If nothing else, at least Obama has cobbled together a serious proposal to take to Copenhagen, and persuaded the Chinese government to come up with something somewhat better than doing nothing. It even appears that US businesses, whose grossest national product so far has been obstructionism, are reluctantly getting down with the program, though with the usual reservations, which they comically share in almost identical language with Red China:

"In the midst of a severe recession with 10.2 percent national unemployment, our economy, the creation of jobs and consumer impact should take much greater precedence over attempts to impress international bureaucrats during an annual convention."

And:

The National Association of Manufacturers said recently that a climate bill would result in job losses and slower economic growth.

Yes, we know that US business is such a good friend to the working stiff, don't we?

Meanwhile, in China:

China will measure its reduction by carbon intensity, or amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of gross domestic product, meaning that emissions would still grow but the rate would slow. China has rejected demands to announce an absolute reduction in carbon emissions, arguing that environmental concerns must be balanced with economic growth and that developed countries must first demonstrate a significant commitment to reducing emissions.

Well, we certainly agree with the last half of the last sentence.

It's worth noting, though, that the biggest exporter in the world, and one of the richest per capita, is neither China nor the US, nor even Japan, but Germany--which instituted strict emissions controls decades ago, and cleaned up the formerly murderous Ruhr Valley pollution, and has only seen its economy improve.

Likewise, tidy little bicycle-mad Denmark has a per-capita GDP 50% higher than America's.

It's quite possible that if we can get the economic dinosaurs to grow a bit of fur, in the form of merely trying out some new ideas, we too might evolve economies that are both clean and prosperous.

As the old saying goes, "Follow, lead, or get out of the way."

Richard Risemberg on 11.26.09 @ 05:17 AM PST [link]  

Longtime New Colonist contributor Debra Efroymson has graced us with another wonderful essay, brought on by her musings on what it will really take to straighten out our world, after last October's 350.org Day of Action.

An excerpt:

People can wait for their government to act, and governments can wait for people to send clear signals that they are willing to make major changes (like using public or active transport rather than driving, and reducing wasteful consumption in exchange for more leisure). Or rich countries can point the finger at China and India, and vice versa, while everyone waits for someone else and some new technology to prevent the need for any real change. Obviously none of this will solve our problems.

But what if instead of finger pointing and blame, instead of dragging our feet (and driving SUVs), we took a radically different and far more rational approach to the issue?

Get the low-down at the full article, titled The Cure.

Richard Risemberg on 11.21.09 @ 06:10 AM PST [link]  

Eric Miller on 11.20.09 @ 06:43 PM PST [link]  

The post office is losing money. I'm not exactly sure why-- postage and mailing seems to cost more than ever, and you might conclude an increase in online shopping has resulted in an increased number of packages.

Still, it's in the package arena that USPS has competition, and I haven't gotten a hand-written letter in a number of years. So what can be done?

One idea that's been floated is to eliminate Saturday mail delivery. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me. In fact, if package delivery could be kept at six days, the regular mail could arrive every other day for a total of three days a week, especially for residential service, and few would miss it much. It might actually lead to a great push to get people to pay bills online. And hey, with the onslaught of information at our fingertips from the likes of Google books and Wikipedia, libraries are searching around for a new purpose these days. Saving the post office money and breaking the digital divide would seem to be an appropriate niche.

But I have another suggestion-- eliminate residential delivery entirely. Use the savings to create bigger and newer post offices and provide a P.O. Box for every address. This will serve to encourage economic development, bring communities of people together and create nodes of information. It's inherently inefficient to take envelopes to every address on the planet. Walmarts distribution model couldn't work if it had to deliver merchandise to individual homes--and I bet Walmart could be enticed to build a post office box facility attached to its stores.

The world has changed enough since the founding of the U.S. Post Office began operation in 1792 (at which point mail had to be picked up in a central location). It's time to rethink whether mail needs to be delivered to every home every day. If residential delivery can be streamlined and the scope of post office operations minimized, then the question can be raised as to whether USPS needs to be in the package-delivery business at all.

PHOTO: Richard Caton Woodville (American, 1825-1855)
War News from Mexico, 1848
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Eric Miller on 11.16.09 @ 11:26 AM PST [link]  

The Federal Transit Administration is proposing changes in Federal development guidelines in order to increase the funding for pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure that serves the "catchment area" of a transit stop. Increasing the defined size of catchment areas would direct more money to bike & ped facilities, so we should all read this closely.

Some quotes:

Whether used for longer trips to access amenities outside the walkable radius of a public transportation station, or whether they enable direct access to a public transportation facility, bicycle amenities play an important role in encouraging public transportation use by providing riders with greater opportunities, choice, flexibility and safety for reaching their final destinations.

