New Geography

Category: Policy

  • The EPA: Leading Into A Rain Garden?

    Newly-installed solar Panels on the White House are an obvious signal that this administration wants to lead by example. Conservatives will no doubt find ways to ridicule the panels, and liberals will praise them as a display to the world that we are a green nation. About one year ago, on Oct. 5, 2009, the President signed Executive Order (EO) 13514, “Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance.” Like the white house solar panels, this EO also is intended to urge federal agencies to lead by example. It sets as policy that federal agencies shall “…conserve and protect water resources through efficiency, reuse, and storm water management.”

    How far have we come… and how far are we likely to be able to go in achieving these goals?

    For federal facilities, the EPA’s green infrastructure solutions , biological systems and engineered systems include, but are not necessarily limited to:

    • Rain gardens, bioretention, and infiltration planters
    • Porous pavements
    • Vegetated swales and bioswales
    • Green roofs
    • Trees and tree boxes
    • Pocket wetlands
    • Reforestation/revegetation
    • Protection and enhancement of riparian buffers and floodplains
    • Rainwater harvesting for use (e.g., irrigation, HVAC make‐up, non‐potable indoor uses)

    For new facilities, these would be good moves. For many years, our design firm has been planning new developments with very low environmental impacts, using approaches that have been either volunteered by the developer or mandated by the local regulations. We accomplish low impact designs by reducing the infrastructure needed for new development, which reduces both economic and environmental impact. Land development can be more efficient, when designed properly, than conventional or Smart Growth design methods; it can allow lower development costs while still complying with EPA mandates. It can be done by harnessing new design methods made possible by the development of new technologies. While “green” brings an image to builders’ minds of expensive, problematic development, being “green” can be less expensive if done right.

    Speaking from my experience in designing 700 neighborhoods in 46 States (and 13 countries), all with innovative design methods, and building a Net-Zero home in 1983, as well as a dual-certified Green home in 2009, here’s how I evaluate the likelihood of success of the current EPA options:

    Rain gardens, bioretention, and infiltration planters: These organic methods are possibly the most economically viable, but they do come with constant maintenance costs that the building facility owner must be aware of. A bio-retention that is not designed properly or maintained constantly will quickly fail. Unlike concrete pipes and iron sewer grates along curbs which can be left alone for decades, an organic solution to storm water must be installed by an experienced expert with a proven track record, and maintained by personnel that know what they are doing. If built correctly and maintained constantly, this can be the lowest cost solution IF there is enough land area and proper topography (flow of the land) to design the system properly in the first place. Typically, these systems rely on surface flow with no curbing or special curbing to allow drainage off paved areas. On newly developed sites, this could mean a significant cost saving. On existing development, replacing curb may be expensive.

    Porous pavements: Sounds simple – install a pavement that allows rain to flow through to the ground. The big problem and huge expense comes from making sure that the ground under the pavement also porous. In other words, if you were to remove an asphalt parking lot and replace it with porous asphalt, the environmental impact would not change. Why? Because under the original asphalt is likely a non-porous class 5 (or similar) base. In a genuinely porous paved surface, the storm water moving through the pavement must continue through the ground below. This means a base that allows storm water to be held and filtered slowly to the ground below, or directed elsewhere. Sounds expensive? You betcha! Two other major problems: heavy vehicles used at federal facilities could damage these systems, and, if the ground freezes, expansion could be a problem. Long term lifespan of porous pavements may be less than that of solid surfaces.

    Vegetated swales and bioswales: See rain gardens, above.

    Green roofs: Retrofit Green Roofs on to buildings not originally designed for them? Green roofs did not work well in 1983 when I built my Net-Zero home during the first (failed, somehow forgotten) green movement, so I’m not sure what has changed to make them feasible. Green roofs can absorb the sun’s energy to solve the heat island problem of large facilities, but simply coating a dark roof with a light or white color solves the heat island problem with little expense.

    Trees and tree boxes: Trees and tree boxes will have little impact on reducing storm water impacts. Of course there are other benefits for planting trees, so, while a good thing, this does little to comply with the mandate.

    Pocket wetlands: See rain gardens, above.

    Reforestation/revegetation: Assumes the federal facility has plenty of space to allow such a thing.

    Protection and enhancement of riparian buffers and floodplains: Assumes there are riparian buffers and flood plains on the site, or adjacent to the site, that can be altered.

    Rainwater harvesting for use (e.g., irrigation, HVAC make‐up, non‐potable indoor uses): Also a good solution when possible. For example, when 90% of the surface is paving and rooftop, the resulting storage of rainfall could be tremendous, depending upon where in the country the facilities are located, and ample to irrigate the remaining small surface.

    Nobody is an expert on all issues, so there may be new factors that I’m not aware of that would make a method more feasible than what we have experienced.

    What is completely missing from the EPA options here are ways to make an existing facility more efficient by removing excessive paved areas. When an existing facility was originally designed, was it efficient in the first place? Keep in mind that being efficient is not necessarily profitable. If the original consulting engineer and architectural firm fees were based upon a percentage of construction costs, then creating excessive construction costs meant larger fees. Paving contractors maximize profit by covering the most land possible with asphalt or concrete.

    The EPA order can be an opportunity to help design solutions that are cost effective to comply with the mandate. For my firm, the mandate could leverage our low impact software system sales, a technology that can be used to reduce wasteful construction while in redevelopment, so we may directly benefit from this mandate. But before that can happen — and before we can know how successful the EPA directives will be — many questions remain to be answered.

    Photo: Pigeons in front of the EPA building by benchilada

    Rick Harrison is President of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio and Neighborhood Innovations, LLC. He is author of Prefurbia: Reinventing The Suburbs From Disdainable To Sustainable and creator of Performance Planning System. His websites are rhsdplanning.com and performanceplanningsystem.com.

  • Green Jobs for Janitors: How Neoliberals and Green Keynesians Wrecked Obama’s Promise of a Clean Energy Economy

    In August 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama traveled to Lansing, Michigan, to lay out an ambitious ten-year plan for revitalizing, and fundamentally altering, the American economy. His administration, he vowed, would midwife new clean-energy industries, reduce dependence on foreign oil, and create five million green jobs. “Will America watch as the clean-energy jobs and industries of the future flourish in countries like Spain, Japan, or Germany?” Obama asked. “Or will we create them here, in the greatest country on earth, with the most talented, productive workers in the world?”

    Two years later, the answer to that second question appears to be no. Obama’s environmental agenda is in tatters. His green jobs plan has done little to make a dent in unemployment, which persists at close to 10 percent. Obama’s signature environmental initiative, cap-and-trade, died in the Senate in July. And, during the first year of Obama’s tenure, China massively outspent the United States on clean-energy technology.

    The story of how Obama’s green agenda came up empty is more complicated than the one conventionally told by Democrats and greens, who imagine that cap-and-trade would have been transformational had Republicans and global-warming deniers not gotten in the way. In truth, the president’s strategy was flawed from the start. Cap-and-trade would not have birthed a domestic clean-energy economy — indeed, it wasn’t designed to. Meanwhile, the administration’s green stimulus spending was split between short-term, if worthy, investments in green technology, to which far too little money was allocated, and over-hyped public-works projects that would never have delivered the new industrial economy Obama promised as a candidate.

    Voodoo Economics

    Shortly before the House passed its version of cap-and-trade legislation last year, the Center for American Progress (CAP), headed by Obama transition director John Podesta, released a study claiming that the cap-and-trade bill and the stimulus combined would create 1.7 million new jobs. Democrats repeatedly pointed to the CAP report to support their jobs claims. Extrapolating from the report’s analysis, it seems that over half of the new jobs, almost 900,000, were supposed to come from building retrofits. The study’s authors apparently believed that a mere $5 billion in stimulus funding for weatherization, plus a price on carbon, would leverage $80 billion annually in private investment and lead to the retrofitting of every single commercial and residential building in America in just ten years.

    Alongside the CAP report, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the leading green jobs group, Green For All, released another study written by two of the same authors, claiming that roughly half of the jobs would benefit low-wage workers and would offer “decent opportunities for promotions and rising wages over time.” Indeed, environmentalists such as Van Jones — who had come to prominence calling upon young people to “put down those handguns and pick up some caulking guns” and briefly served as Obama’s green jobs czar — claimed that building retrofits and cap-and-trade legislation could save both the planet and the inner city.

    In reality, the stimulus’s $5 billion weatherization program, according to the Department of Energy, created or saved just 13,000 jobs during the last reported quarter. But, even if more of these jobs had been created, the idea that inner-city youth should see what are essentially janitorial jobs as a pathway out of poverty was always far-fetched. America’s black middle class emerged from the steel, ship, and automobile factories of the postwar industrial heyday. Those jobs were high-skill, high-wage, and long-term. They manufactured products that could be sold on domestic and foreign markets, and they provided the economic basis for a dramatic improvement in black America’s standard of living. Jobs retrofitting buildings and weatherizing homes are, by contrast, low-skill and short-term.

    To be fair, Democrats in Congress and White House officials always believed that while the stimulus expenditures represented a down payment on the clean energy economy, the real action would ultimately be driven by private investments in response to cap and trade, not sustained public investments in innovation and manufacturing.

    In this way the green Keynesianism that characterized the stimulus comfortably accommodated itself to the neoliberal policy predilections that have, over the last 20 years, become Democratic Party orthodoxy. Born of fashionable neoclassical economic theory and political expediency after the Reagan revolution, Democratic neoliberalism embraces the notion that private firms are better and more efficient at “picking winners,” technological and otherwise, than government. This cliche was never based on the real-world history of technological innovation or economic growth but rather upon the neoclassical assumption that governments must do a worse job than private actors since they are not motivated by profit and cannot act rationally.

    Even Jones, who spent recent years railing against neoliberal economic policies, accepts this neoliberal conceit. “The real solution to this whole thing is to put a price on carbon,” Jones told Pacifica’s Democracy Now in the fall of 2008. “The biggest economic stimulus I can imagine would be a carbon tax or a cap and trade… so that suddenly there is a market signal for private capital to start moving aggressively in a clean energy, low carbon direction.”

    But cap and trade could never deliver the millions of new jobs that Obama, Congressional Democrats, and greens promised. The primary obstacle to private sector investment in clean energy technologies is not the absence of modest carbon price signals such as those in the Congress’ cap and trade proposals and currently in place in Europe. Rather, it is the vast price gap between fossil fuels and clean energy technologies. While fossil fuels are energy dense, widely available, easy to consume, and supported by a well-developed infrastructure, the alternatives are costly, cumbersome, intermittent, or all of the above.

