TEXT SIZE
SEND TO A FRIEND
PRINT
MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONHow Many Americans Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb?
Joan Ogden On The Nation's Uncertain Energy Future
The complete text of this selection is available in our print edition.
This page contains a photograph which requires the Flash plug-in to be viewed. You can download it for free, here.
I first met Joan Ogden in 1976, when I became part of a long-standing communal household called “The Place” in rural New Jersey. Already a resident, Ogden introduced herself as a “hippie guitar player who does physics on the side.” Actually my new housemate had a PhD in theoretical plasma physics from the University of Maryland and was doing postdoctoral research at Princeton University.
Living with Ogden improved both my social life — we threw great parties, and she took me to folk nightclubs — and my environmental consciousness. While I attended protests against nuclear weapons, she worked on developing alternative energy sources in her lab at Princeton. At home she used an old treadle sewing machine to make fabric-covered foam inserts for the windows to keep out the winter cold. She also installed a wood stove that heated our large, drafty farmhouse better than the open fireplace ever had.
After concluding that nuclear fusion — a less-contaminating source of nuclear power than the existing fission reactors — would not be feasible in her lifetime, Ogden shifted her attention to solar power, biofuels, and hydrogen. In 1985 she joined Princeton University’s Center for Energy and Environmental Studies as a research scientist, and she went on to work at the Princeton Environmental Institute. She later traveled to Jamaica, Barbados, and Brazil to explore how to make fuel from sugar cane. In her free time, Ogden recorded a CD and toured Eastern Europe with her “Balkan boogie” band, biked across France with her husband-to-be, and sailed around the Caribbean with her rock-and-roll band Hardly Tight.
Ogden has won awards for excellence in research and development from the U.S. Department of Energy, and teaching and public-service awards from the University of California. She has written many journal articles about alternative fuels and is coauthor of Solar Hydrogen: Moving beyond Fossil Fuels (World Resources Institute).
She is now professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California at Davis, and codirector of the Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways program at the Institute of Transportation Studies.
Ogden lives with her husband and their two daughters in the Village Homes section of Davis, a twenty-five-year-old planned community devoted to environmental sustainability. The family bicycles to work, school, and the weekly organic farmers’ market.
Kendall: Many people believe that General Motors and the other big carmakers have actually developed cars that use almost no gasoline, but they don’t produce them. Is that true?
Ogden: Yes and no. Could the manufacturers produce cars that are much more efficient than what we have now? Without a doubt. Some cars on the market now are already quite efficient — most notably smaller, lighter-weight cars with hybrid engines, which operate on a combination of gasoline and battery power and can get fifty or sixty miles to the gallon. And the carmakers could push that mileage even higher by making the cars more lightweight, more streamlined, with a little less power. So, yes, these technologies exist, and the cost to put them on the market is not that high. The reason Detroit doesn’t do it is that the carmakers think people want big cars — and, not incidentally, they make a lot more money selling an SUV than they do selling an efficient compact.
U.S. auto manufacturers turned their backs on hybrid technology in the early 1990s. They thought no one would want a hybrid car. The Japanese automakers, however, continued to develop it, and when they began offering hybrids in the U.S. around 2000, they found a ready market here — so ready, in fact, that for a while they couldn’t keep up with demand. It seems there are plenty of people who want to buy “green” cars. The fact that this technology is popular with some consumers has caused U.S. automakers to offer hybrid vehicles as well.
Now, if we had political leadership that told us that greater fuel efficiency was our societal duty as good world citizens, then driving an SUV might come to be as socially unacceptable as smoking is now.
Kendall: But because the car manufacturers make more money selling larger, less-efficient vehicles, they market those vehicles more aggressively.
Ogden: Yes, but it’s hard to determine to what extent the automakers have created the desire for bigger cars. I think that public opinion is shaped by more than advertising efforts. Think of cigarette smoking: the tobacco companies actually used to promote cigarettes as “good for you,” but once the evidence got out that smoking is unhealthy, they couldn’t do that anymore. Similarly, there’s evidence that burning too much gasoline is unhealthy for us and our planet. At some point, when the social mores change, companies have to change, too, to stay in business.