[...]

...A bike-on-bus demonstration program in Phoenix, Arizona that led to over 1,400 new public transportation riders per month.

And perhaps most important in terms of actually getting infrastructure put in:

Studies suggest that developments that incorporate bicycling and walking infrastructure in proximity with public transportation can reduce fiscal outlays of local municipalities towards roads and other infrastructure expansion by twenty-five percent. (TCRP Report 102: Transit-Oriented Development in the United States: Experiences, Challenges, and Prospects, Transportation Research Board, 2004)

Read the entire report at edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/pdf/E9-27240.pdf

Go to www.regulations.gov and follow the instructions if you wish to comment.

Richard Risemberg on 11.13.09 @ 07:44 PM PST [link]  

Twenty years ago people around the globe woke up to a different world as the previous day's events finally sunk in" the Berlin Wall had really come down. Freedom was real for the citizens of Eastern Europe and there was hope that maybe, just maybe, the world was becoming a safer place. That the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war were going to go away. The knowledge that Germany was going to be reunified was perhaps scary for some, but overall became considered a very good thing.

In fact, looking back at this historic day, three-quarters of Americans (75%) say the people of Eastern Europe are much freer now than they were then. In addition, three in five U.S. adults (59%) agree that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of a "new world order". Also, three-quarters of Americans (72%) say the reunification of what used to be East and West Germany is a good thing with 46% saying it is a very good thing. Just 2% believe it is a bad thing.

These are some of the results of BBC World News America/ Harris Poll of 2,116 adults surveyed online between November 3 and 5, 2009 by Harris Interactive. READ MORE

Eric Miller on 11.10.09 @ 05:49 AM PST [link]  

We may be running out of oil faster than the average consumer realizes. Reports came out this week that supply estimates may have been distorted in an attempt to avoid panic. Don't take my word for it, however, read the article at the Guardian.

Eric Miller on 11.09.09 @ 02:15 PM PST [link]  

Although the article I'll refer to here does not deal directly with urban sustainability, it provides a great deal of food for thought in a world where expensive infrastructure changes are absolutely necessary to preserve not only civilization but life itself. Our economy, and hence the dollar, is presently based on oil; Iraq's move to the Euro for its oil bourse was a primary reason for Gulf II; an economy based on offshoring requires far more shipping than a more localized economy; and wealth disparities both within and between countries incentivize offshoring, externalization of pollution burdens, and concentrations of poverty (which is seen among businesses as holding down wages). A couple of quotes:

We are told a weak dollar is good for exports and, thus, corporate America favors a weaker dollar. Not exactly. No country has ever depreciated itself into prosperity and corporate America is well aware of that: it is highly unlikely that the U.S. will thrive exporting sneakers to Vietnam. A weaker dollar may indeed help out corporate America for the next quarter's earnings in making foreign income look more attractive. However, with a weaker currency, corporations lack an important incentive to invest in quality. The Europeans have long learned that they cannot compete on price, but must produce value added products such as luxury cars or complex machinery; incidentally, producers and service providers at the higher end of the value chain have more pricing power. China's industry has also recognized this, allowing its low-end industries (e.g. toy industry) to fail and move to lower cost countries.

[...]

Inflation, of course, may also drive up home prices; although it is difficult to direct where inflation may show its ugly head. Many policy makers believe we cannot have inflation when there is no wage pressure. But that's wrong: think of a room with 10 people, 8 poor and 2 rich; the 2 rich people can drive up prices even if the other 8 cannot afford the item. The wealth gap in the U.S. has been widening--in our assessment as a result of too loose a monetary policy allowing those who understand credit to move ahead whereas many more fall through the cracks; look at Latin America--the type of society our policies drives us towards--to see that inflation is possible even when a great part of the population earns low wages.

To read the rest of the article, go to Axel Merk's report, Who Cares about the Dollar?

Richard Risemberg on 11.05.09 @ 04:38 AM PST [link]  

Bay Area Burden, a new report released today by the ULI Terwilliger Center for Workforce Housing finds that the average Bay Area household spends more than $41,000 a year, nearly 60 percent of their income, on transportation and housing costs alone.

These costs vary among the nine Bay Area counties examined, ranging from 54 percent in Santa Clara to 66 percent in Sonoma. But the study finds that one fourth of all households in the Bay Area live in neighborhoods where housing and transportation costs account for 65 percent or more of income, a level defined as an extreme housing and transportation cost burden.

