The progressivism of the powerful.

The New York Times’ Green Inc. blog has been tracking an interesting trend lately: in the last couple of days, three major power utilities have withdrawn from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over that body’s opposition to climate change legislation. Pacific Gas & Electric was first, followed by New Mexico’s PNM, and, today, the major nuclear utility Exelon.

This is just the latest reminder not to assume the interests of domestic groups a priori, or assume that their commitment to their apparent material interests are intractable. Of course, these assumptions often hit the mark; but just as often they fail to pick up on countervailing material interests, longer-term interests, ideology, altruism, or other forces. More often than many people expect, progressive causes like environmental sustainability come to be seen as win, win, win, win issues; but other times, corporations are willing to take a small financial hit for a big boost in prestige. The rising number of LEED-certified buildings is one example. Another is the annual op-ed on one of the major pages by some wealthy altruist arguing that many of the well-to-do have no trouble consenting to higher taxes, and may even prefer them. Be careful out there: whether you’re a rationalist or an idealist, don’t assume against the progressivism of powerful actors.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Domestic, sustainability , positive sum

The next American cities.

A couple of days ago, this marvelous little page on frumin.net was going around pretty hard. The page describes the contents of a report from the New York Met. Transportation Council that gives traffic numbers for various routes into Manhattan, which are staggering. The summary is well done, so I’ll simply quote it here:

Just to get warmed up, chew on this – from 8:00AM to 8:59 AM on an average Fall day in 2007 theNYC Subway carried 388,802 passengers into the CBD on 370 trains over 22 tracks. In other words, a train carrying 1,050 people crossed into the <CBD every 6 seconds. Breathtaking if you ask me.

Over this same period, the average number of passengers in a vehicle crossing any of the East River crossings was 1.20. This means that, lacking the subway, we would need to move 324,000 additional vehicles into the CBD (never mind where they would all park). [...]

At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges.

More complete numbers are available on that site and, naturally, on the report itself. He goes on to calculate roughly the additional amount of space needed to park all the cars that the subway saves from coming onto the island, which leaves massive black blocs down that stretch from 3rd Ave to 9th and take up three times the size of Central Park.

What the author neglects to note is that the continuum does not run between the current situation and this counterfactual New York made up of huge black blotches—in fact there are possibilities that extend in the opposite direction. Right now New York is in a large part made up of those huge black boxes, it is just that they are split into a capillary grid that covers the entire city. When the streets are punctuated by blocks, it is difficult to see just how much city space is taken up by surface streets. So I got curious.

The images below were hacked together very casually and unscientifically in Photoshop, without any help from my seventh-grade art teacher. They are in no way precise or accurate—but they are illustrative of just how much precious urban space is taken up by surface streets. That’s a lot of space! And yes, we do make use of it, but think of the opportunity cost—could we make better use of precious urban land that we mostly use for baking asphalt.

I’ve said it before on this page and I’ll say it again—the first day an American urban area prohibits private cars in its limits will be a great day for the human race. Note that not every street would have to vanish immediately, to provide for access for emergency services—but every other one perhaps could be closed to provide space for public markets, parks, playgrounds, gardens, what have you. Public transportation could expand to drop nearly everyone within a short walk of their home, and covered bike thru-ways could be expanded. Private cars could be parked on the outskirts, but if high speed rail is expanded, rapid regional downtown-to-downtown transport would make this option less and less palatable over time.

As far as I’m concerned, it looks like another of those win-win-win possibilities: shared common spaces could encourage communities to form, gardens and doing away with cars could encourage public health (through exercise, diet, and respiratory benefits), the environmental impacts would be unimpeachable. And, perhaps best of all, we wouldn’t all have a strip of asphalt mini-mall outside our homes. Not all of us have cobblestone streets like Georgetown—but obviously even they could fare better.

I’m being a little dreamy, I understand—but I bet it’s closer than you think, in places like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco. We already regularly impair the efficacy of private cars, with speed bumps, one way streets, cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and so on—and for good reason. And, of course, bicycle ridership has been up this depression (they were already 75,000 on average daily in New York, or 8.6% of all traffic by number, by 1992; 20% of everyone who go over Portland’s Hawthorne bridge are on a bike). It’s a smaller step than you might think.

a.j.m

Filed under: Health, cities, sustainability , bikes, food, roads

Good reads today.

• Greenpeace has up with more than its fair share of absurd and counterproductive strategies of resistance in its history, but its recent tack is a clever one. Aiming at the enormously destructive practice of bottom trawling, in which boats drag nets across the sea floor, leaving huge, barren scars and killing large quantities of both wanted and unwanted wildlife, Greenpeace is sinking large 3-ton boulders into the ocean at strategic intervals to try to prevent the practice. In the past, the organization has struggled to find productive uses for its capabilities (like many environmental groups), but this seems particularly clever: if the governments of the world refuse to regulate overfishing in their waters, they certainly shouldn’t regulate a group moving some rocks around. Ho hum. Don’t mind us.

