Articles by David Roberts

Are the Big Three just ghostwriting WaPo editorials now?

The Washington Post editorial board, drifting ever farther right, covers its Auto Alliance position on CAFE with a shiny, self-righteous veneer of Krauthammerian posturing on gas taxes.

Question of the day

Was Joel Kotkin always this loopy?

Reducing regulatory interference and barriers to clean energy — all at once

Creating a 21st century electrical grid is finally a priority and the possibilities seem enormous. Despite the grand potential, though, many of the most important decisions will involve painstaking regulatory and tax reform rather than sweeping mandates. What's politically intriguing about these reforms is that at least in principle they ought to appeal across ideological lines: Conservatives like less regulation and more rational tax policy, and progressives like removing barriers to renewable energy, so this seems like fertile territory for odd bedfellows.

In that vein I recommend two pieces, both adapted from reports from the conservative Manhattan Institute.

The first is "Growing NYC's Grid," an excellent piece in the New York Post from Hope Cohen of MI's Center for Rethinking Development. It notes a simple barrier to expanding the city's grid: transformers, the facilities that take high-voltage juice from transmission lines and convert it to lower-voltage juice for distribution lines, can only be built on industrially zoned property, which is increasingly rare and expensive in urban areas.

But today's transformers are smaller, quieter, and cleaner than they were when zoning regs were passed, and can be integrated into the urban landscape. (There's one in the base of 7 World Trade Center.) A simple regulatory change -- allowing transformers in commercially zoned areas -- can boost the reliability and efficiency of NYC's power. Imagine how many more rules and laws there are like this across the country.

For more on this, see Cohen's full report, "The Neighborly Substation: Electricity, Zoning, and Urban Design."

NYT gets schooled by readers on efficiency

Last week The New York Times had an editorial singing the praises of energy efficiency. It wasn't bad, nor particularly great -- mixing up conservation with efficiency, focusing too much on oil/transportation, and never giving a decent sense of scale.

On Sunday, however, came a battery of letters in response to the editorial, all of which are excellent and all of which expand the focus in new ways. One of them is from Tom Casten, father of our own Sean and champion of recycled energy. Another emphasizes steady long-term research; several praise solar power's potential; another notes the key role of walkable communities and transit; another mentions meat consumption.

There's a lot of untapped, unaggregated expertise out there on this. I hope the NYT notices the great feedback and pursues the issue further. Imagine how much efficiency we could wring out of our economy if we had the whole culture focused on it.