City Government has spent the last 60 years building bigger faster roads to the far reaches of the city with all the water and sewer and garbage that can be efficiently and unaffordably moved around. And now we can't walk and bicycling is too dangerous and look: we find ourselves chained to Al Queda and Saudi Arabia and unable to grow old in our own neighborhoods. So lets retire to the Sierras and leave it to another generation to figure out what to do with the bad air water and oil soaked soil.
Council members says that the roads are now too dangerous to bike and can we build separate bike paths- ceding the public space to Bush and Al Queda. Another network is needed to get around slowly without pollution and in peace.
But how to grade separate this new facility? And connect community scattered to the outer reaches of our jurisdiction? It will be expensive, so do we have to live with what we got? One way is to move services into the neighborhoods on an 1/8 mile walking radius and then connect these great neighborhoods via bicycles boulevards. Ideally Transfer of Development Rights would restore the food shed on a walking perimeter of a complete neighborhood. I suggest we think big how we want to use the FARTP and use ABAG's and MTC's priority development and conservation areas monies to get us started repairing our world in the next 25 years.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Monday, December 22, 2008
TV and the four directions
There are four basic needs for a citizens- home, food, health care and a job. The last one because how else can you pay your taxes? The first two are easy to justify. The third is essential if you want to get to work so that the government can tax you for the scandals to warm to.
Quoting Stanley in the Times:
The nation is engrossed in an orgy of scandal, a 24-hour cable news burlesque of greed, graft, cronyism and corruption, with appointed villains so lurid and over-the-top they could be characters in “Bleak House.” (Even their names, Madoff and Blagojevich, have a Dickensian ring, like Skimpole or Pardiggle.)
Credit is frozen, the stock market looks perilously close to flatlining, and neither politicians nor economists can begin to predict the short- or long-term consequences of $700 billion government bailouts and a national debt topping $10 trillion. The root causes — an impenetrable tangle of derivative securities, heedless lending and binge corporate buyouts — are too vast and uncharted to examine for long. The solutions are insoluble.
As Neil Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death we are distracted from the four basics by nonsense by the elites need to reduce taxes instead of jobs.
For one the government is not addressing jobs and homes or health care for all.
And maybe it can't, a whole new emphasis on where we are in the era of Peak Everything.
Quoting Uchitelle in the Times:
“It is not in the nature of a market system to have adequate private investment all of the time,” said Robert Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “So we used public investment to smooth things over and improve the climate for private investment.”
That changed. In the 1970s, the public reacted against high taxes and growing budget deficits, and conservatives argued that putting money in private hands would lift the economy more effectively. Public investment tapered off, and was used less as a tool of economic policy as the economy experienced the increasingly sharp ups and downs of the 1980s, 1990s and the new century.
If shortages drive up prices, a good thing, then the pain of being unable to consume frivolously , like the paintings of Dahen, will be difficult to impossible. This will allow resources to go farther since shipping trash around will be impossible. China to the rescue? No but we can learn to live within our means- a concept presently unknown to government, the concept of business itself and us.
For example what's with the rootless society? If we really need a home why don't we settle down and build community and family linked to the neighborhood? Because GM has driven over the dream and created a gridiron of streets which imprison homes away from the community and neighborhood. Without the proximity of a walkable neighborhood there aren't any services, like dentists and farmers markets, wherein to meet and talk to neighbors, and so we move in search of "home."
What missing from this whole scenario? An acknowledgment that without equity we can't solve the peak everything problem and keep from deteriorating into balkanized walled rioting communities. Mumbai is a measure of how far the outside world penetrates comfort to create the trend to balkanized communities. In the movies we get tough on crime, poverty, and punishment delivered. Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood, can erase the margin between constitution and Guantanamo, squarely under the holy cross of Abu Grahib. On the front page America continues to get tough on black and Hispanic youth, spending a whole generation, on the slogan of a racially neutral class free society. Even a fiscal disaster in California won't stop our racist drive over the edge. "Class resentment is the rage" but it doesn't extend to equity in prison spending, education, keep the home economy with jobs, or health care.
