New Geography

Category: Politics

  • Jobs Will Rule November

    Health care lays behind him, financial reform and climate change ahead, but for President Barack Obama–and his opponents–there is only one real issue: jobs. The recent employment reports signal some small gains, yet the widespread prognosis for a slow, near-jobless recovery threatens the president and his party more than any major domestic challenge.

    Tea party activists and conservative ideologues often link the president’s dwindling popularity to an overreach on health care, but it all boils down to the old Clintonian adage: It’s the economy, stupid. Health care reform is simply too complex and its long-term effects too unknowable to be a winning issue for either side.

    The jobs deficit, on other the hand, is immediate and affects tens of millions of families. You can start with the highest-ever percentage of long-term unemployed on record. In recent months there have been roughly five to six applicants for every open position. Youth unemployment reaches near 20% for workers in their 20s–more than 25% for teenagers and over 43% for black teens. Even if the economy improves, according to the administration predictions, unemployment could remain close to double digits by the mid-term elections and over 8% by 2012.

    The prospect of long-term unemployment, and underemployment, is clearly damaging the “hope” brand once associated with the president. Recent CBS poll data show that 84% of Americans are worried about the economy.

    Over a third of those polled were concerned that someone in their household might lose their job. Some 52% identify the economy as the most important issue, while health care registered only 13%. Given the administration’s focus on health care and other issues–such as climate change–it’s not surprising that barely two in five of those polled approve of the president’s handling of the economy.

    Those inside the Washington bubble are too absorbed with political maneuverings to focus on the basic. The primary domestic challenges for the country lie not in addressing climate change, suburban sprawl or gay marriage, but spurring employment and generating new wealth.

    Part of our problem is that the two main parties are committed primarily to serving the interest of aligned constituencies .Republican dogmatism and canine-like obedience to short-term corporate profits contributed mightily to the economic meltdown. In its period in power , the GOP failed to either restrain Wall Street or address the nation’s indebtedness. No surprise then that many even moderate, middle-class voters opted for the Democrats over the past two elections.

    The question now is whether the Democrats are squandering their advantage. After almost 15 months in office, Democratic dogmatism–a mixture of faith in all forms of federal spending, “green jobs” and ever more regulation–has not exactly turbo-charged the economy. As a result, middle-class voters–those making $50,000 to $75,000 annually, have been slipping from the Democrats, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll. These are precisely the voters who also put Scott Brown into the Senate.

    Yet the president’s situation is far from hopeless. Manufacturing payrolls are slowly beginning to grow, and industrial production is on the upswing. Survivor sectors such as health care continue to create new jobs. The bleeding may have finally stopped in construction, where the recession has been particularly devastating. Although the generally high-wage finance and information sectors continue to shrink, rapid growth in temporary business services could presage a new wave of permanent hires.

    These improvements suggest new opportunities for Obama. It allows him to point to a relatively stronger economy–particularly compared with Japan and the E.U.–as proof both of his policy acumen and our country’s overall vitality.

    This is when we really find out whether Obama is a thoughtful moderate of the campaign trail who embodies American exceptionalism or the hard-edged tool of the Democratic constituency groups. So far he has been a man of the left more comfortable with expanding the public sector than finding ways to boost private sector payrolls.

    The stimulus, crafted by old-dog Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, with its emphasis on government workers and the university-industrial complex, solidified this notion. A public-sector-oriented approach has proved to have limited popular appeal, particularly at a time when many in the private sector regard the public workforce as an oppressive and overcompensated privileged class.

    Administration fiscal policy also erred in its focus on Wall Street. Obama, described during the 2008 campaign as the “hedge fund” candidate, has indeed done very well for this privileged class. Yet Democrats are hard-pressed to make the case that what’s good for George Soros is good for the USA.

    Now the question is whether the president can refocus on jobs. This will take, among other things, backing off the economically ruinous climate change agenda. Even the most gullible economic development officials are beginning to realize that “green jobs” are no panacea.

    In fact, as evident in Spain, Germany and even Denmark, over-tough green legislation can destroy the productive capacity of the most enlightened industries. Similarly in green strongholds like California and Oregon, the mounting climate change jihad could slow and even explode the incipient recovery by imposing ever more draconian regulation on businesses that can choose to migrate to less onerous locales.

    There are some hopeful signs of Obama’s repositioning. His recent moves embracing nuclear power and off-shore oil drilling, however inadequate, show that he’s at least trying to triangulate between the green purists and the unreconstructed despoilers. Some sort of moderated energy legislation–there’s no way to get the more radical House version through the Senate–would reassure businesses and the public that the president has jobs as his No. 1 priority.

    The well-funded, politically connected environmental lobby, no doubt, will try to head off any dissent from its agenda. But the same hard-boiled pol who threw his own pastor under the bus–remember Rev. Jeremiah Wright?–would seemingly be willing to diss pesky affluent white greens who, after all, have nowhere else to go politically.

    An equally good opportunity lies in the push for financial reform. As in the case of health care, the Republicans have a miserable record to defend. After all, the GOP dominated Congress and White House did little to rein in the out-of-control financial sector. Sure, there’s blame to go around for folks like Barney Frank but the buck was definitely with the Republicans, and they failed.

    Main Street businesses that felt ignored by the stimulus might look favorably on tough administration polices against big banks. Republicans could yet score points by opposing “too big to fail” provisions, as Mike Barone suggests, but one has to wonder if Republicans possess the moxie to stand up to large corporate interests, even detested ones.

    But right now the burden is on the president. Building on what is still a weak recovery, he must make clear that jobs and growth are his top domestic priorities. If he fails to communicate that message adequately, the voters, however leery of the Republicans, will rebuke him.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

  • Queensland, We’ve Got a Problem

    Queensland Premier Anna Bligh MP has a problem. Reacting to sensationalized media reports of runaway population growth as well as an infrastructure lag revealing itself in everything from mounting congestion to a lack of hospital beds, Queensland residents are starting to say ‘enough.’ The prospects of continuing population growth at around 2.5% or 100,000 people per annum, despite the economic benefits this brings, are increasingly unpopular, something that gets the attention of most politicians.

    In many ways it’s ironic for Premier Bligh to find herself in this position. She follows a succession of Premiers who managed to get away with weekly media boasts of “1500 people every week” moving into the State, drawn – it was alleged – by our climate and lifestyle. In the past, any Premier who questioned this growth would have felt the result at the ballot box.

    Bligh’s response has been (in a time honoured tradition) to convene a ‘summit of experts’ and community representatives (you can read it all here), designed to thrash out a policy accord for the future. No politician worth their salt holds an inquiry unless they have a fair idea of the outcome in advance, so it’s a fair bet the outcomes will include even more regulatory controls on urban growth, in the name of ‘sustainability’ to appease the anti-growth coalition of greens and neo-Malthusians. Pro-growth lobbies on the other hand will be promised a ‘business as usual’ attitude to economic expansion, only under more ‘responsible’ oversight.

