Christmas Letter 2008

This is a time of paradox in our lives. For all of us, in the United States and around the globe, it is a season of hope—for change and for a better day to come. The recent election, though not the ultimate victory over our tragic past, has moved us many steps closer to the beloved kingdom that, each in his or her own way, we all seek.

Yet this is also a time of near-despair. Our livelihoods and ways of living are under threat, not only from economic collapse, but also from the prospect that our planet itself, the underpinning of our very existence, may break down. We are living with hope. And we are also living with despair.

This is the paradox of our time. Yet the tension between opposites—between hope and despair, joy and sadness, even good and evil—can be a creative force in our lives and in the world. That is why this is also a time of great possibility. As individuals, as a nation, and as a global people, we can still create our future. Fear tells us we must find new ways to live with each other and with the earth; hope tells us that we can.

We have already begun. This year, let us celebrate that fact and draw strength for the future from it.

A Follow-Up Note

Just over two years ago, I posted a three-part series on a proposal to build a ten-story parking lot (instead of the originally proposed condominium) in the heart of Philadelphia's downtown. The series can be found at "Design for What," Part I; Part II; and Part III.

In the intervening two years, the developer has found enough tenants to justify building the full condominium, and the building's exterior is nearly complete. While this outcome does little to address other issues discussed in the post, such as creating jobs in the city and the proliferation of parking lots, it is at least better than a parking garage, however "beautiful" (the developer's term when making the proposal).

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Suggestions for Rebuilding

President-elect Obama's economic recovery program includes a great deal of funding for infrastructure repair and green development. Herewith a few suggestions for infrastructure repair that would also be green development—and good strategy as well.

Rebuild the Railroads: The United States was once the leader in developing railroads. Now, as its rail system has been allowed to decay, it has fallen far behind other developed countries and some, like China, that are still emerging. Environmentally and strategically this makes no sense. Rail transport is the most efficient way to move freight, far more efficient than trucking goods or flying them. With better track and rolling stock, freight hauling by rail would be competitive with trucking—as it has to be if we are to cut greenhouse gas emissions and become less dependent on imported fuel.

Make Passenger Rail Competitive: For those seeking alternatives to driving or flying, passenger rail is frequently not an option. Trains are infrequent, sometimes more costly, and often much slower than they could be with improved track and rolling stock. As with freight, rail is the most efficient way to move passengers. It makes little sense to continue policies that encourage air travel, or even driving, when investing in passenger rail—even subsidizing it—would save fuel and cut emissions.

Connect the Dots: Fuel prices, although temporarily in retreat, will not remain low indefinitely. The supply of oil for making gasoline is finite, and the cost of extracting it will go up, not down, in the future. Over time, this will doom the U.S. suburbs to—depending on who is talking—decline or collapse. The suburbs may be, as James Howard Kunstler maintains, the worst misallocation of funds in recent memory; but they are there, and people live in them. The best way to make them viable again is to connect them with rapid, efficient public transport—light rail for preference, or low-emission buses.

Create Walkability: Walkable neighborhoods are in vogue for good reason. They are the future, if we are to have one. In the long term, it would make sense to give businesses incentives to build stores within walking distance (or easy public transport distance) of the dots which the infrastructure package has just connected. This would make it easier for us to lower our dependence on the private car, and hence lower emissions and dependence on imported fuel.

All of these items would cost money—as would other components of any stimulus package worth doing. But unlike simply repairing roads and bridges, however much they need repair, these suggestions would build for a future of high fuel prices and environmental constraints. That, after all, is the future that we face.

Further Thoughts

Coordinate Electric Cars and Public Transport: Commentator Lorcan suggests that roads should be made electric-car ready so that rail passengers could take the train to a depot or station, then pick up an electric car for the trip to their final destination. This imaginative suggestion echos Israeli architect and planner Moshe Safdie's concept of the utility car, which would be available for short trips at transit points like train stations. His book, The City After the Automobile, repays study. By making roads electric-car ready, I assume Lorcan means adding electric car battery-charging stations at intervals on the roads—also a fine suggestion.

The larger issue here is whether we can coordinate our transportation system to encourage users to take the most efficient transport mode for their journey. A future post will address this question.

Mountaintop Removal: Lorcan also argues for abandoning the notion of "clean coal" as a dead end and ending mountaintop removal. Both are important points. For a discussion of mountaintop removal, see "The Price of Coal" on this blog.

