When we think about the future of solar energy, we usually think about new generations of solar cells that are more efficient or more affordable or longer-lasting—or some happy combination of the three. Lots of scientists and engineers are at work on that side of the equation, including Professor of Physics David Tanenbaum, whose current research involves the development of perovskite and organic polymer-based solar cells that should be cheaper to produce than the silicon variety.

And yet, while better solar cells will help, Tanenbaum believes the next big step forward in solar energy probably won’t be on the production side at all—it will be mainly about energy storage.

“It’s really about battery technologies, capacitor technologies and other ways to deal with the fact that we’re changing our world from centralized baseline power plants to distributed intermittent energy generation, whether it’s wind or solar,” he explains. “And the storage of that energy is what’s driving utilities like Southern California Edison bonkers.”

The most important leap forward in terms of generation, he says, may already have happened. “Twenty years ago, when we talked about this, the question was, ‘Can we harvest large amounts of energy from the sun and the wind? Will it work?’ Now we’ve said, ‘Yeah, we can do this,’ but the question is, ‘Can we build a system that can deal with energy that’s produced intermittently as opposed to energy that’s produced constantly?’”

Today’s battery technologies were all designed for portable electronics and are far too small and short-lived to do the job, he says. “All batteries, no matter how well you treat them, eventually need to be replaced. For a product like your laptop computer, which you’re going to replace in five years anyway, that’s not a big deal. But for a product that’s part of your energy grid, that’s not a good situation. Our energy grid needs to be made of parts that will last at least 25 years.  Some parts of our grid are 100 years old and still work.”

Eventually, he believes, some new energy storage technology will be built from the ground up to meet that need, but it’s unlikely to look like anything you’d recognize as a battery. “It’s more likely to be heavy, solid, non-portable, thermal, chemical or mechanical energy storage, that will hold significantly larger amounts of energy than batteries designed for portable electronics.”

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The study of our changing climate has a newcomer: the social psychology of climate change. Professor of Psychology Adam Pearson is helping lead the way with the growth of a new branch he and his collaborators have coined “social climate science.”

Pearson is working with other psychologists interested in what motivates different groups to get involved with the issue of climate change and how decision-makers and influencers can engage a broader segment of the population around these issues. Pearson recently co-edited a special issue of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations that seeks to understand how group dynamics influence how people perceive and respond to climate change, including groups we may often not think about when it comes to environmental problems.

“There’s a myth of the white environmentalist,” says Pearson. “There’s a perception that Whites are most concerned about climate change, but when you look at public opinion polls, those surveys show that minority groups, specifically Latinos, Asian Americans and African Americans, and lower-income Americans are as or more concerned about environmental issues than the prototypic image of an environmentalist often encountered in the media, who is White, affluent, and highly-educated. Some minority groups like Latinos and Asian Americans identify more as environmentalists than Whites.”

Pearson adds that scientists and practitioners need to better understand the consequences of these prevalent stereotypes. That understanding will help answer questions of how people in power—environmental advocates and policy-makers—can better engage minority groups who represent a fast-growing segment of the US public and are often the most negatively impacted by issues like climate change.

“All groups need a say for creating communities that are livable—whether living in coastal areas facing flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, air pollution, or soil contamination. Take the textbook examples of the Flint water crisis or Hurricane Katrina. Some segments of the public were disproportionately affected by these crises, and climate change will exacerbate these disparities.”

Pearson points to the past few decades of research on health disparities and how cross-disciplinary collaborations have helped move the needle on global issues like the HIV/AIDS epidemic that also disproportionately affect communities of color. “There are blueprints out there and a lot of that work comes from within my field, from psychology. Psychologists have contributed to reducing health disparities, and I’m optimistic that we can do the same for environmental disparities.”

Previous (California Water)

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What’s a California winter with no snow-covered peaks? How will we even know it’s December?

By the end of this century, Mt. Baldy and the other mountains in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino ranges will be snowless, says Char Miller, director and W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History. For Miller, it’s not just about losing the great views but the natural water storage that keeps the valleys hydrated.

“The natural system we have is shifting,” says Miller. “Water won’t be stored in glaciers or snow banks to slowly release in the spring, which means when the rain falls, it’s going to be moving. We’re not going to be able to manage water with dams.”