• The New York Times has an excellent article today about a survey by health insurance companies that intends to highlight exorbitant doctors’ bills, particularly for out-of-network procedures. $20,120 for a knee operation for which Medicare pays $584; $72,000 for a spinal fusion procedure that Medicare covers for $1,629—and so on. This dovetails with Atul Gawande’s influential piece in The New Yorker that points to collective culture among doctors as a culprit in spiraling healthcare costs. These kinds of statements belie the Republican talking point of government-run healthcare coming between patients and their doctors: with very little accountability for what tests doctors order and how much they charge for them, a room that holds just a doctor and a patient has no actor with the knowledge and the interest in holding down unnecessary costs that don’t improve the patient’s health.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Health, sustainability

Great new rules for green energy.

For years, green developers, politicians, and pundits have bemoaned America’s approach to incentivizing renewable energy projects. For years, the primary mechanism was a tax break on profits from approved renewable projects. There were two problems with this scheme: first, the financial incentive would not materialize until the projects began to generate revenue, which, for a large thermal solar plant could take years. The second problem is that the tax credit would persist for only a year at a time before it had to be renewed by congress, which set up an annual struggle and made fund-raising, planning, and development for new projects uncertain. Developers always had to be mindful of the possibility of what came to pass last year: the tax break lapsed and threw the renewables industry into disarray and then stagnation. Many green projects are tenuously financed: private capital is matched by some public funding and in any event the numbers are always very tight; the tax credit lapsing was enough to put hundreds of projects on hold.

Two days ago, the Energy Department issued new rules for incentivizing renewable energy development: ‘the government will pay up to 30 percent of the cost of renewable energy projects.’ The change was authorized under the stimulus bill; the first applications will be accepted around Aug. 1 for all projects that could begin construction this year or next. The rule solves both of the difficulties above, for now, and should be a major step toward stimulating a golden age for green development in this country.

Filed under: Domestic, sustainability , renewables

Making the recession last.

Every so often I’ve been checking in with the Bureau of Economic Analysis to see the updates to the above chart, and the news keeps getting better and better. As you can see, the personal savings rate has been steadily declining towards zero and is now higher than it has been in at least a decade—in fact, the rate has not been this high since 1995 (a year that hardly comes to mind when one thinks of frugality).

I’ve been watching the personal savings because it is not simply an economic marker but a sign of our national identity: are we to be obsessed with conspicuous consumption to the detriment of our future and our children’s, or can we get a handle on ourselves to let the next generation of American’s decide their own future? The answer is far from clear, but the chart above is but one reason why this recession has the potential to do much good. But, as I have written before, it is a question of whether the recession—with a crucial push from our public leaders—can instantiate enduring norms or whether Americans are simply responding elastically to economic pressures, with the changes vanishing as soon as the economy seems to return to normalcy? Can American’s learn to save again? Can they retain their enthusiasm for reforming ossified, expensive, and hurtful systems? Can they keep their attention and their purchasing decisions on large epochal problems like climate change? Is this a lasting change to American identity, or just the exigencies of the times?

There is some reason to think that the former might be true. SUV sales, for instance, have proven imperfectly elastic to gas prices, having failed to rebound to previous levels. The percentage of Ford sales that go to large SUVs is a quarter of what it was five years ago. If these changes to consumer sentiment can persist, the structural changes they precipitated will help lock them into place: plants will retool to produce smaller personal vehicles; cities will complete projects to make bicycling more attractive; research and development funds for alternative energy will begin to drive unit prices lower; political rhetoric will develop new and irrevocable commonplaces; and, hopefully, once initial political efforts have confronted issues like healthcare, they will lose their sacrosanct patina and reforms can follow reforms.

Recession mentality suits America. U.S. consumers are almost never receptive to political suggestion about their finances, but if we can draw this recession out, we might be able to create a new era of collective and personal American responsibility. (Because when was the last time you thought of this country as responsible?)

Filed under: Economics, Who We Are, sustainability , cascades, responsibility, savings rate

The return of environmental tariffs.

What started an interesting idea has reared it’s head: a provision to establish tariffs on certain energy-intensive goods from countries that have not accepted emissions limits has found its way into the omnibus energy bill that Obama has to sign. Previously, I argued that if there were some way to differentiate the protectionist signal from the environmental one, the idea might be a useful way to gain some desperately needed leverage on these countries. If the tariffs were established by an international organization or enshrined in an environmental treaty, it would essentially do globally what countries are attempting to do domestically: raise the cost of socially-detrimental goods to get these industries and countries to internalize the full costs of their action. The President understands this, saying: “We have to be careful about sending any protectionist signals.” (These are tough words from a guy who helped kindle a fire of protectionist sentiment in the public and congressional candidates that helped him gain his office, but the point stands.)

I still think I was right in the first place: if we could differentiate the signals, I think it could be a useful lever to push on. So why not do the following?

• Remove the provision from the Senate version of the omnibus energy bill and kill it in the reconciliation committee,
• Initiate a discussion under the auspices of something like the United Nations Environment Programme, including the EU and other industrialized countries that will
• tighten cap-and-trade restrictions or other regulations on a select few of the most energy-intensive industries and
• impose tariffs on goods from these industries from countries that have proven resistant to adopting emissions caps.
• Set up a coordinating body to regulate and adjust tariffs levels.

