A blog about Marinwood-Lucas Valley and the Marin Housing Element, politics, economics and social policy. The MOST DANGEROUS BLOG in Marinwood-Lucas Valley.
Saturday, September 19, 2015
FAMILY FRIENDLY CITIES
FAMILY FRIENDLY CITIES
by John Sanphillippo 09/07/2015
One of the common criticisms leveled at people who promote urban living goes something like this. “Cities are great for college kids, people starting off in their careers, bohemians, and maybe some older empty nesters with money who have a taste for theater and art. But most people have families and tight budgets. Suburbia is the only place that provides a high quality, safe, affordable life for regular folks with children.”
Last year I flew to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to attend a wedding. As we were all milling about with friends and family on the porch eating ice cream on a gorgeous September afternoon I noticed some of my fellow out-of-town visitors from New York and San Francisco looking around with a peculiar expression. It was the same kind of look that dogs get when they’re curious and a little confused – one ear up and one ear down. They looked at their kids playing in the grass and sitting on grandma’s lap. I knew very well what they were thinking. They were a family of four living in a tiny one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and their oldest child will be starting school next year.
Now, I need you to picture the neighborhood so you get the context here. This is a century old streetcar suburb five miles from downtown. There are tree lined streets, front porches on elegant old homes, a charming Main Street with mom and pop shops a couple of blocks away, and an elementary school directly across the street. Even in this very comfortable and pricey neighborhood a grand home with a patch of grass could be purchased for significantly less than the cost of a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. You can actually ride a bicycle to downtown Pittsburgh – and it would be a pleasant and convenient ride. Carnegie Mellon University and a dozen other prominent institutions are nearby.
In large expensive cities many young families are having to make harsh choices. They can stay where they are and pay exorbitant rents or a shockingly high mortgage for less than ideal accommodations in order to have access to good jobs and urban amenities. Or they can move to a more affordable suburb and spend a couple of hours each day schlepping in and out of the city. Or they can step away from the city entirely and organize their lives around a purely suburban set of arrangements: the subdivision, the office park, the shopping mall… For many people who value urban life these are difficult decisions with a lot of unsavory trade offs.
Pittsburgh is just one of hundreds of small and medium sized cities in the interior that people in coastal cities like to dismiss as part of “Flyover Country”. What isn’t clearly understood is that Pittsburgh isn’t competing with New York or San Francisco. Instead Pittsburgh is competing with the distant suburbs of places like New York and San Francisco out in the endless smear of anonymous tract homes and strip malls that ring those cities. Pittsburgh wins that taste test hands down every time for anyone who shows up and actually looks around and experiences what’s on offer.
John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He's a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.
Dick Spotswood: 'Cherry-picking' statistics to attack local zoning
see article: Dick Spotswood: 'Cherry-picking' statistics to attack local zoning
By Dick Spotswood
Special to the IJ
Special to the IJ
Posted: 01/29/2012 05:38:00 AM PST
THE OLD SLAM, "There are lies, damn lies and statistics," comes to mind when reviewing the Marin Community Foundation's new web-available publication, "A Portrait of Marin."
The report's hallmark is cherry-picking statistics to justify MCF's preordained position that Marin County housing is based on racially segregated communities. The report is a work of political advocacy rather than professional scholarship.
Inevitably it will be cited as a "scientific" basis for moves by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Association of Bay Area Governments to justify their goal: overriding Marin's towns' authority to establish their own zoning.
The report's key section is "Analysis by geography, race and ethnicity."
The "action agenda" in "Portrait" unequivocally states the end game: "Zoning laws that limit certain kind of development be suspended for the construction of a multifamily complex with units for low-income tenants and older adults. This approach is particularly appropriate where the zoning laws were originally designed to maintain racial segregation."
The MCF thesis is that since Marin communities don't mimic the racial composition of urban Bay Area, those towns are thus "segregated." The report uses census tract data to show in a seemingly neutral manner that people in more affluent communities are better off than those less prosperous.
True, but so what?
MCF's conclusion: If we just move lower-income people and those of racially defined "protected classes" to ZIP codes with higher incomes, all will be well. Perhaps not.
The report's authors manipulate statistics to justify the desired result. Two examples:
In trying to explain the impact of unequal distribution of educational resources, MCF compares two middle class schools: Redwood High in Larkspur to Novato High. Redwood spends $10,340 per student with high test scores while Novato spends $5,983 and its scores are average.
Somehow that's supposed to show the relationship between expenditures and educational result.