Instead we knock charity for economically distressed communities, like community developers (remember Oboam versus McCain), without acknowledging the role of economic empowerment provided by the organizations nominated. In the Brundtland Report which gave us the common parlance of the phrase "sustainable development" we must overcome our elitist disregard for the conditions pf poverty under the mask of a sustainable meritocracy.
Brundtland laid out four principles in Our Common Future in 1987
1- the elimination of poverty is necessary not just as a human right but as an environmental issue.
2- we in the first world must reduce our consumption of resources and production of wastes.
3- Global cooperation on environmental issues is no longer a soft option.
4- Change toward sustainability can occur only with community-based approaches that take local cultures seriously.
Brundtland said they must apply simultaneously to achieve global sustainability.
Work toward the four basic needs is the only way to keep the goddess happy and the home from being nagged to death as any laid off fellow will tell you.
Quoting Stanley in the Times:
The nation is engrossed in an orgy of scandal, a 24-hour cable news burlesque of greed, graft, cronyism and corruption, with appointed villains so lurid and over-the-top they could be characters in “Bleak House.” (Even their names, Madoff and Blagojevich, have a Dickensian ring, like Skimpole or Pardiggle.)
Credit is frozen, the stock market looks perilously close to flatlining, and neither politicians nor economists can begin to predict the short- or long-term consequences of $700 billion government bailouts and a national debt topping $10 trillion. The root causes — an impenetrable tangle of derivative securities, heedless lending and binge corporate buyouts — are too vast and uncharted to examine for long. The solutions are insoluble.
As Neil Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death we are distracted from the four basics by nonsense by the elites need to reduce taxes instead of jobs.
For one the government is not addressing jobs and homes or health care for all.
And maybe it can't, a whole new emphasis on where we are in the era of Peak Everything.
Quoting Uchitelle in the Times:
“It is not in the nature of a market system to have adequate private investment all of the time,” said Robert Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “So we used public investment to smooth things over and improve the climate for private investment.”
That changed. In the 1970s, the public reacted against high taxes and growing budget deficits, and conservatives argued that putting money in private hands would lift the economy more effectively. Public investment tapered off, and was used less as a tool of economic policy as the economy experienced the increasingly sharp ups and downs of the 1980s, 1990s and the new century.
If shortages drive up prices, a good thing, then the pain of being unable to consume frivolously , like the paintings of Dahen, will be difficult to impossible. This will allow resources to go farther since shipping trash around will be impossible. China to the rescue? No but we can learn to live within our means- a concept presently unknown to government, the concept of business itself and us.
For example what's with the rootless society? If we really need a home why don't we settle down and build community and family linked to the neighborhood? Because GM has driven over the dream and created a gridiron of streets which imprison homes away from the community and neighborhood. Without the proximity of a walkable neighborhood there aren't any services, like dentists and farmers markets, wherein to meet and talk to neighbors, and so we move in search of "home."
What missing from this whole scenario? An acknowledgment that without equity we can't solve the peak everything problem and keep from deteriorating into balkanized walled rioting communities. Mumbai is a measure of how far the outside world penetrates comfort to create the trend to balkanized communities. In the movies we get tough on crime, poverty, and punishment delivered. Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood, can erase the margin between constitution and Guantanamo, squarely under the holy cross of Abu Grahib. On the front page America continues to get tough on black and Hispanic youth, spending a whole generation, on the slogan of a racially neutral class free society. Even a fiscal disaster in California won't stop our racist drive over the edge. "Class resentment is the rage" but it doesn't extend to equity in prison spending, education, keep the home economy with jobs, or health care.
Instead we knock charity for economically distressed communities, like community developers (remember Oboam versus McCain), without acknowledging the role of economic empowerment provided by the organizations nominated. In the Brundtland Report which gave us the common parlance of the phrase "sustainable development" we must overcome our elitist disregard for the conditions pf poverty under the mask of a sustainable meritocracy.
Brundtland laid out four principles in Our Common Future in 1987
1- the elimination of poverty is necessary not just as a human right but as an environmental issue.
2- we in the first world must reduce our consumption of resources and production of wastes.
3- Global cooperation on environmental issues is no longer a soft option.
4- Change toward sustainability can occur only with community-based approaches that take local cultures seriously.
Brundtland said they must apply simultaneously to achieve global sustainability.
