Environment and Energy - All Comments

The Cheapest Option For Thirsty Cities

Environment and Energy — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:01:09 GMT

The New Yorker 's Ryan Lizza pointed to Colorado's Front Range as a window into the political

re: The Future of Dirt

teplukhin2you — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:15:41 GMT

Interesting. The amateur farmers I'm acquainted with, from the midwest and from Russia, have always used charcoal and ash as fertilizer. IIRC "terra preta" is portuguese for "black earth", which is how my Illinois forbears and the Ukrainians bolack earth"th refer to their extraordinarily productive soil. Wonder whether they share a high carbon content.

re: The Worst Sort of Gridlock

JEFF FREY — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:35:35 GMT

r-ennis said:

I didn't say that the grid was not necessary. Only that it will be way more expensive and time consuming than assumed by laymen. And, yes, transmission losses are horrendous in bringing Great Plains power to the coasts. I have a friend who may have a good estimate.

I have a friend who for a while wrote some of the stuff that go in the inserts the power companies send with your bills. I recall him saying that the transmission losses were large, but I don't remember the specifics. So I'd like to see your friend's estimate. I am not surprised that the losses are horrendous, and I think they can be reduced dramatically, although I don't know what the real technical limits might be. I suspect it is a great target for conservation savings, and it might pay for a significant fraction of the cost of the upgrade, over enough time (the sticking point being that the people who pay and the people who save may not be the same, which makes it harder for any market solution to work).

I am lukewarm about offshore drilling and ANWR, although I think eventually we will drill there. Only a question of when and under what environmental rules. Shale production worries me because of the energy cost of producing oil from oil shale. Like with ehtanol, I am not sure it buys us very much if we count it in the ultimate currency: energy. And like the oil sands production featured here a few days ago, I wonder if it is actually sustainable.

Do you really think that wind power generation would slow down or disrupt winds to a degree that it might have an effect. I find that very unlikely from conservation of momentum considerations, but if you have some numbers that contradict my intuition then I would like to see them.

re: How Important Are The Next Eight Years?

aeromonas — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:29:18 GMT

"Tipping point" is another name for "positive feedback loop."

Methane aside, the simplest positive feedback loop having to do with arctic icemelt is a function of albedo, the proportion of incident solar energy absorbed per unit of land or sea surface, the remainder being reflected back to space. Sea ice's albedo is, I think, roughly 0.2, i.e. ice reflects 80% of solar energy back to outer space, whereas sea water's albedo is roughly 0.9, meaning that sea water reflects only 10% of solar energy to space. Thus the warmer the arctic gets, the more the sea ice melts, the more the Arctic Ocean retains incident solar energy, the warmer the arctic gets, the more the sea ice melts, and so on.

It's good to try to do something about climate change and if Obama gets elected maybe we will take a tilt at it within the next 8 years, but I still hold that one of the following three scenarios is much more likely:

1. Significant climate change happens but turns out not to be that big a deal. Humankind adapts slowly over the next two centuries and moves on without much pain.

2. Significant climate change happens and turns out to be a very big deal. The initial shocks are big enough and obvious enough to clue everyone into the danger and spur some higher speed adaptation on the part of humankind. Civilization limps forward in a damaged, diminished world.

3. Signigicant climate change happens and turns out to be an unmitigated disaster triggering widespread crop failures and/or nuclear war. Billions of people die. Civilization collapses.

re: California's New Pitch For Density

singlespeed — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:26:43 GMT

$2.4M? Damn man...

California, to me, has never been cheap. It's perception of high real estate begets high real estate and when I read articles about post-WW2 700SF bungalows in LA going for high $500K I get sticker shock.

Guess those fly-over states like Colorado still hold appeal to me. I can't wait to get out of the DC area.

re: California's New Pitch For Density

teplukhin2you — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:04:37 GMT

single - I wish them well, and certainly would love to see them succeed. We would love to able to walk to the nearest equivalent of a downtown and in fact went (casually) house-hunting in that town last weekend. The houses we had our eyes on-- nothing special, really, 70+ year-old, ~ 2,000 sq ft houses with some character and within a 1.5 mi walk to dntn-- averaged $2.4m. Oh well.

re: California's New Pitch For Density

singlespeed — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:48:43 GMT

Tep..

You're right about Tyson's corner. But that also suffers from not being planned for either pedestrians nor mass-transit access in the first place. That's a case of building a new shopping center, then office towers came next, a few hotels and voila! The isolated business center. It's neither very walkable or very amenable to anyone. What's happening elsewhere, like Denver and it's now suburban towns like Arvada, is that most of these new TODs are very much near working class neighborhoods of the first suburb kind. Post WW 2 housing with yards, etc. Folks that have lived and watched their neighborhood go from good to bad to wasteland to good again with a resurgence of families that don't want the city proper lifestyle but don't want the exurb lifestyle either. They get access to quality schools and a greater density.