    But the biggest irony is that attempts to contain or control growth may be too late. It is just possible that the unthinkable will happen: growth will stall, and in coming years, a future Premier will be wondering what went wrong.

    How could this happen?

    First, a bit of history. Queensland’s growth status in the Australian context has been driven over the past 30 years almost entirely from interstate migration. Low state taxes, relatively cheap housing, aggressively pro business governments (including one which famously went too far) and a ‘Florida-like’ allure of lifestyle and warm climate all combined to make the state a population magnet. “The Sunshine State” – just like Florida – was how tourism promoters labeled it. “The low tax state” was the label peddled by business promoters. Both became interchangeable.

    In contrast, international migration to Australia was largely focused on Sydney and Melbourne. The rate of natural births over deaths was barely in the positive, resurrected recently by a Federal Government baby bonus of questionable long lasting effect. This left interstate migration as Queensland’s growth driver.

    Arrivals from Victoria or Sydney could famously relocate to the south east corner of Queensland and find themselves in a better quality home, in a more convenient location, and with cash left over. They were faced with shorter commute times, lower taxes and overall a better quality of life than the one they left behind.

    But in the late 1990s this all started to change. Increasing land use controls appeared as planners sought to ‘manage’ the growth of the state better. “We can’t destroy what you came to enjoy” became a new mantra, and an urban growth boundary for the popular south east was introduced under ‘smart growth’ principles. In the 1995-2000 period, three statutory plans appeared for the south east, followed by a 10 year regional planning program in 2000 (SEQ 2021) followed by an Office of Urban Management in 2004, a South East Queensland Regional Plan in 2005 and then an updated version in 2009.

    It’s become an industry joke that we now produce more plans than houses. But the inevitable consequence of this explosion of planning regulation – matched at the same time by the surreptitious introduction of exorbitant per lot housing levies under the guise of ‘user pays’ – was to drive up housing costs rapidly while drying up new supply.

    Queensland housing construction is now at a 20 year low. The median house price, which in 1999 was half that of Sydney’s, is now 80% of Sydney prices and roughly at 8 times average incomes. A thirty year or more tradition of relatively lower cost housing in Queensland has been smashed in the space of six or seven years.

    Also over the same period, the state’s tax advantage has been eroded. Once Queensland boasted some of the lowest vehicle registration fees in the country; now it has the highest. Electricity prices, also once amongst the cheapest of any state, are now just as expensive. Land and other property taxes have rapidly caught up with other states and overshot others. According to the Institute of Public Affairs IPA, state business taxes in just one year went from being the second lowest in the country in 2008 to mid field by 2009. Roads and other infrastructure which were once enjoyed as part of the general tax contribution are separately tolled, water is priced and charged separately from council rates to residents. Overall, the general cost of living advantage compared to interstate rivals has evaporated.

    The rapid erosion of Queensland’s relative tax and cost of living advantage prompted a writer for The Australian newspaper to lament in late 2009 that: “Queensland has squandered its low-tax edge and become a public-sector spendthrift, putting at risk its long-term growth potential and ability to attract investment.”

    In fairness, maintaining low taxes and funding a generational catch up in infrastructure might be mutually exclusive. The state is now undergoing a record level of infrastructure investment, in response to the growth it has witnessed. The timing for Premier Bligh though is not good: the benefits of this new wave of infrastructure might not be felt for some years. In the meantime, residents are growing increasingly impatient and the prospects of adding to population numbers are being met with increasing hostility. Some of the more alarmist messages of green and ‘no growth’ advocates are finding traction. Even leading Australian business figure like entrepreneur Dick Smith is warning that we will soon run out of food. This in a state larger than Texas with a population of just 4 million, and in a country with five times the amount of arable land per capita than the USA.

    Faced with funding a much larger public sector plus a big infrastructure program, the state is whetting its tax appetite. Plus, the popular sentiment now turning against population growth suggests that relief from excessive land use controls on housing supply or a meaningful reduction in the level of upfront per lot levies is remote at best.

    The results are already apparent. Interstate migration – once the single biggest driver of growth in Queensland – has collapsed and now accounts for just half the level of births over deaths and only one third the level of international migration. The sun still shines in the Sunshine State but Queensland is now longer the low tax (and low cost of living) state. With lower average incomes than other states, the sums no longer add up for many people. And as birth rates slow, without the international migration tap, Queensland’s population growth overall could hit the brakes. The risk here is compounded by the increasing pressure on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to slow down international migration to Australia (for an example, see here). If that happened, growth could fall to record low levels almost overnight.

    So while Premier Bligh prepares for the population summit and its aftermath, it could prove the ultimate irony that measures to control the rate of population growth in Queensland become quickly redundant and the very least of our worries.

    Ross Elliott is a 20 year veteran of property and real estate in Australia, and has held leading roles with national advocacy organizations. He was written and spoken extensively on housing and urban growth issues in Australia and maintains a blog devoted to public policy discussion: The Pulse.

  • Financial Crisis: Too Late to Change?

    A travelling salesman is driving down a country road when he runs over a cat. Seeing a farmhouse nearby, he approaches to confess this unfortunate situation to the pet’s owner. When a woman answers the door, he says, “I’m sorry, but I think I just ran over your cat.” She asks him, “Well, what did it look like?” “Oh, m’am,” he replies, “I completely ran over it, so it was very awful, just a smear on the road…” “Oh, no,” she interrupts, “I mean, what did it look like before you ran over it.”

    Congress and the Administration are trying to find ways to spend more money in their quest to stimulate the economy. But just like that travelling salesman, they are working with the picture after the wreck – and they can’t seem to focus on what things looked like before it happened. In other words, they are so happy to be spending money without restraint that they have neglected to figure out how we got into this mess in the first place. We all know that the problem started in the financial sector – I don’t know anyone who would disagree with that. In fact, the banks were the first to get money from the federal government – the October 3, 2008 act of Congress that will forever be known as The Bank Bailout.

    Sadly nothing is different than it was on September 17, 2008 – the day that your 401k turned into a 201F. The now officially “to big to fail” banks are no more restrained in their activities today than they were in the days, weeks, months and years leading up to the crisis. If anything, they are a little freer because now they are all “banks” with a federal guarantee for ever more risk-taking behavior without consequences.

