Jeremy Miller

Artichoke thistle flower in Wildcat Canyon Regional Park. Citizens with smartphones can help in a statewide weed-mapping initiative.

If you have a sharp eye for invasive plants – and a smartphone – you can help a Bay Area non-profit in its effort to document the distribution and spread of invasive plants across California.

The Berkeley-based California Invasive Plant Council, or Cal-IPC, has found that weeds cost the state at least $82 million annually in terms of increased erosion and flooding, degraded agricultural land and reduced water supplies.

California is hardly alone. A 2005 study by researchers from Cornell University put the nationwide cost of battling invasive weeds at a staggering $120 billion [PDF].

Climate change is making the issue even more complex, says Doug Johnson, Cal-IPC’s executive director, who is trying to better understand how non-native plants may respond and how they may gain advantage over native plants during prolonged bouts of warming or cooling.

“It’s not as simple as saying climate change is going to make everything worse in terms of invasives,” Johnson told me. “But in general, invasive species are generalists and are able to outcompete native plants. They also tend to thrive on disturbance, so a change in conditions that may impact other species more harshly may end up favoring invasives.”

In order to keep track of California’s weeds, and, more importantly, where they’re spreading, Cal-IPC has worked with state and local experts to evaluate a list of invasive and noxious plants.

“We went through those plants, looking through all the quadrangles of various counties or regions and decided how generally abundant they are, whether they are spreading and if they are under management,” said Johnson.

With the data compiled, the group built an interactive, public site called CalWeedMapper, which uses a mosaic of 7.5-minute quadrangle tiles (covering an area of roughly six by eight miles). Though the map’s resolution is still very “coarse,” according to Johnson, the group has begun to harness the collective power of thousands of smartphone-wielding amateur botanists. Mountain bikers in Mendocino, say, or hikers in the Alabama Hills on the east slopes of Mount Whitney can take note of invasive plants and upload their locations to CalWeedMapper by way of a smartphone app called Observer.

The site is tied in with two other large databases operated by the Consortium of California Herbaria and Calflora, which, Johnson says, enhance the precision and reach of the group’s citizen mapping effort.

The effort comes at an opportune time, particularly with so many fires burning across the state and the West. Cal-IPC is particularly concerned with so-called “fire followers,” invasive plants such as cheatgrass, star thistle, knapweed and scotch broom that tend to expand their range as fires scour the land.

“With climate change, one of our main areas of concern is the Sierra. As temperatures warm, invasive species may be able to move up in elevation,” said Johnson. “There are also rangeland species from Plains states, which are often brought in [inadvertently] on heavy equipment and can take off in areas cleared by fire.”

If you are interested in helping Cal-IPC in its weed-plotting effort – and in downloading the Observer smartphone app – you must first register with CalFlora.

Craig Miller / KQED

Wind turbines in Solano County. 78% of Californians polled favor federal support for renewable energy.

Much has been made lately of Berkeley physicist Richard Muller’s recent “conversion” to the position that global warming is both happening and stoked by human activity.* But it turns out that the controversial scientist and author has been playing catch-up.

In a statewide survey released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), 60% of Californians polled said that the effects of global warming have already begun. Asking the question in a slightly different way, both the Brookings Institution and the Pew Center for People & the Press found that in 2011, 60% and 63% of Americans, respectively, believed that there was solid evidence that global warming is happening.

Californians took it a step further, however, with nearly three-in-four of the 2,500 participants responding that government should take steps to “counter the effects of global warming right away.” PPIC conducted the survey in July and it includes responses in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese.

Interestingly, Californians’ acceptance of mainstream climate science has flagged slightly from its peak from 2006-2008 — about 65%. LIkewise for opinions about the need for immediate climate action, with 80% of people responding, “yes, right away” in 2008. That enthusiasm waned some over the next several years, as Al Gore’s groundbreaking warming documentary faded in memory and critics launched high-profile attacks on the science. The Brookings study indicates that people often connect global warming to the experience of warmer weather, so it may have helped that a severe heat wave has made national headlines this summer.

Californians for the most part favor policies that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Seven -out-of-ten respondents say they support AB 32, California’s law requiring the state to reduce its warming emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. And they support California’s tendency to go it alone, passing stricter regulations and laws than the national standards.

