Carl Sagen's Last Interview issues Warning to Citizens

The Bay Area Council vs. Pat Eklund and the voice of reason

Here is a clip from the December 2. 2015 meeting of the ABAG Regional Planning Committee where the Bay Area Council presents a power point of their new report

Roadmap for Economic Resiliance

Among the more controversial elements in this plan is the suggestion for punishing cities and towns for failing to build enough housing and the creation of a regional planning board that supercedes local jurisdiction.

Of course they also want new levels of taxation to support their new bureaucracy too.

It seems Pat Eklund is the only voice of commonsense in the room. Marin County Supervisor Katie Rice and former Supervisor Susan Adams (serving as a member of the "public") sat silently objecting to not a single word.

"The Bay Area Council, a business group representing 300 Silicon Valley business puts out a plan to create a regional government, institute taxes and punish cities who do not conform to their demands for urbanization. Novato Mayor Pro--Tem, Pat Eklund,  is the sole voice in the room that questions this massive over reach into our local communities by an unelected regional body. If this plan is enacted, it will be the end of local independence and lead to the urbanization of Marin"



P.S.  A special thanks to www.regional-video.com where you can find the full meeting plus hundreds of other MTC and ABAG meetings.

VIDEO: Agenda 21. -John Birch Society (JBS) view on Smart Growth and One Bay Area Plan

This is a slick video on Agenda 21, presented by the John Birch Society (yeah, the same one that was active during the cold war warning people about communism). 

Although, we personally do not subscribe to the point of view illustrated in this video,  we present this to you so that you may understand what people are talking about.  The objection to  One Bay Area Plan in Marin and elsewhere spans cultural, political, ethnic and economic lines. We find allies with every group that values individual liberty over government and corporate control.  Quite literally we have allies in the Occupy Wall Street movement,  Democrats, Republicans, Tea Party Activists, Progressives and Environmentalists.  We are indeed all Americans fighting against government over reach and corporate profiteering to transform our communities. If Roosevelt could form an alliance with Stalin to defeat Nazism in World War II, surely the people of the Bay Area can join together to fight ABAG and the One Bay Area Plan.

Although, we recognize the essential facts of Agenda 21,  this writer is far too cynical to believe anyone could pull of a massive conspiracy of this magnitude.  We believe that Agenda 21 is merely Smart Growth driven by political ambition and fueled by capitalism.  In other words- money and power.

Why the Paris climate deal is meaningless

Why the Paris climate deal is meaningless

The more seriously you take the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the angrier you should be.



The lack of progress becomes even more apparent at the country level.

Negotiators from around the world gather in Paris this week to finalize an international climate change agreement, capping a years-long process on which hopes have been riding for global action to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. When those demanding U.S. action speak of the need to show “leadership” and foster international progress, they speak of building momentum toward Paris.

“This year, in Paris, has to be the year that the world finally reaches an agreement to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can,” said U.S. President Barack Obama on his recent trip to Alaska. Miguel Cañete, the EU’s chief negotiator, has warned there is “no Plan B — nothing to follow. This is not just ongoing UN discussions. Paris is final.”



But the more seriously you take the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the angrier you should be about the plan for Paris. With so much political capital and so many legacies staked to achieving an “agreement” — any agreement — negotiators have opted to pursue one worth less than…well, certainly less than the cost of a two-week summit in a glamorous European capital.

* * *

Climate talks are complex and opaque, operating with their own language and process, so it’s important to cut through the terminology and look at what is actually under discussion. Conventional wisdom holds that negotiators are hashing out a fair allocation of the deep emissions cuts all countries would need to make to limit warming. That image bears little resemblance to reality.

In fact, emissions reductions are barely on the table at all. Instead, the talks are rigged to ensure an agreement is reached regardless of how little action countries plan to take. The developing world, projected to account for four-fifths of all carbon-dioxide emissions this century, will earn applause for what amounts to a promise to stay on their pre-existing trajectory of emissions-intensive growth.

