This election cycle, campaigns are making much larger staff and financial investments in social media marketing, said Michael Beach, a co-founder of the Republican digital-strategy firm Targeted Victory.

“It’s night and day different” from 2008, Beach said in explaining the importance of Facebook now.

Beach estimated that the average campaign spends about 25 percent of its budget on online strategy, and while he thinks the amount will increase as it gets closer to Election Day next November, the percentage will not. The online strategies will be strong supplements to traditional outreach such as get-out-the-vote campaigns and TV spots, but won’t replace them, according to Pew Research Center researcher Aaron Smith.

Consultant Josh Koster, a managing partner at Chong and Koster, a progressive digital-media communications firm, said campaign budgets used to be about two things: raising money and spending it on TV.

But this year’s budgets reflect today’s new media market as more Americans go to the Internet for news. This is the first major election cycle that online strategy is receiving a large media budget for advertising, Koster said.

Facebook and Google are the two most popular places for big ad buys, he said.

This year, Facebook implemented stronger ZIP code targeting, Koster said, and that’s changed the game. ZIP code targeting will become important during persuasion pushes for casual supporters closer to the election.

As of May, 60 percent of all U.S. adults and 76 percent of U.S. adult Internet users are on Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center.

ZIP-code targeting for ads allows even “dogcatcher” races to become visible and contested, Koster said.

Leading up to November 2010′s midterm elections, 22 percent of adults online used social networking sites such as Facebook to connect with campaigns or learn about the election, according to Pew.

Facebook remains a key platform for candidates because of the sheer volume of messages they can send. While email campaigns are restricted by the number of emails they can send to supporters before becoming invasive, Facebook lets the candidates reach voters several times a day, Beach said.

“Facebook and social media make it much easier to organize to raise money and to engage supporters because successful campaigns ultimately are about social organizing,” said Andrew Rasiej, a co-founder of techPresident, a blog that covers how candidates use Web technology.

“If a political conversation is happening on Facebook, then to be able to donate where the conversation is happening is key,” he said.

Directing supporters away from Facebook to make donations on campaign sites leads people to websites they’ve never heard of that don’t surround them with the peer pressure of their friends’ engagement. But even Facebook donation apps aren’t one-step, so some campaigns prefer to direct them to campaign websites, where they have more control of the content.

Republican or Democrat, candidates are running similar campaigns on Facebook, Beach said, they’re just at different phases. Republican Mitt Romney’s supporter list of just more than 1.2 million is in the shadows of President Barack Obama’s 24.24 million Facebook supporters. But ultimately, he said, campaigns try to copy one another whenever a new tool is proved effective.

Koster said he thought Republicans were slightly more aggressive with online ads in 2010 because they were “playing catch-up,” but that it was an even playing field now.

On Facebook, it’s not always about the money. Pew’s Smith said Facebook users tended to be more engaged. They’re more likely to vote, to attend rallies or meetings and to try to convince their friends to vote. Facebook users are five times more likely to consider themselves politically engaged than non-Facebook users are, according to Pew.

That’s why applications that allow campaigns to access their supporters’ data to automatically publish when supporters RSVP to events or share articles about the candidates will be important tools for campaigns in 2012, Beach said.

“Facebook and social media is like a water cooler discussion on steroids,” Rasiej said.

Romney’s team launched a new welcome page on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, said the campaign’s digital director, Zac Moffatt.

The page isn’t a typical “wall” for users to comment on. It links to videos, news, the store and other features. Moffatt said the campaign decided to go where the people were instead of waiting for Facebook users to discover Romney’s website.

Moffatt said the president’s huge database of names from the last six years, gathered by the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was both an asset and an anchor to outdated technology.

Tech decisions made in 2008 would be quite different from decisions made about infrastructure now, Moffatt said.

Still, to compare Romney with Obama wouldn’t be an apples-to-apples comparison, he said. Romney’s online campaign has been building only since April.

Obama, however, has the advantage of powerful analytics that measure how users interact with the campaign’s content, Rasiej said.

“The Obama administration has the advantage of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts,” he said. “Regardless of which candidate, the Republicans are going to be playing catch-up.”

Just because someone is highly engaged on Facebook doesn’t mean he doesn’t interact with the campaign elsewhere, of course.

“There probably aren’t mutually exclusive groups,” Smith said. “The people who are engaging on your website are probably engaging also on your Facebook page or YouTube channel.”

Moffatt said he fully expected that there would be people who voted for Romney and never visited his website.

“Facebook has the ability to get people to take another action,” Moffatt said. “It’s about the timeliness of what it is you’re trying to do: debates, endorsements, big news help.”

Facebook is unique from other social media sites because it’s not only the largest, but it also has a more demographically broad user base — a mix of ages, incomes and races — when compared with sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter, Smith said.

Romney’s team uses Facebook differently from the way it uses Twitter. The candidate often updates in the first person on Twitter, but Facebook is a place for a larger campaign discussion between staff and supporters, Moffatt said.