    Becoming a bank means that the money they hold can be protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The FDIC has been “so depleted by the epidemic of collapsing financial institutions” that analysts thought it would be forced to borrow money from the Treasury before the end of 2009. Since January 1, 2010, another 41 banks have failed. To hold the wolves at bay, the FDIC board eased the rules on buyers of failing banks, opening the door for hedge funds and private investors to gain access to “bank” status – and the protections that go with it. At the end of the third quarter of 2009, the FDIC’s fund was already negative by $8.2 billion, a decrease of 180 percent in just three months (from July to September 2009). According to the Chief Financial Officer’s report, the FDIC projects that the fund “will remain negative over the next several years” as they absorb some $75 billion in failure costs through the end of 2013. Taking their lead from Congress – that is a policy of robbing the future to pay off the past – the FDIC is proposing that banks pre-pay their insurance fees for the next three years.

    There is no relief in sight, either. Just this week, a case of “insider trading” in New York was dismissed because the deal involved credit default swaps which – as I explained here last March – payoff losses “like” insurance but not regulated like insurance and which are bought and sold “like” securities but not regulated like securities. Although they are at the root of the causes of the financial crisis, not one new rule, regulation or law has been implemented to stop this nonsense from continuing. If you look at who’s in charge of figuring out what went wrong – and making recommendations on how to prevent it from happening again – you will find the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission consists of political appointees who “have consulted for legal firms involved in lawsuits over the crisis.”

    That’s not reassuring. A Commission composed of members who earn their livelihood from financial institutions – including those that precipitated the crisis – is unlikely to solve or have any incentive to discover the mystery of the causes of the greatest financial collapse in the history of the world. This group is part of the problem – not the solution.

    Eighteen months after Wall Street roasted weenies on the bonfire of your 401k, the one noticeable difference is that the stock market is higher than it was on that fateful day in 2008. Unfortunately, this version of “economic recovery” is being driven by the financial services industry instead of the real economy. As rising stock prices encourage more savers and investors into the stock market, they create an increasing supply of investable funds in the hands of the banks – who remain as free to speed down our financial highways today as they were when they ran over the economy like that poor cat on a country road, leaving nothing but a stain on the pavement.

    Susanne Trimbath, Ph.D. is CEO and Chief Economist of STP Advisory Services. Her training in finance and economics began with editing briefing documents for the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She worked in operations at depository trust and clearing corporations in San Francisco and New York, including Depository Trust Company, a subsidiary of DTCC; formerly, she was a Senior Research Economist studying capital markets at the Milken Institute. Her PhD in economics is from New York University. In addition to teaching economics and finance at New York University and University of Southern California (Marshall School of Business), Trimbath is co-author of Beyond Junk Bonds: Expanding High Yield Markets.

    Photo by David Reber’s Hammer Photography

  • EPA Joins the Green Building Party

    By Richard Reep

    Well into the last decade, green design and smart growth operated as two separate and distinct reform movements. Both were widely celebrated in media, academic and planning circles, seeing themselves as noble causes albeit underdogs in the struggle against the mighty capitalistic enterprise of real estate development. Starting in 2009, the frozen credit market has kept private development moribund, and these two movements are somewhat moot as development takes a cease-fire.

    Yet now the two movements appear to be joined at the hip, a move encouraged by a federal bureaucracy and an Administration that embraces both groups’ agenda. In the process, what was once seen as an alternative to conventional development appears to be well on the way to becoming federally-mandated regulatory policy. The EPA, DOT, and HUD recently signed a memorandum of understanding to start making policy around green design and smart growth, turning these choices into federal standards.

    The standard bearer for green building, LEED certification, is the U. S. Green Building Council’s definition of energy efficiency and green design. A reform-focused movement, LEED established criteria by which a building’s energy and water use could be measured against a baseline, and the USGBC awards credits to the building when energy efficiency measures are achieved. LEED increases a building’s construction cost but reduces the building’s life cycle cost – monthly electric bills – and real estate developers, who gain nothing from lower energy costs, were slow to become interested in this choice. LEED was the domain of owner-operators like governments, who have a vested interest in keeping their future costs as low as possible, and was adopted as a criterion for capital expenditures by the GSA as well as many cities and counties by the close of the last millennium.

    Smart growth’s official champion is the Congress of the New Urbanism, which offers a design style choice for real estate developers. Developers, being profit oriented, historically have been loathe to tinker with what sells, and thus only in a few areas has New Urbanism gained a foothold. At its best, new urbanism represents a choice for homeowners who prefer dense, mixed-use communities that resemble traditional American towns, accentuating walkability and reducing residents’ dependence upon the car. In this key feature, Smart Growth advocates lobbied the U. S. Green Building Council to create a special category of LEED for Neighborhoods.

    Both movements promised reform. Both movements increased cost. Neither program was particularly effective at penetrating the real estate development market as long as the investment community favored large, formula-driven, profit-oriented real estate developers, and innovation consisted of product cost-cutting. The cost premium associated with each movement left them largely the playthings of boutique, niche-oriented developers aspiring to nobility while protecting their bottom line.

    Changes afoot in the last several months, however, are combining these two movements into one powerful force that turns these laudable movements away from choice and towards a prescriptive, and ultimately restrictive policy. Beginning in 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency encouraged communities to build walkable, energy-efficient growth within their boundaries, rather than continue spreading out – a surprising focus for an agency created to reduce pollution. Little else happened until late 2009, when suddenly the EPA began linking Energy Star (a Department of Energy program) to New Urbanist values such as walkability and mixed-use development. The EPA, which regulates pollution, has suddenly moved front-and-center into regulating growth, as if it were another type of pollution.

    At the same time, the U. S. Green Building Council yielded to heavy lobbying by the New Urbanist movement to create a new criterion, LEED Neighborhood Development. A developer may now submit a new land plan for certification to this LEED standard, and “smart growth” is being codified and standardized into a checklist and formula to be measured against a baseline. Like LEED for New Construction, these standards will also increase the cost for the developer desiring to build to these standards.

    Investors and developers may, on the surface, appear to have lost these dramatic battles. In the bigger picture, however, while the economy retools itself, it is not unusual to see regulation increase. If anyone remembers the S&L crisis of 1990-92, one of the biggest regulatory acts to affect real estate in modern times hit developers right between the eyes: The Americans with Disabilities Act. This reform removed physical barriers for all citizens with disabilities, but as a cost burden to developers it pales in comparison to the premiums that will be paid to meet the smart/green regulations currently being formulated by the Feds.

    Banks – hardly institutions with widely popular standing – stand to gain the most, because a developer who borrowed $10 million for a project in 2006 will probably need to borrow $11 or $12 million for the same project by the time bankers get around to discussing credit again. Developers also stand to gain, because as the cost goes up, so does the price. Coming out of the Millenial Depression, new construction will be faced with higher energy performance requirements, the higher costs associated with urban development, and a longer regulatory review process than ever before seen.

