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In Conversation with INESI

by INESI

February 22, 2019

This interview with Dr. Marla Perez-Lugo and Dr. Cecilio Ortiz Garcia, was conducted and condensed by frank news. Both are faculty at INESI. INESI is the National Institute of Energy and Island Sustainability. It is a multidisciplinary and multi-campus institute of the University of Puerto Rico (INESI) that seeks to insert the university community more effectively into the public energy policy of the country and in the resolution of energy and sustainability problems using as a basis for empirical research and academic knowledge.

Let’s talk about the work you’re doing at INESI.

Dr. Pérez: INESI is the National Institute for Energy and Island Sustainability. It was created in 2014 when we realized that the university was being excluded from the process of developing a new energy policy for Puerto Rico. It was very interesting to us because we have one of the biggest programs in electrical engineering in the nation, and we have expertise in many areas that could contribute to the understanding of what energy issues in Puerto Rico are all about.

We understand them as social technical issues, in the sense that yes, they have a technical component that involves technological development and the physical infrastructure, but also energy issues have a cultural component, and a political component.

If you don't address these issues or these layers of the socio-technical system, no transition is actually possible.

We started INESI in trying to insert the University of Puerto Rico into that conversation. We have about 90 affiliates across the 11 campuses of the UPR system. Those affiliates represent more than 23 academic disciplines including psychology, law, electrical engineering, sociology, philosophy, art, natural sciences, and economists. One of our concerns was that most of the resources being included in the conversation were all concentrated in the metropolitan area of San Juan. For us, that was a metaphor for the concentration and the density of decision making in energy policy in general.

What we tried to do was de-concentrate the knowledge being used in decision making by including resources from the other campuses of the UPR system. Since then, we have a standard set approach, to not only the UPR, but also members and sectors of society that are being excluded from those processes. Community based organizations, grass roots movements.

We created the energy stakeholder forum. That includes about 30 organizations across the islands, that at the beginning of this maybe didn't perceive themselves as energy stakeholders. But Maria had a very important function in showing how energy is embedded in all aspects of life.

Community groups that were not involved in energy policy before, now realize that energy is connected to every single aspect of their life, so they are getting involved, or they want to get involved in the decision making processes.

Dr. Garcia: I want to emphasize that number one, INESI as an institute, is a platform that seeks to interconnect all of the resources Dr. Pérez was mentioning across the 11 campuses of the UPR. It is also a knowledge organization. Before the institute, the way the university was organized, actually created an unequal space for the utilization of resources or knowledge in academia, to impact energy issues in Puerto Rico. By highlighting only the work associated with the technological aspects of energy, like electrical engineering, physics, and maybe economics or law, those become the only areas that can contribute to the transformation of energy issues in Puerto Rico. INESI makes a contribution in terms of energy democracy in Puerto Rico by reframing energy issues in terms of them being not only technical, but like the professor said, socio-technical. We are re-organizing knowledge.

Scientific knowledge that's available inside the university of Puerto Rico system has a responsibility to offer those resources for the wellbeing of the people of Puerto Rico, in a way that helps Puerto Rico visualize its energy problems in a more holistic way, in a more interdisciplinary way.

We foster knowledge from outside academia to be mixed with scientific knowledge in order to gain an interdisciplinary view of energy.

Part of the reason this group exists is because you felt left out of the conversation by the government. Has there been a response from the government to your work?

Dr. Pérez: [laughter].

Has that relationship changed?

Dr. Garcia: That's an excellent question.

Dr. Pérez: After Maria, it has gotten worse. When Maria struck, and the electric system collapsed, it would make sense that we were the ones who had a lot to contribute to the rebuilding process, because we knew the system very well.

Dr. Garcia: That was a faulty logic.