    Yet cap and trade enjoyed mainstream credibility for as long as it did in spite of these hard technological realities because economic models seemed to show that a rising carbon price would cause technological innovation and hence emissions reductions. Cap and traders used these models to argue that once we have a carbon price, the market would magically deliver technology innovation because private firms would have an incentive to invest to make those technologies better and cheaper.

    But the magic wasn’t in the market, it was in the models constructed by neoclassical economists, which simply assume substantial rates of technological change. Innovation — non-linear, unpredictable, and ephemeral — is understandably difficult to model. Perhaps more significantly, important innovations have as often as not been the result of public investments in technology which economists, following neoclassical doctrine, are loathe to acknowledge, much less include in their models.

    The real world gives us ample reason to be skeptical of carbon pricing claims. The European Union has had a cap-and-trade system in place since 2005, and Norway and Sweden have had carbon taxes since the early ’90s. None have spurred much innovation. On the contrary, much of Europe has been on a coal-plant-building binge over the last decade. Where European nations have advanced clean-energy technologies–whether wind in Denmark, nuclear in France, or solar in Germany–they did so through direct investments in those technologies that dwarfed the economic incentive provided by carbon pricing.

    The Ideology of Decline

    In late May, President Obama told employees at a solar panel factory in California, “I’m not prepared to cede American leadership” in clean energy. But that is in effect what his policies have done. While U.S. policymakers have fetishized carbon pricing and energy efficiency retrofitting, America’s competitors have been investing heavily to deepen their domination of solar, wind, nuclear, electric car, and high-speed rail technology and manufacturing.

    China, Japan and Korea have moved forward with aggressive plans to out-manufacture, out-innovate, and out-compete the United States in clean tech. China alone plans to spend more than $740 billion (5 trillion yuan) over the next 10 years. While neoclassical economists and their disciples in Washington have presided over the deindustrialization and financialization of the American economy, our economic competitors have used long-term investments to establish dominant positions in advanced, high value manufacturing sectors such as automobiles, electronics, information technology, and now clean tech.

    Obama too could have focused on winning a similarly long-term commitment to public investment in green innovation and manufacturing. Instead, he threw his political capital behind cap-and-trade. Despite the fact that the rising domination of key clean energy technologies by our economic rivals could in no way be attributed to a price on carbon — China, Japan, and Korea don’t even have one — Obama, his Congressional allies, and their cheerleaders in the media such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, have continued to insist that cap and trade legislation was the key to reestablishing U.S. competitiveness in clean tech.

    In truth, cap and trade was conceived as a strategy to minimize the cost of reducing emissions, not to create domestic industries or jobs. Indeed, economists typically argue that government should not even concern itself with such issues. To the neoclassical mind, making microchips is no better than making potato chips, as innovation expert Rob Atkinson wryly observes. If China is better at making solar panels and we are better at making foam insulation, then we should just buy our solar panels from China. From this point of view, creating low-skill construction jobs installing compact fluorescent light bulbs in old buildings has the same economic utility as creating high-skill jobs manufacturing solar panels and nuclear reactors for export.

    Apply these assumptions to climate and energy policy, and what you get is the failed Democratic agenda. Governments should cap carbon emissions and auction the right to pollute. Doing so would establish a price on carbon pollution that will make fossil fuels increasingly expensive and thus drive private investment and consumption to efficiency and renewables. If all those solar panels and windmills get made in China — so be it. America will still lead the world in potato chips or something else.

    This is not a recipe for American economic competitiveness in clean energy technology and manufacturing. America’s nascent clean energy industries need sustained public investments to survive and prosper. While neoliberal greens and their allies were hyperventilating over the death of cap and trade, the stimulus investments in technology and manufacturing were hard at work laying the foundations for a competitive clean economy. Though overshadowed by the public works-style efficiency programs, stimulus-funded investments in clean technology arguably saved the American renewables industry, which was in free-fall after the 2008 financial crisis.

    In contrast to the green public works projects, stimulus investments in manufacturing and innovation have largely done what they were intended to do — support an embryonic domestic industry and help improve clean energy technologies so that they can become competitive with fossil fuels. Those investments helped put American clean energy manufacturing back on a competitive footing globally, and, ironically, created more jobs at less cost than the green public works investments that were supposed to put millions of Americans back to work. Already, Deutsche Bank estimates that the stimulus grew U.S. battery manufacturers production capacity from two percent of the global market to 20 percent by 2012, and the story is similar for other technologies.

    Those technologies still have a long way to go before they will be good enough and cheap enough to become the basis for a sustained American economic renewal. But the road map for getting there looks a lot more like what America began through the stimulus investments in technology and manufacturing than through the green public works programs and carbon market making that have distracted the Administration and Congress for the better part of the last two years.

    This should not particularly surprise us as the history of industrialization and technology innovation in America is the history of government investment in technology. In the postwar era, the federal government made investments in the development and commercialization of new technologies such as nuclear power, computers, the Internet, biomedical research, jet turbines, solar power, wind power and countless other technologies at a scale that private firms simply could not have replicated. Those investments “crowded in” rather than crowded out private investment and the result was high growth and prosperity that benefited virtually every American.

    Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his fellow Democrats still seem to get it. While White House officials, in the wake of the collapse of cap and trade, tout the impressive short-term accomplishments of the stimulus investments in technology and manufacturing, they have done little to date to prevent them from expiring next year.

    Change We Can Believe In

    Obama appears genuinely moved by the vision of a clean-energy economy. He seems to have convinced himself, however, that America’s energy economy can be transformed through carbon markets and efficiency retrofits.

    The president’s proposal to “make clean energy the profitable kind of energy” — which was always code for making fossil fuels more expensive — today needs to be replaced by a focused effort to make clean energy cheap through innovation. Doing so will require large, direct, and sustained federal investments in new energy technologies. This focus on innovation may seem like an indirect way to create jobs, but history shows it is also the one with the strongest record of producing whole new industries — industries that have driven America’s long-term economic expansion.

    There is a growing consensus in favor of such an effort, which includes some conservatives and Republicans who opposed cap-and-trade. Support for greater investment in energy innovation includes corporate chieftains, such as Bill Gates, GE’s Jeff Immelt, and Intel founder Andy Grove, as well as dozens of Nobel laureate scientists and energy policy experts across the ideological spectrum.

    The failure of cap-and-trade to make it through the Senate may thus turn out to be a blessing in disguise. It spares the country a program that would have done little to help either the economy or the environment. And it gives Obama and the Democrats an opportunity to reconsider how they might build the clean-energy economy they were elected to deliver. With the right policies, the answer to the question Obama posed two years ago in Lansing — will the United States lead the way in creating clean-energy jobs? — can still be yes.

    This piece originally appeared at Breakthrough Blog.

    Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus are co-founders of the Breakthrough Institute and authors of Break Through.

    Image by heatingoil

  • The Future of a Hub: Can Singapore Stay On Top of the Game?

    Viewed from a broad, historical perspective, Singapore’s position as a hub is far from inevitable or unassailable. History shows that hubs come and go. Malacca used to be the centre of the spice trade in Southeast Asia. Venice was the centre of East-West trade throughout the Middle Ages. Rangoon, now Yangon, was the aviation hub of Southeast Asia before 1962.

    Is Singapore in danger of also ceding its hub status as a result of forces beyond our control? The case of Malacca is instructive. By the 16th Century, the city on the Malay peninsula had become the most important port in Southeast Asia. It served as the bridge between the spice-producing islands of Southeast Asia and the markets in Europe and Asia. Malacca became so integral to East-West trade that a Portuguese traveller and writer, Tome Pires, proclaimed that “who is Lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice”.

    Malacca was a forerunner of the free port that Singapore was to become. It welcomed foreign merchants as well as their trade. But after the Portuguese conquest of the city in 1511, it declined as the spice hub of the region, as the Portuguese – and later the Dutch – sought to achieve monopolistic control of the spice trade. Fierce competition from neighbouring ports such as Johor meant that traders had other options. The city soon declined and today is best known as a tourist attraction.

    Half a world away from Malacca, Venice emerged as the European hub of the global trading network. For nine hundred years, Venice was a flourishing centre of trade between Europe and Asia, especially in silk, grain and spices. Geography played an important role in Venice’s rise. Its relative isolation from the mainland insulated it from the confusing and often deadly politics of the Italian states.

    Venice concentrated its resources and energies on advancing its commercial interests in distant regions. By the 13th century, Venice was the second largest city in Europe after Paris, and its most prosperous. It linked the main trade routes between Europe and Asia.

    But eventually Venice also declined. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 disrupted the traditional overland trade route from Europe to Asia, forcing Europe to find alternative trade routes to the East. At the turn of the 16th century, Portugal’s discovery of a sea route to the East Indies undermined Venice’s monopoly. New ports emerged to become Europe’s main intermediaries in the trade with the East, striking at the very foundation of Venice’s wealth. With its centrality as a commercial hub broken, Venice declined and eventually fell to the Austrians in 1797.

    The Theory of Hubs

    Malacca and Venice are both examples of hubs in that first flourished and then declined as trade routes and technologies changed. Simply defined, hubs are the exceptionally well-linked nodes in a network. Malacca and Venice exploited their commanding positions in the main trade networks of their times. They consolidated their hub positions by astute diplomacy, openness to talent from elsewhere, and broadening the range of their activities beyond just trade.

    Throughout history, hubs have been the main engines of economic growth and development. Network theory provides us with insights to explain why hubs acquire wealth more easily than other nodes in a network. Today, as in the past, the world’s economic geography remains dominated by hubs which are the focal points of opportunity, growth and innovation. Firms locate where skills, capabilities and markets cluster.

    A recent study identified the existence of 40 mega-regions worldwide. They are defined as places that claim large populations, large markets, significant economic capacity, substantial innovative activity, and highly skilled talent. Many of these 40 mega-regions are formed by hub cities growing outward and into one another. Singapore is one of these hubs.

    Today, of course, air transport plays a critical role in establishing hubs. Air hubs make previously unlinked cities accessible to one another in just one or two links. Singapore is classified as a “connector” hub – it is a hub within the East Asian/Southeast Asian region, with a high number of links to cities in other regions. So in 2007, while Changi Airport was ranked 19th by the Airports Council International in terms of passenger numbers, it was ranked 6th if only international passengers are considered.

