It’s my great pleasure today to have Doug La Follette on the show. Doug is a United States academic, environmental activist, and politician. He is the current Secretary of State of Wisconsin. Known as an environmental activist before running for public office, in 1970 he was a Wisconsin organizer of the first Earth Day for Gaylord Nelson, and co-founded Wisconsin’s Environmental Decade (now known as Clean Wisconsin) with Peter Anderson.
We talk about the history of the environmental movement, how you can figure out the global warming facts from the climate change disinformation, and what you and I can do to make a difference.
To get the facts, Doug recommends these websites:
STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER, CLIMATOLOGIST
THE HEAT IS ON
Cam where’s his wHooiz Profile?
Brilliant Cam. Well done. This guy was great to have on the show. Another episode with him would be great.
One of the difficulties that some American IT companies who encouraged telecommuting found was that not being in the office was detrimental psychologically for many people. It caused increased rates of depression and decreased productivity.
Also when you work from home its hard to delineate work and home time. People end up running personal errands during the day and then working late into the night which increases stress levels.
Steve – he’s in Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_La_Follette
Jason – thanks!
Mizza – hogwash. Being at home causes depression? I want data! The delineation problem is no different from people who take work home with them anyway. Managing productivity is easy. You reward people based on outcomes. Employers like Microsoft have been doing that for years.
Is that why it took them 5 years between XP and Vista?
Also are you saying Whooiz is only for people not in Wikipedia?
Cam I agree with Tony, you need to have those guys in wHooiz.com as well as your average types.
Don’t limit yourself man…just ask him if you can enter it for him 🙂
and then link to him on wHooiz.com NOT wikipedia 😉
Not everyone is good at managing their own productivity in a less formal environment. Its like the kids who do great at highschool with teachers breathing down their shoulders but fail their first semester of uni because they don’t have that structure to fall back on.
The company I was thinking of before was IBM
A couple of articles (couldn’t find the one I remembered the issue from, it was a 2005 article in the age) backing me up.
http://www.sfu.ca/mediapr/news_releases/archives/news09120602.htm
http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/Projects/effect-on-interpersonal-skills/Work3.htm
I just read through one of the studies and the data relating to depression said that in general there were increased levels of depression in teleworkers however working mothers had a decreased level of depression.
But grownups aren’t kids at Uni. They are grown ups. As someone who has worked from home full-time for two and half years, I definitely realize the challenges. It’s easy to take a nap in the middle of the day (like I did today actually) and it’s also easy to work 24×7 (like i do often). But these are both choices.
The point of the conversation is that we NEED to stop people spending hours every day in traffic. It’s killing the planet. Pussy excuses about lack of structure don’t cut it any more than big corporations saying it will be too expensive.
We all need to change.
Tony/Steve, you’re right, EVERYONE needs to be in wHooiz, but remember when I said wHooiz was for people who aren’t important enough to be in Wikipedia? Well Doug is important enough. 🙂
When is someone going to put ME in Wikipedia?
Hi there Cam. I was interested to see what the secretary talked about. I get infuriated when I hear politicians talk about how us domestic consumers should be doing all we can to cut back on the amount of energy we use when it is industry who uses the vast majority of energy produced from fossil fuels.
Example. A couple of years ago I worked on the DCS upgrade for the yallourn W power station. This place has 4x 320 MW turbines that because of provatisation are running at around 110% of their rating producing up to 1.48GW of electricity. To do this, the plant comsumes 600 tonnes of brown coal ( the most polluting kind) EVERY HOUR !!!. There is no sortage of coal either, with enough coal in the coal field for the power station to consume it at 600 tonnes/hour for the next 200 years.
And remember this is just ONE of the power stations in the latrobe valley and most of this power is bound for use in the industrial sector. A steel plant I once worked at had a peak usage of 480MVA. 10MVA is a faily typical load for a suburb.
But its not just power. Industry uses the vast majority of water too. I recently worked on a mineral sands mine that uses 500 cubic meters (1 cube = 1000 litres) of water an hour to produce a heavy mineral sand containing rutile (used to make titanium) and zircon (used in ceramics). Admittedly water recycling cuts this back to 30 cubes an hour but this still amounts to 720,000 litres of water a day, an amount which is a little over half (57%) of the daily water usagefor melbourne during the past week !!
The point of these random facts is that while we should be doing all we can to take the tv off standby, turn off the lights and have shorter showers, it wont be until there is a serious effort made by government to get industry to cut back on their energy/water usage that things are going to change. Keep up the good work with the shorter showers etc but keep pressure up on government too.
Cheers
John McGuinness
John, I’ve actually spent a bit of time back in Microsoft days at Yallourn. I even went down into their open cut mine! It was an impressive site but scary all the same. I brought home a piece of coal and told my kids that it was a piece of wood potentially millions of years old.
You’re right – we need to do our bit as individuals as well as influence our governments. I’ve always figured having greater control over our media is the first step to bringing more political pressure – hence TPN. Until we the people have greater control over the media, it’s hard for us to truly asset much political power.
A better compromise is a 50/50 type arrangement. Do paperwork etc at home but still travel to work for meetings and suchlike.
OOPS, misplaced a decimal point in the water calc in my last post.
720,000 litres/day is .057% of the water usage of melbourne for the last week
but thats still a lot of showers !!!!!
How embarrasment
Trouble with getting people to conserve water is that a lot of people don’t believe the reported reservoir contents etc. I’ve had to show people the reservoirs on google earth to convince them that they are actually that low.
Miriam,
And you can bet your bottom dollar that those photo’s werent taken yesterday either.
Nearly every part of australia is getting dryer, even tasmania. 4 years ago I was working for hydro tasmania (the power utilility) on an RTU upgrade for their gordon power station and lake gordon had only half of its 12.5 cubic kilometer water capacity then. We would go back up to the surface for break time, look accross the lake and see at least 20m down the opposite bank. to the water
In the summer tassie gets all its power from this lake, and every day the lakes level goes down by 20mm.
As far as water conservation is concerned, I think that the only way to make people consider water is to jack up its price until it reaches the point where demand falls off. People will think about water only when its price reflects its real value.
John
Cam:
The next time you talk to La Follette, perhaps you can discuss Wisconsin’s current prohibition against building new nuclear power plants.
I recognize that there are plenty of points of controversy about the subject, but people consume electrical power in their daily lives and it has to come from somewhere. Telecommuting, for example, is dependent upon reliable electricity both for the PC at home and for the servers and communication systems that make it possible.
In Wisconsin, as of 2004, more than 67% of the electricity came from coal while almost 20% came from nuclear power plants.
Unfortunately, the coal contribution has been increasing – since 1990, coal fired electrical power production in Wisconsin has increased by more than 27%; nuclear has remained essentially constant. (Stats for electricity production by state can be found at http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/wisconsin.html
Though utilities in many states are now considering nuclear power, there are no indications that they are thinking about trying to build in Wisconsin. Instead, the most likely source of new power there is coal. Here is a page on the WWF site talking about one proposed project – http://takeaction.worldwildlife.org/results/wi_plant.asp
Aside from your complete failure to take the opportunity to plug The Atomic Show when Mr. La Follette mentioned power production, I was simple disappointed that you did not ask what other electrical power production methods he favored.
Rod, I was just laying the groundwork so I could get you on the show the next time I interview him! I didn’t want to steal your thunder. 🙂
Now you’re talking! I guess I really do need to find your Google calendar so I can see when you have that next chat with La Follette planned.