Ignored is the Sausalito Marin City School District. The small elementary school district spends significantly more per student in its non-charter classrooms than does Redwood.
If money is the answer, Sausalito Marin City should have outstanding results. Instead, while improving, their results remain below expectation.
Another metric is the authors' so-called "Human Development Index." It is composed of life-expectancy, education attainments and income.
San Rafael's Canal neighborhood is at the bottom, though counterintuitively, the report indicates that life expectancy of Marin Latinos at 88.2 years is higher than whites at 83.5 years.
The Canal tract does show the county's lowest education attainment rates and income.
Why might Canal residents have completed less college and earn less than white and Asian Marinites? Could it be that many just arrived from rural Mexico where education is poor? The "Index" proves nothing except restating the obvious.
The progressive Brookings Institution suggests a different approach. Its publication, "Creating an Opportunity Society," quotes "data showing that the middle class dream is largely achievable if individuals do just three things: graduate from high school, work full-time and delay child bearing until marriage."
The MCF-HUD-ABAG approach actually harms those they claim to help. Their discredited approach that for "protected classes" to move up the wealth index, government action such as curtailing local zoning, not personal responsibility, is the answer.
As suggested by Brookings, a combination of two contrasting approaches works best.
Smart personal decision making, particularly good parenting, is the foundation. It's matched with improved schools and first-rate preschool programs.
Local zoning has nothing to do with it.
Friday, September 18, 2015
Dick Spotswood and Sashi McEntee discuss Plan Bay Area effects on the November 5 elections
Dick Spotswood and Shashi McEntee talk Plan Bay Area
Violent Femmes - Kiss Off
"Kiss Off"
I need someone, a person to talk to
Someone who'd care to love
Could it be you?
Could it be you?
The situation gets rough, and I start to panic
It's not enough, it's just a habit
And, kid, you're sick
Well, darling, this is it
Well, you can all just kiss off into the air
Behind my back, I can see them stare
They'll hurt me bad, but I won't mind
They'll hurt me bad, they do it all the time (yeah, yeah!)
Yeah, they do it all the time (yeah, yeah!)
They do it all the time (do it all the time!)
They do it all the time (do it all the time!)
They do it all the time, do it all the time
I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record!
Oh, yeah? Well, don't get so distressed
Did I happen to mention that I'm impressed?
I take one, one, one 'cause you left me
And two, two, two for my family
And three, three, three for my heartache
And four, four, four for my headaches
And five, five, five for my lonely
And six, six, six for my sorrow
And seven, seven for no tomorrow
And eight, eight, I forget what eight was for
But nine, nine, nine for the lost gods
Ten, ten, ten, ten for everything, everything, everything
Well, you can all just kiss off into the air
Behind my back, I can see them stare
They'll hurt me bad, but I won't mind
They'll hurt me bad, they do it all the time (yeah, yeah!)
Yeah, they do it all the time (yeah, yeah!)
They do it all the time (do it all the time!)
They do it all the time (do it all the time!)
They do it all the time, do it all the time, do it all the time
Someone who'd care to love
Could it be you?
Could it be you?
The situation gets rough, and I start to panic
It's not enough, it's just a habit
And, kid, you're sick
Well, darling, this is it
Well, you can all just kiss off into the air
Behind my back, I can see them stare
They'll hurt me bad, but I won't mind
They'll hurt me bad, they do it all the time (yeah, yeah!)
Yeah, they do it all the time (yeah, yeah!)
They do it all the time (do it all the time!)
They do it all the time (do it all the time!)
They do it all the time, do it all the time
I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record!
Oh, yeah? Well, don't get so distressed
Did I happen to mention that I'm impressed?
I take one, one, one 'cause you left me
And two, two, two for my family
And three, three, three for my heartache
And four, four, four for my headaches
And five, five, five for my lonely
And six, six, six for my sorrow
And seven, seven for no tomorrow
And eight, eight, I forget what eight was for
But nine, nine, nine for the lost gods
Ten, ten, ten, ten for everything, everything, everything
Well, you can all just kiss off into the air
Behind my back, I can see them stare
They'll hurt me bad, but I won't mind
They'll hurt me bad, they do it all the time (yeah, yeah!)
Yeah, they do it all the time (yeah, yeah!)
They do it all the time (do it all the time!)
They do it all the time (do it all the time!)
They do it all the time, do it all the time, do it all the time
Thursday, September 17, 2015
What is "Carbon Farming" in West Marin?