But don’t ask for too many details as a whopping 57% had never heard of cap-and-trade, the system of emission permits that can be bought and sold between companies. It’s the centerpiece of California’s strategy to comply with AB 32 and companies will begin trading permits in November. To be fair to the survey participants, once the policy was spelled out in the question, more than half the respondents said they favored cap-and-trade.

Let’s recap: for the most part Californians believe global warming is happening now, and something should be done about it now, including policies that would force emissions down. Some of the things favored include requiring greater energy efficiency in buildings, higher fuel economy standards in cars and trucks, and encouraging city planners to change land use and transportation strategies in order to reduce the number of cars on the road. The responses to questions about energy production, however, are a bit more mixed.

Nuclear power plants like this one at Diablo Canyon have fallen out of favor with Californians since the nuclear disaster in Japan. (Craig Miller/KQED)

Respondents were exactly split 48%-48% on whether to allow more oil drilling off the coast of California, and 63% oppose building more nuclear power plants. That number has gone up since the disastrous tsunami and nuclear meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in March of 2011. Californians are also divided on “fracking,” the controversial process used to extract oil and natural gas from rock formations. Of those familiar with the term, slightly more oppose using the method in California (46-42%). Variations on the technique have been used for years in California’s oil patch. The current debate centers on using the method to wring natural gas out of shale formations.

On the question of renewable energy, Californians overwhelmingly favor of more federal funding to develop wind, solar and hydrogen technology, despite varying reports on the nation’s commitment to renewable energy.

*Hear an hour-long discussion with Muller, host Scott Shafer and Climate Watch Senior Editor Craig Miller, on KQED’s Forum program.

Stanford University

Stanford professor Noah Diffenbaugh is using real time, online video chat to engage the public in discussions of climate science.

Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford, has focused largely on climate variability and the influence of humans on the global climate system. Lately, he’s also being spending time in the cloud.

In April, he launched an online discussion forum called Hangouts on Air, in which participants from anywhere around the world (with a broadband connection, that is) can participate in real-time online discussions about climate.

Participation has been limited in these first months, but Diffenbaugh says the model holds promise for engaging the public on the complex, contentious and rapidly evolving issues in climate science. He agreed to answer some questions for Climate Watch.

Jeremy Miller: How did you come up with Hangouts on Air and the idea to use online, real-time discussion to engage the public on the topic of climate science?

Noah Diffenbaugh: I haven’t had a blog or been on social media prior to the Hangouts on Air. The hangouts, technologically, have afforded some opportunities for communication that don’t exist in other venues. It allows for direct interaction with people all over the world.

JM: Is this an outgrowth of your work as a researcher and an educator?

ND: Yes, but certainly in a different way. The conventional media certainly has a broad reach and I answer questions for them quite a bit. I also do a lot of public talks, whether it’s at the local church or some other group asking to hear about climate change. And that also has a broad reach to it.

But as you’ve seen in the videos, people from all over the world can come in online and I can talk to them directly about climate change, answer any questions, and clarify any misconceptions they may have. One important point is that our work is supported, in part, by public funding for research and we therefore have a responsibility to communicate with the public that is supporting our research.

JM: Have you been able to reach out to groups you once thought you might not have been able to engage?

ND: Certainly. I’ve been in contact with people from all over the world and all different walks of life. I don’t necessarily know who is going to be there before I come on. It could be a student studying development economics in France – someone I wouldn’t otherwise engage with. But we can do a Hangout and talk about climate. I’ve also done hangouts that don’t appear on air with high school classes.

There have been cases where participants have asked questions that are stimulating for the research or pointed out studies that I wasn’t aware of. The public is really smart and I always get a lot out of it. There is a feedback and I’m enriched by it.

There is also a real-time aspect. Some people are in the hangout and you can see them on the screen and they can talk. And then there is a second group who watch while the hangout is going on. They sometimes post questions but don’t want to jump into the live discussion. Then there is a final group that watches the video of the post after the hangout is done. This is the largest of the audiences. There is apparently more interest at this point in watching the conversation after the fact than being in it.

