much cheaper, they started adopting them in a widespread manner. That's happened all over the world, and wasn't anticipated. In this same way, I feel that distributed solar can be adopted, deployed rapidly, much more efficiently, and cheaply, than traditional grid expansion.
I did field work in 2008 in Pakistan, and in 2009 launched a non-profit called Eco Energy Finance. The purpose of Eco Energy Finance was to build a business case for affordable solar energy for off-grid people in Pakistan. We had to do extensive market research first to understand who this group of people were, what all the different segments were, and then what their purchasing power was? What their purchasing power was genuinely. Not, "Let's shove this product down their throats and hope that they can afford it, but what can they actually afford? And can we match a technology and a product to them, and distribute it to them?”
I met my co-founder in 2010. He was working on energy access surveys, and I had just received a very small grant. We decided to team up and build a skeletal team of 12 people to go and collect this data. We went to 44,000 households. Really trying to understand the true picture of what their lives were. We wanted to understand their consumer preferences without any sort of bias. What type of technology or what use cases are really going to fit their lifestyle? Then we spent three years market building.
We tested a number of different products, and within that time, a new technology became available. It's called "Pay-As-You-Go Solar." The concept is that in the same way somebody in a developing country will go every month and pay for their cell phone. Pay-As-You-Go technology for solar allows you to do the same thing. You go to the same mobile money agent and you give them a fee – we can remotely unlock the corresponding amount of electricity to them, and they get an automatic receipt on their cell phone. If they don't pay, we can shut the system off remotely. When they do pay again, we can turn it back on. It's just like a cell phone.
Only 13% of people in Pakistan have bank accounts. We're, at the same time, generating a credit score for them and deciding who we're going to take a bet on because ultimately what we're doing is financing the cost of a solar home system for them. We're buying it, they pay us a deposit, and then they give us monthly payments until the system is theirs. They can also pay rent every month and we can just perpetually rent the system to them.
We did that for seven years, had 200 customers, and a repayment rate of over 85%, which is pretty high. We decided, "Okay, this is a commercially viable model that we can take to investors." So we re-launched as Eco Energy Global. Eco Energy Finance, the non-profit still exists and we will use it again to go and explore other markets, but Eco Energy Global went out to raise investment money.
Things are going well, but it's been a long road.
To clarify, you’re using off-grid solar as your primary energy system? Do you feel like that's the future of energy? That everything will be private?
I think we'll get a happy medium. For instance, our customers all have these independent solar systems on their houses. But that's because they're coming from having zero demand, to now having a little bit. Eventually we’ll have to connect them. We’re going to be piloting a mini grid next year. I think what will end up happening is that people will either have community based micro or mini grids, and they will be able to plug and play the systems they already have into that system.
Alternatively, in areas that are much more established, I think there will be a way for private, maybe community based solar to feed into and supplement the grid that already exists. I don't think in developed countries the grid is going away necessarily. It's relatively affordable. It's relatively efficient. But I think there are other ways to have an interface between these newer technologies where people feel like they have more say and more control in the fuel source. People will start pushing towards renewable and demand that of their utility companies. As long as there's a way to integrate new energy capacity being generated into those systems, I think that's where a lot of the work and the evolution will come.
With solar and wind I worry about resiliency. When you're dependent on something natural that you can't control, and there is no mass process for storing energy, what happens in a scenario where there is no sunshine, or too much sunshine? How do you deal with that?
That's a really great question, and that's becoming an increasingly important question as time goes on. There's this race for storage capacity. How do you take renewables and store them? I think a lot more innovations will come out of that. In a country like Pakistan with very high solar radiation, it's not as much of an issue just because it's sunny all the time.
Does too much sun ever cause outages?
No. Our customer will be able to power the product for four hours during the day, and then they'll have, say 16 hours of power. There is a battery being used. There is a battery in the system. The batteries will have to get larger and larger and more and more efficient. It's not a problem to us right now, but that will be a problem for the whole industry moving forward.
A race in the tech to create storage.
Yes.
How affordable is solar?
