Nudging in a more enlightened direction

Rob Greenland has an interesting post on The Social Business about the encouraging reduction in plastic bag use – and the even more encouraging way it’s been achieved:

'It's in the news today that supermarkets just missed their target of 50% reduction in plastic bag use (they got to 48%). I'm not a big fan of supermarkets but I think on this one they need to be congratulated. Remember the reaction against proposals to tax plastic bags, and how, many believed, people would never change their habits.

'Far too many bags are still used but a 48% reduction is a massive improvement. If businesses and the public can get their act together on this issue, what other seemingly impossible environmental problems might we solve? It may also suggest that it's better to nudge people into doing the right thing (like the clever question the checkout assistant was trained to ask), rather than taxing them into behavioural change.'

I couldn’t agree more with his recommendation of the nudge-nudge approach and would like to add a couple of simple but effective options that wouldn’t even need nudge-nudge because they would not only achieve savings automatically, but would also be be virtually free and require no new targets or elaborate regulatory controls.

1. ALLOW LEFT TURNS AT RED TRAFFIC LIGHTS
If you’ve ever driven in the USA, you’ll know that most states allow drivers to turn right on a red light if there’s no traffic coming from that direction.

This was arguably the single most important legacy of Gerald Ford’s administration and saves fuel by reducing (a) idling time and (b) the number of times you have to start off from a complete stop. Apart from reducing overall fuel consumption and emissions, the rule brings the added benefit of instant financial savings for motorists and transport companies.

In the UK, for obvious reasons the equivalent would be to permit left turns at red lights – and could be introduced instantly at minimal cost to the taxpayer.

2. REDUCE ROAD AND STREET LIGHTING
In an age when car head-lights are so much better than they used to be, why do there have to be so many lights on so many miles of motorway – and why do they stay on into the early hours of the morning?

And can we really justify so many street-lights in our town centres, suburbs and villages?

Whereas the first recommendation could be brought in instantly, this one would need a bit of experimentation to get the balance right. As a start, I’d suggest turning off 50% of all road and street lighting and see what happened.

Moon rhetoric from Neil Armstrong, JFK & Werner von Braun

About twelve years after the moon landing in 1969, I started writing about the power of rhetorical techniques like the contrast, and remember being vaguely amused and delighted when I realised that, of all the possible things that Neil Armstrong could have said 40 years ago, it was a simple contrast that was beamed back to earth.

[A] That's one small step for man;
[B] one giant leap for mankind.



But this historic achievement was also the fulfillment of earlier memorable rhetorical flourishes from President Kennedy, who’d committed the USA to land a man on the moon within a decade. And here he is cranking out a contrast and rounding off his message off with a three-part list:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,

[A] not because they are easy,
[B] but because they are hard,

because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is

[1] one that we are willing to accept,
[2] one we are unwilling to postpone
[3] and one we intend to win.

(The full text of the speech is HERE).



Rocket scientist though he may have been, Werner von Braun, without whose brains NASA might never have met Kennedy’s deadline, was no slouch when it came to coining memorable quotations.

When the first of the V2 rockets he’d designed for Hitler hit London, it’s been claimed that his mind was already on space – as he was quoted as saying: "The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet."

Other famous lines from von Braun include the following:

“Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.”

“Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity.”

“Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.”

“Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go -- and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.”

“We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.”

“There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further.”

“Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.”

“It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.”

“For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.”

For someone who helped the Nazis to develop the V2 rockets that launched so much terror and destruction on London, US citizenship wasn't such a bad gift either.

Rhetoric revival?

In case you missed Sal Pinto's comment on a recent post, he's drawn attention to the news that a new MA course in Rhetoric is about to be launched by a British University, full details of which can be inspected by following the links from HERE.

As he says, "Progress!".

The picture, by the way is of one of the 'old schools' in Oxford, not the University of Central Lancashire where the new MA will be taught.