Category Archives: Web Article Review

zoning

City Observatory has a long article arguing against the idea that a right-left consensus is emerging against zoning, making the obvious point that existing homeowners fight zoning changes when they perceive they might affect their investment, which often makes up a large part of their savings.

homeowners dominate local development politics in large part because their homes make up such a large proportion of their total wealth that any decline in property values could devastate them. (Or, conversely, cut into huge capital gains, if they are lucky enough to own property in, say, San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood.) As a result, they’re extremely wary of any change to their surroundings that might reduce their property values—and zoning gives them the legal ability to stop those changes.

So even to the extent that there’s a consensus about the damage of zoning among policy wonks, part of that consensus is also that zoning is incredibly difficult to change, because the interest local homeowners have in preserving it is so powerful…

When housing decisions are made hyper-locally, the only interests taken into account are those of nearby residents, who may have worries about their property values, the visual “character” of the neighborhood, or even more directly exclusionary concerns about the type of people who will leave near them. It also creates a sort of “prisoner’s dilemma” in which no neighborhood wants to be stuck with “undesirable,” or costly, land uses. But when decisions are made at a broader geographic level, the people who stand to gain from new housing—renters and potential buyers who want more housing options, businesses that might gain more customers, and people thinking about how more density might support the regional transit system—also get to have a voice. Scholars of zoning and segregation have argued that more local fragmentation in decisionmaking is a crucial part of using land use laws to impede integration.

The basic idea the “policy wonks” are proposing is kindergarten simple – when zoning restricts the supply of something, the price of that thing goes up, and some people who would like to have that thing have to do without. So what we need to do is find ways to promote zoning rules that allow residential density to increase, and commercial intensity to increase along with it, without allowing drastic, sudden changes in the character of the neighborhood.

financial crisis and the right wing

According to Vox, there is strong statistical evidence that financial crises have tended to favor the right wing in Europe. And not just in the 1930s.

What does history have to say about the political after-effects of financial crises in modern democracies? Can we, over the long run of modern history, identify systematic shifts in the political landscape after financial crises? …

In a new paper (Funke et al 2015), we conduct the most comprehensive historical analysis on the political fall-out of financial crises to date. We trace the political history of 20 advanced democracies back to the 1870s and construct a dataset of more than 800 elections from 1870 to 2014. We then complement this dataset with existing data on more than 100 financial crises and with historical data on street protests (demonstrations, riots, and strikes)…

Our first main finding is that politics takes a hard right turn following financial crises. On average, far-right votes increase by about a third in the five years following systemic banking distress, as shown in Figure 1. This pattern is visible in the data both before and after WWII and is robust when controlling for economic conditions and different voting systems. The gains of extreme right-wing parties were particularly pronounced after the global crises of the 1920s/1930s and after 2008. However, we also find similar patterns after regional financial crises, such as the Scandinavian banking crises of the early 1990s. Moreover, we identify an important asymmetry in the political response to crises – on average, the far left did not profit equally from episodes of financial instability.

 

a million trees in New York

New York City has managed to get a million new trees in the ground. Planting a bunch of trees seems like a no-brainer to many of us who are familiar with the logic and evidence in favor of green infrastructure. But this can still be hard for cities. There is a vocal minority of citizens who hate trees. They’re a minority, but did I mention they’re vocal? Then, trees are not a huge expense in the big picture of all the things cities have to pay for, like police, courts, prisons and pensions for example, but their planting and especially maintenance sometimes falls to city departments who are under-funded in good times and the first to get hit by budget cuts in bad times.

New York seems to have gotten past these challenges with strong planning, strong leadership to actually implement the plan, and partnering with a non-profit entity which could really focus on this one mission.

A collaboration between New York City’s parks department and conservation nonprofit New York Restoration Project (NYRP), the initiative just succeeded in planting 1 million new trees in the city this decade. The final tree was planted last month, two years ahead of schedule. While cities like Los Angeles, Boston and Denver have all set the same goal, New York is the first to meet it.

Beyond 220,000 new street trees, MillionTreesNYC planted in parks, on public and private property, and in all five boroughs, increasing the city’s urban canopy by 20 percent.

While the city planted 70 percent of the trees in parks and on streets, NYRP was tasked with getting the remainder into public and private spaces, including hospitals, libraries, churches, public housing developments and private yards.

I do have to point out that “a million trees planted” almost certainly does not mean a net gain of a million trees. While the program was being implemented, some trees must have died of “natural” causes (air pollution, heat stress, poor soil, lack of water). Some also must have been removed for legitimate reasons in the course of construction and infrastructure projects, and if my personal experience in Philadelphia is any guide, not all of those got replanted (the vocal minority of citizens having something to do with this). But all this is exactly why focusing on tree canopy is exactly the right way to look at it. By setting a tree canopy goal and periodically measuring where you are relative to it, you should know if you are replacing the trees lost to attrition at the right rate to keep your overall canopy from dropping.

Jeffrey Sachs vs. the CIA

Jeffrey Sachs does not like the CIA.

