New Geography

Tag: Environment

  • Finally… A Rational Approach to GHG Emissions Reduction

    Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist and author of the seminal “Stern Report,” injected a rare bit of reason into the discussions about global climate change in Cape Town recently. Stern said that if nations acted responsibly they would achieve zero-carbon electricity production and zero-carbon road transport by 2050 – by replacing coal power plants with wind, solar or other energy sources that emit no carbon dioxide, and fossil fuel-burning vehicles with cars running on electric or other clean energy.

    What a welcome vision. No hint of social engineering, no litany of activities and lifestyles to be abandoned, but rather a clear implication that technology offers the solution. (And, by the way, it does.). So let’s put an end to all of this talk about behavior modification and instead set about developing the technology that allows people to live as they prefer.

  • Obama: Only Implement Green Policies that Make Sense in a Time of Crisis

    With the exception of African-Americans, the group perhaps most energized by the Barack Obama presidency has been the environmentalists. Yet if most Americans can celebrate along with their black fellow citizens the tremendous achievement of Obama’s accession, the rise of green power may have consequences less widely appreciated.

    The new power of the green lobby — including a growing number of investment and venture capital firms — introduces something new to national politics, although already familiar in places such as California and Oregon. Even if you welcome the departure of the Bush team, with its slavish fealty to Big Oil and the Saudis, the new power waged by environmental ideologues could impede the president’s primary goal of restarting our battered economy.

    This danger grows out of the environmental agenda widening beyond such things as conservation and preserving public health into a far more obtrusive program that could affect every aspect of economic life. As Teddy Roosevelt, our first great environmentalist president, once remarked, “Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.”

    Today, the “green” fringe sometimes seems to have become the mainstream, as well. While conservationists such as Roosevelt battled to preserve wilderness and clean up the environment, they also cared deeply about boosting productivity as well as living standards for the middle and working classes.

    In contrast, the modern environmental movement often seems to take on a different cast, adopting a largely misanthropic view of humans as a “cancer” that needs to be contained. Our “addiction” to economic growth, noted Friends of the Earth founder David Brower, “will destroy us.” Other activists regard population growth as an unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and increasing planet-heating greenhouse gases.

    For such people, the crusade against global warming trumps such things as saving the nation’s industrial heartland, which is largely fueled by coal, oil and natural gas, even if it means the inevitable transfer of additional goods making it to far dirtier places such as India and China. Of course, the current concern over global warming could still prove to be as exaggerated as vintage 1970s predictions of impending global starvation or imminent resource depletion.

    Certainly experience suggests we should not be afraid to question policies advocated by the true believers — particularly amid what threatens to be the worst economic downturn in generations. Actions taken now in the name of climate change could have powerful long-term economic implications.

    We don’t have to imagine this in the abstract; just look at the economies of two of the greenest states — Oregon and California — whose land use, energy and other environmental policies have helped contribute to higher housing and business costs as well as an exodus of entrepreneurs.

    Bill Watkins, head of the forecasting project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, notes that these two environmentally oriented states now have among the nation’s highest unemployment rates, pushing toward 10 percent — ahead of only the Rust Belt disaster areas farther east. In some places, such as central Oregon, it could hit close to 15 percent next year.

    Many green activists, along with “smart growth” advocates and new urbanists, laud Oregon’s long-standing strict land use controls as a national role model. Recently imposed land use legislation in California, concocted largely to meet the state’s restrictions on greenhouse gas, has been greeted by them with almost universal hosannas.

    Of course, there is nothing wrong at all with trying to curb excessive sprawl or energy use. Promoting a dense urban lifestyle is also commendable, but it is an option that appeals to no more than 10 percent to 20 percent of the population. This is even truer of middle-class people with children, few of whom can hope to live the urban lifestyles of the Kennedys, Gores and other elites — much less also afford one or two country homes to boot.

    Tough land use policies are not only hard on middle-class aspirations, but they appear to have played a role in inflating the extreme bubble that affected the California and Oregon real estate markets. Limiting options for where people and business can locate, notes UCSB’s Watkins, tends to drive up the prices of desirable real estate beyond what it would otherwise cost.

    Perhaps worst of all, it is not at all certain that a forced march back to the cities would necessarily produce a better, more energy-efficient country. Sprawling and multipolar, with jobs scattered largely on the periphery, most American cities do not lend themselves easily to traditional mass transit; in many cases, this proves no more energy efficient than driving a low-mileage car, using flexible jitney services or, especially, working at home. Big cities also have a potential for generating a “heat island” effect that can result in higher temperatures.

    Energy policy represents another field where hewing too close to the green party line could prove problematic. Obama already has endorsed California’s approach as exemplary. And indeed, some things — like imposing tougher mileage standards, stronger conservation measures and more research into cleaner forms of energy — could indeed bring about both short-term and long-term economic benefits.

    However, there are also downsides to adopting a California-style single-minded focus on renewable fuels such as solar and wind. Right now, these sources account for far less than 1 percent of our nation’s energy production. Even if doubled or tripled in the next few years, they seem unlikely to reduce our future dependence on foreign oil or boost our overall energy supplies in the short, or even medium, term.

    Looking at the experience of these two states, bold claims about vast numbers of green jobs created by legislative fiat seem more about offloading costs to consumers, business and taxpayers than anything else, particularly at today’s current low energy prices. In contrast, new environmentally friendly investments in natural gas, hydro, biomass and nuclear are more likely to find private financing and may work sooner both to reduce dependence on foreign fuels and to keep energy prices down.

    The Obama administration certainly should listen to the arguments of environmentalists. But given the clear priority among voters to deal first with the economy, the president should implement only those green policies that make sense at this time of crisis. A sharp break from the Bush approach is certainly welcome, but not in ways that promise more pain to ordinary Americans and our faltering economy.

    This article originally appeared at Politico.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Obama’s Friends: Enemies of the American Dream?

    President Barack Obama has rightly spoken positively about the American Dream, how it is becoming more expensive and how it needs to be reclaimed. But to do this, he may have to disregard many of those who have been among his strongest supporters and the dense urban centers which have been his strongest bastion of support.

    Indeed, the American Dream has been achieved by countless millions of households, though many have been left out of this expansion that began following World War II. Home ownership has risen from little above 40 percent to nearly 70 percent. Automobile ownership has become nearly universal, making it possible for urban areas to grown to unprecedented size. The Brookings Institution, the Progressive Policy Institute and others have published studies showing that people in low income households are far more likely to find and hold employment if they have access to cars.

    All of this has been associated with a democratization of prosperity that has never before occurred. Per capita income is now 3.5 times its 1950 level in the United States (see 1929-2007 inflation adjusted data).

    Yet, the American Dream is under serious threat – and this predates today’s faltering economy. A key component lies in the machinations of an urban policy and planning elite contemptuous of the comfortable lifestyles achieved by so many Americans. Instead they propose creating an environment in which households would have to pay more for their houses and spend more of their lives traveling from one place to another.