Dr. Pérez: Yes, faulty logic. We approached our president, we approached our governor, we approached FEMA, we approached everybody. Systematically the resources in the UPR has been left out from the rebuilding process. What we’ve come to find out is that actors from the outside have been hired. They have been contributing more to the rebuilding process than the people who know the system best, and the people who are going to live with the consequences of that process. We have met universities from the States that have been contracted by our governor's office to do work for hundreds of thousands of dollars that have already been done by UPR resources.

As my colleague here says, it's a manufactured ignorance phenomenon, in which for many reasons, the local government is manufacturing ignorance in terms of the resources and knowledge Puerto Rico has, when talking to outside actors.

Why do you think that is?

Dr. Garcia: It's not that linear. It requires switching frameworks when you talk about governmental resources, or even institutional resources to extreme operating environments after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. It's rather difficult to draw a direct line between the intentional misrepresentation of resources that one has, or does not have, for a particular resource. You are talking about different levels of decision making converging in a particular way, that make it expedient, for certain actors on the ground like the government of Puerto Rico, to behave in a certain way. One of the behaviors we are alleging is happening, is a behavior of not being transparent, with the type of resources you might have available for you to get out of this hole.

When I say, "this hole," you have to look at Maria in the context of Puerto Rico when Maria hit. Puerto Rico was already under certain legislation, and under the fiscal control board series of attacks on our society, and on behalf of US bond holders that are looking to get repaid for their investment. You have a multiplicity of actors, that virtually established a regime where it becomes logical for the Puerto Rican government to act how it acts.

Dr. Pérez:

One thing that gets more complicated is that ideologically and culturally, the fiscal control board and the present administration have perceived and constructed the university as an expense and not as an investment.

Our constitution recognizes higher education as a societal investment. That has been an ideological fight between the constitution and the more conservative, or pro-statehood administrations. When the fiscal control board came to power, the first thing they did was to claim power over the UPR, and claim that there was too much money going into the UPR system. So the budget for the UPR has been severely cut. In fact we have experienced a budget cut of more than 50%, and some of the campuses are singled out for closing in the incoming years.

The budget cuts are increasing, and increasing, and increasing, and the tuition cost for the students are increasing as well, but not enough to cover all the UPR expenses. When you have 95% of the research being conducted in Puerto Rico, conducted in the UPR system, you are killing research, and you are killing the resources that have the knowledge to actually contribute to the betterment of Puerto Rican society.

Dr. Garcia: That's an excellent point. Hurricane Maria brought the administration to a fork in the road. "How am I going to use my research? Well I have to manufacture reality, for outsiders in order for me to be aligned with what I've been using as my policy towards the university." It’s a policy of killing. It's a policy of closing. It's a policy of minimizing.

Dr. Pérez: Exactly.

Dr. Garcia: I cannot be highlighting those same resources out in the open, because I left myself open for questions about, "Well wait a second, aren't you killing the University of Puerto Rico?" It gets really complicated. It's in a complex policy environment. And all Maria did was serve as a catalyst for all of these different pathways, the visions of Puerto Rico's reality, to come up to the surface.

The hurricane exposed all of the ironies, and all of the conflicting narratives.

What is your mission moving forward?

Dr. Pérez: We connected with municipal governments. Instead of going to the state government, we connected with municipal governments, mostly in the mountain regions that were communities that were basically identified as low reconnection priority. After the collapse of the electrical system, it was said by authorities that communities in the mountains were less likely to be reconnected because it was not cost effective. So we drew our attention to that region. While working with mountain communities, we started assembling an electric oasis, a solar oasis. So people in the town square could recharge small electronics, and store medication in small fridges.

We realized there were more than 20 universities from the States coming to Puerto Rico to do several things. To do humanitarian work. Using the disaster as the classroom in a study abroad course, or doing quick response research, rapid grants, from foundations and other funding sources. We realized that those initiatives, although very well intentioned, were disorganized. They lacked coordination. And because there was nobody looking at the big picture, most of the universities were concentrating their efforts in less than 10 municipalities. We have 78 of them. That is a problem for several reasons. From the humanitarian standpoint, if you saturate some areas with aid, but then neglect other areas, that means not everybody is able to receive the aid you’re bringing from the outside. From the scientific perspective, if you base your science in very few, and selected case studies, your science will be faulty.