JM: With a complex and politically charged topic like climate change, how do you set up the discussions? Do you establish ground rules to guide the discussions or do they just sort of happen?

ND: That’s a challenge in general, whether I’m talking to another parent at my eight-year-old’s soccer game or talking to a Congressperson. We’re trying to communicate our understanding of reality in a way that can be understood. So the context certainly varies greatly depending on who we’re talking to.

When you’re answering a reporter’s question via email, for example, you are forced to craft a response and then someone reads that response. That’s very static. In the hangouts, I actually find that it’s easier and more dynamic. I find it easier to communicate when somebody is communicating back, because they can reflect on what they understand and don’t understand. The level of understanding is enhanced in a form of communication where the public is an observer and a participant.

In all of my scientific work I’m trying to communicate objectively and rationally. And I think that the benefit of having a conversation with someone – whether it’s face-to-face or via video technology – is that it provides some sense of the humanity of the person you are engaging with. I’m a human who is a scientist. I think that the ability to have a conversation – rather than just reading a name and a title attached to an article – makes it a direct experience and reduces the political echo chamber effect.

Kimberly Ayers

Green roofs like this one at Vista Hermosa City Park are part of the solution for Los Angeles

Listen to the radio version of this story on The California Report.

The City and County of Los Angeles now have customized climate predictions, thanks to a new UCLA study that took global climate science and made it local. A UCLA supercomputer ran for eight months to downscale 22 different global climate models, distilling them into a surgically precise look at L.A. County and beyond. It’s a new kind of Hollywood close-up and it’s a sobering one: temperatures will rise in areas of Los Angeles County by an average of 4 to 5 degrees by mid-century.

Commissioned by the city of Los Angeles, funded by a U.S. Department of Energy grant and conducted by UCLA’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, the study focused on forecasting for the metro area between 2041 and 2060. But instead of relying on the global climate model grids that use data from 100 kilometer-square cells of the earth’s surface, the UCLA team’s “quintillion-plus” calculations — yes, that’s with 18 zeros — zoom in to a resolution of 2 square kilometers, just over a square mile.  So instead of data and forecasting for the whole county, you can talk specifically about climate change for Corona, for example.

Mitigating those risks is a whole lot easier to sell when the science has your town’s name on it. County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky told me. “That’s what this study has done. It’s given us the science. It’s not anecdotal. It’s not instinct. It’s based on science and it’s very specific.”

And there’s a brand new website, c-change.LA, that includes a slew of suggestions for Angelenos looking to mitigate and adapt to climate change in their own neighborhoods. This new study also gives further momentum to the city’s existing program, Adapt LA, which was started five years ago to green up the city’s energy and landscapes and clean up its air, efforts the city’s mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants to keep moving.

“This stuff isn’t a luxury. We gotta do it. We can target it smart, we can do it in a way that’s phased in, but we’re definitely going to have to move.”

ABAG/MTC

Drawing of a proposed string of high-density, bike- friendly, mass transit-oriented developments along a stretch of El Camino Real between Daly City and San Jose.

A sweeping “green” vision for the future of transit and housing in the Bay Area inched a step closer to realization in Oakland last night.

Officials from the Association of Bay Area Governments and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission voted on portions of Plan Bay Area, a 25-year strategy for land use and transportation for the Bay Area’s growing population, which is expected to surpass nine million by 2040.

The plan also proposes ways to meet the state’s greenhouse gas reduction target of 15% by 2035 outlined under SB 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act – namely by encouraging high-density housing near transit hubs and along corridors.

“What this strategy is about is trying to be more efficient in our use of land,” MTC executive director Steve Heminger told KQED’s Cy Musiker before the meeting, “and also trying to be more cost-effective with our transit investment. As repeated studies have shown, if people live near BART they’re much more likely to use it than if they have to drive a long distance to get there.”

But the meeting was not without its share of contention. Some in attendance viewed the plan as an example of bureaucratic overreach. One resident called the document a “utopian masterplan.” Another said it was “quasi-dictatorial” and “collectivist.”

Others in attendance, such as Carl Anthony, co-founder of Oakland-based Breakthrough Communities, said the plan does not go far enough to address long-standing historical inequality in housing and access to transit across the region. His group was part of a larger coalition of social and environmental justice groups in attendance called Six Wins for Social Equity.