    The losers, of course, will be the vast majority of Americans who work hard and earn modest incomes. New home prices will increase, and renters will have to pay their landlords more to cover the increased costs of politically sanctioned development. While the affluent will be able to enjoy the benefits of a green, urbane lifestyle, the grocery store cashiers, dry cleaner clerks, housekeepers and artists who make up so much of our community will be forced out by the sheer cost of this movement – out to the suburbs, out to the exurbs, and out to the trailer parks beyond them. No green for you: your commute time just got much longer.

    Technology, of course, will eventually decrease in price and become more affordable; like VCRs and DVD players, the early adopters pay the freight until the appliance becomes a commodity. The same is likely true for exotic solutions like photovoltaics or low-voltage lighting as the marketplace sorts out what works from what doesn’t. So the impetus to go green will impose a crushing cost burden on new construction, which may gradually, over time, be absorbed into the mix.

    An affordable starter home in a low-cost subdivision, however, may be as doomed as leaded gasoline, and the American Dream will likely shift away from the landowner-based society once vaunted by Thomas Jefferson. The walkable lifestyle, now being exercised by free will, is well on its way to becoming federal government policy in a grand effort to incorporate reform and regulation into our lives from above.

    Whether or not this achieves the EPA’s mission to reduce pollution will only be discovered in the decades ahead as we incorporate the next hundred million Americans into the urban boundaries we have already set upon the land. It may be entirely possible to reach some of these goals without prescriptive overly burdensome regulation, yet this may only occur if political realities begin to reign in the current regulatory onslaught.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

    Photo by eng1ne

  • Freeing Energy Policy From The Climate Change Debate

    The 20-year effort by environmentalists to establish climate science as the primary basis for far-reaching action to decarbonize the global energy economy today lies in ruins. Backlash in reaction to “Climategate” and recent controversies involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2007 assessment report are but the latest evidence that such efforts have evidently failed.

    While the urge to blame fossil-fuel-funded skeptics for this recent bad turn of events has proven irresistible for most environmental leaders and pundits, forward-looking greens wishing to ascertain what might be salvaged from the wreckage would be well advised to look closer to home. Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy. Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.

    The Endless Weather Wars

    The habit of overstating the current state of climate science knowledge, and in particular our understanding of the relationship between global warming and present-day weather events, has been difficult for environmentalists to give up because, on one level, it has worked so well for them.

    Global warming first exploded into mass public consciousness in the summer of 1988, when droughts, fires in the Amazon, and heat waves in the United States were widely attributed as warning signs of an eco-apocalypse to come. Former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth held the first widely covered congressional hearing on the subject that summer and admits having targeted the hearing for the hottest day of the year and turned off the air conditioning in the room to ensure that the conditions would be sweltering for the assembled media.

    Such tactics have only intensified over the past two decades. In the run-up to U.N. climate talks in Kyoto in 1997, the Clinton Administration recruited Al Roker and other weathermen to explain global warming to the public. In 2006, Al Gore used his “Inconvenient Truth” slide show to link Hurricane Katrina, droughts, and floods to warming. And some environmental groups have routinely implied that present-day extreme weather and natural disasters are evidence of anthropogenic warming.

    But it turned out that both sides could play the weather game. Skeptics also started pointing to weather events like snowstorms as evidence of no warming. While environmental advocates frequently criticize opponents such as Sen. James Inhofe for conflating weather with climate, the reality is that both sides abuse the science in the service of their political agendas. Climate change models, created in an effort to understand the potential long-term effect of global warming on regional weather trends, can no more tell us anything useful about today’s extreme weather events than last month’s snow storms can inform us as to whether global warming is occurring.

    Climate Science Disasters

    For more than 20 years, advocates have simultaneously overestimated the certainty with which climate science could predict the future and underestimated the economic and technological challenges associated with rapidly decarbonizing the energy economy. The oft-heard mantra that “All we lack is political will” assumes that the solutions to global warming are close at hand and that the primary obstacle to implementing them is public ignorance fed by fossil-fuel-funded skeptics.

    Environmental advocates — with help from pollsters, psychologists, and cognitive scientists — have long understood that global warming represented a particularly problematic threat around which to mobilize public opinion. The threat is distant, abstract, and difficult to visualize. Faced with a public that has seemed largely indifferent to the possibility of severe climactic disruptions resulting from global warming, some environmentalists have tried to characterize the threat as more immediate, mostly by suggesting that global warming was already adversely impacting human societies, primarily in the form of increasingly deadly natural disasters.

    The result has been an ever-escalating set of demands on climate science, with greens and their allies often attempting to represent climate science as apocalyptic, imminent, and certain, in no small part so that they could characterize all resistance as corrupt, anti-scientific, short-sighted, or ignorant. Greens pushed climate scientists to become outspoken advocates of action to address global warming. Captivated by the notion that their voices and expertise were singularly necessary to save the world, some climate scientists attempted to oblige. The result is that the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself.

    Little surprise then, that most of the recent controversies besetting climate science involve efforts to move the proximity of the global warming threat closer to the present. The most
    explosive revelations of Climategate involved disputed methodological techniques to merge multiple data sets (e.g., ice cores, tree rings, 20th century weather station readings) into a single global temperature trend line, the “hockey stick” graph. Whatever one thinks of the quality of the data sets, the methods used to combine them, or the efforts by some to shield the underlying data from critics, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that those involved were trying to fit the data to a trend that they already expected to see – namely that the spike in global carbon emissions in recent decades tracked virtually in lockstep with a concomitant spike in present-day global temperatures.

    Other faulty or sloppy claims in the IPCC’s voluminous reports — such as the contention that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035 — followed the same pattern.

    Perhaps most problematic of all, with some environmentalists convinced that connecting global warming to natural disasters was the key to climate policy progress, researchers felt enormous pressure to demonstrate a link. But multiple studies using different methodologies and data sets show no statistically significant relationship between the rising cost of natural disasters and global warming. And according to a review sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Munich Re, researchers are unlikely to be able to unequivocally link storm or flood losses to anthropogenic warming for several decades, if even then. This is not because there is no evidence of increasing extreme weather, but rather because the rising costs of natural disasters have been driven so overwhelmingly by social and economic factors — more people with more wealth living in harm’s way.

    Yet prominent environmental advocates, including Al Gore, have continued to make claims linking global warming to natural disasters. And in its 2007 report, the IPCC — ignoring evidence to the contrary — misrepresented disaster-loss science when it published a graph linking global temperature increases with rising financial losses from natural disasters.

    Action in the Face of Uncertainty

    It was only a matter of time before such claims would begin to undermine public confidence in climate science. Weather is not climate and linguistic subterfuges, such as the oft-repeated assertion that extreme weather events and natural disasters are “consistent with” climate change, do not change the reality that advocates and scientists who make such assertions are conflating short-term weather events with long-term climactic trends in a way that simply cannot be supported by the science.