Work toward the four basic needs is the only way to keep the goddess happy and the home from being nagged to death as any laid off fellow will tell you.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Infrastructure change challenge and opportunity
Society pays for education in the hope of a reward that will benefit the larger public good. Resources undermine this goal because they offer the road to wealth through speed i.e quick ill-gotten-gains. Education produces Engineers who figure out how to use resources, like diamonds, to make a product that no one wants; and Marketeers who figure out how to get people to ask for it; and products from the schools of public policy who torture people far from the intended markets (because of local depletion which led to the formation of empires) to work in the resource industries and produce the goods and rules to keep competition from the product markets. AIG shows that private insurance is another such useless product.
That infrastructure of military and government and markets is overbuilt. The energy source of cheap fossil fuels is running out. If that was it we would be fine. But transferring them from the ground to the air, water, and our body tissue has given us the problem of global warming. Worse the intellectual edifice around the engineers has collapsed- the experts don't know what to do; their solutions try to retard innovation and entrench the past. The challenge is to build a coalition to address necessity is immense since the discourse around the topic is shrouded in the fear of the power of state inspired terror and the business elites- BAU. We need to go beyond the calling cards of power: entitlement and corruption.
However as long the challenges remain unaddressable and the discourse is limited there will always be the O'Tooles and GW Deniers who make an industry from seeming to be right.
The Guardian writes Wednesday December
Discussions in Brussels and Poznan this week will be decisive in terms
of setting the tone for next year, when the world must agree on a
successor to the Kyoto protocol or face irreversible and devastating
climate change. The signs do not look good: in Brussels, Italy, Poland
and Germany are trying to water down commitments on emissions
reductions, backed by shortsighted business lobbies. Meanwhile in
Poznan everyone appears to be waiting for someone else to move first.
Society needs to reevaluate its goal of economic progress. Everything points to the immense benefits of recessions and depressions including a lower population. Government needs to get out of the economic progress business so that we can live in a healthy depressed economy where we grow our own food and recycle our own trash. We need to address consumption. Without addressing the necessity of the demand side why put in (a different) infrastructure? Is it any different then?
A carpet showroom and a parking lot got bombed by ice- I would think that's just global warming deserts for melting the ice caps. But the fact that these losing enterprises are around, except powered by windmills, is not a long term solution. Government builds industrial blocs like autos through subsidization of land uses, easy money credit, and unethical thumb in the pot Congressional oversight which results in zeroed out 401ks. Shouldn't we know better?
If we go around wailing for leaders we are lost. We need to know how to grow our own food or support a local food system with a farmers market in walking or biking distance. And we need to figure out how to recycle our own trash including composting toilets. That is not leadership material. Its the end of asking for government to design in economic progress since we now know for most generations it leads to worthless 401ks.
That infrastructure of military and government and markets is overbuilt. The energy source of cheap fossil fuels is running out. If that was it we would be fine. But transferring them from the ground to the air, water, and our body tissue has given us the problem of global warming. Worse the intellectual edifice around the engineers has collapsed- the experts don't know what to do; their solutions try to retard innovation and entrench the past. The challenge is to build a coalition to address necessity is immense since the discourse around the topic is shrouded in the fear of the power of state inspired terror and the business elites- BAU. We need to go beyond the calling cards of power: entitlement and corruption.
However as long the challenges remain unaddressable and the discourse is limited there will always be the O'Tooles and GW Deniers who make an industry from seeming to be right.
The Guardian writes Wednesday December
Discussions in Brussels and Poznan this week will be decisive in terms
of setting the tone for next year, when the world must agree on a
successor to the Kyoto protocol or face irreversible and devastating
climate change. The signs do not look good: in Brussels, Italy, Poland
and Germany are trying to water down commitments on emissions
reductions, backed by shortsighted business lobbies. Meanwhile in
Poznan everyone appears to be waiting for someone else to move first.
Society needs to reevaluate its goal of economic progress. Everything points to the immense benefits of recessions and depressions including a lower population. Government needs to get out of the economic progress business so that we can live in a healthy depressed economy where we grow our own food and recycle our own trash. We need to address consumption. Without addressing the necessity of the demand side why put in (a different) infrastructure? Is it any different then?