“Political campaigns are also realizing that Facebook exists beyond Facebook.com (apps, mobile, etc,) and Facebook can be a component of other political activities as well,” Facebook’s Andrew Noyes said. “We’ve witnessed Facebook integration with websites, ‘check-ins’ at events, mentions in speeches, links on TV ads and more.”

With an NBC/Facebook GOP candidate debate approaching Jan. 8, social media has changed stagnant TV debates, Rasiej said. If a candidates makes a gaffe on TV, his or her campaign has to manage it in real time, sometimes before a debate is even over.

“Spin is being created on social media faster than it can be created by spin doctors,” he said. “The candidate who doesn’t pay attention to social media as they’re on TV is blind.”

Facebook has created a new page for the 2012 election to curate campaign information: Facebook.com/USPolitics.

FACEBOOK SUPPORTERS AS OF DEC. 6:

_ Barack Obama: 24,243,220

_ Mitt Romney: 1,207,592

_ Ron Paul: 612,210

_ Michele Bachmann: 272,405

_ Newt Gingrich: 205,351

_ Rick Perry: 171,468

_ Rick Santorum: 34,171

_ Jon Huntsman: 26,949

The sense of unity was a far cry from the divided world around him.

“I didn’t realize it but that was a very influential moment in my childhood to experience this sort of egalitarian thing where everybody’s on a level playing field,” Dickerson said.

That lesson has imbued his life’s work. Dickerson founded Manna Inc. in Washington in 1982. Named after the food provided by God for the Israelites during their travels, according to the Bible, the organization provides a means to home ownership for low-income families in the D.C. area.

In 1997, Washingtonian magazine named Dickerson one of its citizens of the year, saying his organization has restored hundreds of “homes, dozens of city blocks, and a great many lives.”

The foundation for Manna Inc. was built long before Dickerson moved to D.C.

After suffering his own battles with addiction, Dickerson said he had a spiritual awakening in 1964 at age 22. He discovered Jesus, quit his job at the phone company and began working for the North Little Rock Boys Club, helping to integrate it.

“Every white kid except a few left, and we did not blink one moment because this was the good and the right thing to do,” he said. “We just continued to provide the best programs no matter who was there.”
North Little Rock minister Paul Holderfield, Jr. says it was “a mass exodus.”

“One black came in and a 100 whites left. it was crazy,” said Holderfield, pastor of Friendly Chapel. But Dickerson welcomed everyone, irrespective of their skin color — and the youths nicknamed Dickerson “Coach.”

Dickerson then worked to integrate churches in the area, to help low-income people with housing issues and, as a college student, become involved with race relations issues on the campus of what was then Little Rock University.

“It was a great time, though. It’s like I had a personal born-again experience in my own life and the whole society was in the throes of a born-again experience,” he recalled.

In 1971, Dickerson moved to Washington and eventually started his nondenominational church, New Community Church.

The small congregation embraced the social gospel while also emphasizing the importance of having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

At the same time, Dickerson started Manna to help low-income first-time homebuyers facing high interest rates and destroyed neighborhoods that were the center of D.C.’s riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

“Nobody was developing anything in the neighborhoods in D.C. It was not what it is today. Whole blocks and whole neighborhoods were devastated,” he said.

The organization sells homes through equity-sharing loans in which it and the family form a partnership. Manna gets the tax benefits and the family comes up with a payment plan to buy the home within five years. Money from the sale goes into the organization’s Capstone Fund to pay for future projects.

Manna also has homebuyers’ clubs that provide support during the process. Participants meet monthly to learn the tools necessary to make it through buying a home such as how to fill out applications and money management.

Recently, Dickerson was been in preliminary talks to start a program similar to Manna in Arkansas, especially in Little Rock and North Little Rock.
Ethel Williams was one of the first to buy a home from Manna in Washington’s Shaw neighborhood in the 1980s. Although she always wanted to own her own home, she never thought she would be able to afford it.

“I told the homebuyers’ club that I was in that the only way I felt like would buy a home is if I hit the numbers or married a millionaire,” she said.

According to Manna President George Rothman, the organization has designed, built and sold 1,000 homes to low-income people in the D.C. area since its founding.

All of the elements that go into buying a house are handled by the organization.

“Most non-profits act as developers and coordinate the work. We actually do it all,” Rothman said.
Former Washington, D.C. Director of Housing Stanley Jackson first encountered Manna and Dickerson 15 years ago.

Although the relationship started off as an antagonistic one with Dickerson saying Jackson should do more to encourage home ownership for struggling D.C. residents, the two eventually became friends.

“The one thing he taught me was humility in service. What I realized is that service is such a noble profession,” he said. “To see a man who has devoted his whole life to service made me very humble and made me understand that I can take and transition my experiences into services that would benefit those among us that have the least.”

According to Jackson, Manna provides a crucial service.

