New American Paradigm

Global Warming Costs Illustrated

If there is one thing I hope to accomplish one day with this blog, it's convincing a few people that their simplest choices can have devastating consequences for someone somewhere else in the world.

For example, the mining practices used in Africa to power our laptops and cell phones probably resulted in someone's death.  Either the minerals are used to fund wars the way West Africa diamonds once did, or the environmental protections are so lax that people are poisoned or simply driven from their homes.  If consumers agreed to pay just a little more, computer makers could pay more for the material and therefore afford more environmentally sound practices.

The Global Warming "Debate"

Over the last 20 years or so a trend in journalism has begun to drive me really crazy. It's the confusion over objectivism and perpetuating a lie.

Journalists, not to be confused with the nitwits on cable tv, are supposed to present the facts... not their own bias. It's a difficult task but something the pros strive to do their entire career. Usually that means presenting the various sides of a debate as equally valid opinions so that their viewers and readers can make an informed decision of their own.

Unfortunately, when one side is favored by the facts, they still feel the need to present the alternative viewpoint. It's a bit like doing a story about life as an African American and feeling the need to interview the KKK to represent the "other side".  Sometimes there is no justifiable opposition... why pretend there is?

Light Rail Of the Future - ULTra

Ever wonder what the future would will look like if we grow brains and actually thought about what sensible transportation solutions would look like?  I know this looks like it's some futuristic utopian system that you might see at a World's Fair or Epcot Center... but this has actually been built at Heathrow Airport and opening this fall.

Peter Calthorpe, author of The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl, said of the project:

"All the advantages of New Urbanism - its compact land saving density, its walkable mix of uses, and its integrated range of housing opportunities - would be supported and amplified by a circulation system that offers fundamentally different choices in mobility and access. Smart Growth and new Urbanism have begun the work of redefining America's twenty-first century development paradigms. Now it is time to redefine the circulation armature that supports them. It is short sighted to think that significant changes in land-use and regional structure can be realized without fundamentally reordering our circulation system."

Prosperity Without Growth Money Quotes

It's rare that you see a government agency in this country or any speak the truth when "conventional wisdom" is so diametrically opposed to what needs to be said.  In this case, the "conventional wisdom" is that we can continue to seek constant economic growth in a sustainable way.  It's a myth all of us repeat to each other almost as though our existence depended on it, because the signs are all around us that this simply is not possible.  I guess constant reinforcement is necessary to maintain mass hallucinations.

Despite all that, our cousins in the United Kingdom have had a commission reporting directly to the Prime Minister that is attempting to do just that.  You can read the whole report here, but I'm going to share some of the money quotes.

Prosperity Without Growth

This is a big meaty report done by the UK's Sustainable Development Commission called Prosperity Without Growth that I plan on diving into over the next week and will offer some thoughts along the way.  It's interesting to me in that it attempts to answer an emerging and difficult question.  How do you reconcile capitalism and sustainability?

Along the way I think there's a dilemma that Americans in particular, but Western societies in general, will need to ask themselves.  Where is the line between capitalism and consumerism?  We almost intuitively understand that the latter is dangerous and perhaps even immoral but are also deeply suspicious of it as foreign or perhaps vaguely communist.  Ironically it also leads us to embrace anti-capitalist systems like China and become dependent on slave labor to pay for cheap goods.

Don't Paint the White House Black

George Clinton fans will probably be the only ones who get the joke in that headline.  Clinton, of Parliament Funkadelic fame, had a brief comeback in the 90's that included the cut "Paint the White House Black".

Well it turns out that doing so would miss a simple solution to climate change.  Use of white paint in sunny areas would reflect so much sunlight away from the Earth's surface it would have the effect of taking all cars off the road for 19 years.

Greening Your Workplace

Few people realize it, but very little of our impact on the environment actually comes from the home.  Yes, I'm proud of you for replacing all your light bulbs with CFLs.  It's good you've started that compost bin.  Bravo for turning down the AC!  Thank you courageous eco-warrior for trying to ditch the disposable diapers (a place I draw the line.)

But alas, residential power consumption may account for only 10% of greenhouse gas emissions; the garbage your office produces is significantly more than your home as well, not to mention all the toxic chemicals necessary to operate a modern office. 