Miller says there is more than one culprit. Climate change is at the top of the list, but so are slow-moving plans to capture fast-moving water (which can travel up to 60 miles an hour on its way to the Pacific) and antiquated water rights that affect how we manage water.

The worst drought in recorded California history has prompted a number of ideas to capture, preserve and distribute water, including projects like desalination plants in San Diego and a proposal for two 35-mile-long tunnels that will carry water from the Sacramento River to the San Francisco Bay area, the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California.

“Orange County, which is way ahead of L.A. County and others, has one of the world’s largest, if not the largest, treatment plant, where they’re grabbing every drop of black water (sewage) and cleaning it up to a level that you can drink it,” says Miller. “Because no one wants to talk about toilet to tap, they’re pumping it into their aquifers and out on the other side as groundwater, which is kind of a fig leaf.”

Some solutions have been around for years, including aquifers, sponge-like areas where the water run-off is stored naturally in the ground. Miller points to Pomona College as an example, where bioswales and permeable landscaping direct water to an aquifer under campus.

“Go look at a picture of the Greek Theatre after the 1938 flood,” he says. “There are students paddling boats there. It is a sink, literally a sink. Nature did that. Reservoirs can trap water, but it also evaporates. If we’re smart, we would utilize these natural aquifers.”

In L.A. County, two miles from the College, the Chino Water Conservation District has been doing just that since the 1940s, says Miller. Initially confined by law to work within the boundaries of San Bernardino County, the district is starting to collaborate across county lines.

“I think there’s going be a shift in terms of how we think about collaboration, how we ignore existing political boundaries, because nature ignores them,” says Miller. “What we also have to do is to rethink not just water as a consumable thing, but how we want to live in a landscape that burns, that floods, and in which the sea level is rising. There are lots of things that we could do right now, and must, if we’d like future generations to look back and say, ‘You know, they actually tried. They may not have gotten it right all the time, but they tried.’”

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Will the United States meet its emissions reduction goals as outlined in the Paris Agreement? Unlikely, says recent grad Tom Erb ’18. Without a strong, federal price on carbon—a long shot under the current administration—the U.S. will surely fail.

Erb is no newcomer to the campaign for carbon pricing. At Pomona, Erb has been a tireless climate change activist, mobilizing young people around the country to act now. For the past two years, Erb has been an organizer with the Put A Price On It campaign, a collaboration with the Years of Living Dangerously television series to mobilize grassroots support for a national price on climate pollution.

“After the reversal on climate action by the U.S. government, American states and foreign countries are continuing the push for climate policies,” he says. “Right now, you have a lot of states trying to get a head start trying to pass carbon taxes: Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts and jurisdiction of Washington, D.C. Those are five or six places that could pass a carbon tax in the next two years,” says Erb.

Erb predicts that in the next five to 10 years more states will adopt policies that include expanding renewable portfolio standards, investments into electric vehicles, tax credits for carbon capture technology and moratoriums on gas and oil extraction. While these policies are not as effective as carbon pricing, Erb argues, they are likely, in the short run, to gain political support.

“But to make a real impact you’re going to need a national carbon tax and we need carbon pricing around the world.”

Previous (Earthquake Safety)

Next (California Water)

Someday—probably in some crowded city in a developing country—an earthquake will come along that causes a million casualties, warns seismologist and President of GeoHazards International Brian Tucker ’67.

Tucker specializes in mitigating earthquake risks, but he believes it may take just such a mega-disaster to force governments to act. “Unfortunately, major advances in earthquake preparedness come after disasters,” he says. “I think the next big advance will occur when a big disaster takes place and it grabs people’s attention and the attention of governments.”

One of those advances he would like to see is wider adoption of earthquake early warning systems (EEW) like the ones developed in Mexico during the 1990s and in Japan way back in the early 1960s. China also has such a system, as do Taiwan and Turkey.

Soon, so will the United States.

The concept of an early warning system in the U.S. has been discussed as far back as the 1860s in a letter to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. Tucker himself wrote in the late 1980s about modeling a warning system in California after Japan’s when he served as director of California’s Geological Survey.