    If Singapore is a central node connecting different regions, what might undermine this position? Challenges could come from two directions. The first is competitors in the region, such as Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Hong Kong, as well as those from other regions, such as Dubai. Dubai is the largest aviation hub in the Middle East and is a fierce competitor for the Australia-Europe traffic. Another challenge is from long-haul flights. The same technology that allows Singapore Airlines to bypass Tokyo on flights to Los Angeles could one day allow Emirates to fly non-stop from Dubai to Sydney, and Qantas or British Airways to fly non-stop along the “kangaroo route” from London to Sydney.

    The more cities move away from the hub-and-spoke model of air transportation to point-to-point transportation, the more difficult it will be for Singapore to retain its status as an aviation hub. This is conceptually no different from Venice losing its hub status because alternative and more direct trade routes were found between markets in Europe and spice producers in the East.

    This threat underlines the importance of constantly re-inventing Singapore as a hub. It would be fatal to assume that the density of connections that we have today and the centrality that we enjoy in today’s networks – whether in air transportation, maritime, or other networks – are permanent. New technologies might create new networks with their own hubs and connectors. Whether we will continue to be a hub in the networks that emerge will depend on our capabilities, on our ability to seize early mover advantages, and on how quickly the new networks emerge.

    I think it is possible to distil five factors that determine the success and sustainability of hubs like Singapore.

    1. Establish your role early. Singapore built the first container port in the region. This gave us first-mover advantage. We exploited it, and Singapore was propelled to the front rank of global container ports.
    2. Ensure open access and maximum connectivity. Singapore under the British thrived because of its status as a free port. In contrast places like Jakarta languished under the Dutch policy of controlling and taxing trade. Being well-connected and plugged into dense networks confer far more advantage than efforts to monopolise production or to control access to resources.
    3. Capitalise on and exploit small initial advantages. The research on networks suggests that the economic development process is highly path-dependent: the choices we face today are largely shaped by the choices we made in the past and the capabilities that we have already built up. Singapore was able to become a leading petrochemicals hub because we were able to build on our early success in attracting oil refinery activities.
    4. Constantly re-invent and diversify the hub’s value proposition. In Singapore’s context, our status as a maritime hub gives us the opportunity to develop strengths in new areas that go beyond our traditional role as a port. These include ship financing, ship insurance and various ancillary activities that the shipping industry depends on. This diversification will also give us greater resilience in the face of uncertainties and rapid changes in the maritime industry.
    5. We need a strong sense of belonging. If people only see Singapore as “Hotel Singapore”, then when there is an economic downturn or other problems, they will move to where the opportunities are greater. The challenge is to maintain a core that will sustain the hub through economic cycles.

    Singapore’s continued success as a hub depends both on its connections to the world, as well as connections to its citizens wherever they may now live. Our strategic response to the limitations of our physical size must be to strengthen our hub position by boosting not only its physical connections to networks, but also in other domains – an R&D hub, an intellectual hub, and even a cultural and entertainment hub.

    To avoid the fate of Malacca or Venice, we must re-invent and re-position ourselves and stay ahead of the competition. This is the imperative that will determine our future as a city-state, as both a place and a nation.

    Peter Ho is Senior Advisor to Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures. Before retirement, he was the Head of Civil Service in the Singapore Government.

    Photo by Storm Crypt

  • The Hudson Tunnel: Issues for New Jersey

    New Jersey Governor Chris Christie sent shockwaves through the transportation industry on last Thursday when he cancelled the under-construction ARC (Access to the Regional Core) rail tunnel under the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York (Manhattan).

    The Governor accepted the Access the Regional Core (ARC) Executive Committee’s recommendation to “pull the plug” on the expensive project because of cost overruns. The project was to have cost $8.7 billion, but could escalate up to $14 billion according to the Governor’s office. All of any such cost overrun would have to be absorbed by the state of New Jersey, which like many other states is in dire financial straits.

    Christie said:

    “I have made a pledge to the people of New Jersey that on my watch I will not allow taxpayers to fund projects that run over budget with no clear way of how these costs will be paid for. Considering the unprecedented fiscal and economic climate our State is facing, it is completely unthinkable to borrow more money and leave taxpayers responsible for billions in cost overruns. The ARC project costs far more than New Jersey taxpayers can afford and the only prudent move is to end this project.”

    Governor Christie indicated that the project could become New Jersey’s “Big Dig,” referring to the Boston highway project that he said escalated in cost by 10 times (that is not a typo).
    Yet supporters of the tunnel were unanimous in their condemnation of Christie’s move, from Paul Krugman of The New York Times to the Regional Plan Association.

    New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg announced that Christie had backed down, noting his “reversal of yesterday’s decision to kill” the tunnel project. Referring to a meeting between US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and Governor Christie, Lautenberg said “The Secretary was clear with Governor Christie: if this tunnel doesn’t get built, the three billion dollars will go to other states. We can’t allow that to happen.” Lautenberg listed a litany of benefits such as a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 70,000 tons annually. He also noted that New Jersey would have to reimburse the federal government the $300 million it had received for the tunnel. Senator Robert Menendez added that “New Jersey taxpayers don’t want to own a $600 million hole to nowhere.”

    However, under examination, it is unclear whether Christie had “reversed” his position. Christie agreed to consider “options to potentially salvage” a tunnel project based upon options (not made public) offered by LaHood. New Jersey and Federal officials will be meeting on the matter over the next two weeks. Christie, however, reaffirmed his concern about project finances, stating that” the ARC project is not financially viable “ and its expectation “to dramatically exceed its current budget remains unchanged. ” The Newark Star-Ledger cited state officials as saying that the decision does not represent a reversal of Christie’s original decision.

    Thus, everything may be up in the air. Given that, here are a few issues the state of New Jersey may like to consider as it finalizes its decision:

    1. Exaggerating the Need for the Project The new rail tunnel is to serve a purported increase in commuter rail ridership to Manhattan jobs in the future. The project’s Final Environmental Impact Statement says that Midtown Manhattan’s employment will grow from its present 2.6 million by another 500,000 by 2030. This is unlikely. Manhattan’s entire employment (not just Midtown) peaked at 2.4 million in 2008. One might expect the planners could have gotten something so simple correct. Manhattan employment remains below 2001 levels and never rose more than 35,000 even at the peak of the last boom (annual figure, from 2001). The consultants also are projecting a 1.6 million population increase west of the Hudson River (New Jersey suburbs along with the New York counties of Rockland and Orange) by 2030. However, the New Jersey and New York metropolitan counties to the west of the Hudson are more likely to grow only 1.1 million, based upon official state projections (Note). The questionable population and employment projections reveal that the “need” for the new tunnel may have been grossly overstated.

    2. Exporting New Jersey Jobs to New York Why should New Jersey pay to build more capacity so that its people can work across the state line? Why should they not work in New Jersey? New Jersey is often thought of an economic afterthought in Manhattan centric media and business interests (such as by The New York Times). In fact only a small share of New Jersey commuters travel to Manhattan for work. Even in the New Jersey counties that border New York, only 12% of commuters work in Manhattan. In the other New York metropolitan area counties in the metropolitan area, the figure drops to 5%.

    The trends here are also important. Since 1956, every new job in the New York metropolitan area has been created outside Manhattan (Manhattan’s employment is 400,000 lower now than back then). New Jersey depends on New Jersey far more than it does New York. New Jersey has developed successful new office complexes in Jersey City, New Brunswick, along the I-287 Belt Route and elsewhere. Perhaps New Jersey should seek to minimize work trip lengths and encourage the next 500,000 jobs to be created in the state rather than in New York. Downtown Newark, for example, has excellent transit access and could use substantial new employment investment. This might prove more beneficial for New Jersey and its taxpayers.

    3. Costs Could Rise Even Higher The tunnel could easily climb in cost beyond the now feared $14 billion. Big Dig cost escalation continued almost to the project’s opening. There is no reason to expect it will be different with the Hudson tunnel. It has been reported that one of LaHood’s options is simply to lower cost projections. New Jersey should buy that option only if the federal government underwrites all of the cost overruns. However, such a deviation from federal policy would bring stiff opposition from other parts of the country.

    4. The Cost of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions Like so many transit projects, the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is raised as a benefit of the tunnel. But at what cost? Each of the 70,000 annual tons of greenhouse gas emissions removed would require a capital expenditure of $16,000. The present market price for greenhouse gases is $20 per ton. New Jersey could accomplish the same objective for just $1.4 million annually.

    The Decision Much rides on Governor Christie’s decision. It may be better for the state to have a $600 million tunnel to nowhere than a $14, $20 or $25 billion tunnel that may not really be needed. Moreover, frustration is building with Washington’s “plunder” philosophy that encourages wasting money at home, so that another state doesn’t get the chance. Digging the nation out of its present (and future) malaise seems likely to require fresher thinking than this.

    If Governor Christie musters the courage to stop this project now, it could be a shot across the bow of an international vendor and consulting engineering community that has routinely low-balled costs only to later jack them up, confident that no project would be canceled once started.

    ——–

    Note: This figure is derived using New York 2030 projections and New Jersey 2025 projections, increased by the 2020-2025 growth rate to project 2030 population.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life”

    Photo: Hudson River looking south between Lower Manhattan and Jersey City (photo by author)

  • Religious Freedom or A Tax-Free Ride?

    The furor over a mosque in Manhattan has swirled around issues of personal freedom and collective tolerance. But very little of the discussion has focused on the pros and cons of construction of places of worship in our cities and suburbs, or on their tax status. In a country that displays high rates of worship and has a growing population, it’s to be expected that religious spaces would be on the increase. Yet, like all things that are added to the built environment, churches, synagogues, temples and even meeting halls can have a negative impact on those who live in the area. Economists term this a ‘negative externality’.

    Parks are a simple analogy, in that it is nice to have somewhere to walk your dog if you live nearby, but it is not so pleasant if dogs are shipped in by their owners from other neighborhoods to use the space, especially if they have little incentive to clean up after themselves [that would be the owners, not the pets]. Places of worship are the same, insofar as it might be convenient to have a temple next door, but only if it is for a compatible religion. If not, it is just another source of traffic and noise for the neighborhood, and if it is a religion that is presently controversial, then there is even more likelihood of unhappiness.