Electric Car Coming to Seattle

Nissan has announced it will begin selling its plug-in electric car in Seattle next year.  For its part, the City agrees to help support a network of recharge stations. 

My hope... they make some sort of noise.  As much as I like the electric car idea, the silence is dangerous to pedestrians.  Though that does make it easier to stalk your target.  Mwahahaha.

The new plug-in vehicle will be able to exceed highway speed limits, go 100 miles on a charge and recharge in four to eight hours using a 220-volt line, similar to those for clothes dryers, said Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan North America.

It will seat five, be similar in size to Nissan's Versa and Sentra and be affordable to a typical family, he said. "We think the market is ready. We think the consumers are ready."

End of Sprawl? Part I

Since it's not the sexiest of issues, land use is never covered by the media like taxation, global warming, or the financial meltdown. Perhaps it should given inextricable link to all of those issues and quite possibly their leading cause. In fact land use policy has a great effect on our lives than virtually any other government policy. Why is it important? Urban sprawl.

When President Obama said last month that "The days where we're just building sprawl forever, those days are over," most people shrugged their shoulders and went back to soaking their 401k statement with tears. In fact this was a profound statement of not only the direction his policies would head, but an acknowledgement of where we are as a country. Obama understands intuitively what builders and homeowners across the country are finding out the hard way, those development patterns are unsustainable and probably a thing of the past.

Urban sprawl can be defined as ""dispersed development outside of compact urban and village centers along highways and in rural countryside." You know it when see it. It's soulless strip malls and large lot/large home development outside of cities. Its cause is simple… lax land use policy that allows urban development on cheap land in rural areas. Unlike normal urban development patterns, urban sprawl is dominated by the car with everything from large parking lots to wide multi-lane roads being designed to accommodate while pedestrian mobility is limited and often conflicts with the design of the development.

Although it occurs in Canada and Europe to a degree, the US fell head over heels for sprawl years ago and the affair only grew more passionate with time. Since most of the country developed after the advent of the car, development geared to this absurdly cheap form of transportation was the norm. In Europe, which mostly built up prior to the automobile, cities are densely packed since foot travel was the most common form of getting around. Everyone had to live within walking distance of everything they needed, their job, the market, a doctor, etc. As a result, travel by car wasn't necessary within town making it more expensive than trains for inter-city travel.

It's a strange phenomenon in that the demand is created by people wanting to get their piece of paradise, killing it in the process. Rather than sharing communal greens in urban parks and, people crave their own private park in a large yard. The result is the destruction of rural areas across the country. Wanting a big home but unable to afford it people turn to large homes built in cheap rural areas commuting further and further to work clogging roads along the way. The population of these areas then demands services but don't have the population in their neighborhood to support them so strip malls are built and designed to accommodate vast amounts of cars.

One of the phenomena contributing to this problem is the "Not in My Back Yard" mentally, otherwise known as NIMBY. As noted before local government tends to fly under the radar despite its impact on our lives. Chances are your local Mayor has made a much greater impact on your life than the President or Congress yet most people can't even name someone from their City or County Council. For the last 12 years I've been one such faceless City Councilmember so I understand all too well how to introduce myself to people; approve a new development or change in zone standards near their home. Suddenly people that haven't paid the least bit of attention to months and months public process, meetings, design charrettes, and outreach are in your face telling you what an idiot you are for destroying the "character" of the community. Oddly, they may live in old small lot homes in a historic part of town and demand large lot homes to "preserve" character. In isolation, this isn't all that big of a deal. But repeated millions of times across the country and the path of least resistance for locally elected officials becomes land use controls that resemble sprawl more than good planning. In incorporated areas outside of cities the problem is reversed, in this case properties are larger and owners typically want to preserve the development potential as it makes their property worth more. Combined with the moneyed interests of developers, rural areas tend to support lax controls and therefore encourage development inappropriate for the area.

Over the next few weeks we'll take a look at sprawl's connection to the subprime meltdown, its effect on tax policy and local government resources, how it impacts climate change, and generally decreases our quality of life. Obama may think that its day has come and gone, but without smart policy that may not be the case. Ultimately it will take a different way of looking at how we live our lives. If we continue to look at a big house/big yard in the suburbs as the way to the good life, we'll actually further erode our quality of life.