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An animation historian on Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon charged with electrifying everything in the early 20th century.
With all the attention paid to electric vehicles and heat pumps, the 2020s might seem like the decade of home electrification — but nothing might ever rival the boom of the original Roaring Twenties. By 1929, 70% of all American homes had access to electricity, double the figure from the beginning of the decade – bringing home electrification from minority to majority.
Home electrification was so big back then, it even had a mascot: Reddy Kilowatt. Invented by a marketer at the Alabama Power Company in 1926, this cheery spokescharacter with a lightning-bolt body and a lightbulb nose was licensed to hundreds of utility companies throughout the greater part of the 20th century to promote electricity – and more specifically investor–owned utilities. Reddy was even used as a tool to link government-owned utilities to socialism or communism in years following World War II.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
I first came across Reddy Kilowatt last year when a climate tech peer emailed me an image of him, probably from the 1950s, powering everything from a hot water heater to a record player with the headline “Your all Electric Home.”
National Museum of American History Archives Center
For weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about that headline because I kept hearing people in the decarbonization movement say similar things (does Electrify Everything ring a bell?). Itching to learn more of the history of Reddy, I reached out to an expert.
Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson is a professor at Seattle University who teaches and writes about animation. Her paper, Live Electrically with Reddy Kilowatt, Your Electrical Servant, explores the history of this “phenomenally successful and ubiquitous spokescharacter.”
I chatted with Dr. Moana Thompson over a video call from her office where a framed illustration of Reddy Kilowatt hung behind her. I went into the call thinking about positioning this article, “Is America ready for another Reddy?,” but by the end I learned he may be best left in the 1900s. The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
Mike Munsell
Can you introduce yourself and tell me how you ended up researching Reddy Kilowatt?
Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson:
I'm a professor and chair of the film and media department at Seattle University, and Reddy Kilowatt was part of my research into animation that has been used in sponsored media — that is media used for non-traditional, non-entertainment purposes to do something else, like sell something, instruct you, persuade you. It forms a chapter in what will be a new book coming out in the next couple of years on animation and advertising. I think Reddy Kilowatt is a great example of how popular it was in the post-war period to use animated spokescharacters to sell products or ideas.
Munsell:
I’m curious: Are animated mascots less prevalent today than back in the post-war period?
Thompson:
My research doesn’t focus on the contemporary era, so I couldn't give you a precise example. But certainly, as late as the ‘70s, animation characters still were extensively used to promote products, not just cereal, and toys, but things like bubble bath and candy and, well into the ‘70s, alcohol as well.
There are lots of reasons for that, because certain types of animation were fairly cheap to produce, were appealing, often comedic, and attention grabbing. They were a great means to sell a product — also great to use for abstract or more complex processes, like, how do you make oil or petrol or gas? How do you convey a concept like capitalism? Animation, as opposed to live action, was often a more successful way to convey or target topics of that nature.
We have to anthropomorphize the things that are too abstract, too conceptual, or too inhuman to make them translatable into something that we can comprehend and relate to. Hence the Geico lizard or the Aflac duck.
Munsell
And that makes sense then for Reddy Kilowatt to advertise electricity back when it was new, right?
Thompson
Yes, it really emerged around the time electrification was in two thirds of American households — by 1930. And electrical utility companies needed to find an appealing way to sell their product and to encourage consumer consumption of things like appliances, which themselves were emerging — things like dishwashers and washing machines and hair dryers and so on. But also rural electrification, and electrification for business purposes and factories, and on farms.
[Reddy Kilowatt] emerged targeting a fairly affluent consumer, by, for example, turning electricity into a servant – an abstract servant that was personalized and anthropomorphized.
But it was also a way of rather cleverly justifying rate increases as well, which occurred a little later, by making Reddy Kilowatt literally a figure that earns wages and was regarded as an employee by many electrical utility companies. So it's a clever way to say to people, hey, everybody deserves a wage and Reddy Kilowatt deserves a wage and prices are going up, so we're going to put his wages up. And that's a fair thing.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
Munsell:
The Smithsonian has a huge collection of Reddy Kilowatt material. Did you get to go check that out?
Thompson:
Yes, I did. The archives are extensive. And so you can read all about how [Reddy Kilowatt creator] Ashton Collins promoted the product, and what the kinds of speeches that he gave to many other business companies and electrical utility companies in the 30s and 40s.