    One of the reasons that so many congregations can afford to build new spaces for themselves is that religious enterprises are not taxed. A glance at the chat rooms across the Internet suggests that this is a warm-button topic — not of major importance, but ready to become so at a moment’s notice. Those who patrol these issues have developed a rather neat logic for this tax exemption, namely, that payment of income or property taxes by religious institutions would violate the separation of church and state. Indeed, the Supreme Court seems to have fostered this logic, arguing in 1970 in Walz vs. Tax Commission of the City of New York, that a tax exemption for churches “restricts the fiscal relationship between church and state, and tends to complement and reinforce the desired separation insulating each from the other”.

    Logically then, payment of taxes by religious groups should indeed be considered unconstitutional. But what if we were to separate the payment of taxes on income from the payment of property taxes? It’s reasonable enough to argue that the former should be exempt, especially if you are comfortable with the reality that plenty of corporations and many affluent individuals pay little or nothing in income tax.

    However, the non-payment of property taxes is quite different, as it has a large impact on the way in which cities operate. Religious enterprises can afford to outbid their competitors when purchasing land as they buy at a discount, namely, the dollars saved on non-payment of property taxes. Put another way, they can afford to purchase marginally larger properties, as they are able to fold the putative taxes into their bids for land.

    Congregations can often afford to buy prime locations at urban intersections; in the suburbs, they can afford to buy larger lots and build mega-churches with vast parking lots. The scale of these developments can be remarkable. A new LDS temple that is planned for Gilbert, Arizona will cater to tens of thousands of worshipers on a 21 acre site.

    Now, I would rather that the urban fabric be maintained than be left idle, especially at present, while the construction industry is in poor shape. It makes little sense, though, to encourage market distortions. Churches can break up the land-use in a city, inserting a structure that is used intermittently among, say, office spaces for which there can be high demand. Building any kind of religious structure in Manhattan, where land can fetch $100 million per acre, serves to drive up the costs of real estate yet further. In the suburbs and exurbs, where land is of course infinitely cheaper, the distortion is less, but the impacts are potentially higher. Vast mega-churches have all the impact of a Wal-Mart but none of the tax benefits, and of course none of the jobs.

    How much are we talking here in hard cash? My simplistic calculations and equally non-rigorous research suggest that there are approximately 350,000 religious spaces in the US. If we assume that each occupies 10,000 square feet [and many are five to ten times larger], then that would be approximately 80,000 acres of land on which taxes are not being paid. Clearly, few of those acres are as expensive as those in Manhattan, but even in suburban Phoenix, raw land reached $300,000 per acre before the 2008 correction. My arithmetic suggests that $20 billion of land is being used without tax payment, which would amount to tens of millions annually.

    Places of worship are in general highly inefficient uses of space if you simply take into account the number of hours per week they are used. This notwithstanding, they place a burden on the public purse in terms of water and sewerage links, road maintenance, and fire and police protection—the fact that they are unoccupied may actually increase the cost of surveillance. These services, plus the opportunity costs of lost taxes, come at a moment when nearly all municipalities and most States are looking for ways to replace contracting revenues. Law professor Evelyn Brody has done a fabulous job in documenting the ways in which non-payment is hurting the public sector, and the innovative ways in which some jurisdictions are using PILOTS (payments in lieu of taxes) to make up the losses.

    As we know, religion is a touchy subject. Asking congregations to pay their property taxes will be taken by many as an assault on religious freedom. But if we also look at the larger class of charitable and non-profit organizations, we find many small charities that could not and thus should not pay property taxes. Small churches, mosques and temples would be in this category. But there are also non-profit organizations that are wealthy; Harvard University should pay millions of dollars on its holdings in Boston, and the same is true of large, wealthy religious organizations with land holdings throughout the country’s urban areas.

    Why single out what many regard as ‘the good guys’? The answer is that welfare subsidies distort the market, wherever and whenever they occur. That’s true of mega-churches, and it’s equally true of new shopping malls that receive tax incentives to locate in one jurisdiction rather than another. Taxes are of course anathema to many in our society, but then so is welfare. So let’s be consistent and get rid of property tax subsidies for developers and large charities, regardless. If that includes large churches, then so be it. The new revenues will be a boon for municipalities, so that they can provide services for those who need them most. Some organizations will claim they cannot pay, but even there the news is not bad: There is evidence that when land-uses change, redevelopment can have a multiplier effect. This was true of plenty of military sites, and it has been documented for churches being re-purposed in inner city redevelopment areas.

    In its 1970 decision, the Supreme Court observed that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” Yet it is also the case that the power to provide exemptions is a powerful distortion of the ways that cities organize themselves as efficient providers of goods and services. To the extent that we can have a sensible discussion of religion or taxation, let’s explore just which interests are served by subsiding worship.

    Photo by rauchdickson of Solid Rock megachurch, Monroe, Ohio

    Andrew Kirby is an urbanist based in Phoenix. For several years he lived next door to the 12th century church in Cholsey in the UK, where Agatha Christie is buried.
    .

  • Environmentalism as Religion

    Traditional religion is having a tough time in parts of the world. Majorities in most European countries have told Gallup pollsters in the last few years that religion does not “occupy an important place” in their lives. Across Europe, Judeo-Christian church attendance is down, as is adherence to religious prohibitions such as those against out-of-wedlock births. And while Americans remain, on average, much more devout than Europeans, there are demographic and regional pockets in this country that resemble Europe in their religious beliefs and practices.

    The rejection of traditional religion in these quarters has created a vacuum unlikely to go unfilled; human nature seems to demand a search for order and meaning, and nowadays there is no shortage of options on the menu of belief. Some searchers syncretize Judeo-Christian theology with Eastern or New Age spiritualism. Others seek through science the ultimate answers of our origins, or dream of high-tech transcendence by merging with machines — either approach depending not on rationalism alone but on a faith in the goodness of what rationalism can offer.

    For some individuals and societies, the role of religion seems increasingly to be filled by environmentalism. It has become “the religion of choice for urban atheists,” according to Michael Crichton, the late science fiction writer (and climate change skeptic). In a widely quoted 2003 speech, Crichton outlined the ways that environmentalism “remaps” Judeo-Christian beliefs:

    There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

    In parts of northern Europe, this new faith is now the mainstream. “Denmark and Sweden float along like small, content, durable dinghies of secular life, where most people are nonreligious and don’t worship Jesus or Vishnu, don’t revere sacred texts, don’t pray, and don’t give much credence to the essential dogmas of the world’s great faiths,” observes Phil Zuckerman in his 2008 book Society without God. Instead, he writes, these places have become “clean and green.” This new faith has very concrete policy implications; the countries where it has the most purchase tend also to have instituted policies that climate activists endorse. To better understand the future of climate policy, we must understand where “ecotheology” has come from and where it is likely to lead.

    From Theology to Ecotheology

    The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word “ecology” in the nineteenth century to describe the study of “all those complex mutual relationships” in nature that “Darwin has shown are the conditions of the struggle for existence.” Of course, mankind has been closely studying nature since the dawn of time. Stone Age religion aided mankind’s first ecological investigation of natural reality, serving as an essential guide for understanding and ordering the environment; it was through story and myth that prehistoric man interpreted the natural world and made sense of it. Survival required knowing how to relate to food species like bison and fish, dangerous predators like bears, and powerful geological forces like volcanoes — and the rise of agriculture required expertise in the seasonal cycles upon which the sustenance of civilization depends.

    Our uniquely Western approach to the natural world was shaped fundamentally by Athens and Jerusalem. The ancient Greeks began a systematic philosophical observation of flora and fauna; from their work grew the long study of natural history. Meanwhile, the Judeo-Christian teachings about the natural world begin with the beginning: there is but one God, which means that there is a knowable order to nature; He created man in His image, which gives man an elevated place in that order; and He gave man mastery over the natural world:

    And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. [Genesis 1:28-29]

    In his seminal essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” published in Science magazine in 1967, historian Lynn Townsend White, Jr. argues that those Biblical precepts made Christianity, “especially in its Western form,” the “most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” In stark contrast to pagan animism, Christianity posited “a dualism of man and nature” and “insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.” Whereas older pagan creeds gave a cyclical account of time, Christianity presumed a teleological direction to history, and with it the possibility of progress. This belief in progress was inherent in modern science, which, wedded to technology, made possible the Industrial Revolution. Thus was the power to control nature achieved by a civilization that had inherited the license to exploit it.

    To White, this was not a positive historical development. Writing just a few years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s eco-blockbuster Silent Spring, White shared in the concern over techno-industrial culture’s destruction of nature. Whatever benefit scientific and technological innovation had brought mankind was eclipsed by the “out of control” extraction and processing powers of industrial life and the mechanical degradation of the earth. Christianity, writes White, “bears a huge burden of guilt” for the destruction of the environment.

    White believed that science and technology could not solve the ecological problems they had created; our anthropocentric Christian heritage is too deeply ingrained. “Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.” But White was not entirely without hope. Even though “no new set of basic values” will “displace those of Christianity,” perhaps Christianity itself can be reconceived. “Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious.” And so White suggests as a model Saint Francis, “the greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history.” Francis should have been burned as a heretic, White writes, for trying “to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation.” Even though Francis failed to turn Christianity toward his vision of radical humility, White argued that something similar to that vision is necessary to save the world in our time.

    White’s essay caused a splash, to say the least, becoming the basis for countless conferences, symposia, and debates. One of the most serious critiques of White’s thesis appears in theologian Richard John Neuhaus’s 1971 book In Defense of People, a broad indictment of the rise of the mellifluous “theology of ecology.” Neuhaus argues that our framework of human rights is built upon the Christian understanding of man’s relationship to nature. Overturning the latter, as White hoped would happen, will bring the former crashing down. And Neuhaus makes the case that White misunderstands his own nominee for an ecological patron saint:

    What is underemphasized by White and others, and what was so impressive in Francis, is the unremitting focus on the glory of the Creator. Francis’ line of accountability drove straight to the Father and not to Mother Nature. Francis was accountable for nature but to God. Francis is almost everyone’s favorite saint and the gentle compassion of his encompassing vision is, viewed selectively, susceptible to almost any argument or mood…. It was not the claims of creation but the claims of the Creator that seized Francis.

    Other Christian writers joined Neuhaus in condemning the eco-movement’s attempt to subvert or supplant their religion. “We too want to clean up pollution in nature,” Christianity Today demurred, “but not by polluting men’s souls with a revived paganism.” The Jesuit magazine America called environmentalism “an American heresy.” The theologian Thomas Sieger Derr lamented “an expressed preference for the preservation of nonhuman nature against human needs wherever it is necessary to choose.” (Stephen R. Fox recounts these responses in his 1981 book John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement.)