Here’s how the game works: The negotiating framework established at a 2014conference in Lima, Peru, requires each country to submit a plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, called an “Intended Nationally Determined Contribution” (INDC). Each submission is at the discretion of the individual country; there is no objective standard it must meet or emissions reduction it must achieve.

Beyond that, it’s nearly impossible even to evaluate or compare them. Developing countries actually blocked a requirement that the plans use a common format and metrics, so an INDC need not even mention emissions levels. Or a country can propose to reduce emissions off a self-defined “business-as-usual” trajectory, essentially deciding how much it wants to emit and then declaring it an “improvement” from the alternative. To prevent such submissions from being challenged, a group of developing countries led by China and India has rejected“any obligatory review mechanism for increasing individual efforts of developing countries.” And lest pressure nevertheless build on the intransigent, no developing country except Mexico submitted an INDC by the initial deadline of March 31 — and most either submitted no plan or submitted one only as the final September 30 cut-off approached.

After all this, the final submissions are not enforceable, and carry no consequences beyond “shame” for noncompliance — a fact bizarrely taken for granted by all involved.

* * *

Perhaps not surprisingly, the submitted plans are even less impressive than the process that produced them. In aggregate, the promised emissions reductions will barely affect anticipated warming. A variety of inaccurate, apples-to-orangescomparisons have strained to show significant progress. But MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change calculates the improvement by century’s end to be only 0.2 degrees Celsius. Comparing projected emissions to the baseline established by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2000 shows no improvement at all.

The lack of progress becomes even more apparent at the country level. China, for its part, offered to reach peak carbon-dioxide emissions “around 2030” while reducing emissions per unit of GDP by 60-65 percent by that time from its 2005 level. But the U.S. government’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory had already predicted China’s emissions would peak around 2030 even without the climate plan. And a Bloomberg analysis found that China’s 60-65 percent target isless ambitious than the level it would reach by continuing with business as usual. All this came before the country admitted it was burning 17 percent more coalthan previously estimated—an entire Germany worth of extra emissions each year.

India, meanwhile, managed to lower the bar even further, submitting a report with no promise of emissions ever peaking or declining and only a 33-35 percent reduction in emissions per unit of GDP over the 2005-2030 period. Given India’s recent rate of improving energy efficiency, this actually implies a slower rate of improvement over the next 15 years. In its INDC, India nevertheless estimates it will need $2.5 trillion in support to implement its unserious plan.

* * *

And therein lies the sticking point on which negotiations actually center: “climate finance.” Climate finance is the term for wealth transferred from developed to developing nations based on a vague and shifting set of rationales including repayment of the “ecological debt” created by past emissions, “reparations” for natural disasters, and funding of renewable energy initiatives.

The issue will dominate the Paris talks. The INDCs covering actual emissions reductions are subjective, discretionary, and thus essentially unnegotiable. Not so the cash. Developing countries are expecting more than $100 billion in annual funds from this agreement or they will walk away. (For scale, that’s roughly equivalent to the entire OECD budget for foreign development assistance.)

Somehow, the international process for addressing climate change has become one where addressing climate change is optional and apparently beside the point. Rich countries are bidding against themselves to purchase the developing world’s signature on an agreement so they can declare victory — even though the agreement itself will be the only progress achieved.

An echo chamber of activist groups and media outlets stands ready to rubber-stamp the final agreement as “historic,” validating the vast reservoirs of political capital spent on the exercise. Already, the Chinese and Indian non-plans have been lauded as proof that the developing world is acting and the United States stands as the true obstacle. India won the remarkably inapt New York Times headline: “India Announces Plan to Lower Rate of Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” A formal agreement, notwithstanding its actual contents, will only amplify the demands that we do more ourselves—and, of course, that we contribute hundreds of billions of dollars along the way.

From a political perspective, perhaps this outcome represents “victory” for environmental activists launching their next fundraising campaign or for a president building his “legacy.” But it comes at the environment’s expense. A system of voluntary, unenforceable pledges relies on peer pressure for ambitious commitments and the “naming and shaming” of countries that drag their feet. In this context, true U.S. leadership and environmental activism require the condemnation of countries manipulating the process. Instead, the desperation to sign a piece of paper in Paris has taken precedence over an honest accounting. And once the paper is signed, any leverage or standing to demand actual change in the developing world will be weakened further.