Sure you can have skepticism but there are folks who are moving into these areas and they're not 'tony' by any stretch of means. It's taken 5-8 years for this turn around to happen but the good thing is the process and market means by which it is happening is moving in the positive direction versus a backlash by out-of-touch builders and developers.

re: California's New Pitch For Density

teplukhin2you — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:05:46 GMT

Thanks for the Denver link, Brad. I'm still skeptical of the notion that people who want the suburban experience-- which after all is about secure and green personal space-- will move into the "patios and townhomes" proposed for Lakewood CO and their ilk.

The risk is that these suburbs will become neiher/nor: neither dense enough to attract critical mass for serious cultural amenities and other urban lifestyle attractions, nor green enough to attract families with kids. A perfect example of this is Tyson's Corner in Virginia. It's basically just a mall with some office space. Tyson's is not a city and it's not a village, anding in some ways it has the worst of both-- traffic jams without the ability to walk anywhere interesting.

The dense suburbs held up as examples by the likes of Chris Leinberger of IIRC The Urban Institute are tony upscale enclaves like Birmingham, Michigan, where a charming little downtown and rail station are surrounded by primo residential real estate that's 4 or 5x more expensive than anything in the area. I could be wrong but I have a hard time seeing that model scale beyond a few super-wealthy, homogeneous small suburbs.

re: California's New Pitch For Density

singlespeed — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:04:24 GMT

Ah...the old house before the car or is it the car before the house? For opponents or skeptics of these types of measures it usually comes down to two positions: 1) I'll be damned before I'm forced to live in a slum tenement housing or 2) it's communistic thinking and coercion if you start subsidizing transit oriented development (TOD) instead of suburbs. How dare you!

The type of measure that California is pushing really comes down to promoting TOD where it makes the most sense but not at every stop sign in suburban California. The complexity of the social and mechanistic elements that cause suburban sprawl and urban crime n' grime won't and can't be solved by a single bill. Wishful thinking aside it shouldn't preclude planning departments, local or state authorities from promoting TOD that will benefit more people than you think. It's not so much a question of getting rid of every car on the road but reducing the number of daily trips one makes and the number of miles driven to get a gallon of milk, pick up the kids, shop, etc. If more people can be given access to housing and commercial development that is denser than the average suburb yet not as dense as the CBD and they can walk or bike to most amenities that should be done. We've had 50+ years of suburban sprawl promotion and we can see now that many of the once positives have become negatives. Most especially with higher energy costs, longer commute times, Tep pounding his dashboard stuck in traffic, illiterate parents sending their kids to school (instead of the kids working the vegetable fields where they belong), meth labs in mountain towns run by strung out white folks, etc, etc.

Denver suffered for a long time from indiscriminate planning and suburban sprawl that resulted in an emptying of the downtown and residential neighborhoods. The suburbs soon bulged and suffered from being loved to much with quality of life dropping. So the entire metro area passed a transit bill to coordinate and promote TOD within each municipality so that the entire metro area could manage and control sprawl, improve aging or dead suburban city centers, reduce traffic and raise quality of life by reducing time spent in cars all day. Now with the light rail expansion to outer suburbs like Littleton, Arvada, etc. and subsequent TOD happening around the light rail stops, the suburban business and retail centers are densifying. But the level of density is not DC or NYC density but is in relation to the suburban residential stock that surrounds it. This means suburban residents don't have to drive to 25 different places for shopping or entertainment but can go down the road to the closer, centrally located and more dense suburban "city center" for those same things. This means more time spent with family, increasing involvement with local schools for parents, less time driving to do errands etc.

So instead of 1 big node (Downtown) with a bunch of branches out to nothing, you get 1 big node with several smaller nodes that are interconnected. The smaller nodes are like mini-downtowns in feel, density and development patterns instead of the current strip-mall development of Everytown USA.

There is also the issue of quality of what is built that has much to do with the property values that surround the TODs. If you build low-quality crap then yes, it won't hold much value or last long before being scraped and replaced. However, if better quality, better designed projects are built then property values will go up. An example. There's an architect in San Diego named Jonathan Segal who designs and builds well designed, quality multifamily buildings as rentals. He gets higher rental rates than the adjacent lower quality properties in the area and he doesn't compete with the overbuilt condo and townhouse market.

www.jonathansegalarchitect.com/.../the_union.html

www.jonathansegalarchitect.com/.../klofts_fin.html

www.transitorienteddevelopment.org

re: How Important Are The Next Eight Years?

ratnerstar — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:45:40 GMT

So ....