    The Greening of Christianity

    From today’s vantage, it seems that White’s counsel has been heeded far and wide. Ecotheologies loosely based on concepts lifted from Hinduism or Buddhism have become popular in some Baby Boomer circles. Neo-pagans cheerfully accept the “tree-hugger” designation and say they were born “green.” And, most strikingly, Christianity has begun to accept environmentalism. Theologians now speak routinely of “stewardship” — a doctrine of human responsibility for the natural world that unites interpretations of Biblical passages with contemporary teachings about social justice.

    In November 1979, a dozen years after White’s essay, Pope John Paul II formally designated Francis of Assisi the patron saint of ecologists. Over the following two decades, John Paul repeatedly addressed in passionate terms the moral obligation “to care for all of Creation” and argued that “respect for life and for the dignity of the human person extends also to the rest of Creation, which is called to join man in praising God.” His successor, Benedict XVI, has also spoken about the environment, albeit less stirringly. “That very ordinariness,” argues a correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, “seems remarkable. Benedict simply took for granted that his audience would recognize the environment as an object of legitimate Christian interest. What the matter-of-fact tone reveals, in other words, is the extent to which Catholicism has ‛gone green.’”

    American Protestantism, too, has gone green. Numerous congregations are constructing “green churches” — choosing to glorify God not by erecting soaring sanctuaries but by building more energy-efficient houses of worship. In some denominations, programs for recycling or carpooling seem as common as food drives. Church-sponsored Earth Day celebrations are widespread.

    Even some evangelicals are turning toward environmentalism. Luis E. Lugo, the director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, speaks of their “broader environmental sensitivity”:

    Once it’s translated into Biblical terms, [evangelicals] pick up the environmental banner using phrases that resonate with the ­community — “Creation care.” That immediately puts it in an evangelical context rather than the empirical arguments about the environment. “This is the world God created. God gave you a mandate to care for this world.” It’s a very direct religious appeal.

    That said, the widely reported “greening of evangelicals” shouldn’t be exaggerated. Conservative evangelical leaders remain wary of environmentalism’s agenda and of any attacks on industrial prowess that could be seen as undermining American national greatness. Many evangelicals are rankled by environmentalists’ critique of the Genesis depiction of man’s place in the natural order. And evangelicals are alert to any hint of pagan worship. Moreover, the available poll data — admittedly rather sparse — paints a mixed picture. In a 2008 survey conducted by the Barna Group, a California-based public opinion firm that concentrates on church issues, 90 percent of the evangelical respondents said they “would like Christians to take a more active role in caring for creation” (with two thirds saying they strongly agreed with that sentiment). But the term “Creation care” had not sunk in (89 percent of the respondents who ­identified ­themselves as Christian said they had never heard of it). And both the Barna survey and another 2008 survey conducted by Pew found that evangelicals tend to be much more skeptical about the reality of ­global warming than other American Christians or the population at large.

    To the extent that evangelicals and environmentalists are in fact reaching out to one another, there can be benefits for each side. For churches with aging congregations, green issues reportedly help attract new, younger members to the pews. And what do environmental activists hope to gain by recruiting churches to their cause? “Foot soldiers, is the short answer,” says Lugo.

    Carbon Calvinism

    Beyond influencing — one might even say colonizing — Christianity, the ecological movement can increasingly be seen as something of a religion in and of itself. It is “quasi-religious in character,” says Lugo. “It generates its own set of moral values.”

    Freeman Dyson, the brilliant and contrarian octogenarian physicist, agrees. In a 2008 essay in the New York Review of Books, he described environmentalism as “a worldwide secular religion” that has “replaced socialism as the leading secular religion.” This religion holds “that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.” The ethics of this new religion, he continued,

    are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world…. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists — most of whom are not scientists — holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

    Describing environmentalism as a religion is not equivalent to saying that global warming is not real. Indeed, the evidence for it is overwhelming, and there are powerful reasons to believe that humans are causing it. But no matter its empirical basis, environmentalism is progressively taking the social form of a religion and fulfilling some of the individual needs associated with religion, with major political and policy implications.

    William James, the pioneering psychologist and philosopher, defined religion as a belief that the world has an unseen order, coupled with the desire to live in harmony with that order. In his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, James pointed to the value of a community of shared beliefs and practices. He also appreciated the individual quest for spirituality — a search for meaning through encounters with the world. More recently, the late analytic philosopher William P. Alston outlined in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy what he considered the essential characteristics of religions. They include a distinction between sacred and profane objects; ritual acts focused upon sacred objects; a moral code; feelings of awe, mystery, and guilt; adoration in the presence of sacred objects and during rituals; a worldview that includes a notion of where the individual fits; and a cohesive social group of the likeminded.

    Environmentalism lines up pretty readily with both of those accounts of religion. As climate change literally transforms the heavens above us, faith-based environmentalism increasingly sports saints, sins, prophets, predictions, heretics, demons, sacraments, and rituals. Chief among its holy men is Al Gore — who, according to his supporters, was crucified in the 2000 election, then rose from the political dead and ascended to heaven twice — not only as a Nobel deity, but an Academy Awards angel. He speaks of “Creation care” and cites the Bible in hopes of appealing to evangelicals.

    Selling indulgences is out of fashion these days. But you can now assuage your guilt by buying carbon offsets. Fire and brimstone, too, are much in vogue — accompanied by an unmistakable whiff of authoritarianism: “A professor writing in the Medical Journal of Australia calls on the Australian government to impose a carbon charge of $5,000 on every birth, annual carbon fees of $800 per child and provide a carbon credit for sterilization,” writes Braden R. Allenby, an Arizona State University professor of environmental engineering, ethics, and law. An “article in the New Scientist suggests that the problem with obesity is the additional carbon load it imposes on the environment; others that a major social cost of divorce is the additional carbon burden resulting from splitting up families.” Allenby, writing in a 2008 article on GreenBiz.com, continues:

    A recent study from the Swedish Ministry of Sustainable Development argues that males have a disproportionately larger impact on global warming (“women cause considerably fewer carbon dioxide emissions than men and thus considerably less climate change”). The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that those who suggest that climate change is not a catastrophic challenge are no different than Hitler…. E.O. Wilson calls such people parasites. Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman writes that “global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.”

    The sheer volume of vicious language employed to recast social and cultural trends in terms of their carbon footprint suggests the rise of what Allenby calls a dangerous new “carbon fundamentalism.”

    Some observers detect parallels between the ecological movement and the medieval Church. “One could see Greenpeacers as crusaders, with the industrialist cast as the infidel,” writes Richard North in New Scientist. That may be a stretch, but it does seem that this new religion has its share of excommunicated heretics. For example, since daring to challenge environmentalist orthodoxy, Freeman Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” and “an old coot riding into the sunset.” For his part, Dyson remains cheerily unrepentant. “We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake,” he has said. “But unfortunately I am an old heretic…. What the world needs is young heretics.”

    Many of those making the case that environmentalism has become a religion throw around the word “religion” as a pejorative. This disdain is rooted in an uncontroversial proposition: You cannot reason your way to faith. That’s the idea behind the “leap of faith” — or the leap to faith, in Kierkegaard’s original formulation: the act of believing in something without, or in spite of, empirical evidence. Kierkegaard argued that if we choose faith, we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason.

    So those on the right side of the political spectrum who portray environmentalism as a religion do so because, if faith is inherently not ­achievable through rationality, and if environmentalism is a religion, then environmentalism is utterly irrational and must be discredited and ignored. That is the essence of Michael Crichton’s 2003 speech. “Increasingly,” he said, “it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.” Environmentalism, he argued, has become totally divorced from science. “It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.”

    A similar attack from the right comes from Ray Evans, an Australian businessman, politician, and global-warming skeptic:

    Almost all of the attacks on the mining industry being generated by the environmentalist movement [in the 1990s] were coming out of Northern Europe and Scandinavia, and it didn’t take me long to work out that we were dealing with religious belief, that the elites of Northern Europe and Scandinavia — the political elites, the intellectual elites, even the business elites — were, in fact, believers in one brand of environmentalism or another and regardless of the facts. Some of the most bizarre policies were coming out of these countries with respect to metals. I found myself having to find out — “Why is this so?” — ­because on the face of it they were insane, but they were very strongly held and you’d have to say that when people hold onto beliefs regarding the natural world, and hold onto them regardless of any evidence to the contrary, then you’re dealing with religion, you’re not dealing with science….

    Secondly, it fulfills a religious need. They need to believe in sin, so that means sin is equal to pollution. They need to believe in salvation. Well, sustainable development is salvation. They need to believe in a mankind that needs redemption, so you get redemption by stopping using carbon fuels like coal and oil and so on. So, it fulfills a religious need and a political need, which is why they hold onto it so tenaciously, despite all the evidence that the whole thing is nonsense.

    Leftists also sometimes disparage environmentalism as religion. In their case, the main objection is usually pragmatic: rationalism effects change and religion doesn’t. So, for instance, the Sixties radical Murray Bookchin saw the way environmentalism was hooking up with New Age spirituality as pathetic. “The real cancer that afflicts the planet is capitalism and hierarchy,” he wrote. “I don’t think we can count on prayers, rituals, and good vibes to remove this cancer. I think we have to fight it actively and with all the power we have.” Bookchin, a self-described revolutionary, dismissed green spirituality as “flaky.” He said that his own brand of “social ecology,” by contrast, “does not fall back on incantations, sutras, flow diagrams, or spiritual vagaries. It is avowedly rational. It does not try to regale metaphorical forms of spiritual mechanism and crude biologisms with Taoist, Buddhist, Christian, or shamanistic ‛Eco-la-la.’”

    The Prophet and the Heretic

    In the 1960s, a British chemist working with the American space program had a flash of insight. Planet Earth, James Lovelock realized, behaves like one complex, living system of which we humans are, in effect, some of its parts. The physical components of the earth, from its atmosphere to its oceans, closely integrate with all of its living organisms to maintain climatic chemistry in a self-regulating balance ideal for the maintenance and propagation of life.

    His idea turned out to have scientific value. However, Lovelock would probably just be a footnote in scientific history instead of the much-decorated intellectual celebrity he is, except for one thing: He named this vast planetary organism after the Greek goddess who personified the earth — Gaia — and described “Her” as “alive.”