    Most of those who wish to create this situation come from the political left and consider themselves to be “friends of Obama.” They have achieved positions of power in some urban areas, such as throughout California, Portland, Seattle and a host of other areas. As early as 2007 some saw Obama as the dream candidate – what one called “a smart growth President”.

    This elite group starts by demonizing the very foundations of America’s inclusive prosperity. Having declared “urban sprawl” a scourge, they seek to stop further development on the urban fringe and want virtually all development to be within already developed urban footprints. These and other overly stringent regulations have served to strangle urban land markets, forcing land prices and housing prices higher, in those region where they have been imposed.

    Over fifteen years ago William Fischell at Dartmouth University demonstrated that California’s overly restrictive land use policies had made that state more expensive than elsewhere. Since 2000, with the wider availability of mortgage credit, the new demand drove prices to double or triple historic norms in areas with restrictive regulation. Price reductions have lowered prices, but they are still well above historic norms. This means that fewer households still are able to own their own homes in areas with restrictive land use regulations. Once normal prosperity is restored, the higher house prices of the restrictive land use areas can be expected to resume their increase relative to the rest of the nation.

    This is a problem for some regions now. But many planners are enthusiastic about Obama in part because he is thought to be sympathetic to recreating these conditions throughout the entire country.

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    The automobile plays the role of the Great Satan in this morality play. The goal of many ‘progressive’ urbanists is to force people into transit and stop road building. Transit, of course, has its place. There is no better way to get to your job south of 59th Street in Manhattan, to Chicago’s Loop or to a few other of the nation’s largest downtown areas. But the stark reality is that transit can not substitute for the automobile for the overwhelming majority of trips, except for these niche markets. Further, failing to expand highways to keep up with traffic growth increases traffic congestion (and air pollution) and reduces economic productivity (read: “increases poverty”).

    Higher costs for home ownership and slower commutes to work – and they will be slower because transit commutes average twice as long as automobile – impose significant burdens on people. Fewer people will have houses and fewer will have jobs. Forcing a single parent to take longer to navigate from home to the day care center to the job, whether by transit or by car, makes life more difficult – and for no rational reason. It is the equivalent of forcing people to work harder for nothing.

    Of course, this way of thinking has been around some parts of the country for decades. The new drive to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has extended its reach. The typical formulation now is that in order to reduce GHG emissions, Americans need to be crowded into dense urban areas and give up our cars.

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    In reality, nothing of the kind is required. “Green” houses are being developed that can make it possible to substantially reduce GHG emissions while Americans continue their favored suburban life styles (the lifestyles, by the way, also favored by Europeans and Japanese). Hybrid and other advanced car and fuel technologies can make it possible for the personal transportation sector to achieve massive long term GHG reductions. The answer is regulating emissions, rather than people.

    But the planning and urbanist lobbies may not fundamentally be driven by the perceived need to reduce GHGs. They would rather regulate people, just as was the case well before climate change was even on the political agenda.

    Of course, the planners don’t see their strategies as nightmarish. They have worked them all out theoretically in their heads. The problem is that the theory is not and cannot be translated into reality. There is no more comfortable place to live in the world for people – particularly those past their youthful and single years – than the American suburb. There are no metropolitan areas of similar size in the world where people spend less time traveling to and from work than in America. Take Hong Kong, which is by far the world’s most dense large first-world urban area. No other metropolitan area of its size should have such theoretically short trips, because everything is so close together. Yet, average travel time to work is almost double that of Dallas-Fort Worth, with a similar population. Indeed, even in “gridlocked” Los Angeles, so often ridiculed for its automobile-oriented “sprawl,” work trip travel times average nearly 40 minutes less per day than in that ultimate of urbanization, Hong Kong. That adds up to about a week’s worth of extra commuting time each year.

    Rather than trying to constrict the dream, President Obama should work on ways to expand it. This will not be easy. Today, less than 50 percent of African-American and Latino households own their own homes. At the same time, Anglo home ownership is about 75 percent. No program to extend the American Dream can be based on policies that unnecessarily increase the price of housing.

    For the new President, there is a clear choice. He can cast his lot with those whose strategies would extinguish the aspirations of millions of Americans, or he could make it easier for more households in the nation to achieve the American Dream.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Corporate Sponsorship of the Golden Gate, the Ultimate Sign of Failed Infrastructure

    The most anticipated tourist attraction in the city where I live, The Golden Gate Bridge, is a testament to the lasting utility of a well executed infrastructure project. The world’s most famous suspension bridge still serves as the critical artery connecting San Francisco to the bedroom communities of Marin County to the north, where much of the city’s workforce resides. Remarkably, this marvel of engineering was completed in the late 1930s – a time when the U.S. was coming out of the Great Depression.

    The New Deal brought about an expansion of infrastructure that should inspire us. Yet nearly 70 years after its completion, the sobering reality remains: it’s difficult to imagine a project of that moxie being constructed today.

    One indicator of the distance between then and now can be seen in the story of Doyle Drive – the one-and-half mile southern approach to the Bridge. In 1993, USA Today reported that the elevated portion of Doyle Drive is the 5th most dangerous bridge in America. After years of EIR studies and bickering amongst a myriad of stakeholders and governmental agencies, San Francisco voters in 2003 finally passed Proposition K, a sales tax increase ensuring the city’s funding for an upgrade of Doyle Drive.

    Sales tax revenue generated from Proposition K is slated to cover only $67.9 million of the $1.045 billion estimated cost of the project. State and Federal funding has also been committed for the project, yet there is still $414 million of cost yet to be accounted for. Along with hopes of securing additional funding from the Fed, The Golden Gate Bridge District is responsible for providing $75 million for the Doyle Drive retrofit. To meet the cost of this and other projects, such as the addition of a suicide-prevention net, the Bridge District is seriously considering soliciting corporate sponsorship of the world-famous span.

    The appalling fact that corporate sponsorship is on the table for one of the most iconic pieces of infrastructure in the modern world confirms the failure of the public sector in regards to maintaining an aging infrastructure. For the past few years, politicians at all levels of the government seeking office have beaten the drum of tax reductions in order to secure votes, only to find themselves with budget crises on their hands once elected. With city and state budgets strapped, local politicians often look to the federal government in order to help pay for repairing roads and other basic services, not to mention the huge pensions of public employees.

    The other place local governments look for money to balance the budget is from the private sector. In many cities across America, elected officials have responded to these kinds of crises by partnering up with private enterprise to generate jobs and sales tax revenue by developing ‘convention and retail districts’. Oftentimes these developments will also include hotels, luxury condominiums and even sporting or arts venues. Even before the recent economic downturn, many of these developments were representing white elephants, sitting empty while the issues of sustained job creation and infrastructure repair remain unresolved.

