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A grim vision of the future mega-city.

Mere moments ago I was whinging about Seattle being unable to build the monorail, paralyzed by an excess of open, transparent democratic process. Then I read this -- "Camel trainers claim that the children's shrieks of terror spur the animals to a faster effort." -- and I remembered that there are worse problems to have than too much democracy.

That problem certainly does not plague Dubai, the subject of a mind-bendingly fascinating essay from Mike Davis (author of City of Quartz, among other books), hosted on Tom's Dispatch.

The Persian Gulf city-state is rapidly being fashioned into a kind of massive walled community for the global wealthy and dissolute:

Free parking is bad, bad, bad.

So what, exactly, do nuns drive? 

Don't search for the punchline; it's an important question raised by Governing Magazine's Alan Ehrenhalt in his recent, useful recap of Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking:

How many parking spaces should a convent be legally required to provide? If you immediately answered "zero," then you probably have some common sense. Parking at a convent shouldn't be a zoning question.

Shoup condemns zoning laws that require businesses to provide free parking without much regard to type of business and neighborhood. Ehrenhalt notes in his article the appropriately large fuss Shoup makes about a pesky little document published decades ago by the Institute of Transportation Engineers called "Parking Generation," which zoning officials still frequently use to guide city policy. It recommends that businesses -- from convents to taxi stands (!) -- maintain enough free parking spaces that "virtually every driver will be able to find one virtually all the time."

Pick on the bad guys, not the kinda bad guys who claim to be good.

I've said before that the unremitting negativity of the environmental movement toward corporations bugs me. I'm fully aware of the evils committed by corporations, but the tactic seems to be to find those that are talking about green issues and accuse them of hypocrisy, thus creating a massive disincentive. The lesson for corporations is: keep quiet.

But don't we want them talking about green issues?

The example I always use is Ford -- Bill Ford is, by all accounts, a committed environmentalist and has been pushing against the massive inertia of the Ford bureaucracy to do some good things (yes, yes, with limited success). But because the Ford fleet overall still has poor fuel efficiency, Bill ends up getting compared to Dick Cheney. Could anything be more insulting? The lesson for Bill -- or rather, for the Ford board of directors -- is: lower our profile on environmental issues. Don't draw the attention of the greens.

Yeah, so, that bugs me. And yet for some reason, this bugs me too. I guess the lesson is that everything bugs me and I should relax. Perhaps drink more.

Oh, wait! Here's something that doesn't bug me: ExxposeExxon, the new coalition trying to put together a boycott of Exxon. (Okay, the spelling bugs me, but ... baby steps.)

The problem with Exxon, you see, is not that they're saying one thing and doing another. It's that they're doing malignant things. Evil, not hypocrisy, is Public Enemy No. 1.

Is local government corruption required to get mass transit moving?

Robert Farley speculates that more corruption in local government might be just the trick in getting mass transit projects built, using as his example the endlessly stalled Seattle monorail. Matt Yglesias links approvingly and says:

The problem with this, of course, is that insofar as corruption is driving your infrastructure investment, you wind up paying a certain "corruption premium" on your investments -- i.e., they're suboptimally efficient.

Nevertheless, it turns out to be the case that America significantly underinvests in public infrastructure from a purely economic point of view under the status quo. Thus, the corruption premium might very well be a price worth paying to rectify structural underinvestment in the infrastructure sector. What's more, public capital is good for social equality above and beyond its economic benefits. ... Realistically speaking, you never get public infrastructure under ideal conditions -- the only alternative is too little infrastructure, and that's worse.

I don't really have anything to say about this. I just find it amusing.

(As a Seattleite, I would break some knees myself at this point to get the #%$! monorail going.)

Get a free (Terra)Pass for $79.95

For you all SUV drivers who fear the "eco-terrorists" mentioned here, and must continue to drive said SUVs, there is some potentially good news: TerraPass decals.

In Washington, DC, eco-vandals smear SUV door handles with dog crap. In Santa Cruz, California, protestors tag more than 60 gas-guzzlers with anti-oil graffiti. In Los Angeles, a Caltech grad student is sentenced to eight years in prison for trashing more than 120 SUVs around the city. It's almost enough to make you feel bad for SUV drivers. After all, some of them are green, too - just not as hardcore about it.

Now they have TerraPass, a clever eco-capitalism experiment. Launched by a group of Wharton Business School classmates, the startup sells a decal that drivers can slap on their windshields. The sticker price - $79.95 for SUVs, less for greener cars - gets invested in renewable energy projects and credits. The credits are traded through local brokers on the new Chicago Climate Exchange.

To purchase your decal, or to learn more, do not pass Go and head directly to the TerraPass website.

(Via Wired)

[editor's note, by Chris Schults] And to read Grist's piece on the aforementioned Chicago Climate Exchange go here.

Necessary evil, or just evil?

The other day Clark expressed some ambivalence about cost-benefit analyses in the realm of environmental policy.

It so happens Dan Phaneuf at the Environmental Economics blog has some thoughts on that very matter.

For my part, I think Phaneuf -- whose comments are generally quite sensible -- underplays the risks of CBA. He acknowledges:

The Toxic Avoider

EPA failing to get health data on scads of potentially harmful chemicals The U.S. EPA hasn’t collected data on the potential risks of tens of thousands of toxic substances, putting the public at risk, says a new report from the Government Accountability Office. Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, which regulates industrial chemicals, the […]

Bad for the Fish, Good for the Grist Swim Team

Warmer waters put wildlife under deadly stress along Pacific Coast Freaky environmental anomalies along the Pacific Coast from central California to British Columbia may devastate the region’s wildlife, scientists say. Ocean temperatures in the area are 2 to 5 degrees higher than usual this summer; no one’s sure why, but scientists suspect a lack of […]

Sewage in the kitchen?

Well, perhaps just the methane from the sewage, to cook our food.

This vision, swinging dramatically across the olfactory spectrum, is part of sustainability architect William McDonough's plan for seven new Chinese cities. The Chinese government has taken McDonough's book Cradle to Cradle on as policy for what he calls the "Next City." Read more at BBC.

Mayors meet at that other Sundance for greener cities

Mayors from over 45 cities met this week in Sundance -- Sundance, Utah, that is -- to brainstorm on ways to make their cities greener and build on the momentum created by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' recent initiative to cut cities' greenhouse emissions, which he discussed with Amanda Griscom Little in Grist.

The Sundance Summit gathered mayors from some of the "usual suspects" (Seattle, Burlington, Berkeley) as well as some not-so-usual suspects (Des Moines, D.C., Pittsburgh, and two cities in Texas). The Summit featured talks by Al Gore, a representative from the Chicago Climate Exchange, and an attorney from the NRDC.

From the Seattle PI article:

"All of our major big boxes have to do green roofs," [Chicago Mayor] Daley said at actor Robert Redford's Sundance mountain resort just east of Provo. "When big boxes come to see us, we change their architecture. ... Everything's a planned development."

Making big boxes change their architecture? Imagine!

If these initiatives take root, and if I'm reading Dave's Sustainablog post correctly, this is an example of ecological "handprint" as opposed to footprint. It's also probably closer to the order of 1 percent reduction of "insult to the earth" rather than .000000000000167 percent.