We started contacting all these universities, and realized that there were teams from the same universities on the ground that didn't know about each other. We started connecting them. We started organizing virtual workshops to give them the context, and to give them the most updated information about the state of the electrical system, because we mainly focused on electricity and sustainability. After that we focused on allowing them to talk to each other, so they could start collaborating instead of competing for spaces, money, etc. Then we invited them all to Puerto Rico for a three day workshop last June to reflect on their experiences, and identify what was wrong and what was right. What can we learn and extrapolate for future occurrences? In the climate change era, these things are going to occur more often now, and in more severe ways.

What do you think the future looks like?

Dr. Garcia: Unfortunately there's many steps, and they are all going to have to be taken at the same time. There is no recipe book for doing this. But the main thing that stands out, with regards to Puerto Rico being an example for both disaster environments and interventions by federal agencies, by universities, by multiple units of government, is that we have a long way to go in learning how to organize ourselves to do better.

We have to build relations in places we know are prone to these events, so that we do not fall prey to the manufactured ignorance we've been talking to you about.

It's life threatening as you can see, by the 2,975 lives that were estimated to be lost from Maria.

More directly for universities, even though were are not set up to be first responders, our experience with Maria has shown us that we are. We end up being first responders. We have a responsibility to look at ourselves, to get together and at least discuss what our role is as universities, in post disaster situations. This goes from how we organize our resources, to how we organize our scientific and non-scientific knowledge, and how we provide spaces of collaboration between different discipline.

Is the goal of your stakeholders forum to raise awareness but also to raise a sense of responsibility in this mission?

Dr. Garcia: Absolutely. If I was going to rank them, the stakeholder forum has been our most effective tool in fighting manufactured ignorance. Not only has it served as a sounding board, and a bulletin board for many, many, many groups who have not historically haven't been included in energy decision making, it has also allowed for an honest dialogue and an open dialogue to exist between university resources and civil society. That is very, very powerful. Especially as we aspire to higher levels of energy democracy in Puerto Rico.

We hope the stakeholder forum internally in Puerto Rico keeps on making big strides towards energy democracy in the islands. And we want to experience that with the RISE platform that can bring a better understanding of what energy democracy involves, not only inside the island, but with other localities around the globe.

To reinforce the point – global warming and climate change are global phenomenons. The relationship between human beings and those phenomenons are local. And as local phenomena, we cannot change that, or expect that one recipe is going to fix every local experience. So it's up to us, universities around the world, to embrace this fact, and to develop new relationships between ourselves and our own communities, and share those experiences between other universities and other communities. That exchange, not only of data, and of science, but also of human relationships, and communication, is the only way that we can develop true local resolutions to what are becoming very, very, wicked problems around us. And if INESI can help in attaining that, then we have been successful.

A Note From the Editors

by franknews

October 1, 2021

A note from the editors,

Two years ago, we spent a month looking at our grid system – we came away realizing that while we are deeply dependent on quick, readily accessible energy, very few people had an encompassing understanding of the system, the grid, that provided our energy.

That sense of disconnect is the same with much of the infrastructure that shapes our modern world. We take the ease that roads, damns, and powerlines provide for granted until they are strained or broken.

It’s painfully obvious that climate change is here, that society, as we know it, has changed, and that the infrastructure that maintains our society must change in response.

September looks at the intersection of climate and infrastructure.

-frank

EDITORSLETTER

We Normalized the Abnormal

by Peter Norton

September 22, 2021

This interview with Peter Norton, professor in the department of engineering and society at the University of Virginia, was conducted and condensed by franknews.

Peter | I study the social side of engineering, including its history and its future. I am specifically interested in mobility in cities, sustainability, and inclusivity in mobility.

