In a thoroughly excellent interview with Streetsblog, Rockafeller Foundation managing director Nicholas Turner urges a pragmatic approach to transportation:
... if you're thinking about transportation ... as being a tool that helps you get to a set of broader societal benefits, you want to be somewhat mode-neutral. My guess is that any attempt to move towards those social benefits would, obviously, expand public transportation, rail, bus rapid transit, walking and biking. But I think it's important to get out of this mode-against-mode battle because otherwise you're not really addressing the problem.
Exactly right.
You can find the same form of argument -- that we should focus on emission outcomes rather than particular energy technologies -- from Sean here, among other places. And as I tried to document here, it's a kind of logic Barack Obama deploys frequently.
Call it Goals, Not Paths. Define where you're trying to go, the social benefits you're trying to achieve, and then allow actors in an open, competitive market to find the best way there. Progressive goals; market-based means.
The way this is often expressed in the political arena is as an aversion to "picking winners." But we have to be careful. Three policy imperatives fall out of GNP thinking:
- The goals themselves must be mandatory and legally enforced.
- No particular path should be given new favors and advantages.
- Paths that presently enjoy favors and advantages should have them removed.
Too often, politicians (cough*McCain*cough) focus solely on No. 2. But in an environment where goals are weak, poorly enforced, and often voluntary, while certain industries have deep legacy advantages, it loses some of its force. If neither No. 1 nor No. 3 obtain, offering special breaks, subsidies, and mandates to particular paths can often be the second-best outcome -- better, often, than doing nothing.
Still, I've always thought that enviros fight too often over No. 2, which places them in the scrum with countless other special interests (witness this summer's disastrous drilling battle). I'd love to see what happened if enviros got more serious about No. 3 and tried to build some functional alliances with libertarians and other fiscally conservative groups.
But the big imperative should be to fight for No. 1. Get the goals in place and legally enforceable. The other battles are secondary.
John McCain’s troubles are the world’s troubles
George Voinovich (R-Ohio) [UPDATED]
Al Franken (D-Minn.)
Comments
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Jon Rynn Posted 8:24 am
28 Oct 2008
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Bart Anderson Posted 8:28 am
28 Oct 2008
Where are these open competitive markets, Dave?
Here is where they are NOT: Energy Transportation Media
Large economic players will always interfere in the market for their own advantage. They lobby governments, influence the public through the media and form monopolies and oligopolies. They have done this for 10,000 years.
The externalities and interconnections are not easily priced into the market. For example, how does one price the externality of nuclear waste, when it will affect future generations for thousands of years?
The Miracle of Markets cannot replace the imperfect process of thought and planning for the public good.
There is a place for the market, but we should be realistic about it can and cannot do.
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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David Roberts Posted 9:15 am
28 Oct 2008
But for now: Jon, I think GNP thinking is a good habit even for planners contemplating public spending, urban design, etc. Say you're planning a community: do you want a community where 30% of the transportation is on bikes, 30% is on public transit, and 40% is in cars? No. You want a community with a strong social fabric, a vibrant economy, a reasonably equitable distribution of resources, and low emissions. You're better off keeping the focus on those goals and not allowing yourself to become too attached to any particular transportation mode or mix of modes. It's a cognitive habit, a willingness to constantly rethink and reassess.
Bart: your comment has a mixed message I find very familiar. On one hand you say we don't have open markets; on the other you say open markets can't do what we want. If A is true, how do you know B? More seriously: Obviously the free market of libertarian fantasy doesn't exist in the real world, anywhere, least of all energy. It is an ideal we can move toward or away from. Secondly, there's no contradiction at all between respecting the power of markets and "planning for the public good." Implicitly or explicitly, we collectively define the public good and shape markets accordingly. The public good is the goal; the best, lowest cost way of getting there is almost always beyond the ability of any small group to suss out in advance. So: via politics we define the public good -- i.e., goals -- and via the market we allow many minds to put themselves to the task of getting there.
Anyway, more later.
grist.org
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Jon Rynn Posted 9:30 am
28 Oct 2008
At a higher level of abstraction, you also have to consider that when you design for cars, you're giving the market a bigger role, because people can choose which cars they buy, whereas, say, in a light-rail system, they choose, through the medium of their government, which light rail. I stress "through the medium" because government choices are usually seen as remote and bureaucratic, which they can certainly be, but in fact they are amenable to democratic forces -- whereas what GM, Ford and Chrysler do are not -- except through regulation.
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Bart Anderson Posted 4:03 pm
28 Oct 2008
There are some differences though...
I don't think this is a matter of ideas as much as power. We are in the present position not because we lack clever insights, but because of 1) powerful special interests 2) 30 years of conservative political effort in building institutions, influencing media, etc.