“Many people are very disappointed,” Anthony told me. A high-profile figure in the Bay Area environmental justice movement, Anthony said that among other things, the current version of the plan does not take public health into consideration, nor does it ensure that proposed investments in high-density housing won’t displace poor communities near transit hubs.

“We want to make sure the public participation we’ve invested for the last 18 months means something,” he said.

A 2011 analysis of the goals of SB 375 by the Public Policy Institute of California suggested that policy should make driving more expensive to get people out of their cars, and that it’s just as important to co-locate transit with jobs, as with housing.

A final draft of the Bay Area plan is expected later this summer, said Napa County commissioner and president of the Association of Bay Area Governments, Mark Luce. From there, he said, completion of the Environmental Impact Report is expected to take about six months.

Phil Schermeister

Sacramento is one of the cities competing to be "Coolest California City."

We must’ve missed the opening ceremonies with the parade of flag-bearing competitors and giant torch-lighting — or maybe it was canceled to save energy. Either way, ten California cities are competing over the next year to reduce their carbon emissions.

Individuals, local governments and businesses will all be involved in the project, called the Cool California Challenge. The Cool California website has a carbon calculator, tips on reducing your footprint and links to rebates. Plus there’s a social media element, so you can envy, goad or cooperate with your neighbors as you see fit.

The competing cities are Chula Vista, Citrus Heights, Davis, Gonzales, Pittsburg, Pleasanton, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, San Jose and Tracy. Participants — whether they’re individuals, companies or other types of organizations — earn points by being more carbon-conscious.

The competition is just for those ten cities, but anyone can use the handy tools the website offers. I tried the carbon calculator. It just took a few minutes to tally up my score, and I have to say, I was pretty pleased with myself and my carbon footprint: 57% the size of comparable households in my area. Oh, but still 275% of the global average. So, there’s room for improvement.

At the end of the year, the city with the most points will win the coveted title, “Coolest California City.” The project was created by the California Air Resources Board and UC Berkeley’s Cool Climate Network.

Molly Samuel

Tracking of when flowers bloom--and how the date changes over time--can help provide insight into how they're affected by weather and climate change.

The participative science project known as Nature’s Notebook is closing in on its one-millionth observation. The crowd-sourced program collects data from across the country on the timing of natural events like plants flowering, leaves growing and eggs hatching. The study of those seasonal life stages, called phenology, gives scientists insight into how they’re connected to each other, and how they’re affected by climate and weather.

Jake Weltzin, the executive director of the USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN), which manages Nature’s Notebook, said he thinks that spring arriving ahead of schedule across much of the country has sparked people’s interest.

“The early spring got people excited,” he told me. “They’re wondering what’s going on.” Weltzin said he and the USA-NPN staff noticed that they were approaching the one-million mark much faster than they thought they would. “We’re gaining 5,000 observations a day,” he said. They had planned to send out a press release before hitting one million observations, but they may not have the time. “We’re just hanging on for dear life.”

Weltzin says this type of data is important because it can provide long-term information on plants and animals that eat them. If the timing of their life cycles is changing due to climate change, he says, we need to learn what impacts that could have, and how — and if — humans can help them adapt.

Read More:

• USGS blog post: Join Citizens and Scientists Tracking the Pulse of Our Planet

Henry Coe Park in Santa Clara County is big: 87,000 acres of former ranch land, dotted with oak trees, meadows that burst with wildflowers each spring, and vast stretches of chaparral. Given that Coe is nestled near Silicon Valley, it makes sense that the retirees who volunteer here bring a certain technical bent to their appreciation of the place.

Case in point: the Lick Fire of September 2007 (Craig Miller reported on it for The California Report). Named the Lick Fire after it was first spotted from the nearby Lick Observatory, the wildfire burned 47,760 acres in the Mt. Hamilton Range by the time it was contained, eight days later.

Since then, citizen scientists who volunteer for the park have been paying close attention to see how the burned land bounces back. In particular: Bob Patrie, a former project manager in Silicon Valley, and Winslow Briggs, Director Emeritus at Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Plant Biology. Together, they’ve pored over satellite imagery to document the impact of the fire on various plant communities in Coe Park.