What is "Carbon Farming"?
from Marin Carbon Project
Editor's Note: Isn't this simply organic farming using compost methods most of us use in our gardens? I believe the true purpose of this project is to "farm" carbon credits to sell for cash from "Cap and Trade" polluters wishing to buy off regulators to allow them to pollute our environment.
"I've got one of them P.H.D.s -Piled higher and deeper." |
WHAT IS CARBON FARMING?
All agricultural production originates from the process of plant photosynthesis, which uses sunshine to combine carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air with water and minerals from the soil to produce plant material, both above and below ground.
Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) |
Common agricultural practices, including driving a tractor, tilling the soil, grazing, and other activities, result in the return of CO2 to the air. As much as one third of the surplus CO2 in the atmosphere driving climate change today has come from land management practices that cause loss of carbon, as CO2, from our working lands.
On the other hand, Carbon can be stored long-term (decades to centuries or more) in soils in a process called "soil carbon sequestration." Carbon Farming involves implementing practices that are known to improve the rate at which CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and converted to plant material and/or soil organic matter. Carbon Farming is successful when carbon gains resulting from enhanced land management and/or conservation practices exceed carbon losses.
Ten easy ways to save Marinwood-Lucas Valley in your spare time. Sign the PETITION before May 13th!
Getting the word out to your neighbors can be fun. |
Here are ten simple ways to Save Marinwood-Lucas Valley from reckless overdevelopment.
1.) Talk to your neighbors. Become informed with the latest happenings in our neighborhood by following the 2012 Housing Element for Unincorporated Marin, http://www.marin.ca.gov/depts/CD/main/housing/docs/2012_Draft_Marin_County_Housing_Element.pdf
local news, and this blog www.savemarinwood.org . Person to person contact is by far the most effective way to communicate. Try to speak to one new person a day.
2.) Offer to speak at your next community event about the changes. You don't have to be an expert. Just relate what you know and advise others to learn about the pros and cons of growth in our community.
3.) Pass out flyers to your neighbors. It doesn't have to be alot. Ask everyone you meet to get involved. A few hours a week can make a difference. Posters will be on this blog or you can make your own.
4.) Attend public meetings. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Ask officials to explain their plans in language you can understand. If assumptions or data doesn't seem right, ask them for their source of their data.. Be prepared to speak or write a letter to challenge unwise land use decisions.
5.) Attend workshops to become a better educated voter. Learn about the core beliefs, economic and political realities driving this push to urbanize Marin.
6.) Participate in social action. While it is true that a relatively small group of people are driving the development, hundreds if not thousands more, will object to the trampling of our property rights, community values and democracy. Social action informs the politicians and the media of our determination to become a true "citizen powered democracy" responsive to local communities. Your presence at these actions is a testament to others.
7.) Write to local media, politicians and friends. Post a blog. Email friends and community lists. Start a conversation. It is important to speak out. There are more of us than they think. Show them by your words. You don't have to be a great writer. Just write as you naturally speak. Your passion will be clear.
8.) Post a sign on your lawn. Let others know where you stand on the issue of growth in Marinwood Lucas Valley.
9.) Post flyers where you work, eat and shop .
10.) Be determined. The powerful politicians and crony "non profit" developers are working double time to build in Marinwood Lucas Valley while we sleep. It will not be an easy task but like many grassroots efforts before us, we can prevail. We are the power. They are the politicians and the few developers. Democracy was made for the people.
VIDEO : "Won't the massive developments affect Miller Creek Water Shed too?"
At the May 13, 2013 Marin County Planning Commission meeting, Lucas Valley Resident, Pamela McKnight comments the effect of development on the Miller Creek Watershed. Specifically, she mentions the email sent by Kate Crecelius about the possible sale of the Idylberry School for housing and the effect it will have on run off. In the staff report found at Planning meeting video, agenda and staff report, you can view Commissionor Crecelius remarks.
We thank Pamela McKnight and other residents for speaking up for our community and demanding commonsense planning that respects the character of the community and its long standing community plan.
Miller Creek is a pristine watershed. |
Biochar: Black Gold or Just Another Snake Oil Scheme?
Biochar: Black Gold or Just Another Snake Oil Scheme?
BY RACHEL SMOLKER – SEPTEMBER 18, 2013
There’s little basis for claims that biochar could solve our energy, food, and climate woes
In an interview with Naomi Klein, published in the Autumn 2013 issue of Earth Island Journal, she referred to the American fondness for “win-win solutions.” I had to giggle, having on many occasions sat in on industry-led events, where the speakers, wildly animated, blather on about their latest “win-win-win” technofix, certain to resolve everything that ails humanity, from climate change to poverty, to deforestation to toxic pollution to nuclear waste. Who could be against such hopeful, all-in-one miracle cures? Perhaps only the skeptics who know the smell of snake oil. Which, I guess, includes me.
