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School vouchers won’t solve educational or environmental problems

Dan Akst contends that a program of school vouchers is what's needed to solve this country's sprawl problem by encouraging otherwise flight-prone would-be suburbanites to stay in the city, thereby easing the push to city outskirts. Well shucks. It's an interesting argument, for a minute at least. OK, less than a minute. After that, the argument can be seen for what it is: a vaguely environmental rationale to justify defunding public education, while perpetrating the rich-poor, class, and race divides in our society.

School vouchers would neither improve schools, decrease pollution, nor curb sprawl -- the essay's central contentions. Not in the world of "Hobsonia" and its supermarkets, and not in real-life America. What vouchers would do is defund the public schools that need the most help, keep the vast array of suburbanites right where they are, and leave pollution completely untouched.

An obvious first question for Akst is: If bad schools really are the reason most people flock to the suburbs from the city (an argument that selectively ignores factors like race, class, and cultural perceptions as embodied in the phenomenon of "white flight"), and that really is what's been fueling sprawl (not, say, poor growth-management policies, developer shortcuts, Wal-Marts, and the like), wouldn't policies to improve schools be the best prescription on all fronts, starting with the very basic but crucial reform of funding public schools more equally by changing the way they're funded (primarily through property taxes -- virtually assuring greater per-student expenditures in wealthier neighborhoods), and not by abandoning the very schools everyone is fleeing?

Well, no, Akst's essay asserts. Substantive solutions that try to address the real problems with ailing schools won't work, silly. And why not? Well, because Akst's friends who agree that meaningful change is needed have kids that mostly go to schools in the suburbs. (A convoluted argument, at best, but it's there nonetheless: "These views are held by most of the caring people I know, but I notice that hardly any of them send their kids to an inner-city school," which can only mean the arguments themselves are invalid ...) But stay tuned, kids. The essay's almost wholesale disregard of logic doesn't stop there.

Reducing energy use painlessly

Via Matt, an intriguing (though troublingly citation-free) case by John Quiggin that the energy-use reductions required to curb climate change are achievable through a combination of thoughtful public policy and rising prices -- without any particular damage to our standard of living. Definitely worth a read.

A common estimate is that to stabilise the global climate, we would need to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 60 per cent, and proposals to achieve this by 2050 have been put forward. Assuming only a limited role for alternative energy sources, it seems reasonably to look at a 50 per cent reduction in primary energy use.

It’s a widely-held view that the kinds of changes required to stabilise the global climate must imply a fairly radical reduction in our material standard of living. This view is shared by radical environmentalists, who see such a reduction as a good thing, and by opponents of such changes most of whom, at least in developed countries are on the free-market right.

The fact that radical environmentalists view the modern economy as critically dependent on unsustainable patterns of energy use is not surprising. On the other hand, supporters of the free-market generally praise the flexibility of dynamism. Currently, energy use accounts for about 6 per cent of GDP. The suggestion that reducing this proportion to, say, 3 per cent, is beyond our capacity seems to represent a very pessimistic view of our economic potential.

...

Given a consistent upward trend in prices and a coherent set of public policies, massive reductions in energy use would follow as surely as night follows day.

Oil’s tentacles

The Wall Street Journal (sorry, sub. only) offers just a teeny tiny glimpse of what genuine oil shortages might look like with a story on all the other industries suffering from the oil-supply damage done by the hurricanes.

The recent hurricanes are sending aftershocks through manufacturers who depend on materials derived from petroleum and natural gas, such as foam and resin. Producers of furniture, building materials, tires and even golf balls are feeling the pain of storm-related shortages and soaring prices for key raw materials.

If oil goes up another $10 or $20, you'll see the list of industries "feeling pain" grow much longer.

Kyoto back in the spotlight

Here's an obscure but significant piece of news:

Remember that Asia-Pacific climate pact that was announced to great fanfare in July? Though the participating governments -- U.S., China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Australia -- denied it, it was widely seen as an attempt to establish an alternative to Kyoto, one that conspicuously involved no mandatory emissions cuts.

Heightening that impression was the stated plan to hold the inaugural ministerial meeting in November, thus stealing the spotlight from the next round of U.N. climate talks to be held in Montreal on Nov. 28.