    Examples of infrastructure from the past, such as the ruins of Roman Aqueducts on the Iberian Peninsula and the dams of the ancient city of Petra in Jordan, remind us of the great lengths societies will go through in order to function more efficiently. Although today the concept of infrastructure is primarily associated with industrial economies and modernization in the developing world, the truth is that ever since the earliest agrarian communities humans have been building physical systems that harness the powerful forces of nature and make life more convenient.

    Years from now, the built environment of America will provide one of the primary measurements for historians seeking to quantify 20th Century achievements. Today the vast networks of roads, bridges, ports, airports, power plants and water lines built in the U.S. over the past 150 years remains the standard for nations undergoing industrialization. Yet while other countries are busy catching up to the American paradigm, the U.S. system is falling behind. Entropy is setting in, and repeated policy failures prevent retrofitting and repair to take place at a mass scale.

    With all the current hubris surrounding the “New New Deal” proposed by the incoming Obama administration, discussion about the fundamental role of infrastructure seems to be missing from the conversation. Primary focus about the infrastructure package remains on rapid job creation rather than long term economic health. New Orleans remains a grim reminder of how infrastructural failure can destroy an economy for good, and misplaced investments in convention centers and other ephemera have limited impact.

    There has also been much press about a ‘green revolution’. While looking for cleaner alternatives to powering our society is an important issue, there is almost no acknowledgment that the most sustainable approach lies in fixing and updating what is already in place. Already, speculators are foaming at the mouth at what will end up probably being the next bubble – clean tech.

    In the coming days, it will be critical that careful attention be paid to a basic approach to ensure that stimulus money is not squandered on pork. As state and local governments – as well as big business and special interests – vie for handouts from Papa Fed, the United States government must seek ways to allocate funds for maximum investment in future generations.

    This is not to say such investments should not be bold and even beautiful. I know it’s possible every time I look at, or cross, the Golden Gate.

    Adam Nathaniel Mayer is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. Raised in the town of Los Gatos, on the edge of Silicon Valley, Adam developed a keen interest in the importance of place within the framework of a highly globalized economy. He currently lives in San Francisco where he works in the architecture profession.

  • How Detroit Lost the Millennials, and Maybe the Rest of Us, Too

    The current debate over whether to save our domestic auto industry has revealed some starkly different views about the future of manufacturing in America among economists, elected officials, and corporate executives. There are many disagreements about solutions to the Big Three’s current financial difficulties, but the more fundamental debate lies in whether the industry should be bent to the will of the government’s environmental priorities or if it should serve only the needs of the companies’ customers and their shareholders.

    But there’s something more at stake: the long-term credibility of Detroit among the rising generation of Millennials. These young people, after all, are the future consumers for the auto industry and winning them – or at least a significant portion of them – over is critical to the industry’s long-term prospects in the marketplace and in the halls of Congress.

    The enormous investments the federal government has been making in private enterprises, including the auto industry, will test the ability of private sector executives to meet the expectations of this very civically minded generation. Sadly, so far, it’s a test many business leaders seem likely to fail.

    In the case of the American auto industry, this failure has deep roots. Over the past few decades the leaders of the Big Three repeatedly have failed to move their industry in new directions, even when the opportunity to do so has plainly been put before them.

    Attempts to nudge Detroit into producing more fuel-efficient vehicles have been going on since the 1973-4 Arab Oil embargo, which led Congress to establish Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFÉ) standards for cars and light trucks. The target was for cars to meet an average of 27.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 1985. On Earth Day, 1992, Bill Clinton proposed to raise that standard even further to 45 mpg after he was elected President.

    When Al Gore was asked to join the ticket, auto industry executives, terrified at the prospect that the man who had called for the abolition of the internal combustion engine might become Vice President, implored the leadership of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) to meet with the candidates and bring them to their senses. The lobbying effort worked. Under pressure from Owen Beiber, then UAW president, and Steve Yokich, who was his designated successor, and the powerful Democratic Congressman from Dearborn, Michigan, John Dingell, Clinton agreed to delay the adoption of higher CAFÉ standards until it could be proven that such goals were attainable.

    This formulation opened the door for what came to be known as the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles or PNGV. Reluctantly supported by the Big Three, PNGV provided approximately a quarter of a billion dollars in government research funds to demonstrate the feasibility of producing a midsize sedan that could get 80 mpg. Often called “the moon shot of the 90s,” each car company was to make a prototype of such a vehicle by the politically convenient year of 2000 and begin mass production by 2004, another presidential election year.

    After a few years of technological research, reviewed by the independent National Research Council (NRC), the partnership settled on the combination of a hybrid gasoline and electric powered propulsion system as the most promising approach. But by 1997, the car companies were resisting development of even a prototype for such a vehicle.

    Vice President Gore, who had been in charge of the PNGV program since its inception, decided to meet with the Big Three CEOs to make sure they did not forget their past commitments. The answer from Detroit was emphatic: profits were coming from SUVs and heavy-duty trucks, not cars. Gore suggested they deploy a 60 mpg hybrid passenger sedan in 2002 rather than waiting for an 80 mpg version in 2004. Ford’s Peter Pestillo and his UAW ally, Steve Yokich, quickly replied, “no way.” Pestillo maintained, “we need much more time than that to make them cost competitive.” Gore could have, but didn’t, embarrass his host by pointing out that Toyota’s Prius was already delivering 55 mpg.

    Not all executives were blind to the challenge. General Motors’ Vice-Chairman, Harry Pearce had been the driving force behind GM’s ill-fated EV1 electric car experiment. Despite a bout with leukemia that took him out of consideration for CEO of the company, he and his allies within GM exerted powerful influence on the company’s CEO, Jack Smith. He also won over an influential ally at Ford, the Chairman of its Board of Directors, William Clay “Bill” Ford, Jr., great grandson of the company’s founder.

    At the Detroit Auto Show in January, 1999 Bill Ford personally introduced a new line of electric cars, under the brand name, THINK. Even though Honda and GM had abandoned the concept of an all electric vehicle by then, Ford said he thought there was still a niche market for such a car. Tellingly, Jac Nasser, Ford’s newly installed CEO, demonstrated his attitude toward these ideas by treating the visiting Secretary of Transportation, Rodney Slater, to a personal trip in a new Jaguar Roadster with the highest horsepower and worst gasoline mileage of any car at the show.

    Right after that display of internal differences at Ford, Harry Pearce personally presided over the public introduction of General Motors’ PNGV hybrid prototype car, which delivered 80 mpg fuel efficiency, while seating a family of five comfortably. He then surprised everyone by revealing GM’s real vision of the future – a hydrogen fuel cell powered car called the “Precept” that got 108 mpg in its initial EPA tests. He grandly predicted that such cars would be on the road by 2010.

    Clearly the industry was at a critical fork in the road. At a 2000 meeting at the Detroit airport, almost exactly one year to the day since their last meeting, Vice President Gore suggested to auto company executives that developing these products could enhance both the industry’s image and each company’s individual brands. Gore reminded his listeners, “It’s not just the substance of the issue you need to consider. You also need to think about the symbolism of the decision. Putting SUVs into the PNGV project would change the public’s perception of where you are going in the future.”