But he's part of a wider movement. There are other leading figures like Walt Disney and Walter Lantz, who were animation studio heads. Walter Lantz, of course, ran what he would pick the Walter Lantz studios that produced Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda, and a number of other popular cartoons of the 40s. And Walt Disney, of course, we're all familiar with. But they all believed that the kinds of skills that animation studios were doing in the 1940s — by making cartoons to train troops to operate machinery or rifles, and by making propaganda to translate the values of the fight for democracy against fascism — they believed that those skills could be applied to the commercial market in the post-war period. And that animation was a key element of visual culture that could translate to a sometimes illiterate population or partially illiterate population.
So Ashton Collins is not alone there. He's part of a broader movement in the film industry and in the animation industry, to understand the unique power of animation to communicate and to sell and persuade.
Munsell
Did you find anything in your research particularly surprising?
Thompson
In addition to extensive print materials in the Smithsonian, you see dozens and dozens of objects that featured Reddy Kilowatt. His image is on everything from stickers to comic books to toys, and other giveaways for kids to little marionettes, and robots, which were used in trade shows and trade fairs. [Author’s note: eBay has an extensive Reddy Kilowatt collection]
It was used in the 1939 World's Fair, for example, to communicate and to encourage the public to interact with Reddy Kilowatt as if it was a real figure. I was quite taken with this – it's really an early form of animatronics. They were using an avatar, a spokescharacter, who was fairly ubiquitous in the American home, on people's electricity bills, and combining it with a large three dimensional object with a record player attached and somebody who operated the speaking, to interact with kids at fairs and to communicate basic ideas. So that was really exciting in a way because it shows how ahead of its time Ashton Collins was at understanding interactivity.
Mike Munsell
I was thinking about copyright and trademark law and the public domain. Reddy Kilowatt was, in his original form, created in 1926. We're coming up on that 100 year mark. Is there a chance he enters the public domain?
Dr. Moana Thompson
I'm not sure about that. Because you can renew copyright. Which of course Disney did repeatedly before it finally had to succumb to the end of copyright. And Reddy is also a trademark as opposed to a copyrighted image. So he has not just appeared in what is public access now, some of his films and TV commercials, but he's also a trademark figure that has a continuing commercial currency. And Ashton Collins was absolutely rigorous at paying attention to trademark law. He sued other companies that had similar characters, like Willie Wired Head.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
I suspect that Xcel Energy [who now owns the rights to Reddy Kilowatt] is going to be very strict in policing its trademarks. Because if this product has value as a commodity of nostalgia for a certain generation, or multiple generations, or even if it has a new function in Xcel’s future corporate identity, he's going to have value.
Munsell
I guess your research sort of doesn't get quite into the present day, but for my understanding Reddy Kilowatt is not really used much today. It was used by a utility in Barbados and an Ecuadorian soccer club more recently, but from your understanding do you know why he stopped being used?
Thompson
Well, I'm not sure that he stopped being used. I have seen the return of Reddy Kilowatt as a consumer figure and as a licensed product that appears on T-shirts and stickers. Amazon has been selling quite a lot of Reddy Kilowatt products. So it's possible that Xcel Energy that owns the trademark sees the value of the product for a new market, which is the nostalgic market, where you can sell a cartoon character itself.
Munsell: I do think that with the emergence of heat pumps, and induction stoves, there is a push toward home electrification and moving away from fossil fuels in your home. I wonder if that’s an opportunity for a reemergence of Reddy?
Thompson
Yeah, it could be an opportunity for them to repurpose the trademark.
Munsell
Is there anything else you wanted to add about your research into Reddy?
Thompson
I thought it was interesting, the blend that Reddy Kilowatt had of both the impersonal and the personal. On the one hand, we've mostly been talking about it as this cute cartoony character of appeal and personality. But on the other hand, he represents an abstract concept, which is almost robotic. He was literally a robot as part of his marketing. This concept of the kilowatt as one and a half horsepower was part of this wider discursive emergence in the ‘20s that electricity was both a servant, as an anthropomorphized figure, and an abstraction that is there at the flick of a switch.
And in their marketing, they used imagery that of course would never be used today. The association of kilowatt as both a “coolie” – which was the specific language used – and a slave.
So this kind of racist imagery is interesting because it gets to the roots of this idea of the dehumanized, depersonalized aspects of Reddy Kilowatt – that electricity represented by using this imagery, and they had little pictures of kilowatt, which were described as a slave or a “coolie” to explain that, basically, this was free labor and unlimited labor. So obviously addressed to an implicitly white consumer. [The idea that] racial imagery of course affected all kinds of aspects of American advertising is well known to scholars in this field and often played on imagery of blackness or whiteness, in the case of soap advertising, for example, but Reddy Kilowatt in particular is this machinic identity.