Congressional Republicans, signaling they will not appropriate the taxpayer funds that a climate-finance deal might require, stand accused of trying to “derail” the talks. But opposing such a transfer of wealth to developing countries would seem a rather uncontroversial position. One can imagine how the polling might look on: “Should the United States fight climate change by giving billions of dollars per year to countries that make no binding commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions?” Certainly, President Obama has made no effort to even inform his constituents that such an arrangement is central to his climate agenda, let alone argue forcefully in favor of it.

The climate negotiators have no clothes. If making that observation and refusing to go along causes some embarrassment, those parading around naked have only themselves to blame.

Oren Cass is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow.

Ding, Dong – The Godfather Of Global Warming Is Dead!

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ANTONIO SCORZA/AFP/GettyImages

by JAMES DELINGPOLE1 Dec 20151,500

Paris, COP21 Climate Summit – One of the most dangerous men of the Twentieth Century has just died: and the weird thing is, hardly anyone noticed.

His name was Maurice Strong (picture above, on the right), Canadian billionaire, diplomat and UN apparatchik, and though you may not have heard of him, he probably did more to make your world a more expensive, inconvenient, overregulated, hectored, bullied, lied-to, sclerotic, undemocratic place than anyone post Hitler, Stalin and (his personal friend) Mao.

He’s the reason, for example, that most of the world’s leaders, 40,000 delegates and their attendant carbon mega-footprint descended here on Paris yesterday in order to talk about magical fairy dust for two weeks and then charge you $1.5 trillion (that’s per year, by the way) for the privilege.

He’s the reason that “climate change” is now so heavily embedded within our system of global governance that it is now almost literally impossible for any politician or anyone else whose career depends on the state to admit that’s it not a problem and to argue that there are more important issues in the world, like maybe the terrorism that killed over 130 innocent people just the other week now, where was it?- oh yeah, here in Paris where for some bizarre reason all the delegates are talking about carbon emissions instead…

He was the father of the mother of all climate summits: the one in Rio in 1992 that spawned a million and one bastard offspring, like the one in Paris now.

He was the main instigator of the blueprint for arguably the most sinister and insidious assault on liberty and free markets: Agenda 21.

If you had met him – if you’d even noticed him – you would have probably quite liked him:

One of the most remarkable things about Strong was how unremarkable he was in person. Somebody once said that you wouldn’t pick him out of a crowd of two.

Nevertheless, he was an avuncular and likeable figure, even to those who disagreed strongly with his world view, as I did. I interviewed him numerous times over a 20-year period, and found that he took scarcely-concealed delight in explaining his often Machiavellian political manoeuvrings.

But as I argue in Watermelons – which gave a lot of space to Strong – it’s a big mistake to expect that supervillains will always have scars down the side of their face and fluffy white cat on their lap.

Strong’s true evil lay in the effects of his acts, not in his (claimed) good intentions.

Then again, the mask did occasionally slip.

In his 2000 autobiography Where Are We Going? he projected that by 2031 two thirds of the world’s population might have been wiped out. This, he chillingly described as:

“A glimmer of hope for the future of our species and its potential for regeneration.”

See: it’s perfectly OK to fantasize about the deaths of maybe 5 billion people – as long as you show at the end that you really care: you’re thinking about the future of humanity.

Strong sincerely believed all this Malthusian stuff and that was the problem. It became ourproblem because unfortunately – see that charm, above – he was such a skilled operator, with an endless appetite for labyrinthine bureaucracy and the will to embed it in the system.

The United Nations, which he joined early in 1947 as a lowly assistant pass officer in the Identification Unit of the Security Section in New York, was his perfect playground.

It was where, he quickly realized, he could achieve his dream of a world of global governance by a self-appointed elite. And the best way to go about this, he understood, was by manipulating and exploiting international concern about the environment.