They used data from the Landsat 5 satellite (before it failed last November). There have been seven Landsats, each designed to provide overlapping coverage of nearly the entire surface of the earth on a regular basis.

Patrie and Briggs zeroed in on a technique for determining the severity of wildfires known as Normalized Burn Ratio, or NBR.

Patrie explains that the chlorophyll in growing plants soaks up red and blue light to maintain photosynthesis, but reflects infrared light to keep from overheating. “This pattern of reflectance is unique to growing green plants. Thus the difference in reflectivity between near-infrared and visible red light from any particular patch of land (NIR-RED) is strongly correlated to the level of photosynthesis from that same patch.”

Patrie and Briggs decided to study four plant communities:

• Mixed chaparral
• Gray pine oak woodland
• Mixed oak woodland
• Ponderosa woodland

“These communities are not mono cultures, nor was the burn intensity uniform over each area,” Patrie says. Just so, they found something interesting: plant life bouncing back after a fire, “tops off” at the same point as before the fire. “You can see that there’s an intrinsic limitation to the amount of any given plant in any given territory,” says Patrie. “It’s true in each kind of ecosystem.”

What they haven’t been able to answer is why bulb flowers “just went crazy” after the fire. Briggs says “Native Americans knew that. They’d do a burn, then harvest the bulbs, some of which are edible.” But the question remains, “What signals to the bulb to flower? The smell of smoke?”

That’s a question they’re still exploring–and can explore further, now that it’s clear the park will stay open, a story told on The California Report on Monday.

Explore KQED’s entire series, “California’s State Parks: On the Rocks,” at our special coverage page.

Molly Samuel

An iPhone can be a field guide, a tool for recording observations and a way to share data.

Today is the first day of the annual Great Backyard Bird Count, when people all over North America tally the birds they see and record their results on the GBBC website. It’s a simple citizen science project to try. Even if you don’t know your birds, you can print out a list of what you’re likely to see in your area to help figure out which bird you’re looking at. And as the four-day project progresses, you can watch results come in from all over the continent.

The Bird Count is important to scientists, too. The information you collect helps answer questions about how bird populations are doing and how migrating birds are responding to the weather or climate change

But the Great Backyard Bird Count is far from the only citizen science project worth trying. While some science is done by people in crisp white lab coats, with specialized tools, a lot of it isn’t. Scientists don’t just work in labs, they don’t just use beakers and Bunsen burners, and most of the time they’re not wearing lab coats.

Also: you don’t have to be a scientist to do science.

Here’s a round-up of apps and websites that ask you to observe the world around you, collect  data, and contribute to our understanding of how the world looks now and how it’s changing.

WEATHER AND WATER

• California King Tides Initiative

What You Do: Take pictures of the highest tides of the year, and add them to the California King Tides Flickr Group. Climate Watch has covered this project before.

How Your Data Is Used: Seeing how the highest tides affect low-lying ares on the California coast helps give us an idea of what’s to come as the sea level rises.

• CoCoRaHS

What You Do: Every morning, take precipitation measurements (CoCoRaHS is an ungainly acronym for Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network), and upload your data to the CoCoRaHS website.

How Your Data Is Used: The National Weather Service, among many others, uses the data to improve forecasts, including severe weather warnings. The precipitation data is updated on their website right after you upload it.

PLANTS AND ANIMALS

• eBird

What You Do: On this website, created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audubon Society, keep a checklist of the birds you see, find out what birds are common in your area, and get alerts when rare ones show up. The Cornell Lab has many other projects you can participate in; there’s a list on their citizen science projects page.

How Your Data Is Used: Researchers use the checklists to track where bird species are, and to look for trends and changes in population and distribution.

• Project Noah

What You Do: Record the species you see using the Project Noah apps for iPhone and Android, or on the website. Upload photos, species ID’s, and location to Project Noah. If you see something you can’t identify, upload it and other project participants will help you out.

How Your Data Is Used: Project Noah’s creators say their goal is to document all the world’s organisms, and in doing so, raise awareness of how they’re all doing. That’s a lot of data. In the meantime, you can get involved in specific “missions,” for example, the California Coastal Wildlife Watch, which asks participants to record species and pollution.