With the economic meltdown continuing, I suspect that political events are going to move faster and farther than we can imagine. There is more talk of Keynes and the New Deal than I've heard in a long time. Even old Marxists are being trotted out for their opinion.
I think we're going to be like kayakers going through whitewater - the most we can do is try to avoid the rocks and move in the right direction without flipping.
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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Sean Casten Posted 12:10 am
29 Oct 2008
The disconnect doesn't compute. When the problem is the paradigm, we have to change the paradigm. Is it easy to do? Of course not. But replacing a fraction of the paradigm with a band aid that doesn't address the underlying issues simply on the basis that we're afraid to push for more strikes me as giving up before we've started.
Let's articulate the goal (to stay on a theme) and push for that goal, rather than simply assuming that our ambitions must be limited to some narrow, less politically-risky path.
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vakibs Posted 12:57 am
29 Oct 2008
By reducing our emissions, we are only postponing the climate tipping points, not preventing them. As the atmospheric CO2 levels keep increasing slowly, but steadily, one day polar ice cover will melt completely.
The debate is not about when this will happen, or how long in the future this can be delayed.
The debate is about how to prevent this from happening.
So why do we keep talking about emission targets ? They don't make any sense. They are inadequate to be our goal, and consequently, any paths that lead to them are utterly meaningless.
As mentioned time and again by climate scientists, including Dr James Hansen, what we should aim for are fixed caps on the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is directly related to fixed caps on the amount of fossil fuels that we agree to leave buried in earth. This is our goal.
We should set paths which help us towards this goal. In other words, we should have comprehensive energy plans which are completely sustainable : efficiency, solar power, nuclear power. We should have fixed deadlines on when we achieve these energy blueprints.
Once we have our goals fixed, we can keep discussing about the paths : about which paths are market-friendly and so on.
Emission targets are not a goal; Cap & Trade mechanism is meaningless. Please move on, everyone.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:57 am
29 Oct 2008
And the market could choose which path to follow if those paths actually existed. But to open those paths, like plugin hybrids, government needs to set standards and order millions of units of these vehicles in order to spur mass production.
That means government has to choose plugin hybrids over hydrogen fuel cell, flex fuel ICE, or the other alternatives. Because there is not the time or capital to follow dead ends.
The way to preserve market efficiency is to throw out the dogmatic free marketeerian philosophy, like FDR did during WW2 war production.
This whole Reagan revolution religious economics has been proven to be worse than useless. We have to get over worshipping at the feet of the so[called free market economy.
Plugin hybrids, solar cogeneration panels, ground source heating/cooling systems, biogas digestor fuel cell distributed power plants, and smart grid systems all have to have standards for performance determined by government in order to measure GHG savings and respective subsidy levels.
This effort needs planning, government planning and selection of standards and orders of millions of these devices to push mass production. Let different suppliers compete on cost, product quality, and marketing.
I watched a history channel presentation about D-day, the rangers that scaled the cliffs at Omaha beach just kept going no matter how many were killed. If they could do that, why can't we do what we actually want to do now.
Government needs to bulldoze over corporate boardroom resistance and let US manufacture this energy re-evolution. This isn't a time to fret about defying the religious dogma of the free marketeeerian corporatist political movement that brought us this economic crash and GHG disaster and oil war after oil war on into a dark oily future.
Lobbyists and your think tank shills,get real jobs, you're fired!
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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spaceshaper Posted 1:18 am
29 Oct 2008
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:27 am
29 Oct 2008
are you referring to radical change? I remember proposing nationalizing the electrical grid, but you said that was politically impossible. Are you talking about pushing for things that are now politically impossible, because it's what is necessary in order to avoid the worst of climate change? Not trying to push buttons here, I'm just confused on what you think is being glossed over.
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Sean Casten Posted 3:56 am
29 Oct 2008
Removing subsidies for the old energy economy wouldn't be enough.
Presumably, you have an opinion about how big those subsidies are - do tell! There are peer reviewed studies showing that the health costs alone of coal-fired power cost 6 - 10 c/kWh. If they were forced to pay that cost, you would shut down every coal plant in this country, and immediately create an incentive for clean sources that could replace them. And that is far from the only subsidy that coal plants get.
I don't claim to have knowledge of the total volume of the subsidy either - but I would caution against overstating its size, or it's ability to massively change behavior if removed. (Look at all the recent fight to get 1.5 c/kWh tax credits for renewables, and compare that to 6 - 10 cents above and it becomes apparent that there is way more value in removing subsidies than in trying to add more on the other side of the ledger.)
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