“If you look at Manna’s performance compared to other organizations, even for profit organizations’ performance, you don’t see any group with such a low default rate,” he said. “Manna does an extremely good job of preparing its clients for the transition from where they are to home ownership.”

Ike Agbim agrees. Agrbim, an architect, lives next to one of Manna’s developments and sees a change in the neighborhood.

“Everything has improved, crime, safety and the feel of the neighborhood. Values have gone up already and are going to go up some more, so we’re really excited,” he said.
Dickerson says God brought him to Washington, but he sometimes longs to return to his home state.

“I’ve never quit missing and loving Arkansas,” he said.

Holderfield, the North Little Rock pastor and leader of a massive feeding outreach to the poor, has drawn inspiration from Dickerson. “He’s one of my closest friends in the world,” said Holderfield. “He just has a love for people that’s so genuine, you can’t help but be drawn to him.”

The holidays don’t inspire warm memories of family and friends for Redd. They’re a hard reminder of the absence of a permanent family growing up as a foster child.

Tracye Redd of Waterloo, Iowa moved to Washington, D.C. for an internship where he speaks out about his foster care experience.

When Redd was about 15, he remembers writing a holiday wish list to give to the director of his youth shelter. It was his second time staying at the shelter, and he was excited to spend Christmas with familiar faces.

“He was really nice,” Redd said of the program director, “if you told him you wanted a CD player, which was cool back then, he’d get you a CD player and a CD or two that you wanted.”

Two weeks before Christmas, though, Redd received a call from his social worker: It was time to move again. He ended up in a treatment center where many of the boys had been in juvenile detention.

Redd was upset and confused. He had battled isolation, homelessness and thoughts of suicide since he entered the foster care system when he was 12—but he didn’t have a juvenile record.

Some of the boys were able to go home to their biological families for the holidays, but because he was new, Redd stayed behind at the facility with strangers.

“Ever since then, the holidays have never been the same,” Redd said.

There were almost 6,600 children in Iowa foster care in 2009, the most-recent year in which statistics were available in a report released by the Children’s Defense Fund.

Teens 14 to 17 comprised 37 percent of kids in foster care, dwarfing any other age group in Iowa. It is a trend mirrored in the national statistics for the estimated 408,000 children in the foster care system, the number in 2010.

But there are groups trying to change that.

Redd is a member of Foster Club, a national program based in Oregon that builds a peer network for foster kids. He was the 2011 Iowa All-Star, learning advocacy and public speaking as he participated in conferences to influence change in the system.

He spent the internship telling his story to foster kids, parents, judges and senators, promoting the idea of permanency, or lifelong relationships through adoption.

Struggling with the adoption option

A lot of kids turn down adoption because they feel they are betraying their biological family, Redd said. “When you’re first in foster care, you want your parents to do better so you can go back home,” he said. They think: “I have a family, why would I want another one?”

Redd isn’t alone. An estimated 107,000 children are waiting to be adopted. Others don’t understand adoption and don’t want to know more about it when asked. Redd was asked about adoption once in passing, but he can’t remember any of the details. It didn’t seem important, and he was never asked again.

Redd “aged out,” meaning he was released from foster care when he was 18.

“Adoption means a lot to me,” said 14-year-old adoptee Alexis Looney from southern Colorado. “For foster kids, at least for me, it’s a day when all the pain of losing people and never fitting in and never feeling loved and trouble spots all just go away because you know you belong somewhere now.”

“Every kid deserves a chance. When you say someone is unadoptable you’re taking their hope away, and it’s just not fair,” Looney said. “Look at me, I’m 14 and I’m adopted. Every child is adoptable.”

Congress is looking for new solutions at the grassroots level through the Senate Foster Youth Caucus, formed in 2009 and co-chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

At a caucus in late November, Wendy’s Wonderful Kids, administered by the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, featured techniques that improve the adoption rate of teens by three times over those not served by the organization.

“A major goal of the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth is to help draw out and spread innovative strategies and best practices in the foster care community,” Grassley said.

What inspires Redd? “I tell myself to beat the statistic,” he said. Redd graduated from high school and wants to attend college in Washington. “If you look at the statistics for black males in America and throw on top of that the foster care system, I should be in jail right now.”

Iowa’s foster youth are 64 percent white, 15 percent black and 8 percent Hispanic.
Black children in foster care are still overrepresented, according to the Children’s Defense Fund.

Two of every seven black children living in Iowa are in foster care. “Thirty percent of the children in foster care are Black, double the percent of the child population who are Black,” the fund said in a May 2011 release.

“I also do it for the people I call my brothers and sisters who are still in the foster care system,” Redd said, “all half-million of them who need someone to look up to, to show them it does get better.”

For more information about adoption in Iowa, contact Iowa Kids Net, a partnership of six non-profit agencies that handle adoption at 1-800-243-0756. For other ways to get involved, contact the Elevate program for foster care and adoptive teens through the Children and Families of Iowa at 515-288-1909.

Since the iPod was introduced in 2001, hearing loss has been an obvious problem among young patients of Brian Fligor, an audiologist at the Boston Children’s Hospital.