You write about something called a “treadmill of car dependency”. Would you tell us a little bit about what that is and what that means?

When you start to accommodate automobiles, you inadvertently start to require them. For example, when you build a society where there are lots of good roads for cars, pretty soon, all the destinations become located far apart, such that now you have to drive. Another way in which this effect kicks in is that if you are used to taking the bus or walking or riding your bike, and you have policies that accommodate drivers, pretty soon, it gets harder to take the bus, or harder to bike, or harder to walk so that, although it may seem like the policies are just giving people the choice to drive, inevitably, they tend to give people the obligation to drive.

When they accommodate car dependency, they're perpetuating car dependency.

Why did we start to accommodate car dependency? If we could go back to between 1915 and 1930, what was our thinking? And what were the interests involved in that decision?

Good question. The usual answer to that question is that this was a market decision, this was a democratic decision. America preferred cars, and in a free society, you have to go along with what most people want to do. However, the more I looked into this, the less the story stood up.

What I found instead was that actually, when automobiles started to appear in large numbers on city streets, around 1915, they were treated as intruders who had to be on their best behavior as the newcomers. The way of looking at who belongs in the streets and who's responsible for safety was hostile to car domination. But by the early twenties, people who wanted to sell cars organized to change those norms. And none of this was a market outcome, and it was certainly not an outcome determined by a majority either. A relatively small, relatively wealthy minority of people was all it took to win car domination in city streets. Interest groups organized to make that happen. They changed engineering standards to favor cars. They changed notions about safety: suddenly fast driving was okay and expected and normal.

Crazy what small tweaks to policy can do to society.

Yeah, it was profound. Maybe even more surprising is that a lot of the experts, a lot of the insiders, actually fought these trends. One of the reasons why we don't remember that is that the automobile interest groups were very smart about giving a megaphone to the engineers who were saying, “yes, we have to rebuild cities for cars.” Those engineers got a huge audience. Again, it was very much of a deliberate effort by the people who wanted to sell us cars.

There's an analogy with the people who wanted to sell their cigarettes. It's not a perfect one, but, if you want to make money from cigarettes, it's a good thing that cigarettes are addictive. Your customer will keep buying. Cars were kind of like that. Once they rebuilt society to accommodate cars, they could count on that treadmill effect.

In terms of equity, what are the ramifications of this transformation?

This has huge ramifications. I'll try to keep them simplified, but they're fairly complex. In the mid 20th century, especially the forties, fifties, and sixties, when car dependency was really proliferating and suburbanization was taking off as well, most of the suburbs were explicitly whites-only through segregation and racial covenants, It was still legal until 1968 to write in your real estate covenant that this house cannot be sold to anybody except somebody of European ancestry. So white people could leave the city and people of color stayed in the city. At this point, the highways are coming along so they clear real estate to put the highways in to serve the suburbs.

So these highways went through majority black and brown neighborhoods with almost no compensation.

They were being expelled to make room for drivers who didn't even live there, to drive through where the local residents had lived before. And the destruction is breathtaking. It's shocking to see. I mean, I think people are acquainted with this now better than they used to be, but it's still just jaw-dropping to see what was done to these cities. I think it's an extremely close analogy with colonialism. In other words, you have the colonial power, in this case, the suburbs, exploiting places under the claim that this is progress, this is what we have to do to have a transportation system that works. Which of course is absurd because what we got instead was a transportation system that actually doesn't even work very well, leaving aside all of these matters of equity. Even many of the motorists are themselves, drivers, by compulsion rather than by choice. People pay a huge part of their paycheck to car payments, insurance, fuel, vehicle maintenance, and so on. In effect, even many of the drivers are part of this system of inequality, but not to their advantage.

So the idea was that this is how the transportation system, as you said, needs to be so that it can work. And it turns out that it didn't work. What are the metrics involved in working on the idea of efficiency? Would you say that we don't have efficiency in the system now?