    Jac Nasser wanted to know if such a commitment would change the dialogue between the industry and government. Gore suggested he would put his personal reputation behind such an agreement, which would garner the auto industry a great deal of positive press and appeal to the growing ranks of environmentally minded consumers.

    But when it came time to put their reputation on the line, the auto executives blinked. The CEOs were not ready to commit to any specific production goals. This less-than-clarion call for a green automotive industry future made it only to page B4 of the Wall Street Journal the next day and was otherwise ignored by the rest of the public that the participants were hoping to impress.

    Today, only Ford, the one American auto company not to ask for a bailout in 2008, is ready to offer a car that meets the original Clinton target. In showrooms in 2009, its Fusion Hybrid five-passenger sedan uses the hybrid technologies first explored in the PNGV to get 45 mpg in city driving, more on the highway, and costs about $30,000. As a result, Ford is in a much better position today to weather the whirlwind of change in consumer tastes and financial markets, even without the support of the federal government.

    Unfortunately for America, General Motors, the largest of the Big Three, went in almost the opposite direction. Rick Wagoner, who became General Motors’ CEO in June 2000, chose to pursue an SUV-centered strategy that won big profits for a brief period. Since then, however, GM stock has plunged 95%, from $60 per share to roughly $3 in late 2008. General Motors, which lost $70 billion since 2005, has seen its market share cut in half. Having failed to embrace a public partnership with a sympathetic government, Wagoner was forced to beg for a federal bailout with onerous conditions. Seven years after the fateful auto summit with Al Gore, when asked what decision he most regretted, Wagoner told Motor Trend magazine, “ending the EV1 electric car program and not putting the right resources into PNGV. It didn’t affect profitability but it did affect image.” [emphasis added]

    Had the auto industry taken Gore’s lead a decade ago and built a positive image among the very environmentally conscious Millennial Generation, it might have built a constituency to support the government’s bailout. Instead, the companies’ brands, particularly GM’s, have taken such a beating that the President-elect recently reminded the car companies that “the American people’s patience is wearing thin.” In contrast to young Baby Boomers buying songs by the Beach Boys celebrating the Motor City’s products, the country seems ready to drive their “Chevy to the levee” and tell the company “the levee is dry.”

    But that is not the right answer. Millennials bring not only an acute environmental consciousness to the country’s political debate, but a desire for pragmatic solutions to the nation’s problems that promote economic equality and opportunity. To secure Millenials’ support, however, the domestic automobile industry needs to be seen as a contributor in ending America’s dependence on foreign oil and improving our environment. Not only would such an approach assure the industry’s future profitability, it would also remake its image in a way that will appeal to both their future customers and the politicians they support.

    Morley Winograd, co-author with Michael D. Hais of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), served as Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Gore where he witnessed the events described in this article. He and Mike Hais are also fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute.

  • Oregon’s Fringes: A New Rural Alternative

    Once the bastion of a thriving rural middle class, Oregon’s rural communities are now barely scraping by. The state’s timber industry employed 81,400 residents at its peak in 1978. At the time, the industry made up 49% of all manufacturing jobs in the state according to the Oregon Employment Department.

    Since then, the recessions of the early eighties and nineties, increased land-use restriction, decreased timber supply, global competition and automation of the timber industry have devastated rural communities that relied on once-plentiful timber jobs. Total timber industry employment has dropped to barely 11,000. Long term forestry prospects are glum. The benefits of carbon sequestration, endangered species protections, growing green building industry and the desire to protect Oregon’s forests for recreation will continue to hamper extraction and employment opportunities.

    Meanwhile, residents of such places as the southwest town of Oakridge (pop, 4,000) are left with few options. As the last mill went in the early nineties, so did the jobs. Many left for employment in surrounding cities. Those who stay often work multiple minimum-wage retail shifts; a trailer or shared space is many times their only living option.

    Oregon’s rural places were wrecked not just because of the necessary industry shift (away from logging) but because of the lack of long-term planning required to accommodate that shift.

    The obvious decline in timber employment called for a multi-generational plan to re-invent the state’s rural communities. Instead, towns like Oakridge were allowed to sink until the situation became bleak enough to gain state attention. What followed was reactionary policy that mandated mostly welfare and other band-aid solutions.

    The current situation calls for a more drastic plan that will once again restore Oregon’s proud rural tradition. The initial step is recognizing that rural Oregon – if the state is to preserve its natural resources and provide healthy communities for its residents – must transition from a rural layout to denser small town formations. The state lacks the resources, population density and geographic appeal to allow all of rural Oregon to make this change.

    Instead, select areas with the potential for turn-around should be identified across the state and given special attention in making the transition. At best, this should come from the ground up: through the initiative of local communities. These “New Towns” will be allotted state resources and special legislation to reinvent themselves as more compact and sustainable communities with the capacity of attracting skilled workers and business alike.

    Rather than attempt to wrestle with every factor in the discussion of the New Town model, what follows is a broad outline of the more crucial considerations suggested by such an approach . This leaves much open to discussion, to which the reader is invited to contribute.

    First, Oregon’s historically strict land-use regulations need to be re-evaluated. Instead of discouraging development, it should be encouraged within the New Town boundaries by incentive packages to developers who add an element of “community value” to their projects. Projects that are built sustainably, offer employment, scenic access, cultural attractions, restaurants, and/or retail options will qualify for the incentives.

    Of course many oppose almost any further development across rural Oregon. But in reality we really have two options: either accept a future of rural disenfranchisement and resource extraction; or concentrate resources, re-zone, and intelligently build new, economically as well as environmentally sustainable towns across Oregon.

    Alternative energy companies such as SolarWorld, Vestas and Solaicx, Inc. are just a handful of the dozens of renewable energy companies running or planning new facilities in Oregon.

    Initially, these firms have clustered around Portland or its surrounding suburbs. But factors such as dwindling space and access to workers could drive these firms further outwards. The right incentives package, inexpensive land and labor would make the New Towns an attractive option for the green industry in the coming years.

    Green business could provide one foundation for these places. Once the green industry demonstrates confidence in the New Town model, other economic players would likely follow. These include industries – such as food processing, data centers and specialized services – that could also be nurtured successfully, as has occurred in smaller communities elsewhere in the region.

    The New Town proposal also offers a viable solution to Oregon’s expected population growth. Between 1980 and 2006, the Oregon population grew from 2.6 million to 3.7 million, an increase of 40.5 percent. By 2050 population growth for the state is projected at 5.8 million according to the Northwest Rural Development Center using U.S. Census data.

    The state’s population growth – mainly from immigration and domestic migrants – will be attracted to locales with affordable housing and job opportunities. So far this has translated into a largely urban migration. Growth within cities or in their surrounding suburbs increased by as much as 50%, while non-metro growth increased by only 19%.