“It depends on what you call major hearing loss, but there are a couple of cases (among children and teenagers) where using headphones contributed to a person’s hearing loss that was enough that they needed to use hearing aids,” Fligor said.

These cases generally involved other factors contributing to the problem but were mainly music-related, he said.

Hearing damage from loud music is not always permanent, but prolonged exposure to loud noise can lead to health problems such as hypertension and tinnitus, or ringing in the ears.

Music-induced hearing loss

Noise-induced hearing loss occurs, simply, when sensitive cells in the inner ear are exposed to loud noises. These “hair cells,” which convert sound energy into electrical impulses that are sent to the brain, can’t grow back once they are damaged.

According to the National Institutes of Health, “long or repeated exposure to sounds at or above 85 decibels can cause hearing loss” — noise louder than city traffic but not as loud as a lawnmower. The louder the sound, the shorter the time it takes to damage hair cells.

At maximum volume, an iPod reaches about 103 decibels, which can cause permanent hearing loss in a matter of minutes while listening through ear buds. In-ear headphones, like the earbuds that come with an iPod, send loud music straight into your ear and directly toward sensitive cells.

Noise-amplifying headphones, such as the kind DJs might use in clubs to hear over background club music, can produce louder sounds and take less time to cause irreversible damage. Just 15 minutes of listening at 100 dB can be harmful, according to the NIH.

Hearing loss among musicians can affect their abilities to discern pitch, perceive loudness and recognize where sounds are coming from, according to Kathy Peck, executive director of Hearing and Education for Rockers. Peck said she has noticed a trend among DJs and hip-hop artists losing their ability to hear bass frequencies.

“If you lose your low end, that’s like hearing a train go by, so that’s very dangerous,” Peck said, as opposed to losing the ability to detect high frequencies like birds chirping.

After years of performing, David Beltran has started to notice that he has trouble recognizing lower frequencies through his left ear, and deep voices sound muffled when he talks on the phone on the left side.

The 27-year-old Chicago DJ said that people in his industry often have no choice but to have their headphones at maximum volume for hours at a time – and they often must stand near monitor speakers, adding to the problem.

“I know a lot of musicians who have experience with some form of hearing damage,” said Beltran, who has tried to better monitor his own volume limit since noticing the problem. “When I’m working with other DJs, they’ll have it as loud as possible. That to me is a sign that these older guys are going deaf.”

Portable music players

For regular iPod users, the negative effects of loud listening might not be immediately noticeable.

“Noise-induced hearing loss or music-induced hearing loss happens very slowly over time,” said audiologist Cory Portnuff. “I think in a few years we’ll be able to see some effects of music players on hearing, but we’re still easily five to 10 years away from seeing larger scale effects.”

Portnuff has been studying the effect of portable music players on hearing loss as part of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Colorado. Studies on the hearing effects of portable music players have been around for decades, first looking at cassette and CD players. Portnuff’s research is the first to use a monitoring device attached to participants’ iPods to take away the unpredictability of self-reporting.

Consistent with previous available research, his study found that people will increase their listening levels in proportion to background noise.

But he said the most interesting or rather concerning result of the study was finding that 17 percent of the people monitored were putting themselves at risk for music-induced hearing loss from daily activities, exceeding the maximum allowable dosage for the day.

“It’s a small but substantial group, about one in six people that are putting themselves at risk for hearing loss,” Portnuff said. “That on its own is not a huge number, but when you think about the number of iPods in the world, we start to get a little concerned.”

The biggest concern is that as hearing worsens over time, people may lose some ability to distinguish consonants and understand speech.

Most people are exposed to the problem throughout their lives, though the change is gradual. Some jobs require prolonged exposure to loud noises, such as those in factories or on construction sites. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration recognizes the risk, limiting workers to 40 hours per week while exposed to noise at 85 to 90 dBA. Even then, it’s acknowledged that this doesn’t necessarily protect against hearing damage.

As Beltran recognized a little too late, it’s an occupational hazard for musicians. But going home and listening too loudly to a portable music player increases the risk.

“The best cure is prevention,” Peck said. “We only have one set of ears — there are no spare parts.”

Portnuff recommended casual music listeners follow the “80-90 rule”: listen at 80 percent volume (about 90 dBA) for 90 minutes, then let your ears rest. Sensitive cells are like batteries that need to recharge after a while.

“My car is capable of driving 120 miles an hour down the streets, but as a society we set speed limits because those are safer,” he said. “We need to set some sort of speed limit for music listening.”

Coleman said his company — North Star Development, LLC, based in St. Louis — will be hiring dozens of people this year, and he sees veterans as the perfect candidates for green building positions. As a prime example, he recalls a retired master sergeant with no residential construction experience he recently hired.

“She was able to complete a training program that a lot of science-type people don’t successfully complete,” he said. “Her dedication, her discipline, her strength in getting to the task, I’m sure she got that as a result of 25 years in the United States Air Force.” And now, Coleman said, “She is completely dedicated to the green jobs initiative.”