High oil prices = we need to worry about price, screw the environment.

Low oil prices = Woohoo! Screw the environment!

I'm starting to wonder if it isn't more realistic to forget trying to reverse climate change and concentrate on mitigating the effects.

re: California's New Pitch For Density

Brad Plumer — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:01:22 GMT

cthulhu--No one's forcing anyone to live anywhere they don't want. The state's subsidizing some types of development at the expense of others, just as it's always done. Except now, instead of subsidizing low-density suburbs, it's subsidizing denser neighborhoods. The low-density suburbs will still exist, though.

re: California's New Pitch For Density

cthulhu2008 — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:53:46 GMT

What boggles me is why people who want to live in dense cities can't just make the choice for themselves and allow other people the freedom of choice to live in a different environment.

What stake do you have in this? Is it about simple control and domination?

re: California Gets Dense Fever

Brad Plumer — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:51:51 GMT

"You need to have EVERY piece of hte puzzle in place"

Totally agree, and I don't think this bill is going to create a large-scale shift where people are fleeing back to the cities or inner suburban rings—as you say, a *lot* of elements would need to be in place for that to happen (and this is assuming people want to, which I don't think is remotely true for everyone).

What it will probably do is have an impact at the margins, giving a boost to different types of development patterns, like those "transit villages" around rail centers (similar to Oakland City Centre), for instance, which typically have condos that are largely inhabited by either retirees or childless working couples, which doesn't do much for families directly, but does moves people off the road and eases up the pressure somewhat to keep building outward into the exurbs.

Anyway, that's just one example. If local governments plan slightly denser suburban neighborhoods with walkable aspects—similar to what Denver's now doing—I believe that would qualify for state funds, too. That's not moving everyone back into cities by any stretch, and people will still need cars, but if you can find ways to chip away at the number of trips made, that can add up. I'll try to clarify the post.

re: The Worst Sort of Gridlock

r-ennis — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:30:44 GMT

Thanks for noting my mood JEFF FREY. I post here because I think I can contribute to the discussion. I am not won over by the more exteme arguments of the Green movement. But, I do agree that the US is a nation of energy hogs, and conservation can have a major impact. I am an oil man but support CAFE standards and plug-in hybrids. Maybe Pickens will succeed in bringing natural gas into the transportation mix. That would help. I also support offshore and ANWR drilling as well as shale development, and coal to liquid because they are good for the economy, not because I think they will reduce the cost of gasoline, though they probably will.

However, because of the law of unintended consequences, I believe that a serious study of downstream climate effects be made before we invest huge sums in wind power in the mid west. The EPA originally mandated MTBE to be blended into gasoline and large sums were spent before it was discovered that it was getting into the water supply. That would be child's play compared with what coud happen with water and soil conditions in the Great Plains if we extract from wind the energy contained in the equivalent of 750,000 tons per day of coal, without being clear about the effects.

re: California Gets Dense Fever

teplukhin2you — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:34:41 GMT

"Fever"? Not even the vapors. These are nice intentions, but they won't amount to much in my hometown, San Jose, and silicon valley. Joel Kotkin has more on this, but here's my personal take, as one who for years cursed every minute spent sitting in jams on silicon valley freeways each am and pm.

The logical nodal points for a high-density reconfiguration of SJ, the South Bay and the Peninsula would be in downtown SJ and at a few points along the two main freeways, 101 and 280. Problem: there are few major employers left in downtown SJ, only a handful along 280 (Stanford owns much of this land and is determined to keep it greenfield), and the 101 employers are all spread out, with many not even within walking distance of 101.

So where would the density start? The only logical place to do so here would be in downtown San Jose. Which leads to problem #2: real estate values for new hip townhome developments near downtown are actually crashing-- even as property values for single-family developments around the nicer suburbs here continue to rise.

Add to the mix crime, gangs, schools in which, per the SJUSD super, one-third of the kids are raised by illiterate parents (gee, maybe we should look a bit more closely at the composition of the 9 million projected new Californians), and you begin to understand why almost no one in his right mind would buy in downtown San Jose, which is why it's moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the market.

The point is that you can't jumpstart the density shift with a few tax or development fund jolts here and there. You need to have EVERY piece of hte puzzle in place-- a critical mass of employers already located close to the planned nodes; good schools to attract middle-class families, without whom you'll never have enough white-collar employee buyers of the high density units; and of course a sane immigration and labor policy that favors people with basic skills. San Jose and the South Bay/Peninsula aren't anywhere close to having these three pieces in place.