    As long as jobs remain in or near the handful of cities Oregon has to offer, these trends will continue. Fortunately, the majority of newcomers are not drawn primarily by urban amenities. Inexpensive housing, job opportunities, and scenic attractions could compensate nicely for the increasing cost and congestion that accompanies urban living.

    The development of the suburbs stemmed from the desire to escape the urban core’s problems. The suburbs continue to surround our cities because of the resources and job availability. However, there is little reason that with the digital revolution and the coming green revolution, once-isolated towns cannot become self sustainable and very desirable.

    Many readers will feel uneasy by the suggestion of deliberately spurring growth in particular places while allowing others to wane. It seems to go against free market ideology and even to be unauthentic.

    Yet a change is needed. These places initially thrived because they were located near natural resources. By shifting from extraction industries, the basis of the local economy has shifted. The whole approach to town development needs to be readjusted to meet these new realities.

    Without a complete shift in how planners view and design for the spaces across the entire state, the rural poor will continue to struggle, while population increases will make our metropolitan areas less and less attractive. The New Town model could present a viable option to the contemporary problems Oregonians face and perhaps to other problems now only on the horizon.

    Ilie Mitaru is the founder and director of WebRoots Campaigns, based in Portland, OR, the company offers web and New Media strategy solutions.

  • Good-Bye, Gentry

    The proposed investiture of Caroline Kennedy as the replacement senator for Hillary Clinton has inspired a surprising degree of opposition – at least from other claimants to the throne, such as the Cuomos, and from those obstreperous parvenues, the Clintons.

    Perhaps less obvious may be a wider disdain expressed by even liberal New Yorkers who feel Kennedy’s elevation may be one celebrity rising too many. Although the big New York editorial boards are expected to line up, like so many obedient lap dogs, grassroots dissent seethes. Queens Congressman Gary Ackerman, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, groused: “I don’t know what Caroline Kennedy’s qualifications are except that she has name recognition. But so does J. Lo.”

    Other liberal New Yorkers I have spoken to detest the idea of Kennedy replacing Hillary Clinton – particularly without even having to battle, as she did, through the elective process. One reporter even spoke of a discernible “populist backlash” against this ultimate insiders’ deal among lower-level pols, reporters and grassroots Democratic activists.

    Still, these yelps are not likely to stop the Kennedy juggernaut. The forces behind Caroline – like moneybags Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Wall Street bagman-in-chief Sen. Charles Schumer – are too powerful and well-heeled to be resisted. The word is out that dissenting on Kennedy could result in loss of the kind of largesse that can make or break political careers.

    The disquiet about her appointment does offer a glimmer of hope about our battered democracy. It could point toward a backlash against the gentrification of liberalism, the Democratic Party and much of American politics. Gentry, of course, have been involved in American politics from the earliest time, but generally as a conservative influence tied to the protection of their moneyed interest or privileges.

    Of course, some wealthy hierarchs also supported liberal politics. Perhaps the most important examples were Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Yet if the Roosevelts favored the middle class and the poor, they often did so at the expense of being labeled class traitors by their peers.

    In contrast, the current gentry liberals increasingly reflect the biases of their own social class. The upper echelons of Wall Street, academe and the media have been moving toward what passes for the “left” for over a generation. Ironically, this movement became most evident in the early 1960s in the elite support that gathered around Caroline’s father, John, who brought with him into office “the best and brightest.”

    As historian Fred Siegel has noted, the Kennedy phenomena differed greatly – in both style and substance – from the “lunch pail” liberalism epitomized by President Harry Truman and, to an extent, that of both Lyndon Johnson and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Their Democratic party was sustained by appealing to the economic interests of working and middle-class Americans.

    As opposed to gentry politics, whose bastions lay in fashionable urban districts and college towns, Truman-style democracy reached into the vast suburban dreamscape – even into small towns and rural areas.

    Over recent years this version of the party, with its more geographically diverse middle-class base, has lost influence. It’s been a process of both addition and subtraction.

    A series of strong Republican politicians since Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan lured many middle-income voters out of the Democratic Party by appealing to their patriotism, economic self-interest and, in some cases, prejudices.

    At the same time, the core of the elite liberal constituency – academics, high-tech businesspeople and media figures – has been growing steadily in wealth and influence. By marrying this constituency to poor minority voters, gentry liberals have turned our core urban areas into a collection of electoral “ditto heads,” with so-called “progressives” winning as much as 70 or 80% of the vote in presidential elections.

    This year’s thrilling primary battle between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama represented a clash of these two tendencies. Although Clinton herself enjoyed strong ties to some gentry liberals, she campaigned, particularly toward the end of the marathon, as Harry Truman in a bright pantsuit. Obama, for his part, sallied forth from a solid base of academics and well-educated professionals, as well as African Americans.

    In first the primary and then the general election, Obama’s growing fundraising advantage stemmed increasingly not from his early base among students and liberal professionals, but from his strong ties to the highest echelons of the gentry. As we now know, it was big money – hedge funds, Silicon Valley, Hollywood – not small donors who helped propel Obama’s financial juggernaut.

    Then it’s not surprising that, so far, the Obama pre-presidency reflects the values of the gentry class. His appointments in key economic posts have been very much in sync with the Schumer-Robert Rubin Wall Street wing of the party. Contrary to the hyperventilations of some conservatives, Obama seems as unlikely to confiscate the holders of mega-wealth, inherited or otherwise, as that muddle-headed blueblood, George W. Bush.

    If the president-elect looks to raise taxes, a more likely target will be the less-well-heeled small businesspeople, farmers and others who have tended to remain closer to the Republican Party. These are the people who earn about $250,000 a year and may now be demonized as “rich.” Another source of pain for the middling classes may come from carbon trading, which could boost energy prices.

    Indeed, Obama’s most liberal positioning may come on environmental issues, a favorite concern of many gentry liberals. “Green” politics appeal to these factions in part because it poses little threat to “information” industries like finance, software and entertainment. Instead the losers will be blue-collar polluting industries – such as traditional energy production, trucking or manufacturing – which have largely remained close to the GOP.

    Another arena may be found in new federal initiatives on urban and planning issues. Many gentry liberals, starting with Al Gore, have long disdained suburban lifestyles that allow most Americans an enviable level of privacy, safety and comfort. After all, members of the gentry don’t need supports since they can afford both spacious city digs and country retreats.

    But it’s not only ideology or cultural preferences that drive the gentry agenda. Many venture capitalists and investment bankers see a carbon-trading regime and massive subsidies for renewable energy as a potential source of windfall profits.

    Yet for all of these synergies, Obama’s embrace of the gentry agenda also poses some longer-term political risks. For one thing, there’s a growing cadre of congressional Democrats from non-gentry constituencies – the Great Plains, various suburbs and exurbs – who may find the Obama approach both not sufficiently populist and too dismissive of their basic economic concerns.