The biggest problem (other than financing) is that California faultlines offer a special challenge. In Japan and Mexico, earthquakes originate offshore and seismic waves have farther to travel before affecting urban centers. In California, population centers sit right on top of fault lines, giving less time for warnings.

Today, however, a U.S. version of the system is finally in the works. “Thanks to advances in telecommunication and the internet,” he says, “an early warning system should become part of Californians’ lives in the next 10 years.”

However, he doesn’t expect it to be easy. “It needs to be thoroughly tested, and people need to be trained in what a warning means and what it doesn’t mean,” says Tucker. “One danger would be having too many warnings that didn’t result in damage, because people would lose faith in the system. Another would be accurate warnings of damaging earthquakes that give too little time for people to react.”

The first stages of an early warning system in California would communicate directly to “non-humans,” according to Tucker. “The application will first be to things such as electrical power plants or subways,” he says. “It will communicate directly to trains telling them to slow down, communicate to hospitals to switch their electrical power to a backup system. It could also automatically open the doors of fire stations before strong shaking occurs. This could become automatic without going through a human, which would be a really great first step in application.”

The beauty of these initial measures is that they come at “no cost.” It doesn’t matter if it’s a false alarm, whereas the tricky thing is issuing alarms directly to humans, because they may panic, or they may get annoyed if it’s a false alarm.

Eventually, Tucker believes California’s system will get to a point where it’s sophisticated enough to communicate directly to people. Japan already has that, he says.

“The warning in Japan’s Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011 was directly to people,” he says. “An amazing fact about that earthquake is that only three percent of the population that was living in the inundation zone of the tsunami was killed. Unfortunately, that amounted to 19,000 people, but, if you go to other places like Sumatra, they expect something like 50 percent of the population living in the inundation zone to die because of lack of warning and lack of preparation.”

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Susan McWilliams doesn’t mince words when it comes to predicting the future of the American Experiment.

“Republics don’t last,” says Professor of Politics McWilliams. “I don’t think we should shy away from the assumption that this republic, like all other republics has an expiration date. If we acknowledge that, then we realize that it is our job to think about how to prolong republican government as much as possible. We should be asking ourselves: What are the specific dangers to republican collapse that we’re seeing now, and how can we mitigate those?”

Those dangers, says Professor of Politics David Menefee-Libey, include the current attacks on liberal democracy and the rule of law by the president and some of the most powerful people in government. “We should also be worried about the cynical ways so many people in the business and nonprofit worlds have responded—taking advantage of the system even as they work to erode it,” says Menefee-Libey. “They spend enormous amounts of money and work so hard to gain influence at the same time they talk trash about politics and governments in public. They seem to want the U.S. system to become more of an oligarchy, run by and for the rich and powerful, than a democratic republic.”

That sounds familiar to McWilliams, who studies the history of political thought. About 2,400 years ago, she says, Plato wrote about oligarchs and their contempt for democracy and linked the uncertainty in people’s lives to democracies that devolve into tyrannies. “Think about America now,” says McWilliams. “We have a low unemployment rate, but most Americans have lives that are very uncertain, where they’re living paycheck to paycheck, where they’re not sure what their children’s lives are going to look like. Plato says if you’re feeling that kind of overwhelming uncertainty, you’re going to be inclined to follow people who tell you, ‘I am certain about this.’”

An antidote to oligarchy and tyranny, suggests McWilliams, is liberal arts education. “The liberal arts are meant to educate in the arts of liberty; that’s where the phrase ‘liberal arts’ comes from,” says McWilliams. “(W.E.B.) Du Bois would say what we’re doing in American today is moving away from a mode of education that aims at civic and political empowerment, and we at places like Pomona need to do all we can to support liberal education everywhere.”

When you educate people, adds Menefee-Libey, it challenges parochialism and the ability to think that other people are somehow less human and less worthy of respect and inclusion in public life.

“I think the next 10, 20 years are going to be extraordinarily difficult, but I also think that there are ideas and leaders, policies and strategies that can get us out of this,” says Menefee-Libey. “I am not an optimistic person, but I am a hopeful person, and I think there’s a tremendous amount of hope.”

Previous (Japan)

Next (Earthquake Safety)

Japan may be the economic canary in the coal mine, Matt Sanders ’00 believes. And at the same time, it may already be transforming itself into the economy of tomorrow.