    Not only was his Gaia Hypothesis predictably controversial in the world of science — as befits a radical rethinking of earth’s complex biosphere — but it was both revered and reviled by those who saw it as fitting in perfectly with tie-dyed New Age spirituality. This was true even though he describes his time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena as one in which “not all of us were hippies with our rock chicks.” For both good and ill, Lovelock not only gave the planet a persona, he created one for himself, becoming “the closest thing we have to an Old Testament prophet, though his deity is not Jehovah but Gaia,” as the Sunday Times recently noted.

    Even though Lovelock continues to go to great lengths to be an empiricist, his 2009 book The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning — published in the year he celebrated his ninetieth birthday — has been reviewed as a prophet’s wrathful jeremiad of planetary doom, studded with parables of possible salvation for the few.

    Being embraced by the spiritual left has brought Lovelock fame and attention. Yet it’s a marvel the challenges Lovelock has created for himself in changing the minds of zealots. In Vanishing Face, for example, Lovelock, ever the scientist, open-mindedly considers the possibilities for last-ditch humans fighting global warming by intentionally reengineering the planet. One idea he discusses is retrofitting every commercial airliner on earth to allow them, as they fly, each to spray a ton or two of sulfuric acid into the stratosphere every day for the foreseeable future. The notion is that this will create molecules that will cause solar energy to be reflected back into space, replacing the reflectivity of the melting polar ice caps.

    So, you say to Lovelock: You’ve succeeded in getting out this idea that the planet is a living organism. An awful lot of people are totally convinced by your hypothesis, and even view you as a prophet. How would you begin to sell this idea of injecting sulfuric acid into a living being that some view in religious terms?

    “Yes, especially when you think about the role of the element sulfur in old theology,” Lovelock replies. “The devil — the scent of sulfur reveals his presence. I hear what you’re saying very clearly. I’ve never had to sell it to religious greens so far. I don’t look forward to the job.”

    Of environmentalism increasingly being faith-based, Lovelock says, “I would agree with you wholeheartedly. I look at humans as probably having an evolutionary desire to have ideology, to justify their actions. Green thinking is like Christian or Muslim religions — it’s another ideology.”

    In terms of saving Gaia, do you view carbon Calvinism as a net plus or a net minus?

    “A net minus. You often hear environmentalists saying that one should do this or the other thing — like not fly — because not doing it can save the planet. It’s sheer hubris to imagine we can save Gaia. It’s quite beyond our capacity. What we have to do is save ourselves. That’s really important. Gaia would like it.”

    Gaia would like it?

    “Yes. I’ve got to be very careful here, because I get misinterpreted badly. I’m not making out Gaia to be a sentient entity and that sort of thing. It’s really metaphoric. So having said that — ”

    Gaia would think it important for us to save ourselves?

    “Exactly. Our evolution of intelligence is something of immense value to the planet. It could make, eventually, part of it, an intelligent planet. More able to deal with problems like incoming asteroids, volcanic outbursts and so on. So I look on us as highly beneficial and therefore ­certainly worth saving.”

    The good news about religious greens, Lovelock says, is that they can be led. Saints like him can change minds. “I have a personal experience here. Something like five years ago in Britain they did a big poll. There was hardly anybody” in favor of nuclear power. Now — thanks in no small part to Lovelock’s lobbying, at least in his own account — the great majority of Britons favor nuclear energy.

    Lovelock’s faith in democracy is shared by Bjørn Lomborg. He believes that people want to do good, and if you approach them on that basis, you can get them to listen to reason. Lomborg is the Danish author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (published in English in 2001), and the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He has been pilloried for opposing the Kyoto Protocol and other measures to cut carbon emissions in the short term because of the evidence he sees that they don’t achieve their goals. Instead, he argues that we should adapt to inevitable short-term temperature rises and spend money on research and development for longer-term environmental solutions, as well as other pressing world crises such as malaria, AIDS, and hunger. He argues, for example, that ­getting Vitamin A and zinc to 80 percent of the 140 million children in the developing world who lack them is a higher priority than cutting carbon emissions. The cost, he argues, would be $60 million per year, yielding health and cognitive development benefits of over $1 billion.

    Despite his heresy, Lomborg thinks empiricism can prevail over faith. He believes that, in a democracy, if you keep calmly and rationally and sympathetically making your case, the great majority can come to think you are making more sense than the true believers. “My sense is that most people do want to do good,” he says.

    They don’t just want to pay homage to whatever god or whatever religion is the flavor of the year. They actually want to see concrete results that will leave this planet a better place for the future. So I try to engage them in a rational manner rather than in the religious manner. Of course, if people’s minds are entirely made up there is nothing you can do to change it. But my sense is that most people are not in that direction. My sense is that in virtually any area, you have probably 10 percent true believers that you just cannot reach. And probably also 10 percent who just disparage it and don’t give a hoot about it. But the 80 percent are people who are busy living their lives, loving their kids, and making other plans. And I think those are the 80 percent you want to reach.

    So why do so many people want to burn you at the stake?

    Oh sure. Certainly a lot of the high priests have been after me. But I take that as a compliment. It simply means that my argument is a lot more dangerous. If I was just a crazy guy ranting outside the religious gathering, then it might not matter. But I’m the guy who says, maybe you could do smarter. Maybe you could be more rational. Maybe you could spend your money in a better way.

    A lot of people have been after me with totally disproportionate behavior if this were really a discussion on facts. But I continuously try to make this an argument about rationality. Because when you do that, and your opponents perhaps exaggerate, and go beyond the rational argument, it shows up in the conversation. Most people would start saying, “Wow, that’s weird, that they’d go this far.”

    This is not to deny that global warming is also a serious problem. But then again I ask: why is it that we tackle it only in the way that current dogma talks about — cut carbon emissions right now and feel good about yourself? Instead of focusing on making new innovations that would [allow everyone] to cut carbon emissions in the long run much cheaper, more effectively, and with much greater chance of success.

    When you make those double arguments, I think the 80 percent we’ve talked about start saying, “That guy makes a lot of sense. Why are the other people continuously almost frothing around the mouth?” And always saying, “No, no, no, it has to be cut carbon emissions and that has to be the biggest problem in the world.”

    I think that’s the way to counter much of this discussion. It’s not about getting your foot into the religious camp as well. It’s simply to stand firmly on the rational side and keep saying, “but I know you want to do good in the world.”

    Lovelock and Lomberg, prophet and heretic, honored and reviled, one hoping for action today and the other expecting solutions tomorrow — yet each professes confidence in an eventual democratic endorsement of his plan. Talk about a leap of faith.

    The New Religion and Policy

    The two faces of religious environmentalism — the greening of mainstream religion and the rise of carbon Calvinism — may each transform the political and policy debate over climate change. In the former case, the growing Christian interest in stewardship could destabilize the political divide that has long characterized the culture wars. Although the pull of social issues has made the right seem like a natural home for evangelicals, a commitment to environmentalism might lead them to align themselves more with the left. Even if no major realignment takes place, the bond between evangelicals and the right might be loosened somewhat. (And beyond politics, other longstanding positions may be shaken up. Activists and scientists who long pooh-poohed evangelicals because of their views on evolution or the life questions will have to get accustomed to working with the new environmental “foot soldiers,” and vice versa.)

    A deeper concern is the expansion of irrationalism in the making of public policy. Of course, no policy debate can ever be reduced to matters of pure reason; there will always be fundamentally clashing values and visions that cannot be settled by rationality alone. But the rhetoric of many environmentalists is more than just a working out of those fundamental differences. The language of the carbon fundamentalists “indicates a shift from [seeking to help] the public and policymakers understand a complex issue, to demonizing disagreement,” as Braden Allenby has written. “The data-driven and exploratory processes of science are choked off by inculcation of belief systems that rely on archetypal and emotive strength…. The authority of science is relied on not for factual ­enlightenment but as ideological foundation for authoritarian policy.”

    There is nothing unusual about human beings taking more than one path in their search for truth — science at the same time as religion, for example. Nor is there anything unusual about making public policy without sufficient data. We do it all the time; the world sometimes demands it.

    The good news about making public policy in alliance with faith is that it can provoke a certain beneficial zeal. People tend to be more deeply moved by faith than by reason alone, and so faith can be very effective in bringing about necessary change — as evidenced by the civil rights movement, among others.

    The bad news is that the empirical approach arose in no small part to mitigate the dangers of zeal — to keep blood from flowing in the streets. A strict focus on fact and reason whenever possible can avert error and excess in policy. But can someone who has made a faith of ­environmentalism — whose worldview and lifestyle have been utterly shaped by it — adapt to changing facts? For the one fact we reliably know about the future of the planet’s climate is that the facts will change. It is simply too complex to be comprehensively and accurately modeled. As climatologist Gavin Schmidt jokes, there is a simple way to produce a perfect model of our climate that will predict the weather with 100 percent accuracy: first, start with a universe that is exactly like ours; then wait 14 billion years.

    So what happens if, say, we discover that it is not possible to return the environment to the conditions we desire, as James Lovelock expects? What happens if evidence accumulates that we should address climate change with methods that the carbon Calvinists don’t approve of? To what extent, if any, would devotees of the ­“natural” accept reengineering the planet? How long will it take, if ever, for nuclear power to be accepted as green?

    In the years ahead, we will see whether the supposedly scientific debates over the environment can really be conducted by fact and reason alone, or whether necessary change, whatever that may turn out be, will require some new Reformation. For if environmental matters really have become matters of faith — if environmentalism has become a new front in the longstanding culture wars — then what place is left for the crucial function of pragmatic, democratic decision-making?

    This article first appeared in The New Atlantis.

    Joel Garreau is the author of Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What it Means to be Human (Doubleday, 2005); the Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture, and Values at Arizona State University; and a Senior Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation. This article was developed during a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion at the University of Cambridge.

    © 2010 by Joel Garreau

    Photo by Andy Revkin.

  • Portland Metro’s Competitiveness Problem

    Portland Metro’s president, David Bragdon, recently resigned to take a position with New York’s Bloomberg administration. Bragdon was nearing the end of his second elected term and ineligible for another term. Metro is the three county (Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties) planning agency that oversees Portland’s land use planning and transportation policies, among the most stringent and pro-transit in the nation.

    Metro’s jurisdiction includes most of the bi-state (Washington and Oregon) Portland area metropolitan area, which also includes the core municipality of Portland and the core Multnomah County.