    The patterns of this dissent can be seen in the early opposition among these Democrats to the initial plan for the financial bailout proposed by President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It might be further stimulated if the administration seeks to smother fossil fuel, agricultural and industrial development as well as steer the stimulus away from financing the roads and bridges critical to the suburban and rural economies.

    For right now, the drive for the Kennedy nomination suggests how powerful, pervasive and even cocky the gentry class has become. But if the economy worsens and grassroots anger grows, the new president may want to avoid emulating JFK and instead follow another playbook, one oriented toward the middle class and epitomized by Harry Truman – the very same approach that almost helped elect his primary rival and new secretary of State.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • City Planning and The Politics of Pollution

    Part Two. Yesterday, in Part One, Critser discussed scientific advances in understanding air pollution. Today, he addresses the social implications.

    The new science of air pollution, with its emphasis on dose-response mechanisms, may remake the traditional advocacy realm of social and environmental justice. In the past, that world has been focused on class, race and ethnicity, classic markers of inequality and vulnerability. Today, the focus is more “exposure driven.” “Dosage… may be something people who have ignored environmental justice can get their heads around,” one researcher at last month’s Environmental Epidemiology conference in Pasadena noted. “It may get people’s attention on something that affects us all.”

    Other new observations are recasting ancient (and highly suspect) urban-suburban dichotomies as well. If one parses the science of small, regional temperature increases—the kind we may see more of in the future—and how those spikes “activate” ultrafine particles, one discovers a disturbing phenomenon: The combination of heat and UFPs makes airborne plant pollens more inflammatory. Such was the finding of Italian researchers studying how traffic emissions and high temperatures in Naples fortify the toxicity of urtica, the common allergen known as the nettle plant. One wonders how the same combination remakes the lovely sage and chaparral environment surrounding Southern California suburbs, even when the region isn’t burning. It is a disturbing prospect for those who believe they have escaped inflammation by exchanging big cities for exurban greenlands.

    What, besides moving to Iceland, can be done? Few have thought more about that, at the practical level, than Andrea Hricko, an associate professor of clinical preventive medicine at USC, where she is trying to translate epidemiological data about pollution into practical public health policy. For years, Hricko’s focus was the Port of Los Angeles and the neighborhoods and schools surrounding that diesel-saturated realm. What she found were huge spikes in childhood chronic diseases, especially asthma, as well as other heart and lung problems. She and others succeeded in getting one school relocated—pushed back from the most truck-intensive route near the Alameda Corridor—but even that victory was a lesson in the unintended consequences of regulation.

    “Come over here, you have to see this,” she said to a visitor one day in her crammed office on the medical school campus. On her computer appeared a picture of a group of kids playing soccer. In the immediate background loomed trucks belching the substances that eventually make the port air so heinously foggy. “See, this is where the school was. This was supposed to be the buffer zone, but… being that it is also rare, unoccupied space, and LA schools have so little recreational area, it is now a defacto playground. So you have kids better protected inside, but doing their deepest breathing part of their day right on top of the trucks.” It’s a perfect public health storm, she notes, because “getting kids outside and exercising more is a huge priority in the obesity-diabetes crisis.”

    Hricko’s focus on the ports, arguably the octopus of contemporary industrial Los Angeles, has taught her some hard lessons. You can always get a regulation that says, for example, don’t build a school within X distance of a freeway, but you can rarely switch the scenario around, say, with a ruling that says don’t widen a freeway when it is within X distance of a school. The same is true of building a new rail yard, as is the case just north of the port today. For years, area residents waged war with the railroad and the port to simply locate the new yard closer to the water, which would have drastically reduced the number of short, emission-intensive trips by trucks, and thus hopefully cut down the high rate of respiratory disease in the area. The solution, instead, was to go ahead and build the yard right by the homes, with a promise by state regulatory agencies to install new, high efficiency filters in all area homes. While that protects the children while they’re inside—and, it would seem, suggests a possible boom enterprise for the filter industry—it’s far from an ideal solution. “They’re still spending most of their time outside, and we still need to get them to exercise more while they’re out there. It’s a frustrating exercise.”

    Hricko has also wondered if the same impasse won’t obtain in the arena of the low-income housing juggernaut led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. One recent hearing concerned an affordable housing complex proposed alongside the 5 freeway near East Los Angeles. As Hricko tells it, that project would be sandwiched between one of the most emissions-choked portions of the freeway and the mass transit Gold Line, which would run just behind it. “There was all kinds of talk about filtering, etcetera, but the real question was never brought to the fore: Perhaps this shouldn’t be considered for housing in the first place.” She notes that a member of the LA County Public Health staff made precisely this point… privately.

    One can understand why. Affordable housing is an important, unmet need in Los Angeles, one with a substantial political establishment behind it and a charismatic mayor in front of it. There is, as a result, an understandable reluctance to get in the way of the parade, especially after years of political impasse. The mayor recently upped the ante and proclaimed a new $5 billion housing initiative, much of which would center on building new housing near mass transit stations. The essence of this transit pod strategy has a fairly sustainable logic: If you can get people to live near mass transit, you’ll dramatically reduce one of the biggest single factors in urban pollution: the numerous short, one-to-five mile trips that people make every day, whether to work or to the store or to pick up the kids at school. You’ll also reduce traffic jams.

    The problem, of course, is human nature, and the naughty desire by poor people, especially in Los Angeles, to be like the rich people, driving whenever and to wherever they want. Compounding this, for the scheme to work, we still must get from the station to work and people will use a car to do that. “For Antonio’s plan to work, you’d basically have to make it a condition of ownership that you don’t have a car. Or, that if you are going to buy this housing, you have to work somewhere on the trainline,” Hricko said with a knowing smile. “Because if you don’t, you still have people driving. You’re defeating your purpose before you ever get started.”

    That’s one realm where a leader like Villaraigosa, with his celebrity status and megawatt smile, could lead by example. But that hasn’t happened so far. Mike Woo, who describes himself as a supporter of the mayor, says “I want to say that I think the mayor’s people are on top of this. I wish I could say that. I really wish I could say that.” Woo notes that there is a slightly bigger time window for solving the housing crunch than is popularly acknowledged. The Planning Commission’s most recent staff report holds that meeting the need for housing in most transit corridors for the next 8-10 years does not require raising the density of housing.

    That’s a rare breather, Woo says. Let’s make the most of it.

    Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin 2003), Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton 2005), and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging (Random/Harmony 2009).

  • Will The New Air Pollution Science Choke City Planners?

    Part One of A Two-Part Series

    Not long ago, Michael Woo, a former Los Angeles city councilman and current member of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, took up a case pending approval by that body: a mixed housing-retail development near the intersection of Cahuenga Boulevard and Riverside Drive. Like many of the remaining buildable sites in the city, the property is right next to a roaring motorway; the windows of some apartments would look right out onto the 134 Freeway. To Angelinos, who have grown up in a car culture, it was hardly a remarkable proposal. But Woo, perhaps one of the brainier members of the city’s political elite—after losing a mayoral race to Richard Riordan in the early 1990s he became a professor of public policy at University of Southern California—had a problem with it, and he couldn’t quite let it go.