And who knows, maybe that'll come back again in the future, because machines are so much more part of our lives now, as compared to 1926 or the mid century with computers and artificial intelligence.
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Current conditions: Severe flooding in west and central Africa has displaced nearly one million people • Brazil is choking on wildfire smoke that can be seen from space • Shanghai was struck by Typhoon Bebinca, the strongest storm to hit the city in 75 years.
Flooding across central and eastern Europe has killed at least 10 people and forced tens of thousands to evacuate. Since late last week, the slow-moving Storm Boris has dumped huge amounts of rain on the region, causing dams to burst and rivers to overflow and inundating communities in Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Parts of eastern Germany are also on alert. In the Austrian capital of Vienna, the Wien River’s water level rose from about 20 inches to more than seven feet in the course of a day. Meanwhile some mountain regions received more than three feet of snow. In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk today declared a state of natural disaster. According to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, the floods could be the worst since 2002.
Flooding in ViennaChristian Bruna/Getty Images
The European Environment Agency has warned that flooding is likely to be “one of the most serious effects from climate change in Europe over coming decades.”
Both U.S. coasts are experiencing wild weather but of very different kinds. The National Hurricane Center issued tropical storm warnings for the Carolinas as “Tropical Cyclone Eight” approaches with 50 mph winds. The system could bring up to 8 inches of rain and flash floods. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, parts of California are expecting snow. The state issued its earliest snow advisory in 20 years for the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where up to 4 inches could fall through Monday afternoon.
With COP29 now less than two months away, key players are working hard to lay the groundwork for the outcomes they’d like to see from the annual climate summit. Here are some recent developments:
A recent study finds that the risk of weather-related supply chain disruptions will rise more in the U.S. than in any other country over the next 15 years. This is because the country is starting from a pretty low baseline risk, thanks to the interconnectivity of all the states. “If a heatwave or period of extreme rainfall hits one part of the U.S., it is easily able to import goods and services from other areas,” CarbonBrief explained. But the risk won’t stay that low forever, and indeed the authors note that the U.S. “is subject to the strongest relative increases in consumption risks” through 2040 as weather shocks increase.
Tesla sold 5,175 Cybertrucks in July, according to data from S&P Global Mobility. Sales of all other EV pickups combined during that month reached 5,546. Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton professor and energy systems engineering expert (and co-host of Heatmap’s climate podcast Shift Key) predicted back in December that the Cybertruck would be crushed by EV pickup rivals like the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian’s R1. But now…
The U.S. Postal Service recently started rolling out its Next Generation Delivery Vehicles — most of which will be electric. The vehicles may not be beautiful, but as Paul Waldman argued for Heatmap, if you want to normalize EVs, “what better way than to have a funky-looking EV rolling down your street every day, delivering mail to your door?”
Isometric is trying to become the most trusted name in the scandal-plagued carbon market.
Regulations are probably coming for the scandal-plagued voluntary carbon market. After years of mounting skepticism and reports of greenwashing, governments are now attempting to rein in the historically unchecked web of platforms, registries, protocols, and verification bodies offering ways to offset a company’s emissions that vary tremendously in price and quality. Europe has developed its own rules, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework, while the Biden administration earlier this year announced a less comprehensive set of general principles. Plus, there are already mandatory carbon credit schemes around the world, such as California’s cap-and-trade program and the E.U. Emissions Trading System.
“The idea that a voluntary credit should be a different thing than a compliance credit, obviously doesn’t make sense, right?” Ryan Orbuch, Lowercarbon Capital’s carbon removal lead, told me. “You want it to be as likely as possible that the thing you’re buying today is going to count in a compliance regime.”
That’s where the carbon credit certification platform Isometric comes into play. Founded in 2022, the startup raised $25 million in its seed round last year, co-led by Lowercarbon and Plural, a European venture capital firm. It has created a rigorous, scientifically-driven standard for carbon removal credits, with the intention of becoming the benchmark that buyers, sellers, and other stakeholders can coalesce around. So whenever federal standards or compliance regimes do kick in, there will be no doubt whether Isometric-verified credits are up to snuff.
“Isometric was basically founded to say, look, the long-term solution here is obviously government and regulation, but in the meantime, this is too important to let the market just keep doing it like this,” Lukas May, chief commercial officer at Isometric, told me. He believes that the government’s role in the carbon market should mirror the financial sector, but instead of preventing insider trading or predatory lending, federal regulators would make high-level determinations on things like what types of credits count and how long carbon must be locked away to count as “permanent removal.” Platforms like Isometric (often referred to as registries) could then focus on setting more granular, scientifically specific requirements for particular methods of carbon removal.