Photo by potaufeu/flickr
I came to such deep skepticism not by nature but from years of experience. One formative experience has been following the hype around biochar. Biochar enthusiasts are a hopeful bunch. They claim that charred biomass will be a win for climate, a win for soils and crop yields, hence a win against hunger and poverty, and a win for renewable energy generation. They are convinced that burning “biomass,” that is, trees, crop residues, animal manure or what have you, (some even advocate burning garbage or tires), could solve our energy, food, and climate woes.
Right away, there is good reason to be skeptical. Burning anything at all seems an unlikely cure for an overheating planet. No matter how it is done, or what is burned, combustion creates pollution — air pollution, particulates, ashes, various toxins and soot, the second largest warming agent after C02. Nonetheless, there are many who embrace biochar and specifically advocate burning things under oxygen starved conditions, via process called pyrolysis, to maximize the production of charred residues. Biochar, they claim, is “black gold.”
***
The first key “win” of biochar, proponents say, is that if buried in the ground, the char, which consists largely of carbon, will more or less permanently “sequester” that carbon and therefore help to cleanse the atmosphere. In an article published in the journal, Nature, some of the leading biochar enthusiasts claimed that it could offset global greenhouse gas emissions by a whopping 12 percent annually. All that would be required is collecting most forest and agriculture residues and animal manures from across the globe, as well as converting over half a billion hectares (an area larger than India) of land to producing dedicated burnable crops. After collecting it, the biomass would be transported to pyrolysis facilities, burned, then the char would be collected and transported back around the globe where it would be tilled and buried into soils over millions of acres. Year after year.
The problem with this idea isn’t just the massive scale of the project, for which there seems little social or political will. It is even more fundamental: There is really little basis for assuming that biochar carbon really will store carbon reliably in soils. A Biofuelwatch review of peer-reviewed field trials as of 2011 showed some remarkably unimpressive results. We only looked at peer-reviewed field trials in order to distinguish clearly between hype and actual results, and to discern how biochar acts in the real world, with living biodiverse soils, rather than sterile, laboratory conditions. Field trails proved rare; only five such studies were found, which between them tested biochar on 11 different combinations of soil and vegetation. In only three cases did biochar result in any additional carbon sequestration. In most cases, there was either no measurable difference in soil carbon, or even a reduction in soil carbon. These results from short-term studies —none spanned more than four years — fly in the face of repeated claims that biochar will sequester carbon in soils for tens, hundreds or even thousands of years.
Photo by crustmania/flickr
More recently, two important reviews (you can read themhere and here) of soil carbon showed that the stability of soil carbon is not so much determined by the molecular structure of the carbon itself, but rather by surrounding soil ecosystem properties. That makes reliable carbon storage very difficult to predict or assume.
Win number two, biochar enthusiasts claim, is that biochar will also improve the quality of the soil and hence improve crop yields, thereby help reduce desertification, deforestation, hunger, and poverty. Again, Biofuelwatch’sreview of peer reviewed field trials showed unimpressive and erratic results. Since then, a recent synthesis review of impact on crop yields found that in half of published studies, there was either no effect whatsoever on crop yields, or biochar actually reduced yields.
The third win, according to advocates, is generating renewable electricity and heat during pyrolysis. But so far, virtually all biochar has been produced without doing so. That’s because pyrolysis is difficult to control and remains largely unproven for commercial application. Another reason is the inherent trade off: If you want more biochar less biomass will be converted to heat and power, and vice versa.
None of these trial results have dampened the hopes of biochar enthusiasts, who still see wins everywhere they look. They continue to promote biochar as a means to reduce fertilizer demand, agricultural runoff, clean up waste water, reclaim mine sites, and offset fossil fuel pollution. Some have even advocated feeding it to cows to make them emit less gas, and one company even claims that biochar will make it possible for consumers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions even while driving big gas-guzzling cars. (see below).
In her Journal interview Klien also spoke about climate geoengineering, which she referred to as a proverbial “escape hatch” providing a way to avoid the consequences of our failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is indeed one of the most perilous hazards of the geoengineering mindset. Widespread doubts about geoengineering have resulted in a push to accept “more benign” technologies, including large-scale biochar and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Both biochar and BECCS require burning lots of biomass — trees and crops, as well as municipal solid waste. Staggering quantities would have to be harvested and burned to have any measureable impact on the global atmosphere. Studies have shown that capturing just one billion tonnes of carbon per year would require conversion of up to 990 million hectares of land to plantations. The consequences for land, water, soils, biodiversity, would very likely render the treatment worse than the disease.
