Please find below the
Finalist Evaluation
Judges'' comments
Thank you for participating in the 2015 Climate CoLab United States' Climate Action Plan contest, and for the time you spent in creating your entry.
The Judges have strongly considered your proposal, and have chosen to not advance it as a Finalist for this contest.
We, the Judges and contest Fellows, are truly grateful for your contribution to the Climate CoLab and for your commitment to address climate change.
We encourage you to keep developing your work and to submit it into future contests, which will open in the fall and winter of 2016. In the meantime, you can keep developing your work by transferring it to the Regional Climate Action Plan Workspace (http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/1302801); here you can re-open it, make edits, and add collaborators. You can do so by logging into your account, opening your proposal, selecting the Admin tab, and clicking “Copy proposal”. Once the 2016 contests open, you can use this same feature to move your proposal to an open contest.
We very much hope you will stay involved in the Climate CoLab community. Please support and comment on other proposals on the platform and continue to submit your ideas into our contests.
If you have questions, please contact the Climate CoLab staff at admin@climatecolab.org
Keep up the great work. And thank you again for being a part of this mission to harness the world’s collective efforts to develop and share innovative climate change solutions.
All the best,
2015 Climate CoLab Judges
Comments from the Judges:
Comment 1:
Compelling topic, but quite hard to execute and not clear how this will be different from the years of effort in this space—some of which have been quite successful and others, less so.
Comment 2:
This proposal is much needed and has real potential. It could benefit from a tighter prioritization of the proposed actions. Also, the proposal might be strengthened by bringing in as partners public relations firms and/or their trade associations.
Comment 3:
If all the 18 associated proposals discussed here were adopted, the impact would obviously be huge. But what exactly is this proposal other than a list other proposals? I am not clear on the strategy for mobilizing social media, or organizing individuals or communities (though I know the author has done this kind of work before, I think the proposal itself still needs a description of strategies and tactics, not just goals). What I see here is a list of other CoLab proposals, and a proposal that the CoLab itself continue to exist as a place to bring in new ideas. This actual proposal does not add meat or substance as far as I can tell. I would like to see a detailed description of how exactly the social media and organizing campaign would work; how the proposal authors would mobilize the funds necessary to provide the infrastructure and technology necessary to advance some of the more far-reaching elements of the plan (e.g. ocean energy); and how the campaign would turn education into political and policy action. All these are missing, so I have to give this a low score on both feasibility and persuasiveness.
Comment 4:
This is more an amalgam of proposals than a single, coherent idea. It suggests what is widely agreed to be needed: a collection of approaches in virtually all sectors of the economy to reduce emissions through changes in technology, lifestyle and governance. However, while it draws on a host of other proposals, this specific combinatorial effort does not provide guidance as to how these multiple pieces would be knit together -- except to say that a new media approach would be used. Absent a more detailed plan of action that explains what would be done, and how it would differ from the course we are already on, it is hard to see what changes would occur and why.
Novelty: few proposals seek to encompass the full and very wide array of likely actions needed; in that sense, this is novel. However, the proposal does not speak to how to implement this broad vision.
Feasibility: in light of the limited explanation of the tie-in and the implementation tools, it is very hard to assess feasibility. Climate change is a problem that has plagued us for decades, and the proposal does snot better illuminate our options or propose practical solutions with political realism. Impact would clearly be enormous if we did all this. However, I am not persuaded that all these actions could be implemented at zero cost (as suggested in the text)
The proposal does indicate clearly the benefits of action, but not how to achieve it.
Additional Comments from Climate CoLab Fellow:
This proposal is quite bold and would result in reduced emissions. A likely immediate benefit of the proposal is the potential to replace burning of fossil fuels with safe, reliable and less-carbon-emitting alternative sources of energy. However, there are so many ideas and themes presented in this proposal which conflate issues rather than building and supporting the core technical and theoretical backdrop it purports to accentuate.