    For 20 years, greens and many scientists have overstated the certainty of climate disaster out of the belief that governments could not be motivated to act if they viewed the science as highly uncertain. And yet governments routinely take strong action in the face of highly uncertainty events. California requires strict building codes and has invested billions to protect against earthquakes even as earthquake science has shifted its focus from prediction to preparedness. Recently, the federal government mobilized impressively and effectively to prevent an avian flu epidemic whose severity was unknown.

    In the end, there is no avoiding the enormous uncertainties inherent to our understanding of climate change. Whether 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, or 450 or 550, is the right number in terms of atmospheric stabilization, any prudent strategy to minimize future risks associated with catastrophic climate change involves decarbonizing our economy as rapidly as possible. Stronger evidence of climate change from scientists was never going to drive Americans to demand economically painful limits on carbon emissions or energy use. And uncertainty about climate science will not deter Americans from embracing energy and other policies that they perceive to be in the nation’s economic, national security, and environmental interest. This was the case in 1988 and is still largely the case today.

    But the danger now is that having spent two decades demanding that the public and policy-makers obey climate science, and having established certainty and scientific consensus as the standard by which climate action should be judged, environmentalists risk undermining the case for building a clean-energy economy. Having allowed the demands of advocacy efforts to wash back into the production of climate science, the danger today is that the discrediting of the science will wash back into the larger effort to transform our energy policy.

    Now is the time to free energy policy from climate science. In recent years, bipartisan agreement has grown on the need to decarbonize our energy supply through the expansion of renewables, nuclear power, and natural gas, as well as increased funding of research and development of new energy technologies. Carbon caps may remain as aspirational targets, but the primary role for carbon pricing, whether through auctioning pollution permits or a carbon tax, should be to fund low-carbon energy research, development, and deployment.

    No longer conscripted to justify and rationalize binding carbon caps or the modernization and decarbonization of our energy systems, climate science can get back to being primarily a scientific enterprise. The truth is that once climate science becomes detached from the expectation that it will establish a standard for allowable global carbon emissions that every nation on earth will heed, no one will much care about the hockey stick or the disaster-loss record, save those whose business, as scientists, is to attend to such matters.

    Climate science can still usefully inform us about the possible trajectories of the global climate and help us prepare for extreme weather and natural disasters, whether climate change ultimately results in their intensification or not. And understood in its proper role, as one of many reasons why we should decarbonize the global economy, climate science can even help contribute to the case for taking such action. But so long as environmentalists continue to demand that climate science drive the transformation of the global energy economy, neither the science, nor efforts to address climate change, will be well served.

    Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are the authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility and a recent collection of energy and climate writings, The Emerging Climate Consensus, with a preface by Ross Gelbspan, available for download at www.TheBreakthrough.org. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, they have written about what they consider flaws in the cap-and-trade debate and why public concern in the U.S. about global warming has declined.

    Photo by ItzaFineDay

  • Don’t Mess With Texas

    One of the most ironic aspects of our putative “Age of Obama” is how little impact it has had on the nation’s urban geography. Although the administration remains dominated by boosters from traditional blue state cities–particularly the president’s political base of Chicago–the nation’s metropolitan growth continues to shift mostly toward a handful of Sunbelt red state metropolitan areas.

    Our Urbanist in Chief may sit in the Oval Office, but Americans continue to vote with their feet for the adopted hometown of widely disdained former President George W. Bush. According to the most recent Census estimates, the Dallas and Ft. Worth, Texas, region added 146,000 people between 2008 and 2009–the most of any region in the country–a healthy 2.3% increase.

    Other Texas cities also did well. Longtime rival Houston sat in second, with an additional 140,000 residents. Smaller Austin added 50,000–representing a remarkable 3% growth–while San Antonio grew by some 41,000 people.

    In contrast, most blue state mega cities–with the exception of Washington, D.C.–grew much more slowly. The New York City region’s rate of growth was just one-fifth that of Dallas or Houston, while Los Angeles barely reached one-third the level of the Texas cities.

    These trends should continue: According to Moody’s Economy.com, Texas’ big cities are entering economic recovery mode well ahead of almost all the major centers along the East or West Coasts. This represents a continuation of longer-term trends, both before and after the economic crisis. Between 2000 and 2009 New York gained 95,000 jobs while Chicago lost 257,000, Los Angeles over 167,000 and San Francisco some 216,000. Meanwhile, Dallas added nearly 150,000 positions and Houston a hefty 250,000.

    This leads me to believe that the most dynamic future for America urbanism–and I believe there is one–lies in Texas’ growing urban centers. To reshape a city in a sustainable way, you need to have a growing population, a solid and expanding job base and a relatively efficient city administration.

    None of these characteristics apply to places like President Obama’s hometown of Chicago, which continues to suffer from the downturn–but you would never know it based on media coverage of the Windy City.

    The New Yorker, for example, recently published a lavish tribute to the city and its mayor, Richard Daley. But as long-time Chicago observer Steve Bartin points out, the story missed–or simply ignored–many critical facts. Mistaking Daley’s multi-term tenure as proof of effectiveness, it failed to recognize the region’s continued loss of jobs, decaying infrastructure, rampant corruption and continued out-migration of the area’s beleaguered middle class.

    Generally speaking, as Urbanophile blogger Aaron Renn points out, the repeated reports of an urban renaissance in older northern cities should be viewed with skepticism. In the Midwest region over the past year the share of population growth enjoyed in core counties–an area usually much larger than the city boundary–actually declined in most major Midwestern metros, including Chicago.

    Yet urbanists generally have not embraced the remarkable growth in the major Texas metropolitan areas. Only Austin gets some recognition, since, with its hip music scene and more liberal leanings, it’s the kind of place high-end journalists might actually find tolerable. The three other big Texas cities have become the Rodney Dangerfields of urban America–largely disdained despite their prodigious growth and increasingly vibrant urban cores.

    Part of the problem stems from the fact that all Texas cities are sprawling, multi-polar regions, with many thriving employment centers. This seems to offend the tender sensibilities of urbanists who crave for the downtown-centric cities of yesteryear and reject the more dispersed model that has emerged in the past few decades.

    Yet despite planners’ prejudices, places like Houston and Dallas are more than collections of pesky suburban infestations. They are expanding their footprints to the periphery and densifying at the same time.

    Of course, like virtually all other regions, Houston and Dallas suffer excess capacity in both office buildings and urban lofts. But the real estate slowdown has not depressed Texans’ passion for inner city development. Indeed, over the past decade the central core of Houston–inside the boundaries of the 610 freeway loop–has experienced arguably the widest and most sustained densification in the country.

    An analysis of building permit trends by Houston blogger Tory Gattis, for example, found that before the real estate crash, the Texas city was producing more high-density projects on a per-capita basis than the urbanist mecca of Portland. Significantly, as Gattis points out, the impetus for this growth has largely resulted not from planning but from infrastructure investment, job growth and entrepreneurial venturing.