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Alison Arieff on Water Management

Alison Arieff's latest By Design column gives a good summary of possible solutions to the problem of water. Well worth reading.

Bailing Out Futility

As anyone who follows the news knows, the United States automobile industry is in trouble. Sales are down, particularly among sport utility vehicles (SUVs), which appeared to save the industry for a few years and are now killing it. So the Big Three, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors, are seeking a government loan. Ford claims that it has enough cash to keep going, but supports the bailout because a General Motors bankruptcy, which is the most likely, would devastate the industry, threaten the livelihood of auto parts makers, and worsen an already grim economic situation.

There is no doubt that a sudden collapse of the auto industry would be ruinous for auto workers, parts suppliers, and the general economy—though perhaps less so for top management at the Big Three, who arrived in Washington separately in private jets and would no doubt escape the wreckage with very fat wallets, as did the CEOs of Hewlett-Packard, Lehman Brothers, and various hedge funds before them. The major question, which Congress is right to ask, is whether a bailout would merely reward bad management without changing a badly-flawed industry very much, if at all.

The auto industry's problem has little to do with costly union contracts and pensions, although these are favorite scapegoats among conservative commentators. A thriving, far-seeing, and innovative industry could pay the contracts and pensions and still make money. But an industry which has tried to thrive by fighting fuel economy requirements and basing its future on SUVs and pickup trucks is neither far-seeing nor innovative. The car companies have used more ingenuity in blocking and trying to avoid fuel economy legislation than they have in adapting to a world with limited and expensive fuel supplies.

It is as simple as this: Oil, which fuels the automobile fleet, is becoming harder to extract and will be more expensive in the long term. Americans are driving less, and many who were interviewed by news agencies intend to drive less in the future even if the price of gasoline comes down because they know the price drop will be temporary. Fuel economy, not size or power, is the new standard for judging cars.

Climate change also factors into buying decisions for many Americans. This reinforces the need for fuel economy and will make low-carbon cars, if they come on the market, very popular.

On fuel economy and low emissions, American car makers have done little or nothing. They did not, for example, develop hybrid technology. They fought gas mileage regulations. They concentrated on building and selling SUVs, which, because they are built around a truck chassis, are technically trucks and not subject to the same requirements as passenger cars. Now General Motors has discovered hybrids, electric cars, and hydrogen-powered vehicles. But they made little or no effort to do so in the past twenty years.

There is a larger problem, not yet discussed, that will become urgent in the long run: The private car as a major people-mover is beginning to see the end of its days. It is simply too expensive and inefficient to remain the transportation of choice much longer. Already, public transit in the United States is seeing large increases in ridership, which it is ill-prepared to handle because we have starved it of resources. Over the next 20-30 years, as fuel becomes even more expensive, this trend is likely to continue. We will still have cars, but they will not be the main part of our transportation system.

There is no reason why car makers cannot adapt to this situation by diversifying into public transit vehicles, but the Big Three have not done so. Instead, they have behaved as if oil is a renewable resource and the chief problem facing them is increasing sales.

Bailing out the car industry in its current form would reward not only bad management, but a disastrous vision of the future. Instead, Congress might consider a different financial aid package that would encourage the car makers to innovate, help displaced workers, and build for a long run in which we must use less fossil fuel. Some elements of that package might include:

• Making the whole package contingent on a commitment by the automakers to develop fuel-efficient vehicles and to seek a minimum efficiency of 50 mpg (already common in Europe) within ten years.
  
• Increasing and extending unemployment benefits so that people displaced by necessary changes (even bankruptcies) in the auto industry need not suffer.
  
• Making additional funds available to help automakers develop and retool for innovative public transit solutions. These funds would be contingent on automakers' developing a plan for the new work, and supervision of their use would be strict to keep them from being used for business as usual. And finally,
  
• Making the whole package contingent on replacing the management which has so badly failed a major industry with people of vision and imagination.

These measures, even taken together, would not solve all the problems of the auto industry or transportation in the U.S. But they would be a start. Whether the Congress has the vision to consider them or something like them is another question—and perhaps the most difficult of all.

What to Do with a Big Box Store

If you set out to deliberately build an unsustainable retailing structure, you could hardly do worse than the big box store. Unattractive, surrounded by acres of parking lots, and closed off from the outside world, the big box store comes close to violating every rule of sustainable and beautiful building. It is a sad legacy of the move to the suburbs.

