3:40

If you drive an older, less efficient vehicle, ever think about swapping it for a new, more efficient one? It’s a good way to reduce your carbon footprint. But there are a lot of factors to consider.

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

All the recent talk about curbing climate change has many wondering how they can reduce their carbon footprint. Some are switching to more environmentally friendly vehicles. NPR’s John Ydstie takes a look at what you should know if you’re thinking about getting a new car.

JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: I started by calling Sport Chevrolet in Silver Spring, Md., to find out what options I might have if I traded in my gas-burning car for an electric or a hybrid. They told me to come by one morning and have a look, so I did. And salesman Norm Kristall started out showing me a small electric car called a Chevy Spark.

NORM KRISTALL: Well, it’s a commuter vehicle, and we hope that most people who buy it are just driving a certain amount of miles every day. It gets up to 80 miles, so…

YDSTIE: So around 80 miles on a single charge but no auxiliary gas engine. So when the battery dies, you’re stuck. We decided to go for a ride.

KRISTALL: Kind of a very quiet start, almost like a space ship. You know, there’s no engine sound when you turn it on.

YDSTIE: Other companies also make this kind of four-seater commuter car. The Nissan leaf was one of the first. Dan Sperling, co-director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at the University of California, Davis, says there are a number of things you should consider before you buy an electric car. First, do you just need a car for commuting or other relatively short trips, and what fuel produces the electricity you will use to charge it?

DAN SPERLING: If you buy an electric car in an area where the electricity is made mostly from coal, your car will be the same or possibly even a little worse than a gasoline car.

YDSTIE: Ouch. To find out the source of your electrical energy, search EPA power profiler, and enter your ZIP code. If you’d like an electric car for commuting but need a car with a longer range for weekend trips, you could consider a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt or the Toyota Prius Plug-in hybrid. Sperling says they typically have a 25- to 50-mile all-electric range, enough for most people’s commute. Of course, the cost of a new electric or a hybrid is also a big consideration. Sperling says these days, many are quite affordable partly because automakers are selling them below cost to try to build a market.

SPERLING: So you can actually get an electric car now for a very low price.

YDSTIE: Some are available for less than $20,000 after subtracting a $7,500 tax credit from the federal government, and many states provide tax incentives, too. There is another thing to consider in making a decision, and that’s the amount of carbon emitted in manufacturing a new car.

SPERLING: Ten to 15 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions from that car over the life of the car would be associated with the manufacturing.

YDSTIE: So, Sperling says, you won’t get any overall reduction in your carbon footprint until you’ve driven your new, more-efficient car 10,000 to 20,000 miles. Another big consideration is how much you drive. Sperling says if you have an older car and you’re only driving a few thousand miles a year, it’s probably not worth it to upgrade to a cleaner car.

SPERLING: If, however, it’s a car that is being used quite a bit – say, 10,00 miles a year or more – there’s definitely a high payoff because now there are cars that get 50 miles per gallon compared to your 25.

YDSTIE: Of course, the best thing to do for the environment, says Sperling, is walk or bike or use mass transportation. John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

3:29

Amid falling gas prices and easy access to credit, auto dealers sold a record number of cars and trucks in 2015. The last few weeks of the year may be one of the best times to get a deal.

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

As the year comes to a close, it looks like 2015 will be the year of the automobile. The auto industry is poised to sell a million and a half vehicles by New Year’s. That would be an all-time high. Not only is the year expected to be blockbuster, but more people are expected to buy cars and trucks in the days after Christmas than the rest of December combined. NPR’s Sonari Glinton has covered the highs and lows of the car industry, and he joins us from NPR West. Sonari, welcome.

SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: It’s good to be with you.

MARTIN: So analysts say this is going to be the best year on record. What is leading to these high sales? Is the economy that great?

GLINTON: Well, consumers are a little stingy elsewhere in the economy, but when it comes to your car, there’s a lot of pent-up demand. So if you remember when the economy bottomed out, we sold almost half as many cars. And right now, the average car on the road is about a decade old. There’s also access to credit, so credit has loosened up. People are defaulting less on their auto loans. Interest rates are low, and there’s an expectation that they’re going to go up. And so people are sort of running to their cars to lock in low interest rates. And cars are safer and more efficient and cooler than they’ve ever been.