    This process is also evident in the Dallas area, which has experienced a surge in condo construction near its urban core and some very intriguing “town center” developments, such as the Legacy project in suburban Plano. In Big D, developers generally view densification not as an alternative to suburbia but another critical option needed in a growing region.

    It’s widely understood there that many people move to places like Dallas, whether in closer areas or exurbs, largely to purchase affordable single-family homes. But as the population grows, there remains a strong and growing niche for an intensifying urban core as well.

    Dallas and other Texas cities substitute the narrow notion of “or”–that is cities can grow only if the suburbs are sufficiently strangled–with a more inclusive notion of “and.” A bigger, wealthier, more important region will have room for all sorts of grand projects that will provide more density and urban amenities.

    This approach can be seen in remarkable plans for developing “an urban forest” along the Trinity River, which runs through much of Dallas. The extent of the project–which includes reforestation, white water rafting and restorations of large natural areas–would provide the Dallas region with 10,000 acres of parkland right in the heart of the region. In comparison, New York City’s Central Park, arguably the country’s most iconic urban reserve, covers some 800 acres.

    If it is completed within 10 years, as now planned, the Trinity River project will not only spawn a great recreational asset, but could revitalize many parts of the city that have languished over the past few decades. It could become a signature landmark in the urban development of 21st-century America.

    As we look at the coming decades, this Texan vision may help define a new urban future for a nation that will grow by roughly 100 million people by 2050. To get a glimpse of that future, urbanists and planners need to get beyond their nostalgic quest to recreate the highly centralized 19th-century city. Instead they should hop a plane down to Dallas or Houston, where the outlines of the 21st-century American city are already being created and exuberantly imagined.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

    Photo by Stuck in Customs

  • Mayor Daley’s Report Card

    In December of 2010 Mayor Daley will become Chicago’s longest serving Mayor. In office since 1989, he will surpass the record held by his father. In the March issue of The New Yorker magazine, journalist Evan Osnos has a long article on Mayor Daley. The front cover of the magazine calls Daley, “America’s most successful mayor”.

    By longevity standards Mayor Daley is a success, but then again so was the late Coleman Young who was Detroit’s Mayor for over 20 years.

    The tone of Osnos’ piece is mostly positive, providing some history:

    He took office at a moment when Chicago was paralyzed by infighting and mismanagement. In 1987, William Bennett, the Secretary of Education, said that Chicago had the worst school system in the country—“ an education meltdown.” The center of the city was a desiccating museum of masterpieces by Mies van der Rohe and Louis Sullivan. Infant mortality in remote neighborhoods was comparable to levels in the Third World.

    In the years that followed, Detroit, Cleveland, and former industrial powers continued to wither, but Chicago did not. It has grown in population, income, and diversity; it has added more jobs than Los Angeles and Boston combined.

    The problem with Osnos’ history is it’s not entirely accurate. First of all, by the time Mayor Daley was elected in 1989 the City Council infighting had mostly stopped. Eugene Sawyer, Chicago’s second African American Mayor, was supported by the white elements of the Chicago Democratic Machine.

    Some of the mistakes are hard to fathom. Osnos cites no source on his rather incredible job numbers. Chicago has roughly the same population as it did in 1989, unlike Los Angeles which has climbed past the 4 million mark. Chicago is stuck under 3 million people with the long term population trend in decline. It’s difficult to have population growth without decent job growth.

    Osnos’ article has provoked a heated reaction from Chicago Reader ace columnist Ben Joravsky. The Chicago Reader and Joravsky, over the years, have covered Daley’s shady tenure as Mayor. Jorasky reminds us in attacking the New Yorker article:

    And why is it that Daley’s boosters always compare Chicago to poor, unfortunate Detroit—a one-industry town battered by the collapse of its one industry? Chicago has always been a larger, healthier, more diverse town than Detroit. If you want to see how Chicago really ranks, compare it to New York City, whose population and wealth are rising faster than Chicago’s with a fraction of the attendant corruption. In fact, Chicago’s population has fallen in the last few years.

    Joravsky could hardly keep from mentioning Chicago’s murder problem:

    Did I mention that in recent years Chicago has been the murder capital of the country? In fact, the murder tally has been much higher under Daley than it ever was under Byrne or Washington—it’s even higher than, yes, Detroit, which Osnos points out was known as the nation’s murder capital in the 1970s. And now we’re so broke we can’t hire police officers to replace the hundreds of veterans who are retiring—even though our taxes keep going up and up. My property taxes were $2,700 in 1997; this year I expect I’ll pay close to $8,000.

    This isn’t Chicago’s only problem. Its convention business is evaporating. Chicago’s union run McCormick Place is headed towards financial ruin. Major trade shows have left Chicago for better places to do business. Part of McCormick Place’s problem has been the pervasive influence of the Chicago Mob, also known as the outfit. Mayor Daley is quite sensitive to the subject because it has affected so many aspects of Chicago. Recently, the Chicago Tribune quoted former senior FBI agent James Wagner explaining the situation:

    The Outfit has long been entrenched at McCormick Place and in many of the unions and contractors that do business there.
    “It’s been a rehabilitate-the-felon location in terms of being a place to get people jobs when they get out of prison,” said James Wagner, a former longtime organized-crime supervisor for the FBI in Chicago and now top investigator at the Illinois Tollway. “It’s had these kinds of problems for about as long as it’s been there. And it’s had someone associated with the Outfit in just about every job there.”
    Among the factors that make McCormick Place a haven for the mob are its sheer size and the number of contracts and trade shows there, Wagner said.
    Four years ago, the riggers union, whose members set up exhibits at McCormick Place, was under federal investigation after its boss, Fred Schreier, who was once married to the niece of the late mob boss Tony Accardo, pleaded guilty to taking a bribe.

    Near the end of Osnos’ New Yorker article Mayor Daley’s scandals get a mention without too much detail. Daley fails to answer questions on the massive Hired Truck scandal which has been closely linked to the Chicago Mob. Daley also refuses to remain silent on why a major campaign contributor and close friend bombed a restaurant with the Chicago Mob, according to federal testimony. Recently, Daley admitted that he’s been questioned by the FBI concerning a major bribery and zoning case which just concluded.
    Chicago’s immediate economic situation has been nicely summarized by blogger Gary Lucido:

    How much worse can it get?

    I just picked up the January employment numbers for the greater Chicago metropolitan area and the picture is getting more grim than I thought – we have hit a new 14 year low. The Chicago area has lost 162,000 jobs in just the last 12 months and a total of 459,000 jobs have been lost since employment peaked in July 2007. The unemployment rate for the Chicago area is now at 11.7%, which is up from a low of 4.6% in November 2007 and that is higher than any rate that I have access to (going back to 1990).