The public has never really been told the true history of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Starting in 1979, the CIA mobilized, recruited, trained, and armed Sunni young men to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA recruited widely from Muslim populations (including in Europe) to form the Mujahideen, a multinational Sunni fighting force mobilized to oust the Soviet infidel from Afghanistan…

By promoting the core vision of a jihad to defend the lands of Islam (Dar al-Islam) from outsiders, the CIA produced a hardened fighting force of thousands of young men displaced from their homes and stoked for battle. It is this initial fighting force – and the ideology that motivated it – that today still forms the basis of the Sunni jihadist insurgencies, including ISIS. While the jihadists’ original target was the Soviet Union, today the “infidel” includes the US, Europe (notably France and the United Kingdom), and Russia…

Blowback against the US began in 1990 with the first Gulf War, when the US created and expanded its military bases in the Dar al-Islam, most notably in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s founding and holiest sites. This expanded US military presence was anathema to the core jihadist ideology that the CIA had done so much to foster.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say “violence is never the answer”. There are always bullies and thugs out there who will take advantage of you if they know you won’t defend yourself. But in the longer term, I think the answer to violence is always to find a way to de-escalate. People, particularly young men, need economic opportunity, and their legitimate grievances need to be identified and addressed. These are the root causes of most violence. After you figure out these two things, you can also think about how to alter any cultural norms that make violence seem okay, and limiting access to weapons. Finally, you can round up the remaining handful of hard core thugs and bullies if there are still some out there. All this is as true on the streets of an American city as it is in the Middle East. Note how both the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror” have gone about this in exactly the reverse order from what I just suggested – start with a violent military or law enforcement approach targeting a whole class of people, go after the weapons, and blame the culture. All this is great for business if you are part of the military-industrial or police-court-prison-industrial complex. If we address the root causes – legitimate grievances and lack of economic opportunity – at all, we tend to give them the least attention and funding.

paste clever title about Christmas and climate change here

We pretty much have to check in with Eric Holthaus over at Slate on the freak Christmas heat wave.

To be clear: Global warming wasn’t primarily to blame/thank for this weekend’s ridiculously warm weather. A record-breaking El Niño has shunted the jet stream far to the north, paving the way for warm air to shatter records. The lack of snow so far—that may change later on this winter—has also helped keep things warmer: Without snow on the ground, the feeble December sun can warm things up much more efficiently. Third on the list, bumping up temperatures by perhaps a couple of degrees, is global warming. (Though, recent science suggests super-strong El Niños like this one might become more common in the coming decades.) Blaming an exceptionally warm December day entirely on global warming is just as misplaced as senators seeking to use a snowball as proof against it. Climate change made this weekend’s warmth more likely, but it wasn’t the main driving force.

car-free cities

The Guardian has a nice run-down on the state of car-free developments around the world:

  • “Oslo revealed plans to ban all private vehicles from the centre by 2019″
  • “Helsinki has ambitious plans to make its “mobility on demand” service so good that nobody will want to drive a car in the centre by 2025”
  • “Paris’s car-free days have successfully reduced high pollution”
  • “New cities – such as the Great City on the outskirts of Chengdu, China, and Masdar near Abu Dhabi – plan to focus on mass transit or electric cars as alternatives to gas-guzzling private cars.”
  • “Venice is often cited as the largest car-free city, but they have it easy, with canals and rivers instead of streets.”
  • “Hamburg, on the other hand, is currently making waves by enforcing an auto-ban on a number of urban roads to develop a network of route for pedestrians and bikes that link parks and open spaces together.”
  • “Madrid, too, is focusing on the city at a human level, and recently hatched a plan to pedestrianise the urban core and expel cars by 2020.”
  • “Dublin and Brussels are also toying with the idea of kicking the habit through city centre diesel-car bans, with similar ideas proposed by Liberal Democrats in London following the VW emissions scandal.”
  • “Milan is offering public transit tokens to residents for every weekday they surrender their cars”
  • “Rome is slowly progressing with parking bans.”
  • ” Copenhagen. Unsurprisingly, large swathes of the Danish capital have been closed to vehicles for decades, with bicycle infrastructure reaching into every corner.”
  • “Every week in the Colombian capital [Bogota], over 75 miles of urban roads are shut to vehicles.”
  • “In Hyderabad’s IT corridor (dubbed “Cyberabad”), a recently launched weekly car ban marks a first for Indian cities”
  • in South Korea, a Suwon neighbourhood recently trialled a full month ban in September 2013, which inspired the wealthy Sandton area of Johannesburg to hosts its own car-free experiment last month.”
  • “Portland hopes to [have] 25% of trips made on two wheels by 2030.”
  • “While modal share for cycling just scrapes an average of 2% in the US, in Davis [California] it’s 20%.”
  • “Alongside the expansion of the subway system, segregated bike lanes are slowly creeping into North America’s fifth largest city [Toronto], and there are whispers around a potential car-free street during rush hour.”