As the United States withdraws all remaining troops from Iraq this month, thousands of veterans are entering the job market, and many are finding opportunities in the green industry — from manufacturing to leadership to service.

Despite the 8.6 percent unemployment rate, the U.S. has a labor shortage in skilled technical manufacturing, said Kate Gordon, vice president for energy policy at the Center for American Progress, “and it’s exciting that there are people coming back who may have some of those skills who can help fill that void.” Businesses like Coleman’s, which retrofit houses for better energy efficiency and lower utility bills, are an area of opportunity because they use many American-manufactured materials, she said.

Manufacturing comprises 26 percent of the green economy, compared with just nine percent of the broader economy, according to a recent study by the Brookings Institution, the non-profit Washington think tank. And Jobs in manufacturing can be perfect for military personnel because of the technical skills they develop, which aren’t widely available in the U.S. today.

The military is “the strongest force in the U.S. government right now working on renewable energy and energy efficiency,” according to Rona Fried, president of sustainablebusiness.com. “They’ve reduced their energy demand on the bases by implementing pretty standard — and some innovative — energy efficient changes,” she said, “like converting your basic barrack, which has absolutely no insulation.”

Job growth in the so-called green economy has moved faster than in any other sector during the recession. Military personnel have the right skills for a wide variety of positions. But nobody’s saying the jobs are plentiful — the U.S. still has a jobs crisis in many areas of the economy.

This is a field of great potential, but without more public and private support the potential won’t be realized, said Sarah White, a senior associate at the Center on Wisconsin Strategy who focuses on sustainable workforce strategies. “The promise of the renewable economy is there, but the jobs have not been created yet,” White said. “There is not a full bucket of green jobs just waiting for them (veterans) to transition into.”

Since veterans often have applicable skills, and access to services like the St. Louis-based St. Patrick Center that helped Harold Coleman, the jobs that do exist are within reach. Also, President Barack Obama last month signed into law a bill that provides tax credits to companies hiring veterans.

Bradley-Morris, Inc., which claims to be the largest military placement firm in the U.S., has helped veterans find jobs across the spectrum of the green industry. The Georgia-based firm has seen high levels of interest in positions related to manufacturing, management, and service within the clean energy industry — on the side of the veteran job seekers as well as employers, according to company spokesman Bill Scott.

Scott also pointed out that energy jobs that aren’t considered green are increasingly available to veterans as well. “There’s a huge amount of potential roles in the energy grid,” he said. “And that’s anything from these green technologies to traditional oil and gas.”

When Solyndra, an energy company that received a $535 million federal loan and was a darling of the Obama administration, folded last month, it was a major bump in the road for all things green.

Obama said in 2010 that the company, which makes solar panels, was “leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future,” but controversy swirled around how early the administration knew the company was in trouble as it continued to approve government-backed loans.

The Solyndra issue will certainly impact the discussion in Washington and perhaps the industry’s funding, said Gordon of the Center for American Progress, but not the enthusiasm of green job seekers.

The way Harold Coleman sees it, it’s a thriving industry that puts his military skills to use. But it’s also a way to continue defending America. “In the defense of our country we can use guns and bullets,” he said. But “we can also use energy conservation to reduce our dependence on foreign fuels.”

One of the easiest ways to save money and energy in your house was made possible when Warren S. Johnson invented the electric room thermostat in 1885. More than 125 years later, his namesake company, Johnson Controls, remains committed to sustainability in building efficiency.

Photo courtesy of Johnson Controls

Mechanical engineer Clay Nesler has worked for Johnson Controls for more than 30 years and is the company’s vice president for global energy and sustainability. A co-inventor on 10 patents, Nesler is now responsible for energy and sustainability strategy, policy, innovation and the Johnson Controls Institute for Building Efficiency.

He has traveled the world speaking from Capitol Hill to the European Parliament and in such major forums as the Clinton Global Initiative, the U.S.-India Energy Partnership Summit, the World Climate Summit (Cancun, Mexico), the World Future Summit (Abu Dhabi), the U.N. Climate Change Conference and the U.N. General Assembly.

Here, he discusses how sustainability and profitability can go hand in hand.

What do you say when people ask you, “What do you do?”

I am saving the planet for fun and profit.

What new idea or innovation is having the most significant impact on sustainability?

The emergence of software applications to help manage sustainability is starting to have a large impact.

Johnson Controls, like many companies, started using spreadsheets to track our energy use and emissions inventory. When you manage sustainability for a global enterprise with hundreds of facilities around the world, a spreadsheet doesn’t really cut it. We are now able to manage our sustainability data on an enterprise basis and can even compute the energy, water and waste used per unit of manufacture at each factory on a monthly basis.

What is even more exciting is the use of technology to integrate real-time data from different systems, visualize the data in customized dashboards and then identify opportunities for further reductions. Within our own facilities, we have seen great potential to leverage these technologies to continuously improve our sustainability performance.