• iNaturalist

What You Do: Like Project Noah, you can use your smartphone to record, upload and share the species you encounter. Browse the website by location or species and find out more about the organisms you see. There are specific projects you can get involved in, like the Global Reptile BioBlitz, and iNaturalist also created a stand-alone iPhone app for recording redwoods. Climate Watch was in on the launch of iNat last year.

How Your Data Is Used: The managers of iNaturalist, a graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution hope the data collected by citizen scientists will help researchers study populations and extinction.

• Project BudBurst

What You Do: Record when plants sprout leaves, grow flowers and produce fruit. Upload your data either on the Project BudBurst website, or using the Android App. The website has a list of plants to help you identify what you see around you.

How Your Data Is Used: Scientists can use your data to see how plants are responding to climate change. Interactive maps show where and when plants have been identified.

These projects are all climate-related. There are tons of others — climate-related and not. To find more, including a backyard bee count, a census of the wildlife in your home, and a crowd-sourced search for new planets, check out Scientific American’s list of citizen science projects.

Hear the companion radio feature to this post on KQED’s The California Report.

“Keeping Up With the Joneses,” the 1920s-era comic strip that inspired the catch-phrase of the same name, is a classic reminder of the ridiculous lengths we sometimes go to just to impress our neighbors. The need to “keep up” has driven plenty of neighborhoods into frenzies of conspicuous consumption—fueling spending sprees on everything from pink socks and fur-lined miniskirts, to microwaves and McMansions.  But can that same impulse really inspire a trend in “non-consumption?”

According to a growing body of research [PDF download] by environmental economists and behavioral psychologists, the answer is a resounding: Yes! Here are some of interesting nuggets to come out of that research.

How Much Energy Do You Really Save?

Hunt Allcott, an economist at New York University has studied the results of efficiency campaigns that appeal to what the experts call “social norms.”  He looked at Opower, a company that has partnered with dozens of energy utilities across the country to send customers “home energy report cards” that let people know how their energy use compares to their neighbors.  According to his calculations, households receiving these reports lower their overall energy consumption by 2% on average.

“While that may not sound like a lot” Allcott says, it’s a lot of bang for less than a buck.   (Make that 60 cents, which is about how much it costs utility companies to send out these reports every few months, though Opower won’t disclose the exact price.) “It ends up being an especially cost-effective approach for utilities” Allcott says, many of which are now are now legally required to take steps to help their customers save energy.

Inspiring people to save energy with a little neighborly competition may also be a more politically palatable approach, than, say, jacking up prices to get customers to cut back on their energy consumption.  Allcott estimates you’d have to raise energy prices by 10% to get the kind of energy savings that these home energy reports have sparked.

If You Do Your Part, I’ll Do Mine

The idea that social comparisons would spur people to consume less energy goes against conventional economic wisdom, according to economist Paul Ferraro at Georgia State University, who studies efficiency strategies that play on social norms. “If you look at any typical economic textbook that characterizes human behavior it tends to focus on private benefits,” Ferraro says.  “We act for our own selfish good. We care about profits. We care about our own satisfaction.”  Using that logic, the idea that we’d start being more energy efficient just to keep up with our neighbors doesn’t make sense.

One theory about what’s going on here is something called “conditional cooperation.” As NYU’s Allcott explains, even if you care about climate change, one of the things that’s especially challenging is that it feels like it’s such a big global, daunting  problem. “We feel like if I do something it’s not really going to have an impact—there are so many people out there that are not doing anything.” Allcott says one of the nice things about social comparisons “is that you help people to see that we’re all part of a group and if we all conserve together that actually will have a big impact.”

The Risks of Conspicuous Non-consumption

Reducing your energy footprint to keep up with your neighbors may not always lead to the most efficient outcomes, warns Ferraro. “If it’s about how others perceive me, then I might take actions that might not be the most cost-effective, but are the most visible to my neighbors.”  Instead of, for example, improving the insulation in your attic to reduce your electricity use, Ferraro says “I might instead install solar panels on my roof where everybody can see that I’m doing something for the environment.” Even if that’s not the most cost-effective way for  you to reduce their energy use.