It becomes even worse when it fails. Stores close, developers abandon it and move on, and it becomes a ghost. (See the three-part series in this blog on Dead Spaces: Part I; Part 2; Part 3.) The ghosts of big box stores complicate water runoff, contribute to climate change even when no one uses the parking lot, and are even more ugly than their live big box cousins.

In the long run, the big box store will almost certainly succumb to rising fuel prices and environmental constraints. The major question is what to do with the buildings and parking lots that remain when a big box store is abandoned. Tearing it down is one possibility, but this is both unimaginative and (because of the building materials used in most big box structures) hazardous to the environment.

Now the Washington Post has assembled a team of artists, architects, engineers, and developers to come up with creative suggestions for recycling these dead spaces. The article by Joel Garreau, repays study. The Post's team has some imaginative suggestions, with artists' renderings that bring them to life.

One doesn't have to agree with all the suggestions to see that this is a good start toward resolving an issue that we face even as I write and will face more urgently in the future.

An Argument to Nowhere

Climate skeptics set great store by the argument that science has not "definitively proved" that human actions are the cause of global warming. The chief problem with this argument is that it goes against the scientific consensus and the evidence, but there is another criticism, less-noted but equally compelling: It does not support the policies that the skeptics think it does.

Skeptics, among them Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (insofar as I can make out what she is saying), are fond of simply stating that there is doubt about the role of human activity in climate change, as if because of this we need not worry about our use of fossil fuels. The implication (never stated) is that we are free to drive to our heart's content in ever-bigger cars, build a new coal-fired electric plant each week, and clear as much rain forest as we like. Nothing of the sort, however, follows. The argument is a kind of bridge to nowhere—or more accurately, to an uninhabitable planet.

What the skeptics have done is to assume that the only reason to cut back on fossil fuels is the danger of global warming. If we can't prevent it whatever we do, then we do not have to change.

Not quite. The reasons to cut back on fossil fuels are many, and they would be persuasive even if the skeptics were right and climate change were beyond human control. Some of the arguments below apply to all countries; others apply chiefly to the West and the United States. None depend on any particular explanation of climate change.

• Fossil fuels are a major source of pollution. This summer's questions about air quality in Beijing were not about long-term climate change, but about short-term clouds of unbreathable smog and how they might affect the summer Olympics. Chinese authorities dealt with the problem by restricting automobile traffic. The smog level dropped, although Beijing's air quality probably remained poor because of China's heavy dependence on coal. It would be hard to imagine a more concrete demonstration of the role of fossil fuels in air pollution. Fewer cars on the road=less fossil fuel emissions=less smog.
  
• Fossil fuels are expensive and often dangerous to produce. Coal mining is known to be a dangerous profession with a long list of mining disasters and tragedies in every major coal producing country. Oil drilling, while not as hazardous as mining, has become more expensive as producers turn to sources like oil shale which are more difficult to extract.
  
• Even before they are burned, fossil fuels create environmental hazards. Oil, for instance, must be transported to markets, generally by ship, with the risk of accidents and spills. The best-known of these was the Exxon-Valdez oil spill. Pipelines, while generally safer than ships, also damage the environment where they are laid.
  
• For the West, and particularly the United States, dependence on fossil fuel is bad strategy. In the summer of 2008, for example, Russian troops invaded Georgia. Although Georgia had attacked first, the Russian action was universally condemned—but the West could actually do little or nothing. Military action was out of the question because of the danger that Russia might resort to nuclear weapons, and an economic boycott was impractical because Europe was heavily dependent on Russia for its fuel supplies. Some like Thomas Friedman argue that the West's use of fossil fuels helps to fund "petro-dictatorships" and, indirectly, terrorist groups. Depending on a resource that funds those who might attack you is not especially good strategy.
  
• "Energy Independence" based on increased production of oil is not possible for the U.S. or the West. The arithmetic is simple and irrefutable. The U.S. controls just over 11% of the oil reserves in North America, or less than 3% of world reserves. Europe controls about 1% of the world's oil. Independence from foreign sources, at least at current consumption levels, is a myth.

The climate skeptics are, of course, wrong. All the evidence and the consensus of the science community says that humans have helped to create global warming and can help to alleviate by changing their way of life. But climate change is not the only reason to change. As the (admittedly incomplete) list above shows, there are many others.