MARTIN: But you know, Sonari, just to kind of set the contrast here, you reported on Detroit. And I remember when we talked about the state of the auto industry some years ago. Do you remember that?

GLINTON: What’s funny is I started reporting on Detroit with GM exiting bankruptcy. So it’s been five years of my career, and I remember talking to you during the Super Bowl when this commercial came out. Remember it?

(SOUNDBITE OF CHRYSLER ADVERTISEMENT)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: What does this city know about luxury, huh? What does a town that’s been to hell and back know about the finer things in life? Well, I’ll tell you – more than most.

GLINTON: And that was a Chrysler commercial. Now, each of the three Detroit automakers has come roaring back. And Chrysler has probably traveled the furthest distance between any of them. They are benefiting a lot from this big sales year.

MARTIN: So what are the cars that are selling?

GLINTON: Well, the reason Chrysler’s benefiting a lot is because of the truck and the compact SUV. So compact SUVs and trucks and SUVs, in general, make up 58 percent of the overall sales of cars. And so that is helping all of the Detroit carmakers.

MARTIN: Is anybody not benefiting from this buying boom?

GLINTON: Hybrids – hybrid sales have taken a hit, in part because gas prices are as low as $2 in parts of the country, and so hybrids have lost a bit of their shine. Also, regular gasoline engines have become a lot more fuel-efficient. In some ways, some of the regular gas engines are more fuel-efficient than some of the lesser hybrids, so there are really fuel-efficient gas cars out there.

MARTIN: Sonari, before we let you go, we talked about the fact that the domestic auto industry has struggled, how autoworkers were certainly pressured to give up a lot in terms of pay and benefits in the recession. What about this year? Has any of that changed?

GLINTON: Well, each of the three Detroit automakers renegotiated their contracts with the UAW. And each of the groups of workers made some gains to get back some of what they lost during the depths of the recession. So wages are going to go up for the first time for a lot of autoworkers, and their share of the profits are going to increase, as well, because of this boom year.

MARTIN: Sonari Glinton covers business for NPR and our Planet Money podcast, and he joined us from NPR West in Culver City. Sonari, thank you.

GLINTON: It’s a pleasure.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

4:16

The special holiday version of Hershey’s Kisses, now on sale nationwide, is an icon of the food industry’s past, and perhaps also a harbinger of its future.

Back when Milton Hershey started making this product, more than a century ago, it was a simpler time. He ran the factory and the sales campaigns — although, for decades, he refused to advertise.

Today, The Hershey Company is a giant enterprise with factories around the globe. It owns food companies in China, Brazil and India.

That’s typical for the food industry, of course. Lots of food companies are huge. And with vastly increased scale comes growing skepticism about what those companies are up to.

Amanda Hitt may be an extreme case. She’s director of the Food Integrity Campaign for an activist organization called the Government Accountability Project, which tries to expose the food industry’s darkest secrets: dangerous slaughterhouses, contaminated meat and exploited workers. “This industry is almost always wrong, and always doing something messed up,” she says. “So yeah, when I look at anything they do, there’s a certain level of skepticism.”

Charlie Arnot, who has studied consumer attitudes as a consultant to big food companies, says consumers have lots of questions: How is this food made? Is it good for me? And they tend not to trust answers from big companies.

“There is a significant bias against Big Food,” says Arnot, who is also CEO of the nonprofit Center for Food Integrity in Kansas City. “In fact, the larger the company, the more likely it is that people will believe that it will put profit ahead of the public interest.”

Companies can’t change that with marketing campaigns, he says. The one thing that they can do — and the only thing that works, according to Arnot’s research — is open up, and reveal details of their operations.

Which brings us back to those Hershey’s Kisses.

Deb Arcoleo, who carries the freshly minted title of director of Product Transparency for The Hershey Company, has brought a bag of them along to our meeting, because there’s something new on that package. Printed on the bag, so small that you’d easily miss it, is a little square QR code. These are the codes that you now see in lots of places, like airline boarding passes.

Arcoleo takes my smartphone, aims it at the code, and I hear a beep. Suddenly, the screen of my phone is filled with information about these Hershey’s Kisses: nutrition facts, allergens in this product and details about all the ingredients. Lecithin, for instance.

“Let’s say I don’t really know what lecithin is,” says Arcoleo. “I can click on ‘lecithin,’ and I will get a definition.”

