Book of note: Deep Economy
I just finished reading “Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.” As part of my new strategy of doing more and talking less, I won’t comment too much on it except to say that this book helped inspire that strategy and is worth a read by anyone with a passing interest in (sub)urban development, food issues, growth, economics, peak energy, environmentalism, and localism/globalism. Our modern condition, basically. It’s a Venn diagram of all of this stuff and more.
Monday morning JHK
There are a few things you can state categorically about the US energy predicament and the national conversation we’re having about it - including the leaders of that conversation in government, business, and the media. One is that we are blowing a lot of green smoke up our collective ass. None of these schemes [natural gas, domestic oil production, Canadian tar sands, electric cars] is going to work as advertised. The disappointment over them will be massive and probably lead to awful political consequences.
Another is that we are ignoring the most obvious intelligent responses to this predicament, namely, shifting our focus to walkable communities and public transit, especially rebuilding the American passenger railroad system - without which, I assure you, we will be most regrettably screwed ten years from now. Mr. Obama had one throwaway line in his speech about public transit and nothing whatever about walkable neighborhoods.
The reason for this obvious idiocy is that it’s all about the cars. That’s all we care about in the USA, the cars. We can’t get over the cars. We can’t talk about anything except how we’ll find magical new ways to run all the cars. This is a very tragic sort of stupidity and if we don’t change our thinking about it, from the highest level on down, history is going to treat us very cruelly.
The Leroy Stick
@BPGlobalPR is a wonderful use of the internet, via Twitter, to heap some well-deserved abuse at a scoundrel of a recipient. Sometimes the tedium of programming administrative-level web applications is almost too much to bear, but it’s shit like this that keeps me excited about the medium, and about mankind’s potential for disruptive social commentary done through alternate means. Banksy comes to mind.
Anyway, 100,000+ followers can’t be wrong. Satire is honesty without pretension.
I ponied up $25 for the t-shirt. I’ve spent more on far more spurious causes.
Couldn’t call it unexpected
Spotted in the newspaper this morning, and worthy of attention.
- White House asserts executive privilege in EPA dispute
- US asks to rewrite detainee evidence
- Deal Reached in Congress to Rewrite Rules on Wiretapping
Like Dylan said, “when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Who are the hangers-on who still think this joke of an administration is worthy of anything but contempt?
And great job, Democrats, of working on that new agenda. I hear there’s some oil off of the coast just waiting to be had.
Mediocrity on parade
If this report is an honest appraisal of Washngton’s state of thought on the nation’s gasoline “crisis,” then we’re truly fucked. I have not heard anything more depressing than these stuffed shirts trying to devise increasingly absurd ways to keep our fantasy of a happy motoring country afloat.
Practiced outrage at this issue is a safe bet politically, no doubt. But whether it’s the administration looking to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), presidential candidates calling for a gas tax holiday, or a windfall tax on oil company profits, it’s apparent that no one has stopped to think that the underlying premise — that we must keep our national fleet moving at any cost — is wrong.
The “one million” barrels of additional production that ANWR would bring to the table is, relatively speaking, a drop in the bucket. The U.S. imports 10 million barrels of oil a day, and produces another 5 million or so domestically. In a report authored three years ago, the Energy Department said that opening ANWR to drilling “might reduce world oil prices by as much as 30 to 50 cents per barrel” (see “Results”). This corresponds to a pennies on the gallon decrease, which is hardly the kind of relief touted by the administration. The report goes on to say that the impact of the influx of ANWR oil could easily by negated by an equal decrease in OPEC exports, so as to keep the amount of available oil static.
I’m also disappointed by Clinton’s echoing of McCain’s call for a gas tax holiday, for it shows that her intentions with respect to the environment are not as pure as I had hoped. Obama’s characterization of the candidates’ tax holiday as an idea “designed to get them through an election” is spot-on.
(Update: The Freakonomics blog issues a challenge to find an economist who thinks the tax holiday is a good idea. I await the results with bated breath. The unsurprising results are in.)
McCain’s plan would do nothing to replace the lost revenue to the Federal Highway Trust Fund, causing it to miss out on about $10 billion in revenue. Clinton, on the other hand, proposes to replace this lost revenue with a windfall profits tax, which, having been repealed in 1988, has not seen the light of day since. While this tax would put Republicans in the hot seat — does one pander to one’s NASCAR base (votes), or does one kowtow to the oil industry (money) — I doubt such a measure would pass.
Though their ways may differ, Republicans and Democrats alike offer nothing new. And in such a tightly contested Democratic primary, I think it’s safe to assume that any ideas offered up will not stray far from what is considered safe politics.
Surely nothing will be heard on efforts to improve our national passenger rail system, better urban mass transit, and curbing sprawl. Instead, the desperate clinging to the status quo of “more houses/more roads/more cars”, as shown by recent talk of bailout of the adjustable-rate mortgage market, ensures that this election season, though notable for the makeup of the ballot, will remain mired in tired ways of thinking which only serve to hasten our country’s decline into a muddling pool of shit.
Killer essay
This commentary hits just about every nail on the head. I couldn’t agree more with the following paragraph:
There are three things that keep me up nights: the threat of climate change, peak oil and the mountaintop removal strip mining that is destroying Appalachia. And I have reached the conclusion that, here in the United States, there are three major causes of these problems: Our homes are too big, our food travels too far, and our entire economy is built around the automobile. American homes are twice as big as they were 30 years ago, though fewer people actually live in them. The average item on a supermarket shelf has logged 1,500 miles to get there. And the homogenous suburb has ensured that we must drive everywhere, destroying at once the traditional, walkable city and the surrounding rural landscapes. Thus we have created a consumer culture that much of the developing world — most ominously, China — wants to emulate. But the problem is that this culture is based entirely on carbon-emitting fossil fuels, and it is therefore a culture that has no future.