What is already painfully evident is that demand for biomass, even at the current smaller scale is already stripping Earth of her remaining biodiverse ecosystems, and replacing them with industrial, chemically-dependent monoculture deserts.
What is already painfully evident is that demand for biomass, even at the current smaller scale is already stripping Earth of her remaining biodiverse ecosystems, and replacing them with industrial, chemically-dependent monoculture deserts.
Another article in the Journal’s recent issue, “Modified Stands,” talks about the push for genetically engineered trees. The impetus behind GE trees is a projected dramatic increase in demand for wood, in large part for bioenergy. This demand is a result of subsidies and supports for renewable energy that fail to distinguish between the kind of renewable energy that requires constant inputs of fuel (wood etc) and combustion, and the kind that does not. The lion’s share of subsidies and supports has gone to bioenergy, including biofuels and biomass burning for electricity, which can conveniently be done 24/7 in coal plants, or stand alone facilities. Windmills and solar panels are more fussy, expensive, and their production cycles are intermittent.
To get a sense of the scale and impact of using bioenergy, consider that in the United Kingdom alone, current and proposed biomass burning for energy would require over 80 million tons of wood, more than eight times the amount of wood produced for all purposes domestically. There is now an expanding international trade in wood chips and pellets to satisfy this voracious demand from the UK and other European countries. Tree plantations and native forests in the southeastern United States and Canada are being cut, pelletized and shipped to Europe to be burned as “renewable energy.” The wood pellet industry is booming, and fast growing monoculture plantations — which could soon include GE trees, are in great demand.
Biochar enthusiasts usually insist they won’t cut forests or convert ecosystems to provide burnable biomass. Just like the biomass electricity industry, they prefer to talk about burning “wastes and residues.” But there is no such thing as “waste” in a forest ecosystem — all is recycled, via decay, to support regeneration and regrowth. In many places, definitions of waste have been expanded to include virtually any wood that is not valued as sawlogs, so timber harvests are more intense and destructive. In agriculture, there are often better options for residues, such as compost, mulch, animal fodder, and bedding. In any case, industrial forestry and agriculture practices have already wreaked havoc on ecosystems. Creating a market for the waste products of unsustainable practices hardly seems a step in the right direction.
***
Photo by Engineering for Change
So far, biochar has not gained the subsidies and investments needed to scale it up commercially. Biochar advocates initially worked to gain funding from carbon markets, arguing that biochar could “offset” fossil fuel pollution, but with the recent decline of global carbon markets they have largely retreated seeking carbon financing. Instead, they are now pushing biochar as a niche product for small-scale and organic farmers.
The good news is that most small-scale farmers are closely attuned to what works on their farms and will judge for themselves. The bad news is that they are largely unaware that they are to some extent being used to promote an eventual massive scale-up of the biochar industry.
The good news is that most small-scale farmers are closely attuned to what works on their farms and will judge for themselves. The bad news is that they are largely unaware that they are to some extent being used to promote an eventual massive scale-up of the biochar industry.
In 2008-09, for example, a high-profile biochar project in Cameroon run by Biochar Fund, a Belgian nonprofit, promised to alleviate poverty and improve nutritional status of poor farmers by improving crop yields. The farmers donated land and labor, and were told they would be compensated with finance from carbon markets. The first set of trials were proclaimed wildly successful without any independent verification. Then the trials were abandoned without even informing the farmers. Biochar Fund moved on and was granted funds for yet another set of trials in Congo. This time the claim was that biochar would enable slash and burn agriculturalists to do less slashing and burning because the soils would be enriched with biochar. So far, there are no reports of the status of those trials. (Read Biofuelwatch’s investigative report about the Cameroon project here.)
Just as with biomass electricity, biochar enthusiasts claim that burning biomass is “carbon neutral” – that the carbon released during combustion will be reabsorbed by new trees or crops. This claim has been soundly and repeatedly refuted. Trees take years to regrow, assuming that they even do so. Cutting natural forests for biomass electricity, or biochar, or any other use results in a massive “carbon debt” that can take decades or even centuries to repay (i.e. for an equivalent amount of carbon to be reabsorbed in new tree growth). Biochar advocates continue to cling to the carbon neutral myth nonetheless. In fact, they take it a step further. Burying the carbon char in soils, they say, will permanently store some of the carbon, so regrowth will absorb additional (not just replacement) carbon. This, they say, makes it carbon negative.