What’s something that most people just don’t understand about your area of expertise?

Most people believe that sustainability costs extra and that you are trading off financial returns for environmental or social benefits. In the area of energy efficiency, it is clear that you can achieve all three of the “triple bottom line” returns from a single investment. Energy efficiency investments in buildings are like bonds producing double-digit returns with the earnings (energy savings) guaranteed when implemented by a credit-worthy energy service company.

What’s an emerging trend that you think will shake up the sustainability world?

I am really excited about supply chain emissions reporting. I know that it is going to be challenging, but I think reporting direct and indirect emissions provides an incomplete picture of a company’s total environmental impact. We are in a business that makes products that require more energy to manufacture but result in significant energy reduction through use. As we sell more of these products, our direct and indirect emissions increase (which looks bad on the surveys), but the planet’s overall emissions decrease dramatically. We need to account for the total impact across the entire life cycle of products and supply chain of companies in a more rigorous and standard way.

What’s a sustainability trend that you wish would go away?

That’s easy — sustainability surveys. We spend incredible amounts of time responding to surveys from customers, investors and NGOs that are 80 percent similar but just different enough to preclude standard responses. This is an area where standardization would make a lot of sense and save companies and organizations a lot of time and money that would be better spent actually improving sustainability.

What’s an idea you became fascinated with but that ended up taking you off track?

When I first took my energy and sustainability role, I became convinced that monetizing energy efficiency through energy efficiency certificates would solve all of the industry’s energy efficiency financial barriers. Although we have reduced greenhouse gas emissions for our customers by almost 17 million tons since January 2000 through guaranteed energy savings projects, we have unfortunately not been able to monetize more than a tiny fraction of the reductions.

Who are three people or organizations that you would put in a sustainability Hall of Fame?

This is a difficult question because sustainability is so broad. I have been very impressed with cities lately as a model for sustainability leadership and action.

Melbourne, Australia comes to mind as a city that has adopted a series of policies that encourage improved environmental performance both for their own facilities and operations as well as providing “carrots and sticks” for the private-sector to improve their sustainability as well.

In addition to Melbourne, New York City comes to mind as a city with progressive policies to drive sustainability in their own operations and across the private sector. Their PlaNYC, or “Greener, Greater Buildings” initiative, includes retrofitting city buildings, strengthening building efficiency standards, requiring annual benchmarking and disclosure of building performance as well as mandatory audits and cost-effective energy upgrades of large commercial buildings.

I am reserving my third vote for the first country to enact similar policies at a national level and am putting my money on the U.K. or Singapore at this point.

What other field or occupation did you consider going into?

When I was in high school, I seriously considered going into music. My private tuba teacher, who was obviously struggling a bit to make a living, asked if there was anything else I was interested in, and I said math and science. He said, in a very nice way, “Have you heard of engineering?” That was the end of my music career.

What website or app most helps you do your job on a daily basis?

The one website that I visit every day is Greenwire and Climatewire from E&E News. Once a day, they send out links to articles and videos via email and I nearly always click, read and forward at least one or more articles every day. It is a great way to keep up on policy issues without being in Washington, D.C.

What song’s been stuck in your head lately?

Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s Turandot. The Florentine Opera recently staged a wonderful performance of the opera in Milwaukee, and I saw it twice. Of course I am a bit biased, being the Board President.

Photo by Christopher McLallen

Mexico City-native Paulina Reyes seeks to promote social change by making the world more beautiful. Reyes said that growing up in Mexico gives her a passion for bold colors and intuitive design, as well as a cultural connection to the craft. She was formerly the art director of Kate Spade New York and led industrial and graphic design for Victoria’s Secret Beauty packaging before landing at the advertising firm, Mother.

Her sustainable handbag designs for Kate Spade are featured in “Design for a Living World,” a traveling exhibit organized by the Nature Conservancy and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. In 2008, Reyes traveled to Bolivia to work with local craftspeople to create handbags using sustainable wood, cotton and a fiber from leaves of the Jipijapa palm tree manufactured by women in the forest’s indigenous communities. Starting Jan. 16, the exhibit will be on display at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.

Here, Reyes discusses how sustainability is a humanitarian issue for her, which makes her work more socially than environmentally driven.

What do you say when people ask you, “What do you do?”

My answer is always the same: “I’m a designer.” When people ask me what kind of designer I am, I laugh, scratch my head and say it depends on the job I have at the moment or on the particular project I’m working on.

Design has always been a multi-disciplinary profession for me. Since I was in university, I refused to specialize and decided to immerse myself in the areas of product design, graphic design and illustration. My whole career has been about creating work that blurs the borders between these disciplines and hopefully has an effect on people at an emotional level.

I have also tried to balance my very commercial work with work that has social relevance. This has been a challenge, but I have had a few great opportunities for collaboration.

What new idea or innovation is having the most significant impact on sustainable design?