Strong was never shy of admitting what he was about:

“Our concept of ballot box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions, particularly in terms of safeguarding the global environment.”

Or, as he put it when he’d wormed his way through the system to the position of Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1991:

Current lifestyle and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning and surburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.

This was the purpose of the Rio Earth Summit – and on the non-binding but secretly deadly agreement Strong managed to gull 179 sovereign nations into signing: Agenda 21.

If you don’t know about Agenda 21, you should. This final quote from Strong will give you an idea how illiberal and undemocratic it is – a blueprint for one-world government by an unelected bureaucracy of technocrats, enabled by diehard progressive activists.

The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental co-operation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of global environmental security.

Now perhaps you understand why the people in the world most saddened by Maurice Strong’s death are currently all at Le Bourget on the outskirts of Paris at COP21, plotting the new world order.

“We thank Maurice Strong for his visionary impetus to our understanding of sustainability. We will miss you,” said Christina Figueres, the head of the UNFCC, which is in charge of the Paris conference.

The rest of us, once familiar with what Maurice Strong did, may not feel quite so teary-eyed.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, they say. But I think we can make an exception for this particular totalitarian control freak.

Editor's Note: I am not a believer in Agenda 21 "conspiracy theories" but the fact remains that Agenda 21 is a UN Policy.  The Global Summit in Paris this week was a part of the UN effort to address climate change.   Despite, all of the noble intentions of many,  I also believe there is  deliberate political manipulation going on by people like Maurice Strong whose political ideology trumps environmentalism. 

Narrow track vehicles - the convergence of the car and the motorcycle

Since Nicholas Negroponte first came up with his landmark teething ring visualization of the coming together of communication, computing and content, the term convergence has become the uber buzzword. Now there’s convergence going on in the personal transport industry, with the car and the motorcycle morphing as car makers attempt to downsize their vehicles to make them better suited to the world’s increasingly crowded roads. This article begins with Nissan’s tandem two-seat, half width tilting car, the Landglider, and examines all the other work being done around the world as narrow track vehicles seriously begin to make their case.

Sitting in Nissan’s Landglider was an experience, I’d been looking forward to it since I first spied the pre-show imagery – this truly is near the point where the motorcycle and automobile meet. It’s a two passenger vehicle, one behind the other, it’s half the width of a conventional car and it leans through corners like a motorcycle.

Being fully enclosed and with impact absorption zones and a composite protection tub, the Land Glider’s pilot is a lot less vulnerable than a motorcycle rider, yet the Land Glider’s light weight and the punchy electric motors mean a motorcycle-like torque to weight ratio for quick acceleration and the steer-by-wire system leans the Land Glider up to 17 degrees – it may not be the 45 degree plus of a sports motorcycle, and the proof-of-concept will surely be in the driving experience as to how drive-by-wire feels in comparison to the mechanical systems we’re all accustomed to, but it’s more than enough to have safe, low-speed fun commuting to the office.

The Land Glider is one of a wave of new single track concept vehicles being shown by auto makers this year as they begin preparing for yet another looming crisis for the auto industry - Global Traffic Congestion!

Global Traffic Congestion

The number of vehicles on the world’s roads will double between 1989 and 2025, while the total length of commonly used roadway will essentially remain the same.

In Europe, drivers already spend one quarter of their road-going time in traffic jams, so as the number of vehicles grows, a future of extremely congested roadways looks likely unless something is done. The developing super nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China alone will add billions of new cars to our roads over the next few decades.

Automobiles per capita has long been an indicator of a country’s economic prosperity and as these highly populous nations grow wealthy, massive automobile uptake is being forecast.

Right now, China has 131 cars per thousand people and India just 12 cars per thousand.

By 2050, India will have 382 cars per thousand people, and China will have 363 cars per thousand. By 2050, India will be the most populous nation on earth with 1.6 billion people, and China will be a close second with 1.5 billion. Do the math and you’ll begin to understand the problems we face – by 2050 China and India alone will have 1.1 billion cars – and that’s more than the total number of cars in use on the planet right now, and with an infrastructure likely to be well behind the growth.