Rather than advancing a “mega project development approach” (which as currently offered only ends up conflicting the technology and policy solutions presented), this proposal would benefit considerably by emphasizing a bottom-up led approach; as an effective response to the Cartesian dualism that underpins modern lifestyle which continue to create an ecological contradiction between humans and environmental well-being (as well as climate change contradictions). Consequently, as productive capacities of nature, space, and labor are diminished over time, capitalism gently responds to these realities by finding new fields for exploitation, thereby staving off these paradoxes; for instance dwindling oil reserves are replaced by new shale boom produced by hydrofracking. The proposal would have benefited by focussing on a more decentralized, less capital intensive, and bottom-up driven solutions.
The author might also look to other Climate Colab proposals (for example Adaptation, and Shifting Attitudes & Behavior) as well as review recent publications on urban city planning, technological innovation, and environmental economics focusing on the U.S. region, to make this plan more competitive and realistic.
 Dave Finnigan Aug 31, 2015 05:44  | Proposal contributor Kate Gordon - We worked hard as a team with numerous phone consultations and came up with what we feel is a clear statement of what we are doing and how we intend to do it. We hope that what now shines through is the idea that we will be working from the bottom up, not from the top down. Here is an example from real life. I personally worked from 1966-1976 at the Ministerial level as the Population Council consultant to the National Family Planning programs of South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines and saw first hand how working at the "rice roots" level with small incentives, and unleashing the power of marketplaces (so it was in everyone's economic interest to change), could effectively take a program nationwide in a few years. In Korea and Taiwan we were so successful that average family size fell from 6 children to 1.6 in a single generation. In the Philippines the central government tried to run everything by fiat, and when Marcos went out the Catholic church moved in and got Corrie Aquino to dismantle our 2,600 clinics and got the legislature to ban the sale of contraceptives. The consequence is that Korea went from under $1,000 per capita income to over $40,000, whereas the Philippines went from under $1,000 to under $2,000. Population in Korea went from 30 million to 43 million and is falling. In the Philippines it went from an almost identical 30 million to 100 million and the parents are already alive who will give birth to the next 100 million. Meanwhile China saw what we were doing in Taiwan and started a top down and draconian "command" program that was equally effective. So these approaches have been tested in real world circumstances with large populations, and a great deal of what I learned there is transferable and many of us who worked in those programs are still alive. Your next question is how we can reconcile the bottom up and the top down approaches effectively. Here it is important to recognize how any political change takes place. It usually starts with a few people who see the vision of the new paradigm and they need to spread that vision to others (e.g. Gandhi, MLK, Lenin, Jesus). Then the larger society comes along. It almost never starts the other way, with Congress making a change for instance and the people falling in line. First the people make the changes and then the elected officials jump in front and claim to be leaders, or new people emerge from the change agents (e.g. Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, George Washington). So we expect that now that we have a bare bones of a plan for each sector people of good will will step forward with the help of small incentives and awards and recognition to move their sectors forward. I know that the Pledge to Mobilize people will do this, as will the Catholic Church and program such as our own Climate Change is Elementary and Alliance for Climate Action. Just give us all a green light and some guidance and we will not stop, because we have internal motivation for our part of this program to succeed. Once we are really rolling with these low cost and high impact programs the technological tools will become available and the money making will begin. For instance when our program goes out into the community we get families to pledge to specific actions and then we get the vendors of green products and services to offer rebates to schools for purchases by families. This is self-perpetuating. Church organizations, Scouts, and other civic groups will have the same opportunities. So as the Moms and Dads and parishioners and scoutmasters and Rotarians and other citizens get the word and start making changes in their lives they will support the sorts of projects that will change the society writ large. This is not "wishful thinking." This is how it works. This is how change takes place. The question of costs and benefits we have broken down a bit into our 18 proposals for action and our three proposals for adaptation, but there is not enough space to explain them in detail. Suffice it to say that if we are free to tell the truth (by avoiding the "unfair and unbalanced" mass media) and if we can create systems for citizen engagement like the Rapid Prototyping experiment in Colorado, we can get the mass of people to join our efforts at very little cost. The fact that about 1/7 of the World's population is on Facebook at any one time is quite encouraging. The reach of schools at every level and of religious and civic organizations into communities must not be undervalued. Homologous peers are the most credible source of information for