For me, it is idea of sustainable design not only to rescue the planet, but also to rescue humanity — design that takes in consideration the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

What’s something that most people just don’t understand about your area of expertise?

In my personal experience, it tends to be the fact that I define my specialization not in specializing but more in integrating disciplines.

What’s an emerging trend that you think will shake up the sustainable design world?

More than a trend, I think a need to look at sustainability not only as an environmental issue, but a social one as well.

What’s a sustainability/design trend that you wish would go away?

This question is hard for me to answer. Sometimes I feel like companies use the term “green” just for publicity, and I get annoyed. Then, I think that this idea might actually be pushing companies to be more conscious about the materials they use and waste, so it is at least a start.

What’s an idea you became fascinated with but that ended up taking you off track?

I feel like I haven’t been taken off track enough yet — hopefully it’ll happen one day. An idea that really excites me is the possibility of creating a profitable company that can generate its production by using the craftsmanship of women in vulnerable conditions. I have been able to collaborate in three very different projects relating to this matter, and have been incredibly inspired by these experiences. I hope one day I can figure out a way to bring different worlds together through design, education and commerce.

Who are three people or organizations that you would put in a sustainable design Hall of Fame?

This question is a bit daunting, as I know there are so many people who are changing the world in terms of sustainable design. So I’ll mention the people and organizations that have personally influenced me.

1. Women for Women International. This organization (among other things) helps women in war-torn countries attain economic stability by gaining a source of income. While I was a designer at Kate Spade, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Women for Women International by designing winter hats and mittens that were knit by women in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
2. Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí. This Mexican university initiated the program PAZ-Huasteca, which was created to generate progress in areas and communities that are at risk through conflict. It focuses on the Huasteca zone, which is an area in Mexico gravely affected by poverty, violence, pollution, poor sanitary conditions and environmental issues.
3. Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Through the years, I have admired the Cooper-Hewitt’s commitment to spreading the importance of environmentally and socially responsible design through their exhibitions.

What other field or occupation did you consider going into?

For me, it was always about art and design. I ended up in design because I liked the idea of my work being part of people’s everyday life. I have always wanted to make the world more beautiful.

What website or app most helps you do your job on a daily basis?

I couldn’t name one, but I will say I would find it very hard to work without Google these days.

What song’s been stuck in your head lately?

“Hey Moon,” by John Maus.

“Occupy” protestors blocked traffic Wednesday on a march down K Street in downtown Washington.

The march was organized to show anger and resentment toward lobbyists who work with lawmakers. K Street has traditionally been the home of many lobby firms and has become political shorthand for lobbying and influence.

Police were monitoring the march and the “Occupy” group had its own yellow-vested crowd controllers.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military has faced criticism over the ethics of the use of the unmanned aerial vehicles — or drones — as the number of strikes carried out with drones skyrocketed in recent years.

The premise for the criticism is that the robotic technology, formally called unmanned aerial vehicles, is a new type of weapon that has killed thousands of people in recent years, so it needs an entirely new ethical framework.

But others see it as a new style of weapon, not a new style of warfare.

“I think these questions would be more relevant if there had not been a human in the loop,” said Guy Ben-Ari, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic International Studies, a Washington think tank. “Until we have the debate about whether or not to make these systems autonomous, I think that the ethics issue doesn’t really come into play.”

The way Ben-Ari sees it, as long as a human — regardless of where that human is located — is making the decisions behind a weapon’s actions, the ethics should be viewed through the same lens that’s used for other weapons.

“Just by virtue of keeping a human in the loop,” he said. “You are self-insuring — the military is self-insuring — against any sort of misuse of these systems.”

From 2004-07, the United States launched a total of nine drone strikes, followed by 33 in 2008, 53 in 2009, and 118 in 2010, and 70 in the first 10 1/2 months of 2011, a study by the New America Foundation, a non-partisan Washington think tank, stated.

This rapid increase can be attributed to a variety of factors, including technological advances and non-traditional wartime enemies.

UAVs, like the one that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric who called for attacked against U.S. interests, in a September drone strike in Yemen, are controlled remotely — often from thousands of miles away — and can launch strikes on specific targets. Despite their precision, they have been criticized for their potential to cause collateral casualties.

In 2010, 748 militants were killed by drone attacks and 46 non-militants were killed collaterally, the New America Foundation’s recent report “The Year of the Drone” concluded.

Dan Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a conservative think tank in Virginia, argues that drones are more precise and careful than other alternatives.

“We can talk about SEAL team or a CIA paid assassin,” he said, “but honestly, in terms of aerial munitions [drones are] just about the most discriminate capability we have.”

Goure pointed to drones’ ability to loiter and wait for the absolute best time to launch an attack, as well as the precision of the weapons drones carry. This “makes them much more discriminate and therefore moral, ethical, effective than what we had before,” he said.

Asked to expand on drone policy, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, Pentagon spokesman, pointed reporters to a speech by the U.S. State Department legal adviser as the representation of the U.S. government’s position.