Tree
I’m not sure if the New Yorker website will ever include the full text of “A Death in the Forest” (December 10, 2007), but it’s worth the effort to track down the issue and read the article. It’s a strong piece of environmental reporting that tells the story of the failing Eastern Hemlock ecosystem.
Except for the fact that this is the state tree of Pennsylvania, I have no real personal attachment to the hemlock. However, this kind of stuff — bits and pieces of the puzzle that are simply disappearing — is happening all over, and that’s reason enough to care.
Nestled near the end of the article is this gem of a paragraph that takes a simple observation and makes it into a huge metaphor that speaks volumes about everything else:
From the top of Jim Branch No. 10, we could see that the forest canopy was a ruin. The crowns of the dead trees were still encrusted with living material — a hemlock rain-forest canopy without the hemlock. It was a scaffold of lichens and other organisms. The trees that harbored them had died so recently and so suddenly that they were all carrying on, for the moment, as if nothing had happened.
The short of it
Elizabeth Kolbert, in a few elegant words, gets down to crux of the world’s car consumption problems, and makes a strong point for why alternative fuel technologies will ultimately fail to save us:
Designing the car of the future is such a daunting challenge because its bigger even than cars. […] Its true that hydrogen cars, which the Bush Administration and the Big Three claim to be working on, dont need gasoline…but they do need hydrogen, which has to be produced using energy from somewhere. If that energy comes from, say, burning coal, […] then the puzzle hasnt been solved; its just been rearranged. The same catch applies to plug-in cars and cars that run on ethanol. (Ethanol made from corn takes almost as much energy to produce as it yields.) If someone, somewhere, comes up with a source of power that is safe, inexpensive, and for all intents and purposes inexhaustible, then we, the Chinese, the Indians, and everyone else on the planet can keep on truckin. Barring that, the car of the future may turn out to be no car at all.
Gas and taxes
Lately, there’s been a lot of things worth mention, but here are two of particular note:
Ethanol: Now it’s personal
This love affair we’re having with ethanol has got to stop. Among the many shortcomings that are noted in a recent New York Times blog post, “Ethanol and the Tortilla Tax,” comes this gem:
So far, Americans havent really caught on to what is happening to the price of products such as soybean or corn-based foodstuffs. But that may change if and when this rush to all fuels allegedly more environmentally friendly affects the price of beer.
It could happen; Heineken, the brewery giant, said beer prices might have to be raised because so many crops are being planted and diverted to bio-fuel production that the supply of barley and hops is being reduced.
Over-reliance on a crop that is chemically dependent and facilitates erosion, being disingenuous about the energy required to produce the stuff (and its purported “green” image), and shortchanging the world’s food supply in favor of keeping our country’s fleet of S.U.V’s in motion is one thing. But fuck with our beer supply? It just won’t fly.
Encouraging bad behavior
Representative Zack Space of Ohio has a solution for the twin “problems” of foreclosures and “high” gas prices:
…families who lose their homes to foreclosure frequently are hit with a massive tax bill. They lose their home and are hit with a “foreclosure tax” by the IRS, adding insult to injury. […] This “foreclosure tax” is simply unfair and needless injury. That’s why I will be introducing legislation to help alleviate this problem.
I also don’t have to tell you what gasoline prices have done to our families’ budgets. Earlier this summer, prices climbed to $3.25 per gallon and higher. For most of us who live in rural areas, we have no choice but to pay those prices if we want to continue to get to work and pick up our kids from school.
That is why I announced my plan to introduce the Rural Commuters Tax Relief Act of 2007. This legislation could not be simpler: If your household makes less than the national median income, you drive more than 30 miles to work and you work at least four days per week, then you receive a $100 tax credit for each month that the average price of gas is more than $3 per gallon.
So, if I read this right, he’d like to set up programs that only serve to reinforce the behavior that caused the problems in the first place? That’s poor governance.
To wit:
Why are more people suddenly facing foreclosure on their $300,000 home? It’s got a lot to do with the recent subprime lending boom and the popularity of adjustable rate mortgages, which allow for the easy acquisition of a McMansion in the ‘burbs. Speculation in a real-estate market that is teetering on the edge of collapse is not, historically, something that Joe Middle Class usually engaged in. Why not direct this “relief” into something more productive, such as borrower education that encourages potential homeowners to realign their expectations with economic reality?
Representative Space’s district lies amidst a lot of Rust Belt cities that could use an infusion of fresh blood. Incentives to repopulate these empty urban centers would serve to increase the economic health of his state more so than the current cycle of suburban development, which does nothing but keep the fast food chains, big box stores, and highway construction contractors happy. True, it may keep his district from becoming a haven for the Bed, Bath and Beyond set, but we should be concerned with preserving, not developing, our rural communities.
Promoting this type of behavior would also serve to eliminate the need to “help” people who “drive more than 30 miles to work.” The best help for these kind of people is the kind that encourages them to move closer to where they work. In Representative Space’s district, that would probably include cities like Columbus, Akron, and Canton. None of which are weathering the current suburban exodus all that well.