It's a great question because what you use to measure this has obviously profound effects on your analysis.

For example, if you measure how many people are served, you get a very different answer than if you ask how many vehicles are served per hour. And yet the metric many agencies use is cars. Ultimately we care about the people getting where they're going. So that's a strange measure right there.

Another perverse measure is a delay. “Delay” is what traffic engineers say when they mean that you can't go the speed limit. Delay becomes almost like a magic justification for spending public money to reduce delay on the vehicle. The formula they use is they say, well, your time as a person is worth something, like whatever you get paid per hour, and therefore the delay is costing you this amount of money. And therefore we should spend at least that amount of money to remove the delay. That is absurd in a lot of respects. One of the absurdities is that the person causing the delay is the person driving – the drivers cause each other delay. Another thing is if you want to eliminate delay for vehicles instead of delay for people, then you basically have to pave over most of the city. In fact, a lot of American cities are mostly paved over.

In line with what you're saying, but the solutions to overcrowding and traffic seem to be, build more, add more lanes. I mean the freeways in LA are monsters. Would you suggest a different way to think about the current challenges that we're living with?

Well, we need a total transformation. There are some indications that big change is already underway, but not yet 1% of what has to change. We have to have cities so that you do not have to drive. I'm a historian and to me, it's a little surprising how much resistance that idea gets. As a historian, I'm used to looking at cities that are from an era when no one drove and it actually worked quite well. It was certainly not perfect, not even close to perfection, but there were a lot of things going for it that make it attractive.

A lot of Americans who can afford to take a vacation in other countries will go to countries where a city is a city where you have a hotel room and you can walk to the grocery, you can walk to a restaurant, you could walk to your job if you have one there. In an American city, that's usually illegal. By that, I mean maybe about half of Americans live in areas that are zoned for single-family residences only. And if you live in such an area, no one can open up a grocery store that you can walk to because that would violate the zoning ordinance.

And so – strangely in a time when we have to be doing everything we can to make our transportation less energy-intensive – some of our biggest obstacles aren't that we don't have the technology or the money, it's that we actually made it illegal to do it better.

And that's really crazy. We need to change that.

There are so many other things we need to do. We need to just reverse the priorities. We've reversed them before. One hundred years ago, pedestrians were priority number one. We need to put them back to priority number one. Given what we know is sustainable, inclusive, healthful, affordable, equitable, then it's very clear that number one should be pedestrians. Number two should be cyclists. Number three should be other kinds of micro-mobility, like electric bikes and scooters. Number four should be mass transit — buses, electric streetcars, passenger rail, commuter, rail. Automobiles should be last. If we can reverse those priorities, the amazing thing is not only is that more sustainable, it's also cheaper.

What is holding us back from making that transition?

We have normalized the abnormal. So it's abnormal to think that if you want to go somewhere, even to get a cup of coffee or to get a pain reliever, that you have to get in your car to do it. We've gotten so used to it that we think it's normal. If you look at it from a historical perspective, it's really, really weird. It's really weird that if you want a sandwich, that probably means going through a drive-through.

We have to renormalize what we made abnormal.

And that's not easy, but I think there's some good news: we did it before. We can do it again.

It does seem however that so much of what drove the shift were business incentives. Do you think it's possible to invite change not through business and through communities?

That is one of the biggest obstacles. When there's money to be made, there's going to be groups that are very powerful, making sure they make that money. This is a big problem because right now people are telling us, well, we can have carbon-neutral mobility, but it's going to take amazingly high-tech stuff. You're going to need incredible tech. You're going to need all this lithium, all this nickel, all this cobalt. You're going to need all these sensors. You're going to need all these integrated circuits and processors.

All of those things may be wonderfully helpful, but the problem is that they are only telling us about the things they can make some money on. And they're not telling us about all the things we can do that won't make anybody rich. I'm talking about just making environments where you can bike to work, or you can walk to work.