Tap another tab, and we see a note about whether this product contains ingredients from genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

There’s a place where Hershey’s could list certifications, such as whether an independent organization such as the Rainforest Alliance had certified that a particular ingredient had been produced in a way that protects the environment. “What’s not allowed is marketing spin and fluff kinds of claims, like, ‘America’s favorite popcorn,’ ” says Arcoleo.

Hershey’s created this system, called SmartLabel, but other companies are now adopting it, too. Very soon, Arcoleo says, there will be tens of thousands of products on supermarket shelves with SmartLabel codes.

“I really, really hope that we can make this as easy as possible for lots of companies to follow our lead. I think this is a game-changer for the consumer packaged goods industry,” she says.

I took the Hershey’s Kisses back to our skeptic, Amanda Hitt from the Food Integrity Campaign, and demonstrated SmartLabel for her. Her reaction was guardedly positive. “Anything that informs consumers is a good thing, and gets us closer to a certain level of transparency,” she said. But SmartLabel only shows us part of the picture, she says; it’s highly unlikely that companies will voluntarily reveal the most unappetizing aspects of their business.

Charlie Arnot, the food industry consultant, thinks that some companies may, in fact, be willing to do this. Consumers are forcing them to do it.

“Consumers are interested in the good, the bad and the ugly,” he says. They are saying, “Give me the information, treat me like an adult, and allow me to make an informed choice.”

Arnot is telling big food companies that “transparency builds trust,” and advising them to post on their websites documents that may contain bad news, such as outside audits of their food safety procedures.

When companies do this, it can force executives to ask difficult questions, Arnot says: “Is that information that we’re comfortable sharing with the public? And if not, do we change?”

There are risks to this, he says. But the risks of not doing it may be even greater.

3:21

SpaceX, the commercial aerospace company, pulled off a major feat Monday night. After pushing satellites towards orbit, the rocket’s booster separated, and safely landed back on earth.

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Last night, a rocket from the commercial spaceflight company SpaceX took off from Florida.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Five, four, three, two, one, zero. We have lift off of the Falcon 9.

SHAPIRO: But for rocket fans, the real excitement came 10 minutes later, when the rocket’s massive first stage, more than 15 stories high, came back to Earth.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Stage one has landed.

(APPLAUSE)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: LG one, the Falcon has landed. Landing operators, move into procedure.

SHAPIRO: Supporters say the safe return of part of the rocket could change spaceflight forever. Joining me to discuss it is NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel.

Hey there.

GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Hi there.

SHAPIRO: Looking at the video, it does seem amazing that they were able to do this. How hard is it?

BRUMFIEL: Well, SpaceX says it’s like firing a pencil over the Empire State Building then having it turn around, come back and land vertically in a shoebox.

SHAPIRO: So no big deal.

BRUMFIEL: No. No big deal at all, right. No, I mean, this rocket, at the time it releases its upper stage which is what’s carrying the satellites, it’s going over 3,000 miles an hour. And then it has to flip back around, deploy some fins that kind of help it steer through the atmosphere, fall back to Earth and then right before it lands, fire its engine so it can just float down to the ground. I mean, this is pretty amazing.

SHAPIRO: And the reason to do this amazing thing is ultimately because it saves money. That means you can reuse it, right?

BRUMFIEL: Exactly. So the plan over at SpaceX is, these boosters are these big pieces of metal. They’ve got engines on the bottom that are very expensive. And if you can recycle them, you can really lower the cost. Here’s SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ELON MUSK: The potential cost reduction of it long-term is probably in excess of a factor of a hundred.

BRUMFIEL: So that’s a hundred times cheaper. I should say, we’re a long way away from that right now. It all depends on how much work it takes to refurbish these first stages and use them again – and how often they can be used again, for that matter. They’re going to take this test stage and really examine it closely to learn more about what needs to be done.

SHAPIRO: Geoff, what are the implications of space travel potentially being a hundred times cheaper in the future?

BRUMFIEL: You know, that really is the big question here. There have been studies that show this could really revolutionize the way we could use space. I mean, you could imagine people firing up commercial satellites for all sorts of stuff – everything from agriculture to, like, looking at how people travel around cities. Elon Musk, you know, he has even bigger ambitions. He hopes this technology could one day be used to colonize Mars.