The startup aims to separate itself from existing registries, which include Puro.earth, Verra, and the Gold Standard, in two big ways.
First is just a focus on science. May said that 15 of Isometric’s first 25 hires were scientists. Today, the company’s chief scientist is Jennifer Wilcox, who recently left her position on the leadership team at the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, housed within the U.S. Department of Energy. Other registries, he told me, are “filled with NGO types” and “policy people” who lack the technical background to, say, evaluate what types rock formations are best for the geological sequestration of bio-oil or how CO2 fluxes in the soil impact enhanced rock weathering. These types of in-the-weeds analyses are integral to establishing stringent protocols to validate the amount of carbon that’s actually been removed.
Additionally, May, Orbuch, and Khaled Helioui, a partner at Plural who led the firm’s investment in Isometric, all said the company fixes a key flaw in the voluntary carbon market —- alignment of financial incentives. Traditionally, carbon removal suppliers pay registries to certify their credits, which creates an incentive for registries to overlook lax standards. But Isometric is instead paid a flat fee by the buyers for performing verification work on a per-ton basis.
This year, Isometric verified its first credits ever, from the carbon removal companies Vaulted Deep, which collects sludgy, organic waste and deposits it underground, and Charm Industrial, which injects processed biomass into abandoned oil and gas wells. Credits from these two suppliers were sold to Frontier, the carbon-removal initiative led by the payments firm Stripe. Just last week, Frontier identified Isometric as its first and only leading credit issuer.
“What makes Isometric stand out is they’re explicitly focused on durable CDR [carbon dioxide removal],” Joanna Klitzke, Frontier’s procurement and ecosystem strategy lead, told me. “Durable” refers to the fact that Isometric’s projects must sequester CO2 for 1,000 years or more. “They’re building tech products that make data and reporting particularly easy for suppliers and for credit management,” she added.
Everyone is essentially trying to avoid another scandal like the one that engulfed rainforest carbon offsets, which were found to be largely worthless. The industry has thus been shifting away from more nebulous carbon offsets, which seek to avoid future emissions by preventing deforestation or funding renewables development, and towards more concrete, but often more expensive, forms of carbon removal — think direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, or biomass carbon removal and storage, all of which have seen a boom in investment.
“As carbon removal was emerging as a new and potentially very exciting way to do this stuff, potentially more measurable and more rigorous, we couldn’t just sit and watch the same registries do the same thing,” May told me, saying doing so would “destroy trust in the carbon removal industry before it’s even off the ground.”
In a past life, Isometric’s founder and CEO, Eamon Jubbawy, founded a digital identity verification company for the financial services industry. This gave investors confidence that he could bring his expertise in trust-building and verification services to the carbon removal space.
“It’s not a like for like, but there’s a lot of overlap in terms of actually introducing efficiency, effectiveness, and having technology really open a market,” Plural’s Helioui told me. “This is not an endeavor or an opportunity where I would have been necessarily that keen to back a first-time founder, just because of the complexity of what you need to manage,” he said. “We’re really talking about market creation.”
But May doesn’t expect Isometric to totally dominate other registries. Just like there are many private banks, May envisions an “ecosystem of high quality registries,” eventually unified around a set of federal guardrails. Until then, he believes Isometric’s role is to “set a bar that is so high that the expectation and norm in the market shifts,” thus avoiding a race to the bottom where companies are able to greenwash their image with cheap, low-quality credits.
Now, not every company can afford the highest quality credits. And because of Isometric’s 1,000-year storage requirement, many cheaper, nature-based projects, such as reforestation, are excluded from its registry, even though there’s still demand for them. Orbuch told me that Isometric will continue adding guidelines for different carbon removal pathways, as it recently did for biochar, a charcoal-like brick that locks up carbon contained within biomass.
It’s still early days, and there’s plenty of room for Isometric to grow alongside the market. After all, it’s only issued 5,350 carbon removal credits to date, while nearly two billion credits have been issued in the voluntary carbon market overall.
“The whole industry needs to be scaling up,” May told me. “So we need to, in 10 years time, be, you know, issuing and verifying hundreds of millions, if not billions, of credits annually.”