A carpet showroom and a parking lot got bombed by ice- I would think that's just global warming deserts for melting the ice caps. But the fact that these losing enterprises are around, except powered by windmills, is not a long term solution. Government builds industrial blocs like autos through subsidization of land uses, easy money credit, and unethical thumb in the pot Congressional oversight which results in zeroed out 401ks. Shouldn't we know better?
If we go around wailing for leaders we are lost. We need to know how to grow our own food or support a local food system with a farmers market in walking or biking distance. And we need to figure out how to recycle our own trash including composting toilets. That is not leadership material. Its the end of asking for government to design in economic progress since we now know for most generations it leads to worthless 401ks.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
petition on globla warming
Save our Environment dot org has a petition to Obama saying "It's time to Repower, Refuel, and Rebuild America.
We need to get our economy moving by building a clean energy future. We applaud your efforts to make energy a top priority, and urge you to adopt these goals:
* Move to 100% electricity from clean small distributed sources such as wind and solar
* Cut our dependence on oil and coal by 95%
* Create 5 million new clean energy jobs
* Reduce global warming pollution by at least 80%
* Tax fossil fuel consumption not working America.
We call on you to introduce a plan in your first 100 days that will reach these goals, and to utilize the federal budget and any economic recovery package to get us started.
We need to get our economy moving by building a clean energy future. We applaud your efforts to make energy a top priority, and urge you to adopt these goals:
* Move to 100% electricity from clean small distributed sources such as wind and solar
* Cut our dependence on oil and coal by 95%
* Create 5 million new clean energy jobs
* Reduce global warming pollution by at least 80%
* Tax fossil fuel consumption not working America.
We call on you to introduce a plan in your first 100 days that will reach these goals, and to utilize the federal budget and any economic recovery package to get us started.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Infrastructure and pollution to end life
Worst crab season since the clean water act! The problems of unmitigated pollution and extraction clearly affects life itself on this planet.
Depleted coastal fish stocks displace sustainable farmers moving fuel intensive operations out with drag net fishing that causes havoc in the high seas which allows for pollution intensive hotel uses on the coast. A good resource is Save The High Seas.
Instead of treating symptoms with a blatant disregard for conformance goals we should use the successful energy model in CA to tier price the demand side and change the supply side infrastructure needs. The goal should be to shrink the footprint on the biosphere. Leonhardt writes:
Government agencies usually don’t even have to do a rigorous analysis of a project or how it would affect traffic and the environment, relative to its cost and to the alternatives — before deciding whether to proceed. In one recent survey of local officials, almost 80 percent said they had based their decisions largely on politics, while fewer than 20 percent cited a project’s potential benefits. Please, please don’t just pour more money into the current system.
The SF Examiner highlights one problem of our current infrastructure- permanently damaged lungs for our children.
Harvey Wasserman writes: So let's convert GM's infrastructure to churn out trolley cars, monorails, passenger trains, truly green buses.
The environmental justice result is that congestion management expands capacity at the expense of all other modes. Because of the low real estate cost expansion is disportionately in poor communities.
Depleted coastal fish stocks displace sustainable farmers moving fuel intensive operations out with drag net fishing that causes havoc in the high seas which allows for pollution intensive hotel uses on the coast. A good resource is Save The High Seas.
Instead of treating symptoms with a blatant disregard for conformance goals we should use the successful energy model in CA to tier price the demand side and change the supply side infrastructure needs. The goal should be to shrink the footprint on the biosphere. Leonhardt writes:
Government agencies usually don’t even have to do a rigorous analysis of a project or how it would affect traffic and the environment, relative to its cost and to the alternatives — before deciding whether to proceed. In one recent survey of local officials, almost 80 percent said they had based their decisions largely on politics, while fewer than 20 percent cited a project’s potential benefits. Please, please don’t just pour more money into the current system.
The SF Examiner highlights one problem of our current infrastructure- permanently damaged lungs for our children.
Harvey Wasserman writes: So let's convert GM's infrastructure to churn out trolley cars, monorails, passenger trains, truly green buses.
The environmental justice result is that congestion management expands capacity at the expense of all other modes. Because of the low real estate cost expansion is disportionately in poor communities.