This misguided logic is what lies behind claims by companies like Cool Planet that consumers can clean the atmosphere by driving more. The California-based biofuel and biochar company seeks to make transportation fuels from wood, which they say is “carbon neutral,” and then bury the char residue from their production process, thus renderning the entire process “carbon negative.” By Cool Planet’s logic, driving more could actually reduce carbon emissions. That kind of “win” has an especially outstanding appeal. Cool Planet has won significant corporate backing from BP, ConocoPhillips, General Electric, and Google among others, and is now looking at opening two new facilities in Louisiana.
The logical conclusion for biomass electricity or biochar, from a purely carbon accounting perspective is that we should burn things that grow faster and therefore incur a shorter “carbon debt.” GE eucalyptus perhaps? Clearly it is not very helpful to reduce the whole affair of climate change to counting carbon molecules. Forests, soils, ecosystems all are far more than agglomerations of carbon. They are intricate, multidimensional, interconnected, and complex beyond our imaginings and hence beyond our ability to measure, manipulate, and control.
The reductionist mindset that carbon accountants engage with is a dead end that only serves to blind us to the full scope and range of Earth as a whole. It fails to see that this planet is more than the sum of its parts. If we are really serious about preserving life on Earth, we will have to relearn how to envision the whole, embrace humility in the face of our ignorance about how life-supporting earth systems work. No amount of biochar, no climate geoengineering tricks, no technofixes or markets or “private sector engagement” or fancy carbon accounting will be a “win win win” for us. By far the winning strategy would be to allow Earth to restore, regenerate and recover, on her own terms.
MTC Chair argues for "Good Displacement"
MTC Chair, James P. Spering argues for "good displacement" when people are removed from "failed communities" and moved into places where "civilized people" live in the suburbs.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
"We will fund Dixie Schools with Riches from our Unicorn Farm"
"Unicorns have been spotted in West Marin in our Priority Conservation Area" |
"These friendly creatures may be the answer to funding from dollars lost to Non Profit Housing that pay no taxes. " |
"Unicorns can help bring in much needed revenue that when partnered with your tax dollars can fully fund the Dixie School District forever." |
"The rainbow's are for happiness."
Vote. Don't think.
Environmentalists Will Lose, And That’s Great News For Mankind
Here is the lede of Jonathan Chait’s long but optimistic piece on climate change (“This is the year humans finally got serious about saving themselves from themselves” says the subhead) in New York magazine:
Here on planet Earth, things could be going better. The rise in atmospheric temperatures from greenhouse gases poses the most dire threat to humanity, measured on a scale of potential suffering, since Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany launched near-simultaneous wars of conquest. And the problem has turned out to be much harder to solve. It’s not the money. The cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels, measured as a share of the economy, may amount to a fraction of the cost of defeating the Axis powers. Rather, it is the politics that have proved so fiendish. Fighting a war is relatively straightforward: You spend all the money you can to build a giant military and send it off to do battle. Climate change is a problem that politics is almost designed not to solve. Its costs lie mostly in the distant future, whereas politics is built to respond to immediate conditions. (And of the wonders the internet has brought us, a lengthening of mental time horizons is not among them.) Its solution requires coordination not of a handful of allies but of scores of countries with wildly disparate economies and political structures. There has not yet been a galvanizing Pearl Harbor moment, when the urgency of action becomes instantly clear and isolationists melt away. Instead, it breeds counterproductive mental reactions: denial, fatalism, and depression.
Although Chait makes a number of fantastical economic claims, it’s worth focusing on the moral question: Is global warming really a more ominous threat to mankind than communism was—an ideology that, at best, condemned hundreds of millions to rot in poverty under totalitarianism or, at worst, left them to be massacred or starved to death?According to some sources, Mao’s government killed at least 45 million after 1949. An unimaginable number surely suffered. This was an expansionist ideology that fomented war in every part of the world.
Is global warming really a more dire threat to mankind than Islamic radicalism, which has convicted millions of people to be subjects of brutal theocracies, and billions more to be the targets of terror? Those thousands of Muslim refugees aren’t risking their lives in the waters of the Mediterranean because there’s been one-degree Celsius change in the temperature over the past century.
Is the threat of global warming worse than the threat of global poverty?