Once a powerhouse, Japan’s economy has struggled for the past 30 years. Much of that sluggish growth, says Sanders—the founder and president of East Gate Advisors, a U.S.-Japan business advisory firm—can be attributed to demographics. “Japan leads the world in its aged population, and there’s also the fact that the Japanese population has actually been in decline for seven years,” he says. Add to that the tendency for Japanese women to quit the workplace after they marry, and you have a declining number of workers supporting an increasingly expensive non-working population.

But with populations aging throughout the developed world and automation displacing more and more human workers, Sanders thinks other societies—including ours—may soon be in the same predicament. If so, he says, the liabilities that have hindered Japan’s progress may also be transforming it into the economy of the future.

That’s because the Japanese are integrating technology in general—and robotics in particular—into their society at a rate that Americans find mystifying. Americans remain leery about interacting with robots, but the Japanese have welcomed them enthusiastically.

Sanders points to the proliferation in Japan of such robots as Aibo, the cute little robotic dog; Asimo and Pepper, anthropomorphic robots designed to act like humans; and Paro, a cuddly robotic baby seal designed to work as a kind of therapy animal with dementia patients. These may seem like curiosities now, but in a world where fewer people are working and more people need care, such technologies may soon be necessities. “In the U.S., the lack of consumer and general public acceptance has a real tendency to hold that technology back in integrating into society, and that’s where you can see the Japanese sort of charging ahead,” Sanders says.

The resulting transformation of Japanese society, he says, will be just one more in a long line of periodic transformations. “Japan stays exactly the same for a long, long time, until some sort of event happens. And then it changes really quickly, like right before your eyes, overnight and radically. The place will stay exactly the same for 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. Then suddenly, something happens, and boom—it’s unrecognizable the next day.”

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Next (The United States)

With the July 1 election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (widely known by his initials, AMLO) as president, Mexico stands at a historic turning point, one that leaves Professor of Latin American Studies Miguel Tinker Salas cautiously optimistic about the prospect for real change.

“This represents a collapse of the existing political structure, led by the National Action Party [PAN] and the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution [PRI],” he explains. “It represents a rejection of their policies and of the U.S.-imposed war on drugs, and it speaks to the need most Mexicans feel for a fundamental change in their society.”

As an election observer, Tinker Salas says he saw blatant election fraud, but this time, the outrage over rampant corruption and desire for change were too strong for the two parties that have held power for the past 82 years to quash.

Among other things, AMLO has promised a major shift in the nation’s war on drugs—which has left more than 200,000 people dead and 30,000 disappeared in recent years—even proposing an amnesty for those not involved in violent crimes. He’s also pledged to defend Mexican immigrants in the U.S. and to revisit the controversial energy reforms of his predecessor. To show accountability, he’s vowed to offer himself up for a recall vote halfway through his six-year term.

Though AMLO has been labeled a leftist by his opponents, Tinker Salas believes the charge is bogus.

“Comparisons to Chávez in Venezuela or Correa in Ecuador or Morales in Bolivia are facile. They’re intended to inflame the political debate. AMLO was a member of the PRI, the dominant party. He attempted to reform the dominant party. Unable to, he joined other forces in forming the PRD, the Party of the Democratic Revolution, ran for office twice, with some very strong evidence of fraud against him.

“This time,” he adds, “indignation defeated fear.”

Previous (Syria)

Next (Japan)

Predicting the future in a conflict as multi-faceted as the Syrian Civil War is daunting, and Politics Professor Mietek Boduszynski says his thoughts on the matter have shifted several times, including last May, when the United States pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal.

With that decision, the former U.S. diplomat believes, President Trump may have ratcheted up the chances of a military confrontation between Iran and Israel that might complicate his future policy options in Syria.

“One way it might play out,” he says, “is that Iran—which has wound down some of its proxy forces since the defeat of the Islamic State—may feel it has nothing to lose in expanding activities in Syria, which would alarm Israel. So Israel continues to drop bombs and maybe moves to something more, such as special forces, and then it escalates from there. And the ultimate escalation would be if Hezbollah, operating out of Syria, fired a long-range missile that hit an Israeli target and killed lots of civilians. You can imagine what would happen then.”