Equity in infrastructure pricing
Set an equitable cost distribution on pollution. Infrastructure pricing should reflect the burden of polluting the biosphere. The model is tier pricing in energy.
Examples:
CA needs to develop a model off-street parking ordinance that implements "Intelligent Parking" similar to what SF wants and Redwood City may have the begining off (from Mike Bullock).
Traffic impact fees, estimated at 40k per car per ten year period would fund zero pollution changes to the way the air and water basin are destroyed.
PAYD road financing should replace the highway gas tax using GPS or license-plate RFID tags. Roads should be priced so that they produce an agree-to rate of return on the VALUE of the lane. Note that I said value. Value is the price of land plus construction, at the time of collection. Privacy concerns should not allow drivers to permanently impact growing lungs by large roads (Mike Bullock).
A revenue neutral carbon tax to address imports. The market partially addresses this but the impact varies with the price of CO2 intensive fuels like gasoline. Without an extraction fee 96% of fossil fuels won't stay in the ground through 2250 for 350 ppm of CO2.
Universal single payer health care to address pollution through environmental justice.
Tie Federal funds to a tangible goal like reduced traffic or carbon emissions.
Examples:
CA needs to develop a model off-street parking ordinance that implements "Intelligent Parking" similar to what SF wants and Redwood City may have the begining off (from Mike Bullock).
Traffic impact fees, estimated at 40k per car per ten year period would fund zero pollution changes to the way the air and water basin are destroyed.
PAYD road financing should replace the highway gas tax using GPS or license-plate RFID tags. Roads should be priced so that they produce an agree-to rate of return on the VALUE of the lane. Note that I said value. Value is the price of land plus construction, at the time of collection. Privacy concerns should not allow drivers to permanently impact growing lungs by large roads (Mike Bullock).
A revenue neutral carbon tax to address imports. The market partially addresses this but the impact varies with the price of CO2 intensive fuels like gasoline. Without an extraction fee 96% of fossil fuels won't stay in the ground through 2250 for 350 ppm of CO2.
Universal single payer health care to address pollution through environmental justice.
Tie Federal funds to a tangible goal like reduced traffic or carbon emissions.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Landuse efficiencies for sustainable communities
When evaluating landuse Efficiencies needs to have their total impact evaluated. For example saying a Prius is efficient leaves out the landuse element. A Prius is more efficient than a Ford F150 in fuel consumption; but the issue of fuel consumption arises because of the poor landuse choice of living out in what used to be the sequestered carbon of open space. Politically moving policy in favor of a Prius thus means we can continue to expand usage of air and water and food and land basins, i.e the biosphere, that we pollute.
The efficiency is thus only relative to the reduced variable of fuel consumption and not the total impact of the biosphere disruption. The sustainable state would go beyond what architect S. Mouzon called Gizzmo Green in The Original Green. Growing Cooler points out that if VMT continues to grow three times faster than population growth any improvements in fuel mileage will quickly be negated. Without a competent urban strategy gains from technological improvements will be overwhelmed by suburban inefficiencies leaving us less sustainable in the future.
A combination of strategies are necessary taking advantage of efficient building types, efficient locations, reused infrastructure, efficient goods and service movement, rebuilt carbon basins, efficient technologies, and equity efficiencies to attain a sustainable state. As Zack and Lyon say the important indicator is lower per capita resource consumption, not necessarily deploying flashy new machines.
The efficiency is thus only relative to the reduced variable of fuel consumption and not the total impact of the biosphere disruption. The sustainable state would go beyond what architect S. Mouzon called Gizzmo Green in The Original Green. Growing Cooler points out that if VMT continues to grow three times faster than population growth any improvements in fuel mileage will quickly be negated. Without a competent urban strategy gains from technological improvements will be overwhelmed by suburban inefficiencies leaving us less sustainable in the future.
A combination of strategies are necessary taking advantage of efficient building types, efficient locations, reused infrastructure, efficient goods and service movement, rebuilt carbon basins, efficient technologies, and equity efficiencies to attain a sustainable state. As Zack and Lyon say the important indicator is lower per capita resource consumption, not necessarily deploying flashy new machines.
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