If you’re going to fear monger, measuring threats on a “scale of potential suffering” is the absolute best kind of fearmongering as it’s really no measurement, at all. Here on Earth, on a scale of tangible, real-world suffering, things have gotten considerably better—less hunger, less poverty, longer and freer lives—for a large chunk of humanity. Concurrently (but not coincidentally) most of this has happened when this climate-change crisis was gaining momentum.
Now, unlike coal, oil, gas, and market economics, an environmentalist has never lifted anyone out of poverty. But if you’re convinced that every wildfire and tornado is the fault of Koch Brothers, Ayn Rand and a recalcitrant GOP Congress, this moral structure probably makes some sense to you. If you believe the moral magnitude of climate change falls somewhere short of the killing of 70 million people (we don’t know the exact number World War II took), but is a more a pressing problem than mass hunger or disease or war, I can understand why you think doing nearly anything to stop it is okay. Like emulating one-party authoritarianism, for instance.
That’s where you will find hope. Our agreement with China has Chait very upbeat. Basically, Obama will issue some diktats through the Environmental Protection Agency, then in 2030, or some year around that time, when China’s carbon emissions are expected to peak, it promises it will implement some ambiguous action plan at some vague point in the future. All we need to do is trust them now and act. The agreement contains no binding language requiring any goals to be met. After that, it will be “enforced” by international diplomatic pressure. If we are good role models, however, China will do the right thing, as well.
But wait! Maybe it’s the Chicoms who are the role models. “China, in fact, has undergone an energy revolution far more rapid than anything under way in the U.S. — the country that supposedly couldn’t be shamed into action has, instead, shamed us,” writes Chait, who finds it amazing that things become efficient and productive as a nation become wealthier.
Do you feel shame?
China’s industrialization and capitalistic reforms have probably done more to alleviate poverty than any other state action. It’s one of the great stories of the late twentieth to early twenty-first century. One of the most tragic stories is that the same communist government holds billions hostage to that poverty by denying them access to the same reforms. One Chinese official claims that 82 million people in China live below the poverty line. Those people, by the way, live under $1 a day, so they don’t drive cars or abuse their air conditioners and ruin the Earth. But Li Keqiang, premier of China, guessed that 200 million Chinese live on $1.25 a day or less. If we applied the standards Americans typically use to measure, we would probably be looking at a population of poor far larger than the entire United States. But, hey, communists subsidize the inefficient solar panel industry with more dollars than we do.
Alas, in the United States process gets in the way. When Chait claims that politics are “fiendish,” he means Republicans are fiendish for their skepticism that curbing economic growth or signing on to some top-down state-driven plan is useful, doable, or needed. You won’t be surprised to learn, I imagine, that state intervention circumventing these Republicans and unilaterally implementing liberal policies is the ideal way to fix this mess and bring the Earth back into balance. Like the Chinese do it. China is not bogged down by “politics.”
Now, most Democrats will concede that markets wiped out much destitution around the world, but argue you can keep that wealth under a worldwide social engineering project that will fix the climate a hundred years from now. You can’t have it both ways. China can help ease climate change, but it will condemn billions to poverty. Or not. It can’t do both. To argue it can is economic denialism.
If there were any chance environmentalists could “win,” as Chait claims, rolling back hundreds of years of progress rather than waiting for the technological breakthroughs that will organically allow us to “transition” away from fossil fuels, the world would be in trouble. Thankfully, they can’t win. Not because Republicans hate science or because anyone Democrats disagree with is bought off by shady oil men, but because, in the end, neither they nor I nor you are giving up our lifestyles in any meaningful way.
For us, the Chinese, Indians, Nigerians, and everyone else, that’s great news. The environmentalist is free to embrace fantasy and then fatalism, or they can start figuring out ways to acclimate to this new reality.
Equality & Respect: How I'm Equal to Hugh Jackman
According to the Declaration of Independence, we’re all created equal. But Professor Aeon Skoble is not as rich as Bill Gates, as tough as Vin Diesel, or as sexy as Hugh Jackman. To Professor Skoble, the Declaration intends for us all to be treated equal before the law. Put another way, we should all have equal freedom to choose our own respective paths to happiness as long as we do not infringe on the freedoms of others.
Treating people as equals means that we should show equal respect for the choices they make. That means that, although we may disagree with others, we should respect their preferences for jobs, tv shows, music, etc… The legal system should show equal respect for persons by respecting their rights equally, not by interfering with the outcomes of people’s choices. If we try to produce equality in some other fashion, we will necessarily violate people’s freedom to choose.