It's going to be very hard to overcome that business interest model to prioritize what's good for the planet and the people who live on it. But there are some good examples of how even against those kinds of odds, we can do some impressive things. One of my personal sources of inspiration is Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring in 1962. At that time, chemical companies were making lots of money selling herbicides, insecticides, and so on. And they still are, but there were some practices that were going on that were profoundly destructive and they had been normalized.

She wrote a very eloquent book explaining exactly why this had to change. And amazingly, within eight years of the publication of her book, the number one pesticide that she was pointing at was abolished in the US — and that was a very profitable pesticide. How did she do that? She took millions of isolated people and united them in a common cause. We can unite millions of people as well.

The people who sold us car dependency were very smart about it. They learned that you have to give people a beautiful vision of an attractive future. Even if that attractive future isn't even achievable, if you make it credible, people will sacrifice to get to it. We can make beautiful visions of livable cities.

You touched on electric vehicles but how do you think it fits into the picture?

We do need electric vehicles. Electrification is essential. There's no question about it. The fact that I'm critical of electric vehicles doesn't change that fact.

What I'm critical of isn't electric vehicles. What I'm critical of is the notion that car dependency will work if we just electrify the vehicles.

There's a very big difference. We need a world where you have an option of affordable housing from which you can walk to work or take transit or ride a bike. In that world, electric vehicles might be useful. In this world, electric vehicles solve nothing.

The quantity of metals necessary for the batteries is incredibly problematic in its human and environmental costs. And then it's not even clear we could ever get all the metals necessary to do it. The resulting vehicle is inevitably quite expensive – more expensive even than a combustion-engine vehicle. We simply can't afford that kind of resource-intensive transportation system, not to mention the fact that even right now about three-quarters of our grid is powered by unsustainable fossil fuels. We need to get that up toward a hundred percent, but it won't get there if we have a huge new electric demand. The more new demand we put on the grid, the harder it is to get a grid that's from renewable fuels or sustainable energy sources. Electric vehicles are necessary, but they are not the solution.

Are you hopeful?

The new infrastructure bill does not excite me because it's still primarily based on the assumption that driving everywhere is normal. That can't be normal. I am heartened by some elements in it, including some money for freeway removal, which is unprecedented in federal policy. That's huge and encouraging, but, in general, policy does not make me optimistic. The people who are demanding the policy change give me some optimism. I don't think change is going to come from policymakers of their own accord. It is going to come when people unite and demand change.

E. F. Schumacher was the author of a book called Small is Beautiful back in 1973. One thing he said that stuck with me is when we talk about being optimistic or pessimistic, the trouble with saying you're optimistic is that it leads you to be complacent, and the trouble with saying you're pessimistic means it leads you toward resignation and not trying. We just need to do the best we can.

I can't say I'm optimistic, but I don't dare be pessimistic either.

I'd like us to just go about doing what we need to do to make transportation and energy sustainable.

I think that’s probably right and the only way really to think about our climate crisis without getting either overwhelmed or dejected. It is also trite to say but my favorite thing about New York is the sort of interaction that creates community. When I go back to LA, I'm like, this is lonely...

Yeah. Have you noticed that the sustainable path is often framed as we have to sacrifice? I think a lot of the sustainable way forward is actually very attractive for reasons you just articulated. If we can frame it that way, that may help us overcome some of the resistance to it as well.

We're not just trying to survive. There's also a better world that can be built with the decisions we make now.

Back to the smoking analogy. When the experts were saying “you've got to stop smoking,” the tobacco companies framed that as an unbearable sacrifice. And they said, "Well, you don't have to quit if you use this amazing filter on your cigarette." And what people gradually figured out actually is that quitting is hard, but once you've quit, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice anymore. It feels like liberation. And I think there's something very much like that in store for us. If we can get this right and get it right in time, in not being so prodigious in our energy use and in our driving, it can actually be very liberating.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

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