Two years ago, humanity passed the point where 50% of the world's population is living in urban areas. Cities are a relatively recent development in civilization. Two hundred years ago just 3% of the global population lived in cities, by 1950, that grew to 30%. But the numbers are surging and by 2030 five billion people will live in urban areas – more than 60% percent of the population.

Yet cities cannot build more roads because there is no more space.

Traffic congestion is very bad for economic health. It wastes the time of all caught in it and the resultant inability to forecast accurate travel time means more people add additional time to their travel "just in case" and a huge lump of non-productive time gets added to everyone’s routine.

Traffic jams waste fuel and increase air pollution, and no country knows this better than Japan where road congestion is at its greatest on Earth.

The automobile-based mobile society Japan helped build has ironically created the world’s largest traffic jams in its heartland for several decades now.

See the full article and photos HERE

Government Creating Chaos: Less On Street Parking/Denser Population

November 27, 2015 By Stephen Frank 3 Comments

How do you create the slums, crimes, ghettos and chaos of New York City> Easy, get rid of on street parking, take car lanes and make them bike lanes, then increase the density of housing—put more people into a smaller space—just for the heck of it, knowing that these conditions are the perfect storm for economic disaster. This guarantees the poor in crime areas, the middle class leave the area and the rich live in suburbs and penthouses.

“One of the old standbys of the Car Cult zealots is the cry that we can’t put in bike lanes, or wider sidewalks, or Complete streets treatments, if they will remove so much as a single curbside parking spot for cars. Likewise, calls for denser development, especially if accompanied by reduced parking requirements, inspire the usual bug-eyed rage and teeth-baring barks of,“Where will all the cars park?”

As President Reagan famously said, government is not the solution, it is the problem.

Parking Madness

Written by Richard Risemberg, City Watch LA, 11/27/15

JUST SAYIN’–One of the old standbys of the Car Cult zealots is the cry that we can’t put in bike lanes, or wider sidewalks, or Complete streets treatments, if they will remove so much as a single curbside parking spot for cars. Likewise, calls for denser development, especially if accompanied by reduced parking requirements, inspire the usual bug-eyed rage and teeth-baring barks of, “Where will all the cars park?”

Yet, it happens that most parts of most cities have far too much parking, and that parking helps create traffic congestion (through induced demand, especially when it’s offered at below-market pricing, or even free).  It also hurts development, making it too expensive for locally-owned businesses to establish themselves and enhance the health, wealth, and happiness of our communities—something corporate malls and bigbox stores simply cannot do (and don’t even want to).

The Pigeon’s own Josef Bray-Ali wrote an important article on this very matter a few years ago, which was published in the Los Angeles Business Journal. Alas, there it resides behind a paywall; but it’s been excerpted in another article posted by the Natural Resources Defense Council here. 

The NIMBYs, of course, want nothing more than fully-subsidized parking everywhere they might want to go—rather the attitude a three-year-old holds towards candy. The rest of us are to pay for the sequestration of that land from more productive use, as well as the costs—financial, social, environmental, and medical—that the resulting sprawl imposes on us all.

In regards to commercial establishments, the cry for more parking! is particularly focused: Black Friday—the day after tomorrow, counting from our publication date—is the day when all the parking lots and structures in America fill to overflowing with cars, “proving” that we need those gigantic asphalt wastelands to be reserved from any other use the other 364 days of the year.

The problem with that rationale is that is is so rarely true: most parking lots and structures, even at the most gargantuan of consumerist swamps, America’s declining malls, simply…don’t fill up.

And so, in response to the untested assumption underlying the NIMBY’s Black Friday battle cry, Strong Towns has for several years organized the Black Friday Parking event.

This is what you do to join in:

1) On Black Friday, go to a mall at peak shopping hour.

2) Wander the parking lot, smartphone or camera in hand.

3) When you see swathes of empty parking space—and odds are that you will—snap a picture.

4) Post said picture to social media with the hashtag #blackfridayparking and (preferably) location info.

That’s all it takes. A little dose of reality to help take the edge off the great American delusion about cars and parking.