For more, visit LearnLiberty.org
Treating people as equals means that we should show equal respect for the choices they make. That means that, although we may disagree with others, we should respect their preferences for jobs, tv shows, music, etc… The legal system should show equal respect for persons by respecting their rights equally, not by interfering with the outcomes of people’s choices. If we try to produce equality in some other fashion, we will necessarily violate people’s freedom to choose.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
The Lone Mountain Compact: Principles for Preserving Freedom and Livability in America's Cities and Suburbs
Lone Mountain, Big Sky, Montana |
Lone Mountain CoalitionThe phenomenon of urban sprawl has become a pre-eminent controversy throughout the United States. Recently a number of scholars and writers, gathered at a conference about the issue at Lone Mountain Ranch in Big Sky, Montana by the Political Economy Research Center, decided to distill their conclusions into the following brief statement of principles. The authors have called this statement the "Lone Mountain Compact," and have invited other writers and scholars to join in endorsing its principles. A partial list of signatures appears at the end.Preamble:
The unprecedented increase in prosperity over the last 25 years has created a large and growing upper middle class in America. New modes of work and leisure combined with population growth have fueled successive waves of suburban expansion in the 20th century. Technological progress is likely to increase housing choice and community diversity even further in the 21st century, enabling more people to live and work outside the conventional urban forms of our time. These choices will likely include low-density, medium-density, and high-density urban forms. This growth brings rapid change to our communities, often with negative side effects, such as traffic congestion, crowded public schools, and the loss of familiar open space. All of these factors are bound up in the controversy that goes by the term "sprawl." The heightened public concern over the character of our cities and suburbs is a healthy expression of citizen demand for solutions that are responsive to our changing needs and wants. Yet tradeoffs between different policy options for addressing these concerns are poorly understood. Productive solutions to public concerns will adhere to the following fundamental principles.
Principles for Livable Cities:
- The most fundamental principle is that, absent a material threat to other individuals or the community, people should be allowed to live and work where and how they like.
- Prescriptive, centralized plans that attempt to determine the detailed outcome of community form and function should be avoided. Such "comprehensive" plans interfere with the dynamic, adaptive, and evolutionary nature of neighborhoods and cities.
- Densities and land uses should be market driven, not plan driven. Proposals to supersede market-driven land use decisions by centrally directed decisions are vulnerable to the same kind of perverse consequences as any other kind of centrally planned resource allocation decisions, and show little awareness of what such a system would have to accomplish even to equal the market in effectiveness.
- Communities should allow a diversity in neighborhood design, as desired by the market. Planning and zoning codes and building regulations should allow for neotraditional neighborhood design, historic neighborhood renovation and conversion, and other mixed-use development and the more decentralized development forms of recent years.
- Decisions about neighborhood development should be decentralized as far as possible. Local neighborhood associations and private covenants are superior to centralized or regional government planning agencies.
- Local planning procedures and tools should incorporate private property rights as a fundamental element of development control. Problems of incompatible or conflicting land uses will be better resolved through the revival of common law principles of nuisance than through zoning regulations which tend to be rigid and inefficient.
- All growth management policies should be evaluated according to their cost of living and "burden-shifting" effects. Urban growth boundaries, minimum lot sizes, restrictions on housing development, restrictions on commercial development, and other limits on freely functioning land markets that increase the burdens on lower income groups must be rejected.
- Market-oriented transportation strategies should be employed, such as peak period road pricing, HOT lanes, toll roads, and de-monopolized mass transit. Monopoly public transit schemes, especially fixed rail transit that lacks the flexibility to adapt to the changing destinations of a dynamic, decentralized metropolis, should be viewed skeptically.
- The rights of present residents should not supersede those of future residents. Planners, citizens, and local officials should recognize that "efficient" land use must include consideration for household and consumer wants, preferences, and desires. Thus, growth controls and land-use planning must consider the desires of future residents and generations, not solely current residents.
- Planning decisions should be based upon facts, not perceptions. A number of the concerns raised in the "sprawl" debate are based upon false perceptions. The use of good data in public policy is crucial to the continued progress of American cities and the social advance of all its citizens.
From Kenneth Orski, publisher of Innovation Briefs: "Smart Growth" is a movement with a political agenda that has nothing to do with improving people's daily lives. Rather, it is an effort by a certain group of urban elitists to impose their lifestyle choices on the vast majority of Americans who prefer a suburban lifestyle, and in the guise of "sprawl containment" and "open space preservation," deprive low-income households of an opportunity to share in the American dream of home ownership.
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