    Just a few weeks before, the Commission had witnessed a lengthy presentation by a scientist who’d been studying how living within 500 yards of high traffic corridors—freeways and some particularly busy streets—substantially raises the risk for a number of chronic diseases. “We were all sort of sitting there, looking at this proposal and discussing it through the conventional lens we normally use, when I said, `Wait a minute. Didn’t we just hear a pretty compelling argument about this the other day? Can we talk about that for a minute?’ It struck me that it was impossible to read those studies and then continue approving housing that sits that close to freeways.”

    The Commission then asked for the developer’s point of view on the issue. “As I recall, the only real mitigation that they brought up was almost comic,” Woo says. “Their idea was, you know, we’ve got that covered: We’re going to make sure that residents can’t open the windows that face the freeway.” The project was approved.

    Woo doesn’t particularly fault anyone in the exchange, because the implications of the new science of air pollution—much of it driven by pioneering work at USC, the University of California at Los Angeles, and California Institute of Technology—are utterly mind boggling. No one has quite calculated exactly how much buildable land would be excised from use for housing and schools if this growing body of work were to take hold in the policy realm, but, as Woo said, “We can’t hide from this issue anymore. The hard science on the subject is compelling. It makes you fundamentally rethink some pretty key parts of how, where and why we’re building housing in such locations.”

    For decades, pretty much everyone “knew” that smog—usually measured as ozone, the gas that forms from sunlight’s ionizing effect on air particles—caused all kinds of health problems, principally those associated with the lungs, like asthma. But the truth of the matter is that, until ten years or so ago, no one knew how that happened; they didn’t know the “mechanism of action,” the intricate physiological processes that lead to chronic airway inflammation. Epidemiological data was confounding, because some high ozone communities showed lower rates of asthma than low ozone communities. Also, smog levels—measured as ozone—were going down, while asthma rates were going though the roof.

    One suspect was what researchers called fresh emissions, comprised of ultrafine particles, or UFPs, which are so small that they can penetrate the furthest reaches of the lung’s bronchial branches and set off the systemic inflammation that causes respiratory disease. Thus, it was possible to have lower ozone levels and still have increased levels of inflammation, or as USC Professor Robert McConnell notes, “You could have cleaner horizons but still have increasing inflammation to people who live closer to where the particles are being produced.” McConnell has been leading the federally funded Children’s Health Study in Los Angeles for over a decade. “I tell people that I’m studying how pollution causes asthma, and people look at me and say, `I thought we already knew that,’” says McConnell. “The fact is that we assume risks that aren’t there, and we’re ignorant of risks that are there.”

    What caused the sea change in pollution epidemiology—the ability to link exposure to tail pipe emissions and chronic diseases—is as much a story of ingenuity at the lab bench as it is one of persistence against conveniently indolent regulations. At USC, engineers over the past 20 years have invented ways to concentrate particles from the freeway, assess their specific toxicity in human doses, and then test various theses with lab animals genetically engineered to physiologically respond like humans. They have also developed ways to track real-time daily human exposures to ultrafine particles. On any given day in Los Angeles there are mobile smog units measuring how pollution ebbs and flows on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. There are people wearing “personal ambient pollution” backpacks to track how individuals experience different loads of smog throughout their day, part of which may be spent in a low-pollution environment, part in a high. Through modern genomics, we also now know that several highly prevalent gene mutations make some people more susceptible to pollution, and that others make them less susceptible.

    At all three universities, engineers in the aerosol sciences developed machines that could accurately measure not just ozone—a rather crude measure of air toxicity—but also specific toxins, known as ultrafine particulate matter, or UFPs, of less than 2.5 microns. It is stuff so small that it can reach the bottom of the airways; there, it can over-stimulate the so-called inflammatory cascade of the body’s native defense system and turn it into a disease called asthma. At UCLA, cell biologists, toxicologists and lung and heart specialists have even been able to image what happens to the human cell when it’s exposed to high levels of ultrafine particles. It is the kind of image that can make one utterly despairing, but one that also might clue modern physicians, medical researchers and environmental scientists on how to better focus on the issue and perhaps mitigate it.

    A few examples of new directions within the science:

    Ultrafine Particles, Diesel Exhaust And Asthma: A growing consensus holds that, infants, young children, and expectant women experience substantial elevations in risk for deficits in lung function growth when living near high volume motorways. There is less consensus on the recommended buffer zone, ranging from 75 meters to 500 meters.

    Ultrafine Particles And Heart Disease: A growing body of laboratory experiments and human observational work links heart disease, especially the process leading to atherosclerosis and heart attack, to air pollution. Recent work at UCLA and USC on lab mice parked next to the 110 Freeway has suggested an alarming thesis of causality: That chronic exposure to high levels of ultrafine particles may make us more likely to get heart disease because it makes HDL—the so-called “good,” form of cholesterol that “cleans up” the bad form—dysfunctional.

    Diesel, Ultrafine Particles And Alzheimer’s: Work coming out of Mexico City, increasingly LA’s sister city in the environmental sciences, documents how amyloid plaque, one of two suspect brain proteins associated with Alzheimer’s, increases with exposure to air particles, especially in children and young adults.

    Diabetes, High Blood Pressure And Obesity: A small but growing body of research shows that being fat and breathing smog is really bad for you. Worse, high exposures may accentuate existing diabetes and metabolic syndrome, the perfect storm of high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.

    Air Pollution, Expectant Mothers, And Infants: UCLA researchers have repeatedly demonstrated a consistent, dose-dependent relationship between expectant mothers living in high traffic-emission-adjacent housing and premature births, low birth weights, birth defects and respiratory diseases. In a recent report, the UCLA Institute of the Environment concluded that the problems were of such magnitude as to “require drastic changes to motor vehicle and transportation systems” over the next decades.

    In Part Two, Critser explores the politics of pollution.

    Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin 2003), Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton 2005), and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging (Random/Harmony 2009).

  • New Zealand Voters Swing Right: John Key’s Shower Power

    Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker opens his commentary on the New Zealand election by saying: “At least one country is responding to the financial crisis by moving to the right, not left.” This is factually correct but may overstate the case.

    Certainly, New Zealanders elected a conservative National-led coalition government and removed from office a Labour-led coalition which had served three terms of three years. While it is appealing to contrast this move to the right with America’s move to the left, it is probably unwise to claim that these were contrasting responses to the international financial crisis. Indeed, I suspect the analysis of both the New Zealand and American elections is equally flawed.

    The key mood in the New Zealand electorate was simply that it was “Time for a Change”. And given that the incumbent Government was a left-of-centre Government, the change could only be to the right of centre. In this regard, there is a strong parallel with the American Presidential race where the mood was equally that it was “Time for a Change.” In the US this meant a move from the Republican right to the Democratic left.