    The New Yorker article mentions Mayor Daley polling numbers dropping into the 30s. In Chicago’s one party state, Daley can run next time, even with low polling numbers, and win — unless a credible wealth financed candidate materializes. No candidate has. But, one sign that Mayor Daley feels he’s got a bad report card coming: he opened up a Twitter page.

    Steve Bartin is a resident of Cook County and native who blogs regularly about urban affairs at http://nalert.blogspot.com. He works in Internet sales.

    Photo by kate.gardiner

  • Immigrants Key to Economy’s Revival

    In Washington on Sunday, the tens of thousands of demonstrators demanding immigration reform looked like the opening round of the last thing the country needs now: another big debate on a divisive issue.

    Yet Congress seems ready to take on immigration, which has been dividing Americans since the republic was founded.

    But identifying immigrants as a “them,” as both their advocates and nativists do, misses the point. Immigrants — and their children — are the people who will help define the future “us.” They are also critical to the revival of the U.S. economy.

    This is particularly true on the entrepreneurial frontier.

    Overall, some of the country’s highest rates of entrepreneurship are found among immigrants from the Middle East, Cuba, South Korea and countries of the former Soviet Union. These recent arrivals regularly build new businesses — from street-level bodegas to the most sophisticated technology firms.

    Immigrants started one-quarter of all venture-backed public companies between 1990 and 2005. In addition, large U.S. firms are increasingly led by executives with roots in foreign countries, including 14 CEOs of the 2007 Fortune 100.

    Nowhere is this contribution more critical than in our major cities, many of which would be economically destitute without these immigrant communities.

    In Los Angeles County, for example, the self-employment rate among immigrants is more than 10 percent — almost twice that for the native-born. Nationwide, according to the last economic census, the number of all Latino establishments increased by nearly three times the national average, while those owned by all Asians expanded by two times.

    Immigrant contributions extend across a range of activities, from retail and food to culture. Asian immigrants, like the Italians and Jews before them, have concentrated in specific niche markets and then expanded beyond historic ghettos.

    Asian Indians, who began emigrating in large numbers starting in the 1970s, specialized in hotels and motels across the country. South Koreans opened greengroceries in New York and Los Angeles. Vietnamese became known for nail parlors, and Cambodians for doughnut stores. Overall, Asian enterprises expanded at roughly twice the national average in the first years of the new century.

    Perhaps most remarkable has been the movement of Asian immigrants into technology. In California, they account for a majority of such firms. Regions at the center of the high-tech economy — including Silicon Valley, Orange County and parts of suburban Seattle — are now heavily Asian-American. Although most of these new companies are small, some have grown sizable. The founders of Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, AST Research and Solectron are all of Asian descent — and are largely immigrants.

    This immigrant experience, says John Tu, president and co-founder of Kingston Technologies, the world’s largest independent producer of computer memory, has forced them to think differently.

    “The key thing is,” Tu said, “being an immigrant makes you flexible. … IBM, Apple and Compaq were inflexible. They told the memory customers: Take it or leave it. We thought about the customer and the relationship with the employees. I guess we didn’t know any better.”

    Yet the immigrant contribution goes beyond high-tech. In the years ahead, these new Americans, nonwhites and the “blended” population could reshape the national marketplace. Taken together, purchases by Asians, African-Americans and Native Americans, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, have exploded, growing far more rapidly than the national average.

    Combined with Latinos, these minorities could account for more than $2.5 trillion by 2010 — nearly one in every $4 of U.S. consumer spending.

    Perhaps nothing better illustrates these changes — and immigrants’ effect on daily life — than the shifts in that most basic of industries: food.
    In the old paradigm, ethnic groups such as Italians might cook traditional foods, like pizza, for their compatriots. Then, in a generation or two, they would reach out to the mainstream population. Meanwhile, immigrants, and particularly their children, acclimated to “American fare” like McDonald’s.

    But today, the shift from ethnic niche to mainstream is rapid. In Houston, once dominated by Southern cuisine, nearly one in three restaurants — overwhelmingly small, family-run businesses — serves Mexican or Asian cuisine. They account for more establishments than all the hamburger, barbecue and Italian restaurants put together.

    Nationwide, while pizza, hamburger and other traditional fast-food restaurants have stagnated, new chains selling quick, inexpensive Asian or Mexican food have flourished. Consider the successful Panda Express, started and owned by immigrants.

    By embracing, and being embraced by, immigrants, America can continue to build on its diversity. This allows the nation to retain its youthfulness, tap the global market and provide critical new spurs to innovation.

    America increasingly resembles Walt Whitman’s description, “not merely a nation, but a teeming Nation of nations.” The mid-21st-century United States can reflect that description — and aspiration — to our substantial long-term benefit.

    This article first appeared at Politico.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

    Photo by SEIU International

  • The Not-So-Lucky Country

    President Obama’s last-minute decision to postpone his homecoming to Indonesia and a trip to Australia expands the list of friendly countries–which include France, the U.K. and most of Eastern Europe–that have received a presidential snub. Yet in putting off his Australia trip, Obama will also miss an opportunity to commune with the politician whom he most closely resembles.

    Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, like Obama, symbolizes a distinct shift in his country’s politics. Replacing the rough-hewn but long-serving Liberal Party leader John Howard, Rudd offered sophisticated Australians a better reflection of their own savoir faire, much as Obama restored the self-image of America’s Bush-wracked educated classes. Like Obama, Rudd is widely seen as smart and worldly as well as perhaps a bit rude and arrogant.

    On a more serious note, Rudd reflects a shift from the country’s foreign policy orientation, which historically focused on British and, later, American ties. Like Obama, Rudd has little patience for the old ties to the English-speaking world. A confirmed sinophile, Rudd clearly sees the sun rising in the east–or in his case, the north. He has made no bones of his post-European perspective and his interest of aligning his country closer to Beijing.

    Indeed the affection of Rudd, a former diplomat fluent in Mandarin, for things Chinese worries some Australians, given the Middle Kingdom’s increasingly assertive authoritarianism.. His coziness with the Communist Party bosses has provided fodder for clever comic videos from down under.

    Also like President Obama, Rudd epitomizes the ascendancy of a new “progressive” educated class in Australia that has little allegiance to the traditional notions of what constitutes “the good life” for the vast majority of citizens. Down under–even more than in America–the “good life” generally means a suburban home with a backyard.

    In contrast, Rudd’s core supporters are disgusted by what they see as a wasteful, anti-social suburban sprawl. Like their counterparts here in North America, they have embraced a climate change agenda that, as part of its dogma, seeks to densify Australia’s cities.

    Although the Labour Party’s roots lay with the working class and private sector unions, New City co-editor John Muscat contends that the Rudd Labour Party has transformed into an instrument of the bureaucracy and “progressive” gentry. The latter includes academics, green activists, media stars and some prominent business interests well-positioned to flourish in a hyper-regulated state.