"Let them take a bus to Larkspur Ferry"

Marin County Supervisors, Kinsey, Connolly & Rice plus Dan Hillmer comments against a parking structure for cars at the Larkspur Ferry.  They feel that people should take the bus regardless of personal inconvenience, time spent or weather.  It is yet another example of "Smart Growth" ideology trumping the practical considerations of the people.  None of these politicians will need to take the ferry on a daily basis.  Fortunately, the majority of the Transportation Authority of Marin board voted for the consideration of a parking garage at the October 22, 2015 meeting.

Is Climate Change Our Biggest Problem?

Marin deserves practical traffic solutions

Marin Voice: Marin deserves practical traffic solutions

By Mimi Willard

POSTED: 11/28/15, 2:11 PM PST |

3 COMMENTS

The recent effort of Marin supervisors Steve Kinsey and Katie Rice to kill the Transportation Authority of Marin’s consideration of a parking garage at the Larkspur Ferry terminal illustrates the lunacy of letting rigid ideology overrule common sense.

At its October meeting, the TAM board voted on its submission to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission of the required Regional Transportation Plan. Only projects that TAM puts on this list can get funded by MTC over the four-year planning cycle.

Putting a project on the list does not commit TAM to pursuing the project. It simply keeps the option open.

No one loves parking garages. But sometimes they’re a sensible solution or at least worthy of consideration.

Parking availability is a real problem at Marin’s ferries, which are currently the county’s most effective, convenient and popular mass transportation. Besides being a green commuting alternative, the ferry relieves vehicular traffic congestion, which tops residents’ list of what they want their elected officials to fix.

Doctrinaire rather than pragmatic, Rice and Kinsey voted to kill consideration of a Larkspur ferry parking garage by removing it from the TAM’s list. Their rationale?

Taking the ferry isn’t green enough.

Residents should get to the ferry by bus, or the as yet unproven Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit train.

Rice and Kinsey’s way to make that happen is to limit parking availability.

Rice and Kinsey seem to prefer prescriptive top-down planning over practical solutions to Marin’s current, real, traffic problem.  See the full article in the Marin IJ.

Water Planning, California Style

4 Replies

Thanks to the wonders of government planning, San Diego County residents have to pay more for water they are not allowed to use. California, as everyone knows, is suffering a drought, so the state legislature mandated water conservation statewide, whether it is needed or not.

San Diego is one place where it isn’t needed, as that county has 99 percent of its normal amount of water. Yet residents are still required by state law to “let their grass die.” The costs of providing water haven’t declined, so the reductions in water usage due to mandatory conservation measures have forced the county water authority to raise its rates to cover those costs.

But it gets worse. San Diego is about to get an overabundance of water that is more costly than ever as a new $1 billion desalination plant is about to open that will increase the county’s water supply by as much as 10 percent. The plant is privately financed, but was built only after the county signed a contract agreeing to buy water from the plant whether it needed it or not. The water authority expects to spend $114 million next year buying water that was previously costing it only $45 million. This has led it to increase in water rates yet again.

The real solution to California’s water problems is not desalination plants but water pricing. If supplies fall, prices should go up, which might lead private entrepreneurs to develop desalination plants without government promises made at taxpayers’ expense, but more likely would lead to more cost-effective combinations of conservation and increased supplies.

Farmers use 80 percent of California’s water, yet they are exempt from the state-mandated water conservation measures. They are not only exempt, they are legally obligated to use that water or lose the right to use the same amount of water in future years. This use-it-or-lose-it requirement forces farmers to install inefficient irrigation systems and forbids them from selling water to cities and others who may value it more.

A water pricing system would allow farmers to continue to grow crops but still provide plenty of water for cities in drought years. Farmers would have incentives to use water more efficiently, making more available to other users. Since farmers who don’t have water rights under today’s regime could buy water from farmers who do, agricultural production might actually increase and water shortages would be things of the past. Unfortunately, the state politburo legislature has never considered such a radical free-market solution to the state’s periodic water crises.

Documentary - The lost world of communism part 1 (East Germany)