In a speech, delivered March 24, 2010, at the annual meeting of the American Society of International Law, Harold Hongju Koh said the United States, when engaged in war, isn’t required to provide its targets with legal process before the use of lethal force.

“In U.S. operations against al-Qaida and its associated forces, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles,” Koh said, “great care is taken to adhere to these principles in both planning and execution to ensure that only legitimate objectives are targeted and that collateral damage is kept to a minimum.”

But because there’s no question that drones are unprecedented weapons. And other experts — such as Peter Singer of the non-partisan Brookings Institution in Washington — say they warrant a new set of ethics.

“New technologies are game changers,” Singer said. “And we should be asking tough questions about them. These are all sorts of questions that we haven’t had to ask before.”

While drone technology has advanced quickly, Singer said the ethics have moved at a “glacial pace.”

“We can’t develop a technology, put it out in the real world and decide after the fact that there needs to be laws and ethics attached to it,” he said.

Drones are operated by pilots sitting in front of computer screens, which look similar to a video game, in locations such as New Mexico and Nevada. As distant as these controls are from the death and destruction they cause, the psychological impacts on the operator appear to be similar to those that combat pilots over the skies of Afghanistan experience.

Any discussion of drone ethics would be remiss to ignore this. To think that drone strikes are so remote that they don’t affect an operator’s psyche isn’t wise, Singer said. Drone operators, despite carrying out a strike and then going home to their families all in the same day, still suffer from trauma, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It’s only the last few years that people have been even willing to talk about PTSD and it’s still not something understood,” Singer said. “So to think we have a handle on this new kind of experience of fighting from afar and its stresses after just a few years would be really arrogant of us.”

Whether drone strikes will play a major role in the future of the U.S. military isn’t in question — they will.

If Singer had his way, the government would be designing official ethical guidelines for the use of drones but little formal action has been taken in this direction.

Here are five things you can do to sharpen your financial savvy as a D.C. reporter.

1. Get on the list

Contact media coordinators and get on the press list for any or all of the following: Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Chamber of Commerce.

If you want to narrow your focus and avoid email overload, choose agencies based on your areas of interest. If you like interest rates and bonds, connect with the Fed and Treasury. If you’re into Wall Street and regulation, the SEC, CFTC and CFPB are the newsmakers.

Being on the press list gives you access to briefings and embargoed information you can use to break the latest stories on economic and financial policy. You’re the first to know, which is crucial for all reporters but especially so for those covering a fast-paced business beat and writing for a demanding, constantly updated investor audience.

2. Go to the right meetings

Don’t underestimate the presence of finance on Capitol Hill. Find out the Senate Banking and House Finance Committee schedules. Take advantage of your press credential and go to the hearings. Why? The chairmen call on top leaders and gurus to testify on topics that affect Wall Street, the economy and thousands of individuals. You can break a story based on the testimonies or use the information from the hearings for an enterprise piece. Either way, you’re getting inside access to the core of domestic and international business policy.

Something else to consider: The SEC, CFTC and CFPB hold public roundtables. Executives from New York often come to Washington. Again, same deal: You can break a story or get ideas for future articles.

3. Dig for buried data

The phrase “follow the money” doesn’t just apply to campaign contributions. Resources like OpenSecrets.org, the Project on Government Oversight and the Sunlight Foundation are filled with provocative data on budgets and the spending that takes place in business-oriented government agencies as well as reports on the financial regulators.

Finally, don’t be intimidated by legislation. It isn’t necessary to pore over every page, but bills and proposals by members of the banking and financial committees are great starting points for stories often missed in daily news coverage.

4. Talk to the experts

There’s no shortage of economists, analysts, lobbyists and professors who focus solely on the financial policy decisions made in Congress. Look up think tanks, lobbying groups, financial firms and universities. My go-to organizations: Brookings Institution, Cato Institute, Center for Responsive Politics, S&P Capital IQ and Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In reality, the list is endless. Find out who the experts are and get in touch.

Have a conversation about the Federal Reserve’s latest policy decision, the newest member of the Treasury Department or anything else you’re curious about. These sources are deeply invested in their topics. You’ll always walk away a little smarter after speaking to one of them.

Lastly, experts come from all sides of the political spectrum. Make sure you know the background of the organization or individual you get in touch with. Talk to a variety of experts to get a well-rounded perspective.

5. Make the connection

It’s easy to get wrapped up in pages of banking legislation and economic data (the Wall Street Reform Act itself spans more than 2,300 pages). The key point is to not get lost in a sea of complicated details. Rather, always stop and ask yourself why you’re looking at a certain policy or researching a specific issue. The important thing to look for is the connection between policy and business. If your stories from the Hill answer questions and shed light on issues relevant to investors and the financial community, you’ve met the goal of business reporting.

Bottom line: Washington – while famous for politics – is at the core of finance and the policies that affect Wall Street, businesses and individuals across the country and around the globe. Embrace your inner nerd, power your brain and break some stories along the way.