"This heavy burden forces residents to make extremely difficult decisions that pit housing and transportation choices against other basic needs such as health care, education and food," said ULI Terwilliger Center Chairman J. Ronald Terwillliger. "These findings reinforce that years of ever-sprawling development have resulted in a growing gap between where people live and where they work.” Terwilliger, chairman and chief executive officer of Trammell Crow Residential, founded the center in 2007 to help achieve a measurable increase in the supply of workforce housing in high-cost markets throughout the nation.

Bay Area Burden, produced in partnership with the Center for Housing Policy (CHP) and the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), provides a comprehensive analysis of the "cost of place" in nine counties located throughout the San Francisco region by examining the costs and impacts of housing and transportation on residents, their neighborhoods and the environment. The report demonstrates the severity of the problem in the region and how the combined costs of housing and transportation are leaving San Francisco Bay Area workers with insufficient resources to meet their basic needs. The report finds that three fifths of all Bay Area residents live in communities that are unaffordable to households earning less than $80,000.

Two former Secretaries of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), who are now ULI Terwilliger Center Advisory Board members, Henry G. Cisneros and Steve Preston, attended a press conference along with federal, state and Bay Area leaders, to announce the report, a new website (www.BayAreaBurden.org) and cost calculator, all designed to bring greater awareness and understanding of these issues and their impact on communities.

Housing that appears to be affordable based solely on housing costs may not be truly affordable when it is located far from transit, jobs centers and services,”"said Cisneros. "This report underscores the importance of broadening the understanding surrounding some of the challenges associated with housing affordability to also include transportation costs, travel time and the negative environmental impacts of commuting."

Bay Area Burden also demonstrates the unintended environmental impacts of these decisions. The successful implementation of greenhouse gas emission reduction plans in the transportation sector is particularly important in the Bay Area, where transportation accounts for 40.6 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 33 percent nationally. As reported in Bay Area Burden, densely developed urban counties like San Francisco are estimated to have substantially fewer vehicle miles traveled per household (19.4) and thus lower per-household carbon dioxide emissions (20.2) than do more rural and suburban counties such as Solano, where those figures are 50.4 and 49.4 respectively. Considering that less than one in ten (9.5%) Bay Area workers use public transit, compared with 26.5% in the New York Metropolitan area and 11.1% in the Washington DC region, these figures are even more compelling.

The report is available at a new website sponsored by the ULI Terwilliger Center -- www.BayAreaBurden.org, which will serve as a resource center of information to aid individuals, households, planners, government officials and municipalities better understand the issues and true costs of housing and transportation. Included on the site is the Terwilliger Cost Calculator, which provides Bay Area residents with up-to-date data on housing and transportation cost that demonstrates for each individual where they live and the findings in Bay Area Burden on a personal level. Developed in partnership with CNT, this product allows users to input their own expenses to show their true burden as well as allows them to explore how to lower this by moving closer to their place of employment or to areas better public transportation systems. The calculator helps consumers see the true combined costs of their housing and transportation decisions.

"This study reinforces the importance of planning for transportation, housing and the environment. The cost calculator provides real people here in the Bay Area with a valuable tool to examine the relationship of where they live and work to what they spend on housing and transportation," said Preston. "Given the importance of these issues and the need to develop local solutions, the calculator is a vital step towards empowering residents to call upon policy makers to affect change."

Bay Area Burden highlights that over the next 25 years, the Bay Area is projected to grow by 1.6 million new residents, a 22 percent increase in population. The report identifies current and future challenges and the opportunities to integrate land use, housing and transportation policies to encourage new residential development in areas that are well served by public transit or near job centers. The data provided on housing and the consequences faced by Bay Area households and the consequences for the environment may help expand awareness of the problem and build support for the resources and high-level policy attention needed to address it effectively in the future.

Eric Miller on 11.04.09 @ 08:37 AM PST [link]  

Momentum Magazine in Canada has published an article by New Colonist editor Richard Risemberg, covering the history and present state bicycle travel and advocacy in the original sprawlville, Los Angeles, where he has lived for over half a century. Says Risemberg:

Now a perfect synchronicity of factors is working to revive urban cycling in the very city that once scorned it most. Add to that a retail culture that is offering not only touring bikes again, but Eurostyle city bikes, ready-made fixies, and even cargo bikes and bakfietsen, and you can see that Los Angeles is poised to leap into the Bicycle Millennium with a joyous "Wheeee!"

To read the article online, go to Momentum Magazine.

The very handsome print edition is also available here and there; find out where at Momentum's Pick It Up! page.

Richard Risemberg on 11.03.09 @ 04:15 PM PST [link]