most people and we need to do what we did in Korea and Taiwan where we trained field staff to go to villages and enlist participants who joined because it was in their own self interest to do so. Incidentally in Korea and Taiwan we almost never talked about the Population Problem, writ large. We stressed "happy families with few children and high education and good jobs." In the same vein we do not tell kids in schools or parishioners that they will drown or lose their homes to flooding or die of the heat if they do not comply - instead we tell them that they can have a clean and green future for their children and more income and better health if they comply. We lead with hope not with fear. Jonathan Pershing - Feasibility is really high with this project because it does not rely on much outside funding, but relies on intrinsic rewards that come from doing the right thing for the Planet and getting paid with lower energy costs, better health, more wilderness, cleaner air, better water, etc. The synthesis is what we get from Climate CoLab, a single source for ideas and hopefully a single coordinated channel for funding and for administration. We expect that CoLab will help us break down the silos between organizations just as we are breaking down the barriers between all of our proposals. In a sense CoLab has "created a monster" and no matter what happens next the ideas are on the table and actions will take place whether fostered and coordinated by CoLab or not. In a historical analogy Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlic, Garret Harden, Donella Meadows, Lester Brown and others were the great philosophers of our Enlightenment who foretold the transformation. Michael Mann and James Hansen have served as our Jefferson and Adams. CoLab has been convening the Continental Congress annually. Al Gore is Paul Revere and he trained 6500 addition Paul Reveres. What we need now are the generals, colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, sergeants and privates to actually wage the battles and win the war. They are found in schools, churches and service organizations in every community. I asked Bill McKibben to be our George Washington, but he declined. (Honestly) We do need an action officer to be the General of the Armies and she or he will appear once there is a clear path to victory spelled out for that person. They will probably not be the seminal thinker but they will be the critical doer, so Naomi Klein is probably not going to be our Commanding General, but will be an advisor on the general staff, as will academicians at MIT and elsewhere. Maybe if he loses his bid for the Presidency Bernie Sanders will step forward. The right person will appear when required. Novelty - You know the saying "If you keep doing what you have been doing you will keep getting what you have been getting." well that is what is behind our approach. What we suggest is revolutionary. It follows the pathway to success in any social change movement. You always start with Awareness (I know there is a problem). Then you move to Interest (I wonder what I can do to help?). Then you go to Trial (I'll buy lightbulbs and take shorter showers) and that leads to Evaluation (Did that work out for me?). You repeat this duality many times (Trying more and more energy and water saving products and evaluating them one by one.) This leads to Adoption (I have moved from high energy and water use to low energy and water use.) But you still need Confirmation by your peers to eventually move to Advocacy (where you help others move up the path.) The irony is that those of us who are most passionate about this topic went straight from Awareness to Advocacy so we may not understand the intermediate steps our colleagues must go through. In the Family Planning programs in Korea and Taiwan we did find that with small incentives for behavior change we could accelerate this process very rapidly. We can discuss that for Climate Change. Our proposals are linked by having one point of focus, our overriding ethos, that we are answering every day the question, "What do we have to do to get people to care enough to take action?" That works for every subpopulation and it is not out of the question for the same person who brings the Climate Change is Elementary program to their children's parochial school to also promote energy and water saving actions in their congregation. Impact - This project is the only way proven to have impact, but it is also the most difficult because it requires egos to be put aside, silos to be eliminated, and funding to flow not to "technical fixes" but to Information, Education, Communication, and small incentives for big actions at the household or community level. There is not room to explain this in detail, but it is exactly what we faced in Korea and Taiwan when certain members of the national governments wanted to have huge budgets and create massive bureaucracies and we (the foreign assistance community) said "No this is a people problem and it must be solved one village at a time using the wisdom, resources, and tenacity of the Korean and Chinese people." We were right, but that entire era of our foreign assistance history has been all but forgotten. I intend to bring it back. People wanted a happy and healthy future for their children and we showed them how. Americans want a clean and green future and we will show them how to get there one household and one community and one congregation at a time. Presentation Quality - We hope that we have now made ourselves as clear as we can within the limits of the word count and the strictures of the categories. Joseph Nyangon - We hope you are pleased because we have done what you suggested and built this project around the "bottom up" approach, not a "top down" model. Thanks for the assistance.
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