Well, now that inaugural Asia-Pacific meeting has been postponed -- until January at the earliest, probably longer. Depending on your perspective, this could mean:

• that, as FoE's Stephanie Long puts it, "Nothing has happened to take this pact forwards, there's been nothing to disclose what it would entail, and it doesn't seem like it's as important to get around the table as it was to announce the setting up of this pact" -- in other words, the countries just couldn't get their shit together to make this fantasy any kind of tangible reality;
• the pendulum of international opinion is swinging back toward Kyoto-style mandatory cuts;
• oh, gosh, nothing, just some bureaucratic details that need to be ironed out.

The best idea I never had

Just learned of a new site, Since Sliced Bread, that's looking for "fresh, common-sense ideas" to perk the country up. The bestest will score $100,000.

This contest, sponsored by the Service Employees International Union, is already inspiring fantasies like, oh, universal health care and interstate rail systems. Crazy! (It also oughta prove the "it takes all kinds" theory, if the drinking shirt is any indication.)

So go forth and idea-ify. And share the prize with me, will ya? I'm fresh out.

Good, if hopeless, ideas on how to rebuild N.O.

It sure would be nice if New Orleans were rebuilt according to the principles of sustainability, wouldn't it? In a way that puts it in balance with nature? A way that's more equitable for the poor and disadvantaged? A way that could serve as an example of state-of-the-art urban design?

... wait for it ...

And a pony!

Back in the real world, the same people who ran the "reconstruction" of Iraq are running this gig. Literally: several of the officials who worked in Iraq are being hired by the companies contracted to work in N.O. Money is flooding in, accountability and transparency are completely absent, and the forces of good are being caught flat-footed. Expect travesty.

But still, we can dream. If we did have a responsible, imaginative government, what would the rebuilding process look like? Turns out the editors of Environmental Building News have a fantastic piece about just this subject. Read the whole thing -- seriously -- but here are the 10 steps they lay out:

Burning in New Orleans

Don't miss Carl Pope on the decidedly brown clean-up techniques being used by the recipients of the no-bid contracts for New Orleans remediation. In particular: they're burning the debris, which is likely loaded with toxic chemicals.

This, of course is the same reckless approach to cleaning up after a disaster that the Bush administration adopted in its official disaster response plans for another terrorist attack after 9/11. A Sierra Club analysis discovered that the Administration had decided that in another terrorist attack it would "waive" cleanup standards otherwise required under federal law, and that devastated communities would be left contaminated forever. We protested at the time that it seemed clinically insane to say that, if terrorists attacked a community, it would not get the same kind of protection and cleanup that would follow a natural disaster. Now it turns out that we hadn't heard the sound of the second shoe dropping. The response to Katrina shows that our government has no intention of protecting communities after they suffer any disaster, whether natural or terrorist.

Naked Lunch

Naked Chef hits reality TV to press for healthy, green school lunches Every day, at thousands of schools across the U.S., kids eat crap — over-processed, nutrient-poor, canned, just-add-water, microwaved mystery-meat crap. Not that we have any bitter memories. But a champion of healthy, eco-friendly, locally produced school food for American children has arisen — […]

How many kudos does Bush deserve for endorsing conservation?

George W. Bush recently endorsed energy conservation. How much credit does he deserve?

The other post-Katrina recommendations featured in yesterday's press conference include trimming back environmental regulation on oil refineries, giving the feds siting authority over said refineries, and trimming money from Medicare, Medicaid, and the food-stamp program to pay for hurricane cleanup. No military or homeland-security programs will be touched, nor will there be any pause in the serial tax cuts for the rich.

Oh, and in the event of an avian flu outbreak, U.S. military grunts may be used as quarantine-enforcing first responders. Throw ya hands up for the Posse Comitatus Act! No, seriously. Put your hands up.

How much credit? Not so much.

Why the environmentalists shouldn’t ignore the ground beneath their feet

"Common as dirt," goes the old insult. Despite its antique nature, the saying may sum up industrial (and post-industrial) society's take on soil: low, squalid, filthy, annoyingly abundant, beneath dignity and respect.

Consider the zeal to clean, to wash, to sterilize and scrub. Claudia Hemphill, a doctoral student in environmental science at the University of Idaho, has been doing some interesting work on the recent social history of soil. As U.S. society mutated from primarily rural to overwhelmingly urban and suburban in the span of less than a century -- today less than 3 percent of the population engages directly in agriculture -- dirt came to be demonized, Hemphill argues.

By the dawn of the 20th century, when immigrants (many of them former farmers) and our own displaced rural populations flocked to U.S. cities, they found themslves confronted with a stark public-health slogan: "Dirt, Disease and Death."

A society washing its hands of agriculture didn't want dirt clinging to its trousers. Hence the cult of detergent.