    The losers, Muscat notes, are the traditional middle- and working-class constituencies of the party. Where the Labour government has in the past sought to help people fulfill their quest for the “Australian dream,” the current leadership plans to make it difficult for them to achieve it. “Green planners,” Muscat says, “engage in a form of class discrimination. The costs of climate change are heaped on outer-suburban working people, who lose jobs, mobility and housing amenity, while the affluent emerge unscathed.”

    Such a result would seem to be unnecessary in a vast country with a population that in 2050 will be smaller than California’s today. Australia has often been called “the lucky country” since its prodigious natural resources and fertile agriculture have long afforded an astonishingly high quality of life for its citizens. This position has been made even stronger as demand for commodities has skyrocketed in recent years, paced largely by demand from China, India and other developing countries.

    Yet now, at precisely the time that the Australian “dream” would appear, if anything, more supportable, the administration and local state governments seem determined to wage war against the aspirations of its own citizens. Strict limits on developing land on the periphery–something supported both by oligopolistic property interests and greens–have been turning Australia from highly affordable to one of the least affordable places to buy a home in the English-speaking world.

    These changes are evident in Sydney, a city that 20 years ago was filled with charming tree-lined, relatively low-density neighborhoods. Strict land regulation has made homes more expensive by restricting new subdivisions further in the periphery; indeed the city is now the second most expensive major housing market, based on income, in the English-speaking world, behind only Vancouver.

    At the same time that suburban housing has been limited, Sydney has allowed the spread of high-rise apartments into formerly bucolic neighborhoods. To many natives it seems less like the very livable old Australia and more like the overcrowded, frenzied new China. Similar policies are infecting other Australian cities, including Melbourne and Perth. As the New City bloggers warn, “Enjoy your country while it still exists.”

    Not surprisingly, the agenda embraced by Rudd, like that of Obama, also has had negative political consequences. Rudd’s attempt to force a “cap and trade” system on his country is problematic given the country’s dependence on fossil fuel and mineral production as well as greenhouse-gas-gushing big agriculture. In December Rudd’s cap and trade proposal was blocked by opposition in the Australian Senate, much as Obama’s cap and trade legislation has been stymied by malcontents, including some in his own party, in the American Senate.

    When they do finally get together, Obama and Rudd could also commiserate on their falling poll numbers. Rudd’s 74% support last year has declined to a new low of 48%. He now runs neck and neck in surveys with the opposition leader, Tony Abbott. Rudd wants to run largely on the issue of climate change, a course that one suspects Barack Obama may not be so deluded as to pursue.

    Of course, Rudd’s gentry liberal politics still play well among Sydney’s media mavens and pundits, just as Obama’s does in similar circles here. But they both are running into strong opposition from voters, with whom their appeal is clearly weakening.

    Ultimately, these two very modern leaders will have to face the consequences of their own worldviews, which are shaped primarily by a belief in the superiority of the prescriptions favored by the highly educated classes .This defines their approaches in everything from foreign policy and climate change to governing how people should live.

    The problem with this philosophy is that neither the U.S. nor Australia functions along the lines of Plato’s Republic, where the enlightened get to rule unhindered by the hoi polloi. Despite the preferences of their betters, citizens in both countries still have a say over what happens to them. This is something that may not bother Rudd’s Chinese Communist allies, but it can prove troublesome for those politicians wishing to take their people places they may not want to go.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.

    Photo by London Summit

  • Another Caution on California: Golden State’s Grassroots Are Dying

    The subject line on the recent e-mail got my attention: “The Speaker wants to talk with you.”

    The message referred to California State Assembly Speaker John Perez, a Democrat who represents the 46th District, which includes Downtown and nearby districts that are part of the Garment & Citizen’s circulation area.

    Perez has been in the Assembly for more than two years, and he’s gotten plenty of publicity for being the first openly gay person to become Speaker. Some folks are vaguely aware that he’s a cousin to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and a former city commissioner.

    Perez hasn’t been what you’d call a man about the district, though. Ask beyond tight circles of political operatives and special interests—inquire among regular folks who live or work or own small businesses in the 46th District—and you’ll likely find little familiarity with him or his staff.

    Not many can point out much good Perez has done as a public servant, either. A number of observers and constituents believe that his most significant piece of legislation amounts to a favor for the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), owner of the LA Live development near the Staples Center—and also a big political contributor. Perez championed a law that granted AEG an exception on selling alcohol advertising at the Nokia Theatre at LA Live, a potentially lucrative concession.

    I still held out hope when I saw the subject line of the recent e-mail—but that evaporated when I read the message. It came from a group called Courage Campaign, and it aimed to orchestrate some sort of mass teleconference with Perez as the star attraction.

    Courage Campaign has been active in the push to make marriage legal for gay couples in California, and I’ve got no problem with those efforts. My problems arrive when leaders of the group claim to be a “multi-issue advocacy organization” that deploys “an online organizing network that empowers more than 700,000 grassroots and netroots activists to push for progressive change and equality in California and across the country.”

    I grow wary when I see that Courage Campaign’s website on the Internet tosses tired chunks of red meat to the partisan political class, touting the organization’s efforts to help “kill” some proposal by Republicans. I get more concerned about a list of “partners” that includes assumed allies of the Democratic Party.

    The members of Courage Campaign are certainly free to engage in whatever politics they like—and so are all of their partners. So is Perez, for that matter. I just wish that all involved would be honest about “grassroots” and “netroots.” It’s obvious that Courage Campaign is part of the political power structure and the bickering that passes for government in California these days. That’s not a grassroots or netroots approach. Grassroots political movements challenge existing power structures. Courage Campaign is a cog in a political machine.

    Consider the appeal in the recent e-mail from the organization: “Hosting these special statewide calls can be very expensive. Can you help us cover the cost of this Courage Campaign Conversation with Speaker Perez? If you can contribute $10, $25 or $50, it will allow us to open this call to as many participants as possible.”

    I won’t begin to question the actual costs of hosting such conference calls. I’ll simply offer my suggestion on what Courage Campaign officials really meant:

    The Speaker wants to talk with you so he can convince you to give money to a political organization that will, in turn, provide him and his allies support in the future.

    Now here’s what I mean to say to members of the Courage Campaign and all of the other political operatives—liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican—who dilute and devalue the meaning of grassroots and netroots:

    You are all special interests, creatures of twisted system. Getting the Speaker of the California State Assembly to shill for your fundraising makes it obvious that you are part and parcel of a political culture that has failed. You might soon be just about the only ones left who don’t realize what you have become.

    We need a new approach, fresh ideas, and bold challenges to the old politics that have done so much damage to California.

    A pay-to-play teleconference with a politician who has yet to solve one problem amounts to nothing more than the same old problems.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

    Photo by ZSasaki