SHAPIRO: Now, Elon Musk is not the only guy in this business. Just last month, another company, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, did something similar. And I gather there has been some posturing between these two billionaires on Twitter?

BRUMFIEL: Yeah, that’s right. So last month, the Bezos company, called Blue Origin, sent up a rocket and it came back down. It looked very similar to this. That rocket was suborbital so it didn’t go as high or as fast. It’s an easier problem to solve. At the time, Elon Musk was sort of condescending on Twitter – basically said, no big deal. This time, Jeff Bezos came back and said, welcome to the club, implying that he’d been the one who’d done it first. I mean, I think if you’re going to have billionaires showing off their big rockets, you know, you might as well have some fun doing it, right?

SHAPIRO: Billionaire burns, from NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel.

Thanks Geoff.

BRUMFIEL: Thank you very much.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

2:53

Predictions are always a tricky thing — especially for a fast-moving world like technology.

Alina Selyukh and Aarti Shahani spoke with Robert Siegel on All Things Considered about some of the biggest themes in tech and tech policy. You can hear our quick recap on net neutrality, drone regulations, self-driving cars and data breaches in the audio above.

Aarti, Laura Sydell and Elise Hu had a similar conversation as 2014 came to a close, forecasting a few themes they expected to spill into 2015. Now, as 2015 is wrapping up — how did they do?

Elise’s 2014-2015 Idea: Voice Activation & Anticipatory Computing

This year we saw Amazon Echo — a digital personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence — become a hot buy during the holiday season. It’s vaulted into the Top 10 of Amazon’s best-selling electronics, sure. But the behavior of using your voice to boss around inanimate objects (in Echo’s case, a cylindrical speaker, but in Siri’s or Cortana’s case, a smartphone), and then relying on that object to use the wealth of data you’ve shared with it to anticipate your needs, still isn’t as common as I expected it’d be.

I’m surprised. It’s been nearly two years now since we reported that anticipatory computing (what Google Now or Echo does) was “the next wave” of computing. We’re still going to go that way. What Om Malik and I talked about in 2014 is still true:

The more we add apps and digital functions we need to perform on our devices, the more individually tapping or typing for each function becomes a hassle.

“As we become more digital, as we use more things in the digital realm, we just need time to manage all that. And it is not feasible with the current manual processes. So the machines will learn our behavior, how we do certain things, and start anticipating our needs,” Malik says.

Anticipatory computing became more of a thing in 2015. But it still hasn’t become mainstream.

Aarti’s 2014-2015 Idea: Data Breaches

After all the news of hacks in prior years, you’d think that 2015 would provide respite, but that’s not what happened.

This year’s mega-breaches were even more dramatic than past ones:

• We had numerous health care data breaches. Anthem, the health insurer, was breached, with roughly one-third of Americans’ personal data stolen. Excellus BlueCross BlueShield and UCLA Health, in California, were also health industry targets.
• In the government, there was the IRS breach, and of course, the Office of Personnel Management. In the case of OPM, files on 22 million individuals were taken — everything from home addresses to very personal disclosures (stuff that can be used to blackmail).
• Consumer hacks included the toymaker, VTech, that resulted in theft of with data on millions of kids was taken. Also the Ashley Madison hack, which exposed the information of millions of users of the adultery site (remember, not every user listing was correct!).

The best expert we could find — one recommended by federal authorities — estimates hackers have taken 60 to 80 percent of American Social Security numbers. In many of these breaches, the data was not encrypted, which is bonkers. We’re in 2015 and seems like encryption should be a norm. But it’s not — and arguably the penalties for companies just aren’t high enough to force them to clean up their acts.

Laura’s 2014-2015 Idea: Apple Inc.

Last year at this time I commented on how well Apple’s stock had done after its record sales of the iPhone 6. The stock has now declined from April’s high of more than $134 per share to below $110.

Apple continues to have record sales of its iPhone under CEO Tim Cook. So why is Wall Street so gloomy?

Apple has not released any official sales numbers of its watch, prompting some speculation that it hasn’t done that well. Research firms like IDC say next year, the smartwatch market will grow significantly and Apple will lead the way. If that proves true, it wouldn’t be the first time that Apple defied naysayers, who also pooh-poohed the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. But this time, Steve Jobs isn’t around — will Cook have the mojo to pull off the watch? The jury is still out, but I do predict that in 2016 we will finally see if the Apple Watch has been a success.

