99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-11- 99% Undesigned

Episode Date: November 25, 2010

Almost everything in modern life is designed to waste energy. The whole system evolved on a false premise that petroleum is cheap and plentiful and will be that way forever. The awesome Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on The Brain … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. You may not want to waste energy or burn fossil fuels, but the deck is stacked against you. Everything is designed to just use more and more fuel.

And as you'll see, Lisa Marganelli argues that design might not be the right word, but let's just say designed for now. My name is Lisa Marganelli argues that design might not be the right word, but let's just say it designed for now. My name is Lisa Marganelli, and I wrote a book called Oil on the Brain Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank. First, a metaphor. We are on a tugboat. A couple months ago, I was at a tugboat race, and we were looking at an old tugboat from when they used to be powered by coal. And it was beautiful, it was shaped like a canoe on the bottom. And the house on top was rounded and aerodynamic. Just like it is in the Popeye cartons, it was beautiful. It was shaped like a canoe on the bottom. And the house on top was rounded and aerodynamic.

Just like it is in the Popeye cartons, it was gorgeous. It was all very streamlined to slip through the water and through the air on top. But there's also a newer diesel tugboat. And the hull is relatively square-ish. I mean, it's shaped to go through the water, but things are not scooped the way they were in the other one. And the top is just straight flat pieces of steel. They don't even bother to shape them. They just skimp on all the corners.

And the reason is that when you have a coal-fired tugboat, every bit of coal that you have to put on that tugboat has to convert to power, and you want to reduce the amount of extra fuel that you need to have there. With diesel fuel, it's very easy. It's very plentiful now. It's much easier to just design the tugboat to use more fuel, to waste fuel essentially, then to shape the steel and design that tugboat to use

less fuel. So fuel is our expendable in our economy right now. And the whole world is designed as a big diesel square bottomed tugboat. The biggest waste of energy is the whole system. And the most wasteful component of that whole system in the US is the way we drive to and from work. The whole process of selling mortgages and selling houses over the last 15 years or so is based on this concept of drive to the qualify. So you drove as far out in the countryside as you could stand

to the place where you could get a decent rate on a mortgage and a house with a low enough down payment that you could make that payment. And at the same time, you'd get like more square footage in your house. And what supported that was that you were gonna drive further to get into the city to do your job. And then what supported that was that there were discounts

on really big cars. So if you'd been making that trip in a small car, you might have felt a little bit unsafe, but you could buy this like, palatial car at great discount. And those big cars have horrible gas mileage, but that's not all. Everything along the way acts to burn more gas. Just stopping at a stoplight uses an enormous amount of energy. But it's not just the obstacles. Even barreling down the highway at top speed is a problem. Cars were tuned to be most efficient around 55 to 60. That's the speed the government used to test for fuel efficiency.

So they were essentially designed to be less efficient at the speeds that we really drive them because we really drive around 65 to 70. It's as if some evil genius designed a system so that we will waste gasoline. How evil is this? Yeah. It's more much more banal than evil. If someone sat down to consciously design this thing,

I don't know that they could do such a good job of making a mess of things. It's the tyranny of the lack of design, that tragedy of building a bad idea on a thoughtless notion on a careless plan. Another dumb thing piles on to another dumb thing and pretty soon we've got just a huge tangle of dumb all based on buying gasoline fairly cheaply. And speaking of buying gasoline cheaply, there is something designed, actually designed, to make you more comfortable with all of this when you buy gas. We don't like to be in gas stations, we feel like they're dangerous, and we don't like to be

paying money for gasoline to the oil companies. And we always feel that gas is too expensive, no matter what the price is. So, gas pumps have been specifically designed to sort of diffuse that anger. So, they did some market research and they found that people have warm feelings towards ATM machines, and they had bad feelings towards gas pumps. So they redesigned the gas pumps to look a little bit more like ATM machines. So you felt like you were having sort of an intimate warm experience when you were at the gas pump as opposed to thinking about hating the oil companies. Because we want an experience in tune with our values, Even if what we're doing isn't.

99% Invisible is produced by me, Roman Mars, with support from Lunar. It's a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architect, San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. Find out more at 99%invisible.org.