    The mood for change was probably stronger in New Zealand because for a three-term government (nine years) to win a fourth term is most uncommon here; Helen Clark’s nine years as leader of that Government was a record, and had she won a fourth term as a Labour Prime Minister it would have been unprecedented. The historical odds were against her. On the other hand, all US Presidents must move aside after two terms, so change is thrust upon them.

    Now that both elections are over, the new US president and the new National Government, led by John Key, must face up to the harsh reality of the inevitable recession or depression resulting from the collapse of the housing and financial bubbles that dominated both economies during the last decade. This focus may encourage analysts to believe that the financial crisis was the cause of the electoral outcomes, even if the ideological swings were opposite.

    However, I believe that Barack Obama would have won the Presidential race had there been no financial crisis, and that John Key would also now be Prime Minister of New Zealand. But both their victories might have been less emphatic.

    In both countries voters were faced with a generational change. Obama is a young man in his early prime; McCain is an old man whose mortality worked against him. Helen Clark is younger than McCain (58 vs 72), but because she entered Parliament in 1981, became Deputy Prime Minister in 1989, and has been Prime Minister since 1999, she was seen as one of the old guard. She has stepped down as leader of the Labour Party as part of conceding defeat on election night. John Key is a young man of 47 who has been in parliament only since 2002, and Leader of the Opposition only since 2006.

    The role of the financial crisis in this New Zealand election was an ambivalent one. By law, our full-on election campaign is brief – only three months – compared to US campaigns, and Parliament goes into recess during the whole of the campaign. As it happened, the full impact of the financial crisis on the NZ economy became apparent at about the same time as campaigning began, although the collapse of the housing market had begun somewhat earlier. The campaigning politicians had little time to develop solid policies in response to the threat and, given that Parliament was in recess, could do nothing about it anyhow.

    Helen Clark argued that her Labour Government had successfully managed the economy for nine years and her team had the experience to manage the New Zealand economy through the next three years. John Key argued that his party had more skills in the field, and that the Labour party benches were full of academics and trade unionists, most of whom had never run a business.

    Clark’s response was that the National Party, and John Key in particular, were part of the problem. Her trade union base saw Key as a Wall Street banker and a cause of the problem. Key’s business base saw him as a man who understood the industry and had the skills and know-how to deal with the problem.

    National Party heavyweights included Don Brash, who had stepped aside as Leader of the Opposition to allow John Key to take over. Brash had been Governor of the Reserve Bank for 14 years; since resigning from Parliament in 2007 he had served as an adjunct professor of Banking at the Auckland University of Technology (and Chairman of the Centre for Resource Management Studies). John Key began working as a foreign exchange dealer at Elders Finance in Wellington, then moved to Auckland-based Bankers Trust. In 1995, he joined Merrill Lynch as head of Asian foreign exchange in Singapore. He was promoted to Merrill’s global head of foreign exchange, based in London, and was a member of the Foreign Exchange Committee of the New York Federal Reserve Bank from 1999 to 2001.

    On election night Key’s Centrist but Conservative National Party, (combined with the soft, somewhat libertarian Act Party as a coalition partner) scored a decisive victory – probably about as decisive a victory as is possible, given our system of Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP).

    There is widespread agreement, at least among the supporters of the new regime, that Labour’s massive defeat was primarily caused by New Zealanders’ rejection of the “Nanny State,” which has increasingly interfered in our daily lives. And here may lie the real lesson for the new President of the USA.

    While the US is a genuine Super Power, and New Zealand is a mere pimple on the global body politic, we always aspire to punch above our weight, and frequently do. Helen Clark had decided that New Zealand would be a world leader in fighting climate change (anthropogenic global warming), and that we would become the world’s most sustainable economy with a carbon neutral footprint. So, for some time, New Zealanders responded with some enthusiasm to this new challenge of leadership on the world stage. We were proud to be Clean and Green, and of our Tourism Board’s promotion of New Zealand as 100% Pure – presumably we are free of even impure thoughts.

    However, as commentators as diverse as the late Aaron Wildavsky and Vaclav Klaus have warned, Global Warming is the mother of all scares because it enables Government to interfere in every aspect of our lives – to claim that no price is too high if necessary to save the planet for our grandchildren. Inevitably, the High Priests of “Sustainability” began to demand that we break our “addiction” to private automobiles and learn to love public transport; that we learn to love high-density apartments and abandon our home gardens; and that we stop doing anything which consumed fossil fuel. It soon became clear to many that the main concern of these New Puritans was that someone, somewhere, might just be enjoying themselves.

    Our unsubsidized grass farmers who pay most of our way in the world began to wonder why our belching cattle should be penalized by Kyoto rules, when subsidized European cattle were not. After all, cows have been belching since the first ruminants walked the earth, and they don’t run on fossil fuel.

    Rodney Hide, leader of the Act Party, began to argue that we should dump the Emissions Trading Scheme and withdraw from Kyoto because the whole Global Warming fear was a massive scam. This was supposed to be political suicide, but the polls showed that Act’s support suddenly increased. Act is now part of the new government, and their extra five seats consolidate John Key’s comfortable majority in the 120 seat Parliament.

    If President-Elect Obama becomes a High Priest of Climate Change, he too may find that 95% of Americans, just like New Zealanders, believe that other people should use public transport so that there will be more room on the road for them. He may also find that while the costs of Kyoto are scary and may drive even more energy intensive industries offshore to non-complying countries like China and India, it is the minor interventions in daily life which are the real irritants that could turn the electorate against him and make him a one term President.

    Because when it comes down to it, John Key’s majority may have been cemented in place by New Zealanders’ affection for taking a shower.

    A few weeks before the election, the Labour Government, largely at the behest of the Green Party on whose support they depended to maintain their majority in Parliament, proposed regulations which would limit the flow of water through a shower head to about 1.5 gallons per minute. The aim was to save both water and energy and thus make our houses more “sustainable”. The standard “low flow” rose in most showers at the time delivered about 3.5 gallons per minute.

    This proved to be the last straw. The grumblings about the proposed mandatory replacement of incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, similar to the rumblings in the US, exploded into a furor on blog sites, talk-back radio and letters to the editor. A popular blogger drew up a list of 85 things the Greens want to ban. People recalled how a Green Party official had endorsed a petition calling for the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide…which just happens to be water.

    The proposal was not just irksome; it soon became evident that it probably would not even achieve its objective. People would stay in the shower longer or alternatively run a nice deep hot bath. As is so often the case in political campaigns, this single minor proposal came to symbolize a whole range of discontents, and people could use it as a focus for their latent rage and fury against the Nanny State.

    So Jesse Walker’s comment that triggered the request for this commentary on the New Zealand election might more properly have read, “At least one country is responding to global warming alarmism by moving to the right, not the left.”

    Our recent experience in New Zealand should give Barack Obama reason to pause. A stance against Global Warming is popular, right up until it starts to bite. Then the American public too, might just bite back.

    Owen McShane is a Resource Management Consultant based in New Zealand