The story isn’t much different with Apple Pay. So far, the mobile payment system doesn’t seem to be widely adopted, though again, Apple isn’t sharing a lot of information about it. According to a report by Infoscout, use of Apple Pay declined this shopping season. But Apple also just made a deal to get Apple Pay into China, where people don’t have a long-entrenched habit of using credit cards. That and the fact that more retailers are accepting Apple Pay may lead to a turnaround this year.

So where are we are we from what I said a year ago? Sadly, still waiting.

4:27

Plans for the transcontinental canal to be built across Nicaragua have been placed on hold. Opposition is growing and the main Chinese backer has lost a large percent of his wealth in the downturn of the stock exchange.

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Nicaragua had big plans to build a $50 billion shipping canal across the Central American country, perhaps big enough to rival the Panama Canal. Now the project is on hold. The Chinese businessmen backing the project had deep financial losses this year, and opposition to the canal is growing among many who fear it will destroy the country’s natural resources. Here’s NPR’s Carrie Kahn.

CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: The main man in the Southern Nicaraguan town of San Jorge is Rafael Angel Bermudez. To find him, just ask anyone for El Escuelita.

RAFAEL ANGEL BERMUDEZ: (Foreign language spoken).

KAHN: “That’s me. I’m one of a kind, at your service,” booms Bermudez. Now 60, he got his nickname back in the 1970s when he ran a training school for guerrilla fighters during Nicaragua’s revolution. These days, he’s leading the fight in his small town against the massive canal backed by President Daniel Ortega.

BERMUDEZ: (Foreign language spoken).

KAHN: “Look,” he says, “we’ve been jailed, beaten up, you name it,” says Bermudez. “But we’ll keep fighting.” Since announced nearly three years ago, the 178-mile long inter-oceanic canal has met with opposition. When built, it will pass through some of Nicaragua’s most sensitive regions, indigenous communities and Lake Nicaragua, Central America’s largest freshwater source. Financed by a Chinese telecom billionaire, the estimated $50 billion project will also include a new international airport, two seaside ports and a major four-lane highway. Fatima Duarte’s small house near San Jorge sits right in the path of the proposed highway.

FATIMA DUARTE: (Foreign language spoken).

KAHN: “I only have my tiny house. I don’t have great properties in their way. But I won’t be forced from my home,” says Duarte. She says she was just kicked off the local city council by Ortega party officials because of her opposition.

DUARTE: (Foreign language spoken).

KAHN: “I showed up at a meeting and they blocked me from entering,” says Duarte. She says she also stopped receiving her government salary, a tough blow for the single mother of two girls. The Chinese financial backer of the project received a 50-year exclusive lease to build the canal, but his finances have since taken a catastrophic hit. Valued at $10 billion this summer, Wang Jing’s personal wealth dropped nearly 85 percent along with the Chinese stock market decline. Bloomberg named Wang the worst performing billionaire of 2015. But Telemaco Talavera, a spokesman for the Grand Canal Commission of Nicaragua, insists the project’s finances are just fine.

TELEMACO TALAVERA: (Foreign language spoken).

KAHN: “The project remains on track,” says Talavera. He says the delay in major excavation is to allow for additional traffic studies and the impact on archaeological sites.

MANUEL ORTEGA HEGG: (Foreign language spoken).

KAHN: “Their studies have all been superficial and full of holes,” says Manuel Ortega Hegg, the president of Nicaragua’s national association of scientists. Ortega says an international panel recently rejected the long-awaited environmental impact report on the canal.

HEGG: (Foreign language spoken).

KAHN: “How is it possible,” says Ortega, “that a study evaluating a project that will move the largest amount of Earth ever in history took just 17 months to conclude?”

Sitting right outside her small banana farm on the banks of Lake Nicaragua, Antonia Romero talks over the sound of an engine sucking water out of the lake and pumping it through her fields. She worries about what will happen to the fresh water she depends on to irrigate if the canal is built.

ANTONIA ROMERO: (Foreign language spoken).

KAHN: “If they destroy this lake, it will be like killing us,” says Romero. “I won’t let that happen,” she says. “They’ll have to do it over my dead body.”

Carrie Kahn, NPR News, San Jorge, Nicaragua.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.