The provision cannot enter into the upcoming Copenhagen environment summit, which needs a consensus agreement. But this scheme would do two other beneficial things: first, it would serve as a point of integration for the European and American cap-and-trade markets (which diplomats have been looking for anyway), and; second, it would put pressure on recalcitrant countries to behave better at Copenhagen.

Filed under: Economics, Energy, sustainability , trade

High speed rail for the long-run.

I took the time this Sunday morning to read a piece from the New York Times magazine on the tremendous complexities, the technological sophistication, the dazzling possibilities, and the tantalizing pragmatism of what would apparently be the most expensive single public infrastructure project ever built, California’s new high speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The $10 billion bond measure that passed this election season will be the first of a expected $33 billion for planning, renovation of existing stations, construction of new ones, expropriation of farmland, procurement of trains, electricity infrastructure (and so on) that planners expect could eventually do the same thing to California that it did to France: extinguish regional plane flight in favor of a cheaper, cleaner, faster transportation system that would revitalize large public works in this country.

The piece is filled with delicious details, like: the control systems on new bullet trains shut the train down if the conductor’s feet lose contact with the floor and does not override the process, (or when it gets too close to another train or senses an earthquake or sabotage); “At peak times, double-decker trains carrying more than 1,000 people leave Paris every 30 minutes for Lyon. “Those trains are full, full, full,” Mellier told me. Generally speaking, Mellier added, Alstom’s high-speed trains suffer two or three “faults” — delays of more than five minutes — for every one million kilometers, or about every 621,000 miles, they travel.” Here is my favorite: “Up above, the trains are delicate: the pantograph that touches an overhead electrical wire (the catenary) is far more sensitive than its equivalent on regular trains in order to maintain electrical contact at extreme speeds.”

The best part about the California plan is that it relies entirely on technology that has been proven safe, popular, and profitable in France and Japan (and now in Spain). The drastic expansion of California’s population means that the high speed rail system should actually be cheaper than a project to expand highways and airports, which would be necessary soon anyway. Put these together and you have a system that is absolutely pragmatic.

High speed rail is another one of those issues for which conservatism and foot-dragging is totally incomprehensible given the benefits. This demonstrates another point I think is absolutely crucial: rather than develop a middling system that meets transportation requirements adequately, high speed rail should be initially expensive, innovative, progressive, inspiring. Because initial ridership numbers will be an important test case, America’s high speed rail system should be advanced, shining, and obviously valuable. Building one train for $33 million that helps out California only goes so far—but building something that helps revitalize how we move around this country, and sets an example for the rest of the world, should be far more valuable.

The concept of leapfrogging is usually used to show that developing countries should be able to follow a different trajectory and develop more cleanly than America did using advanced technologies. The United States is so far behind in high speed rail, we should be able to leapfrog other established countries and put in place an advanced, expandable infrastructure from the start. Strangely enough, one of California’s arcane legal requirements actually facilitates just that: the California train is required to cover the distance between San Francisco and L.A. in two hours and forty minutes; the simulations show that meeting this requirement will demand a cutting-edge train like Alstom’s AGV. This is good, because nothing would be worse for this country’s transportation system in the long-run than a creaking, half-full, perpetually delayed, perennially ignored California system.

Filed under: Domestic, Who We Are, sustainability , california, high speed rail, leapfrogging, transportation

Win, win, win, winning rainforest development.

One of the main affectations of this page over the last six months has been to demonstrate the existence of fully positive sum solutions—those seemingly intractable global problems that with good science and good leadership can can be solved in such a way that generates positive externalities across other issue areas.

This Willie Smits TED Talk is a particularly lucid example, and totally inspiring. If you have twenty minutes today, I guarantee you will be bowled over by his articulacy, knowledge, and vision. A biologist, Smits details how, with a little capital, good politics and marvelous science, he regrew a rainforest in impoverished, fire-swept, environmentally-devastated Borneo. Using carefully selected crops and agro-forestry (in which trees and crops are grown together on the same plot to avoid unnatural monocultures), they drove back a deleterious grass, created homes and incomes for thousands, and actually changed the surrounding climate by regrowing trees, increasing rainfall for the area by 11% and lowering ambient temperature 3-5° C. By involving the community at every step of the way, all of this was done sustainably and democratically.

Smits is just one compelling reminder this world wants to be better. Far too often we let politics, obstinacy, narrow-mindedness stand in the way.  Imagine a worldwide application these techniques, to regrow rainforests and carbon sinks, reducing poverty, creating civil society, creating sustainable economic growth. The best part is—it wouldn’t require money—just capital. So why not? It is, as Thomas Friedman rightly said of a gas tax, win, win, win, win, win.

On so many issues we do face genuine conflicts of interest and morality—but on sustainable energy, development, health care in the industrialized world, if we can put a good solution in place, the only thing that would lose is a way of life that none of us really want anyway and that is doing us no favors. And who knows what those other problems will look like once we’ve solved the easy ones?

Filed under: sustainability , positive sum