    Local television station KGW (Channel 8) featured Bragdon in its Straight Talk program before he left Portland. Some of his comments may have been surprising, such as his strong criticism of the two state (Washington and Oregon) planning effort to replace the aging Interstate Bridge (I-5) and even more so, his comments on job creation in Portland. He noted “alarming trends below the surface,” including the failure to create jobs in the core of Portland “for a long time.”

    Bragdon was on to something. Metro’s three county area suffers growing competitive difficulties, even in contrast to the larger metropolitan area (which includes Clark and Skamania counties in Washington, along with Yamhill and Columbia counties in Oregon). This is despite the fact that one of the most important objectives of Metro’s land use and transportation policies is to strengthen the urban core and to discourage suburbanization (a phenomenon urban planning theologians call “sprawl”).

    Anemic Job Creation: Jobs have simply not been created in Portland’s core. Since 2001, downtown employment has declined by 3,000 jobs, according to the Portland Business Alliance. In Multnomah County, Portland’s urban core and close-by surrounding communities, 20,000 jobs were lost between 2001 and 2009. Even during the prosperous years of 2000 to 2006, Multnomah County lost jobs. Suburban Washington and Clackamas counties gained jobs, but their contribution fell 12,000 jobs short of making up for Multnomah County’s loss. The real story has been Clark County (the county seat is Vancouver), across the I-5 Interstate Bridge in neighboring Washington and outside Metro’s jurisdiction. Clark County generated 13,000 net new jobs between 2001 and 2009 (Figure 1).

    Domestic Migration: Not only are companies not creating jobs in the three county area, but people are choosing to locate in other parts of the metropolitan area.

    Between 2000 and 2009, the three counties – roughly 75% of the region’s total population in 2000 – attracted just one-half of net domestic migration into the metropolitan area. Washington’s suburban Clark County, across the Interstate Bridge, added a net 48,000 by domestic migration and has accounted for 40% of the metropolitan area’s figure all by itself.

    Core Multnomah County, which had nearly double Clark County’s 2000 population, added only 4,000 net domestic migrants, at a rate less than 1/20th that of Clark County. Suburban Clackamas and Washington counties did better, but between them achieved barely one-half of the Clark County rate.

    Exurban Columbia and Yamhill counties, outside the jurisdiction of Metro but inside the metropolitan area, added nearly 13,000 domestic migrants, more than three times that of Multnomah County, despite their combined population less than one-fifth that of Multnomah’s in 2000.

    Effects of Pro-Transit Policies: Portland’s unintended decentralization has even damaged the much promoted, and subsidized, public transit agencies. Despite Portland’s pro-transit policies, the three county transit work trip market share fell from 9.7% in 1980, before the first light rail line was opened, to 7.4% in 2000, after two light rail lines had opened. Two more light rail lines and 9 years later, (2009) the three county transit work trip market share had fallen to 7.4%, despite the boost of higher gasoline prices. The three county transit work trip market share loss from 9.7% in 1980 to 7.4% in 2009 calculates to a near one-quarter market share loss. By contrast, Seattle’s three county metropolitan area, without light rail until 2009, experienced a 5% increase in transit work trip market share from 1980 to 2009 (8.3% to 8.7%).

    While taxpayer funded transit was attracting less than its share of new commuters out of cars, one mode –unsupported by public funds – was doing very well. Between 1980 and 2009, working at home rose from 2.2% of employment to 6.2%. in the four county area (including Clark County). Thus, nearly as many people worked at home as rode transit to work in 2009 (Note). Already, working at home accounts for a larger share of employment than transit in the larger 7 county metropolitan area. All of this is despite Portland’s having spent an extra $5 billion on transit in the last 25 years on light rail expansions and more bus service. (Figure 2).

    Why is the Three County Area Doing Less Well? Why have Portland’s policies that are designed to help the core failed to draw jobs and people? People who move to the Portland area from other parts of the nation are probably drawn by the lower house prices in Clark County, where less stringent land use regulation has kept houses more affordable. New housing in Clark County is also built on average sized lots, rather than the much smaller lots that have been required by Metro’s land use policies. House prices are also lower in the exurban counties outside Metro’s jurisdiction.

    As Metro has forced urban densities up in the three county area and failed to provide sufficient new roadway capacity, traffic congestion has become much worse. A long segment of Interstate 5 in north Portland seems in a perpetual peak hour gridlock unusual for a medium sized metropolitan area, which is obvious from Google traffic maps that show average conditions by time and day of week. Even more unusual is the gridlock on a long stretch of the US-26 Sunset Highway that serves the suburban Silicon Forest of Washington County. A long overdue expansion will soon provide some relief on US-26. However transportation officials seem in no hurry to provide the additional capacity necessary to reduce both greenhouse gas emissions and excessive travel delays on Interstate 5 in north Portland. People who move to Clark or the exurban counties can avoid these bottlenecks by working closer to home or even in the periphery of the three county area.

    Portland has important competitive advantages, such as a temperate climate and marvelous scenery. It also helps to be close to hyper- uncompetitive California, which keeps exporting households to neighboring states. But a higher cost of living driven by policies that have kept prices 40% higher than before the housing bubble (adjusted for household incomes), and increasing traffic congestion make Portland’s three county area less competitive and nearby alternatives more attractive.

    This is not surprising. More intense regulation deters business attraction and expansion. An economic study by Raven Saks of the Federal Reserve Board concluded that … metropolitan areas with stringent development regulations generate less employment growth. At least part of the reason the Metro region’s diminished competitiveness lies with a failed strategy that appears to be having the exact opposite effect to what has been advertised – and widely celebrated – among planners from coast to coast.

    Note: 1980 three county data not available on-line.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life”

    Photograph: South Waterfront Condominiums, Portland. Photo by author

  • The Tea Party and The Great Deconstruction

    Some say a Second American Revolution has begun. In the first American Revolution, American militiamen at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, fired the Shot Heard Round the World at British Redcoats on April 19, 1775.

    The Shot Heard Round the World in the Second American Revolution was the surprise election of Scott Brown, again in Massachusetts, on January 19, 2010. The bullets fired were ballots as a Tea Party-backed candidate captured the “Kennedy seat” in the US Senate. The militiamen of 2010, riding pickup trucks rather than horses, call themselves the Tea Party, named after an act of insurrection against the out of touch establishment of King George.

    Since January of 2010 the Tea Party has swept Republican establishment politicians from office in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Alaska, Delaware, Utah and Florida. Like King George, the establishment does not plan to go quietly. Governor Crist continues to run as an independent in Florida. Senator Murkowski announced she would run as a write-in candidate in Alaska.

    Americans who joined the Tea Party movement believe our government has grown too big. In this they have broad support that extends beyond the 50% coalition that elected George Bush. Part of the key to their successes to date has been steering clear of divisive social issues and concentrating on fiscal ones.

    Like a majority of Americans, Tea Parties are alarmed that government spends too much (Chart from Heritage Foundation) and does so with borrowed money. They understand that our children and grandchildren will be forced to pay for today’s reckless spending. As a result they have gone to the polls in record numbers to make their voice heard. They want the spending to stop and if the politicians do not listen, they will throw them out as their forefathers displaced King George. It does not appear that the politicians are listening. Despite the boisterous town hall meetings of 2009 and a string of primary upsets in 2010, politicians discount the public sentiment. Democratic Congressman Tom Perriello of Virginia recently said, “If you don’t tie our hands, we’ll keep stealing.”


    Source: Heritage Foundation

    What kind of America does the Tea Party want?

    The Tea Partiers have watched the federal budget double under Bush and Obama at a time hen they have had to cut back on their own family expenditures. (Chart from the Cato Institute) They want a smaller, less intrusive government and most importantly, a government that lives within its means. The Tea Party wants an end to trillion dollar deficits. Where the two political parties accept trillion dollar deficits, The Tea Party demands draconian change in our system of governance. They recognize the need for the coming Great Deconstruction.

    The Cato Institute has offered a website dedicated to downsizing the federal government. Cato outlines clear and concise methods to reduce spending and deconstruct the various departments of government as the Tea Party is demanding. Cato’s author, Chris Edwards, envisions the elimination of entire branches of the federal government by “devolving” various programs to the states.

    The annual savings proposed by the Cato Institute study total more than $400 billion per year. Some call the recommendations draconian and outrageous. Yet the savings represent just 11% of current spending – a critical way to adjust to the new realities of the deconstruction.

    The Second American Revolution may have begun. If it is so, and America earns its independence from trillion dollar budget deficits and professional politicians, the future of America may look very much like Cato study has proposed. No matter what the outcome of the elections in November of 2010, the future will look very different than today as the Great Deconstruction comes to pass.

    ***************************

    Robert J Cristiano PhD is the Real Estate Professional in Residence at Chapman University in Orange, CA and Head of Real Estate for the international investment firm, L88 Investments LLC. He has been a successful real estate developer in Newport Beach California for twenty-nine years.

    Other works in The Great Deconstruction series for New Geography

    Other works in The Great Deconstruction series for New Geography
    Deconstruction: The Fate of America? – March 2010
    The Great Deconstruction – First in a New Series – April 11, 2010
    An Awakening: The Beginning of the Great Deconstruction – June 12, 2010
    The Great Deconstruction :An American History Post 2010 – June 1, 2010
    A Tsunami Approaches – Beginning of the Great Deconstruction – August 2010

  • Political Decisions Matter in State Economic Performance

    California has pending legislation, AB 2529, to require an economic impact analysis of proposed new regulation. Its opponents correctly point out that AB 2529 will delay and increase the cost of new regulation. There will be lawsuits and arguments over the proper methodology and over assumptions. It is not easy to complete a thorough and unbiased economic impact analysis.

    Should California incur the costs and delays of economic impact studies?

    California should, because political decisions matter and too many California politicians don’t believe it. I’ve had a State Legislator, sitting in her office in the Capital, tell me in essence that decisions made in this building won’t impact California’s economy.

    She’s not alone. It is common to hear politicians or their advisors claim that “California will come back” or something similar. They believe that California’s climate and abundant amenities are enough to guarantee prosperity. They are wrong.

    Consider North Dakota, and its booming economy. As of July 2010, North Dakota’s unemployment rate was 3.6 percent, and in 2008, the most recent year for which we have data, its economy grew at a 7.3 percent rate. California’s unemployment rate was 12.3 percent in July 2010, and its 2008 economic growth rate was an anemic 0.4 percent.