Previous (Revolutions)

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Where in the world will the next revolution happen? And what will it look like? These are questions Associate Professor of Sociology Colin Beck thinks about a lot. The author of Radicals, Revolutionaries and Terrorists is now at work with five other scholars on a new book titled Rethinking Revolutions, and last fall, three of his coauthors joined him at Pomona for a panel session called “The Future of Revolutions.” As part of that event, Beck asked each of them to make a prediction as to where the next revolution will unfold.

Some of the answers surprised even Beck.

The first to hazard a guess was George Lawson of the London School of Economics, who settled, provocatively, on a country that seems like the height of iron-fisted control—China. “China has more collective action events, more protests, than any other society in the world on a yearly basis,” Beck explains. “Most of them are local, anti-corruption protests against local corrupt elites. But George made a really good point—that one of the more robust findings in revolutions research is that, to the extent that a regime becomes personalized, as it becomes invested in a single individual as an expression of power, it also becomes more vulnerable, because it creates a target for people to impose their grievances on. So as Xi Jinping moves toward a much more personalist rule and away from the Politburo, away from the bureaucracy, that creates a potential danger in the years to come.”

Second up, Daniel Ritter of Stockholm University shifted the focus to the oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia. “Another consistent finding in revolutions research is that revolutions are often catch-up events,” Beck says. “They’re taking societies that have not kept up with modernity and thrusting them into it. So as Saudi Arabia is trying to modernize its government and liberalize somewhat its society, they may actually be fueling the potential for mass protest.”

A third scholar, Sharon Erickson Nepstad of the University of New Mexico, refused to speculate about the next revolution. Instead, she made a suggestion about where it won’t be—the protest-torn state of Venezuela. “Because everyone would think that would be the place, right?” Beck says. “She’s done a lot of work on peace movements and the like, and she looks at the situation in Venezuela and thinks the opposition there hasn’t done the hard work of mobilizing that a successful movement needs to do. They haven’t built the organizational infrastructure. It’s not deeply rooted enough in society.”

Beck himself isn’t so sure, however. “The Venezuelan government shoots people dead in the streets,” he notes, “and shooting people dead in the streets is generally a losing strategy. I mean, it’s a successful short-term strategy but a poor long-term strategy—unless you shoot a lot of people down in the streets. Then it works, as terrible as that sounds.”

And what was Beck’s pick for the next revolution? “I decided that I would, provocatively, say what the political scientists are starting to call ‘the illiberal democracies’—Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Russia,” he says. “Turkey, in particular, is really setting itself up for a challenge. There’s a lot of concern right now about the illiberal democracies, and maybe this is the way of the future, but I think human rights, democracy—they’re too widely legitimated. They’re too embedded in normative consciousness globally for them to erode that quickly. Which means that these countries are going against the grain, and they’re creating the contradictions that can fuel future protest.”

There were two points, however, upon which all four scholars agreed.

First, most revolutions are likely to follow the same nonviolent path as the Arab Spring—unarmed civil protests as opposed to violent insurgencies—at least for now. “There’s definitely been this shift from the kind of mid-20th-century communist guerilla warfare model towards this kind of Berlin Wall-Arab Spring model,” Beck says. He wonders, however, how long that will last, given the fact that so many recent examples have ended in failure.

Their second point of agreement was surprising, given the usual narrative about the Arab Spring. “My colleagues and I all pretty much agreed that the effect of social media on revolutions has been overstated,” he says. “The thing I like to think about is that the biggest day of protests in Egypt happened the day after the Mubarak regime shut off the Internet. And the reason that was the biggest day of protests was because the Muslim Brotherhood decided to turn out, and the Muslim Brotherhood has a traditional form of grassroots organization.”

All of these speculations were intended to be a kind of engaging thought experiment, Beck says, adding the disclaimer that predictions of this sort are really little more than educated guesswork. He points to recent events in Armenia, where protests unexpectedly brought about a sudden change of leadership. “A few weeks ago, George wrote all of us to note that no one had mentioned Armenia at all,” he says. “It’s too soon to say what will happen there, but we saw the model again—protest and elite negotiation to force a change in who is in power. And none of us saw it coming.”

Next (Syria)