On the U.S. Postal Service’s wonderfully weird shift to electric cars
When you think of a gas-guzzler, what comes to mind is probably a gigantic pickup like the Ram 1500 TRX, which gets a combined 12 miles per gallon, or a sports car like the Ferrari Daytona, which manages a less-than-impressive 13 mpg. But you may not think about a vehicle you’ve likely seen a thousand times: the small trucks driven by most local mail carriers, known as the Grumman Long Life Vehicle. They lived up to their name, since they’ve been in service since the mid-80s; the newest of them were built 30 years ago. But they get an abysmal 9 miles per gallon, burning fuel by the tankful and spewing emissions as they go about their appointed rounds.
So after a long and winding journey to a replacement for the LLV, the first of the Postal Service’s Next Generation Delivery Vehicles — most of which will be electric — just hit the road. And they are beautiful.
Oshkosh Defense
This may not be a widely shared opinion. Indeed, some will find the NGDV downright ugly, and they won’t exactly be wrong. But the new postal truck’s weird appearance — many have remarked that it looks like a duck, or something from a Richard Scarry book — is what, I predict, will make it iconic. In addition to bringing a touch of whimsy to your neighborhood, the NGDV will advance the cause of vehicle electrification much more than you might expect.
Postal delivery vehicles were always a no-brainer for electrification: They do a lot of stopping and starting, they follow fixed routes so they can charge at a single location, and since the existing fleet uses so much gas, electrifying them will make a real dent in the nation’s emissions.
The old trucks didn’t just add to our nation’s carbon emissions, they got no love from the workers who drove them. If you’ve noticed your mail carrier sweating profusely as they bring letters to your door in the summer, it’s not just because they have to carry that heavy bag up and down the street. It’s also because their creaky, uncomfortable vehicles have no air conditioning. In 2024.
“It felt like heaven blowing in my face,” said one carrier after trying out the NGDV, which does indeed have air conditioning, along with many of the safety features, including backup cameras, antilock brakes, and airbags, that are common in modern cars but the LLVs lacked. The new truck also looks unusual because it solves many of the problems the old vehicles pose for letter carriers. The truck had to be tall enough to allow them to stand up in the back, so they won’t have to hunch over the way they do now. It had to be low to the ground so they can get in and out easily dozens of times in a shift. It had to have a big enough windshield for the shortest and tallest carriers to see out comfortably.
Oshkosh Defense
All that meant that the NGDV wound up looking like no other vehicle. Once they are fully deployed — the current plan is to put 60,000 into service over the next few years — their unique profile will become familiar to everyone. And it’s important that this strange electric vehicle will be associated with the Postal Service. Because people love the Postal Service.
That might be a surprise given familiar complaints about lines at the post office. But it turns out that when surveys are taken, the Postal Service always ranks at or near the top of public approval among federal agencies. A recent Pew Research poll put the USPS’s approval at 72%, behind only the National Park Service. Gallup polls show them at the top. A 2020 survey by the department’s Inspector General found 91% of respondents saying they had a positive view of the USPS.
Perhaps people have a sense that what the Postal Service accomplishes is nothing short of miraculous. They move over 300 million pieces of mail every day, and deliver to 167 million addresses. They’ll pick up a letter at your door, take it anywhere in the country by land or air or water, and deliver it right to your Aunt Myrtle in the space of a few days — and not for $50 or $100, but for 73 cents. It costs the same whether that letter is going to Atlanta or Alakanuk. As U.S. law states, the purpose of the Postal Service is “to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people.” The USPS is nothing less than a national treasure.
Maybe people appreciate that, or maybe it’s just that most of us like getting mail, and our mail carriers are part of our communities (and usually friendly). In any case, the new electric vehicles will be associated with all the positive feelings people have about the USPS.
Which is why it’s fine — and maybe even better — that the NGDV is odd-looking, or even ugly (but in a charming way). One prevailing theory about EV adoption — advanced by Tesla’s Elon Musk and embodied in other vehicles like the Ford F-150 Lightning — is that the way to get people to buy EVs is to make EVs that are cool. It’s a valid perspective, but another way to think about the long-term goal of transportation electrification is that EVs ought to be in as many places and as many forms as possible. If you want to normalize them, what better way than to have a funky-looking EV rolling down your street every day, delivering mail to your door?
It may be a while before you spot an NGDV in your neighborhood; among other things, it will take time to install the charging infrastructure at all the postal facilities necessary to electrify the entire delivery fleet. After all, one of the things that makes the Postal Service such a vital part of our national life is that it touches Americans, and delivers to them, no matter how far-flung they are. At least at first, we may be more likely to see electric delivery vehicles in big cities than in remote rural areas.
But before long, the NGDV could become the most widely recognized EV in the country, and one that people associate with service, community, efficiency, and patriotism. And yes, they look weird. Which is part of what makes them great.