Here in Philadelphia, we’re asking if a bike lane is still a bike lane several years after the paint wore off…

ecological civilization, and the bees from The X Files

We’re entering that time of year for look-backs and trend forecasts. Trends in Ecology and Evolution journal has A Horizon Scan of Global Conservation Issues for 2016:

This paper presents the results of our seventh annual horizon scan, in which we aimed to identify issues that could have substantial effects on global biological diversity in the future, but are not currently widely well known or understood within the conservation community. Fifteen issues were identified by a team that included researchers, practitioners, professional horizon scanners, and journalists. The topics include use of managed bees as transporters of biological control agents, artificial superintelligence, electric pulse trawling, testosterone in the aquatic environment, building artificial oceanic islands, and the incorporation of ecological civilization principles into government policies in China.

I vaguely remember that The X Files was obsessed with bees as delivery devices for smallpox, or aliens, or alien smallpox…

I hadn’t heard the phrase “ecological civilization” before. When I Google it I am finding references to statements by the Chinese government and quotes from Marx and Engels (who had a lot to say about depletion of natural resources by short-sighted profit seeking entities, although they might have objected to the term “natural capital”). Here is an article from The Diplomat, a respected international news magazine based in Tokyo:

The “ecological civilization” concept first appeared in 2007, in a report to the 17th National People’s Congress. At the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee in 2013, Xi stressed that China would implement “ecological civilization reforms” – reforms to reconcile contradictions between economic development and the environment. In April this year, the plan was restated, with the release of a document outlining the acceleration of moves to establish an ecological civilization.

Proposals include performing natural resources audits when local officials leave their posts, so as to force officials pay attention to environmental protection while in office, or be held to account when they leave. A pilot scheme will be carried out in five different locations, including Hulunbuir in Inner Mongolia. It is the first time such a trial has been proposed by the central government. It will take place in three stages: a launch this year, expansion next year, then in 2017 full audits in the trial locations, with regular audits starting from 2018. The aim is to get local officials to give greater priority to the environment, compared to the economy…

Sun Xinghua, deputy chair of the China Environmental Sciences Association’s auditing committee, told chinadialogue that “confirmation of property rights for natural resources has never been raised before.” Currently, ownership of natural resources in China is unclear. Clarification of rights and responsibilities will reduce disputes and allow for valuation of natural resources. And valuation will allow the compilation of tables of ‘natural resource debts’, removing a major obstacle to auditing of natural resources when local officials leave their posts.

That’s a pretty interesting idea – calculating a politician’s “debt to nature” based on policies they have chosen. You could even do that for, say, an entire legislature and display that number next to economic output statistics for their time in office.

the Paris agreement

There is plenty of media coverage on the Paris agreement by people more knowledgeable than me. Even though I’m not an expert, I like to skim the actual document and try to pull out a few key points myself, just like I do with the IPCC reports. I had to get all the way to page 21 to find what looks to me like the two most important provisions:

  • Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change

  • In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out in Article 2, Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.

The first paragraph (sentence? nobody does a run-on sentence like the United Nations) is notable because it appears to be a commitment among most of the nations of the world to a more aggressive target than the 2 degrees C that seemed all but abandoned just recently. The second paragraph is nice because it conveys clearly that the goal is not just for emissions to stop growing. They have to be rolled back to a level where they are not actually adding to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It seems like that would almost certainly have to mean an end to fossil fuel burning, unless carbon is being captured on a large scale.

A more pessimistic way of looking at it though is that the “second half of this century” ends in 2099, and this wording seems like it would let things keep getting worse until then, and then let them stay at whatever bad level they are at.

I suspect that technology is likely to make fossil fuels obsolete well before 2099, and if so these targets will require no action to achieve. If we are still around in 2099, we will probably have new opportunities and problems that are well beyond our wildest imaginations now.

abandoning Lake Powell


Lake Powell is on the Colorado upstream of the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, controlled by Glen Canyon Dam. Lake Mead is downstream of the Grand Canyon, controlled by Hoover Dam. With the decade-plus drought affecting the basin, there is actually talk of bypassing Glen Canyon Dam and just letting Lake Powell drain into Lake Mead.

One option involves filling Lake Mead first. This would allow Upper Basin water to flow past Glen Canyon Dam for storage in Lake Mead. A legal analysis published in The Water Report, issue 112, concluded that the plan doesn’t violate the Compact, because the counting point for Upper Basin water deliveries could be moved downstream, from Lees Ferry to Hoover Dam. Another option is to release water through Glen Canyon Dam’s river outlet works at 3,374-foot elevation. There’s also the option of drilling bypass tunnels — as former Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy once suggested.

Upper Basin officials say that losing generation at Glen Canyon would cause a “spike” in electric power prices, raising rates by as much as 500 percent. This is highly unlikely. Glen Canyon Dam’s power may be marketed to 174 Southwestern utilities and providers, yet it contributes less than 1 percent of the total capacity of the Western power grid. There are also alternative power sources available.

If Glen Canyon Dam went offline, gas-fired power plants could instantly meet the demand at a similar cost. In fact, given Lake Powell’s recent decline, the dam has already been producing only 60 percent of its generating capacity. Yet no electricity rate “spikes” have occurred.