    That’s a very big difference. If California had North Dakota’s unemployment rate, it would have over 1.3 million jobs than it has today. That is almost the entire population of Sacramento County and 30 percent more than the entire population of Northern California’s Contra Costa County.

    Why the big difference? Why is North Dakota booming, as the United States suffers its most devastating economic decline in over 70 years? Why is California’s economy, with almost 30 percent higher unemployment than the United States, performing so poorly?

    Does North Dakota have some naturally endowed advantage over California? If so, nobody has noticed it before. It is not climate. California has a friendly Mediterranean climate, while North Dakota has a Northern Continental climate. North Dakota’s mean minimum temperature is below freezing six months of the year, and it gets as low as -60F! Many Californians, living on the coast, can go decades without witnessing a freezing temperature. I remember when we had a multi-day freeze in my hometown of Ventura, sometime in the 1980s. I was freezing; a North Dakotan would be walking around in a t-shirt.

    California has oil and gas. North Dakota has oil and gas. California has over 2,000 miles of beaches. North Dakota doesn’t have beaches. California has magnificent mountains. North Dakota doesn’t have any mountains and only a few hilly areas. Over 20 species of trees reach their largest size in California. Most of North Dakota doesn’t naturally grow many trees.

    Let’s face it. Most Californian’s consider North Dakota to be a cold, windy, God-forsaken piece of dirt best left to the bison. North Dakota’s natural endowment doesn’t explain why it has been growing with vigor while California has been stagnating.

    Maybe North Dakota has been lucky while California has been unlucky? Luck can play a part in economic performance, and North Dakota has almost surely been luckier than California over the past few years, but that can’t be the only explanation.

    It’s hard to point to a single source of North Dakota’s prosperity. Its taxes aren’t particularly low. It has a reasonable safety net for the unfortunate. It does have a booming oil and gas business. Its agriculture sector is doing well. It has a small, but dynamic, tech sector. Its universities remain well funded since the state is actually running surpluses. It has a hardworking, well educated, Midwestern population. Governments and politicians in both parties tend to be business friendly, willing to support business and enter into occasional partnerships. North Dakotans have done lots of things right, and they’ve probably also been a bit lucky.

    It’s just as hard to point to a single source of California’s dismal performance. California hasn’t maximized the economic potential of its oil and gas resources, but its economy is large, and oil and gas alone can’t explain the differences between California and North Dakota. California hasn’t updated its ports to accommodate the most recent and planned ships, but those ports see lots of activity. Many California communities are not business friendly, but some are, particularly some smaller ones inland. California has lost some military bases, but many remain. California is a relatively expensive place to do business, because of taxes and regulation, but California’s workers are more productive, even after adjustment for industrial composition and capital, and California’s consumers still constitute a huge market.

    California’s economy is dying the death of a thousand cuts: a tax here, a regulation there, an unfriendly city council in Coastal California, a lack of infrastructure investment everywhere. These things add up to a significant net negative for California, its businesses, and its workers.

    Californians have done lots of things wrong, and they’ve been a bit unlucky.

    That’s why AB 2529 is a good idea for California, why it’s worth the costs and delays. The analysis will require regulators to consider the economic costs of regulation, something many green activists and Sacramento politicians simply ignore. Perhaps if this regulation had been in place over the past few years, some of California’s 2.2 million unemployed workers would have jobs and once Golden State would not be on the verge of becoming, as historian Kevin Starr has noted, “a failed state”.

    Bill Watkins is a professor at California Lutheran University and runs the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, which can be found at clucerf.org.

    Photo by Willem van Bergen

  • High Speed Rail: Fast Track To Nowhere

    Given that Warren Buffett ponied up $44 billion in cash and stock to take private the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, I wonder why President Obama is betting that the way to lift the country out of stagnant growth is to invest another $50 billion, in public funds, to swing aboard the dream of high-speed intercity rail.

    According to the administration, new money needs to be allocated to such high-speed rail (HSR) projects as those between San Diego and Sacramento, Orlando and Tampa, and — my personal boondoggle favorite — the DesertXpress between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a $4 billion bet that getting high-rollers to the blackjack tables will lift the U.S. economy out of its doldrums.

    To establish some track cred, I spend much of my life dreaming about trains, consulting timetables on how to catch them, and plotting trips that might end up on night trains to Butterworth (the station for Penang) or Iasi (change in Ungheni, on the Moldovan border).

    More to the point, I have ridden nearly all the high-speed trains — in China, Japan, and France — that are being held as speeding examples of what the United States could build if Congress would fork over another $50 billion, and if the President could appoint a railroad czar with the acumen of E. H. Harriman.

    Painful as it is for me to admit, the $50 billion high-speed stimulus package is a way to lay track to nowhere.

    Take the rail link between Tampa and Orlando that imagineers hope will shuttle theme-parkers at speeds reaching 186 m.p.h. President Obama has already thrown $1.25 billion at the line. Presumably, the named expresses will be The Absentee Balloter and The Recount.

    Local officials have been busy buying rights-of-way and planning stations in their home districts, although, oddly, downtown Orlando is given a miss.

    When the stimulating project is finished for close to $3 billion, a family visiting Disney World can drive to the station, catch a high-speed train to Lakeland, pay a cab driver to take them to the Detroit Tigers spring training facility, and watch a game. After the game, to get back to their hotel, they would do the trip in reverse. Or they could drive to Lakeland in the hour projected on MapQuest. What would you do?

    The reason high-speed rail has more allure in Europe is because people live in cities. Nor do they like driving their cars on the cobblestones of historic quarters. In China, cities are megalopolises and few Chinese own cars or want to drive them across the vast country. France is a one-city country, so all rail lines lead quickly to Paris, as Louis XIV would have wanted.

    In Target-specked America, everyone has a car, lives out-of-town (“we like it here”), and, except for a few New Yorkers, drives everywhere, except when they fly. Orlando might be the most car-centric suburban cluster in the country.

    Not long ago, I had to drive from my Orlando motel just to find dinner. Is it remotely possible that Floridians will hop a high-speed train to rush them into downtown Tampa, which after 6:00 PM, when I was last there, looked like Death Valley?

    I can imagine Chicagoans taking a fast train to St. Louis, as opposed to flying out of O’Hare. But normal trains, and lots more of them, that reached the 100 M.P.H. speeds of the 1930s would suffice in most corridors.

    What logic explains betting public billions on a concept — intercity rail transportation — that the same government has devoted countless resources to destroying? Through most of the twentieth century, the American government used public money to lay down roads and interstates, and to subsidize airports, that choked off demand for passenger rail service.

    Federal bodies like the Interstate Commerce Commission, which regulated the profits out of the industry, killed off the national jewel that was the railroad network in the 1920s, with its 250,000 miles of track.

    It is doubtful whether the combined forces of the Texas Railroad Commission, Jay Gould, railroad baron Daniel Drew, and Leland Stanford, could have kept passenger service alive when confronted by a government that lived by the rail credo of William Vanderbilt, who said: “The public be damned.”

    Between the 1970 collapse of the Penn-Central and the 1980 passage of the Staggers Act — President Carter’s successful deregulation of the industry — most Class I railroads flirted with bankruptcy, earning less than one percent on their capital, and were unable to set rates competitively.

    The Staggers Act got the government off the rails; since then, the vital signs of the business have flourished to the point of attracting Warren Buffett’s capital. Trackage has been rationalized from 270,623 to 160,734 miles. Container traffic has grown from three to twelve million. Productivity has more than doubled, and, adjusted for inflation, prices are down (although the big coal companies hate deregulation, and they are forty-five percent of the business).

    I mourn the loss of such evocative railroad names as Grand Trunk, Boston & Maine, Nickel Plate, and Chicago & Alton (for which my grandfather worked). Nonetheless, from more than thirty failing companies, mergers have produced five thriving Class I railroads. The industry employs 164,439 works at an average annual wage of $72,836. Even the government made a profit by spinning off Conrail.

    Despite such a success story, renewed federal intervention threatens the freight revival. A Bushism called Positive Train Control, a computer system to reduce accidents and allow tighter spacing between trains, will cost the industry $15 billion, although there’s little proof that it will work better than what Casey Jones would have known as the “dead man’s hand” (a grip that stops the train if the engineer dies).

    The new stimulus package represents the government belief that it understands the passenger business better than either the industry or the capital markets, neither of which wants in on any high-speed rail action. (You would think the Vegas Highball would tempt Wall Street.)

    More to the point, the government’s record with Amtrak ought to disqualify it from any say in how to run a railroad.

    Freight companies are leery of high-speed rail because of what it might do to their rights-of-way. Many plans project HSR running on freight lines, which are notorious for “putting the varnish in the hole.” Meaning: let the passengers wait on a siding while a freight train goes through.

    I love trains, so I take Amtrak often and everywhere, and it’s an endless disappointment, with late trains, cold food, clogged toilets, and indifferent “customer service representatives.” Even though I collect its schedules and prowl its web site, Amtrak reminds me of Aeroflot.

    Nor is Amtrak’s meandering route system anything more than the arteries of a patronage network that would warm the heart of E.H. Harriman, who knew all about railroad patronage. Remember Mark Twain’s aside: “I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.”

    Before the United States rushes further into high-speed rail, it needs first to decide whether passenger rail service should be a public or private business. A white paper is due out this fall, but I am not holding my breath.

    Personally, I like the English model, flawed as it may be, in which BritRail (the U.K. Amtrak, but with cold pork pies) was privatized, and routes around the country were sold to private railways. A government corporation, albeit one starved for capital, held on to the track and infrastructure.

    On the surface, anyway, British trains are now shiny, clean, faster, and a pleasure to ride. The airline Virgin has some trains, and newer lines, like Eurostar, have come into business. It used to take BritRail ninety minutes to chug out to Cambridge from central London. Now two companies compete on the line, and the trip is forty-five minutes.

    I doubt that Warren Buffett wants to get the Burlington Northern back into the passenger business. His bet is that he can monopolize container traffic from Asia to Chicago and maybe, someday, with another deal, to New York.

    With proper incentives, why wouldn’t a private company bid for the line between Boston and Washington, or San Diego to Los Angeles? Or maybe Disney could integrate the Orlando-Tampa train into its monorail? At least it could fill the seats without stimulus money.

    Matthew Stevenson is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, winner of Foreword’s bronze award for best travel essays at this year’s BEA. He lives in Switzerland (near the station).

    Photo: Amtrak (although this particular one is the Pacific Surfliner in Del Mar, California)

    Map: The White House