We've got a solution that's a four watt solution that costs $35 a system. Somebody will pay a couple dollars a month for 18 months until they pay it off. Then there's a larger system that's a 12 watt, and costs $80. People will pay $9 a month until they pay that off. Then there's the one we sell the most, the 50 watt system, and that costs $100. Whatever configuration a person wants, we can supply them with that. Then like I said, we're going to be piloting a mini grid soon too.
What we really look to do is figure out what people are currently spending and then try something comparable in cost to, or less than, what they are already spending. A lot of the small business owners, for instance, don't usually use kerosene, they use diesel generators, but that diesel generator might cost $35 a month. We can offer them something for $28 a month, and as they're paying $28 dollars a month to us and paying off the product, the fuel source becomes free. Whereas a diesel generator you have to pay in perpetuity.
Are you looking also to integrate this idea into U.S. energy systems?
Probably not to be honest with you. There's 1.4 billion people globally who are completely off the grid, zero electricity. We will look more at markets similar to Pakistan. We're looking at Afghanistan next. I'm really interested in looking at overlooked markets, and for whatever reason, people are not interested in going into these countries, but there's definitely a demand. Bringing something as basic as electricity could be life changing.
We're not the only ones doing this. I would say globally there's about 15-20 entrepreneurs just like me who do this in frontier markets. I met colleagues that are working in the Philippines, all over east and west Africa, Vietnam. Any place there's a high density population and a huge off grid population is a good place for us to go to.
Energy access is a basic infrastructure people need to improve the quality of their life. Electricity is an underlying basic infrastructural need that needs to be in place before anything else can be delivered.
If somebody has to walk eight hours a day to go and collect fuel wood, they're contributing to deforestation, and that eight hours a day could be spent doing something more productive. As far as countries like the United States, what I see happening is that consumers have demands unlike the consumers of 20, 30, 50 years ago. People care about where their money is going, where their dollar is going, and they want to know that it's being used in a way that drives what their personal values are. Consumers will probably be demanding more and more clean energy, to be integrated into the traditional grid system. The technology to become grid independent if you're a person that wants to do that, is becoming available. So, that might happen too.
I wonder how we'll be able to participate in clean energy on a large scale in Western countries with our current grid.
It takes, on average in a developing country, nine years to have a grid line built out to you and hook you onto it. That's somebody's entire childhood. Being an environmentalist with my family originating in Pakistan, I was thinking, this is a country of 210 million people. It's about to be the fifth largest country in the world in terms of population, and the population's not slowing like it is in India or in China. How are we going to meet the demand of these new people? Two thirds of the population is under the age of 35. We need to figure out ways to meet the demand. They're going to continue to have growing energy needs.
How do you define energy democracy?
Democratization means giving people access to the basic infrastructure that's available to people in other parts of the country. If you extrapolate from that globally, developing countries are not able to contribute to their local or national economies, or to the world economy, because they don't have access to basic infrastructure, and that's why they're not able to break the cycle of poverty.
It has to be done. Now it’s just how are we going to do it, and how can we do it quickly, and can we think of new ways to do it? Why do we have to rely on antiquated ways of doing things now that we have new technology? It's an equalizer.
International development experts have figured out it's really important for developed countries to help developing countries have democratized energy, and for everybody in these countries to have access to basic infrastructure, like clean drinking water, electricity, healthcare, and education. It makes for a much more stable population.
Any time we speak with or work with the U.S. government, there is a clear recognition that if the United States wants to spend their money on security, outside of military aid, building basic infrastructure and making sure people have access to basic infrastructure, is good for security.
That's interesting.
We need people to have a chance at living within a certain standard. You don't know where the next major insight or breakthrough is going to come from. If people don't have a fighting chance to develop a thought or an idea, because they're so focused on meeting their basic needs, those innovations won't come to light. A rising tide lifts all boats.
If we can leverage technology to make energy access quickly and cheaply and efficiently, I think it's a win-win globally. It's definitely a priority globally. It's one of the sustainable development goals. It's Number 7 in the Universal Energy Act, so there is a recognition globally that this should be a priority, and it's just a matter of getting there.
There are a lot of us working on it, we'll get there eventually.