The typical two social models that Grist likes to contrast are:

Exurbian:  Large home, multipoint transit via personal vehicle.

Urban: Hub and spoke rail system.  High density dwellings.

Both these models assume one thing: A lot of people working for other people in businesess or organizations.

Although I have brought it up many times, you never consider the idea of:

3) Reallocating capital to foster more self-employment, stay at home parents, wealth acquisition allowing people to break free of the command and control structure.

Not that I've run the numbers, but I would think option 3 would require neither cars NOR trains because people wouldn't have to "go to work" -- they would simply stumble to their PC or lathe or oven and start producing.

Instead of workers going to the means of production, the means of production would come to the workers.   Thus, hydrogen and battery vehicles would be employed to drop off goods (groceries) and take away products from these independent businesses.

Do I make sense?
 

J. Bailo Participant Texeme.Construct()

You raise some good points -- parents (or a parent)  should be able to stay home with their kids, people shouldn't have to be worker-drones, the best transportation is no transportation -- but I think that much of that is made possible by a denser situation.  Density does not have to mean the disappearance of the single family home, by the way -- in the Chicago area for instance, there are lots of single family homes, that with a little effort could be made very accessable to good public transit and definitely bikes and human-powered vehicles.

Certainly the office is a bizarre institution in a number of ways.  Employee-owned and operated firms are more efficient and nicer to work for than hierarchical firms.  If the economy was set up in a more rational way (say, with more manufacturing), we could probably have many more  families with one wage-earner.

But, for better or worse, the reason cities grew up in the first place (besides security considerations) was because the short distances between the different parts of the system of production made possible by the city is such a powerful economic engine.  However, we now have high-speed internet access, so it may be possible to decentralize some of the work -- but people will still need to come together at intervals to exchange information and materials face-to-face.  So I guess I'm trying to say that, for an efficient/resilient society to prosper, at the very least, there will have to be a fairly large proportion of the population that is living and working in a dense environment.

  Current technology is not sufficiently advanced to solve the climate issue (350 or even 450ppm peak). At least it isn't if we consider the fact that we must politically sell the needed lifestyle/economic sacrifices to major populations who are in denial about either the existence -or severity of the problem. Current technology should be sufficient to begin reducing emissions.

   So we do need the significant advances, but barring cheap and scalable free air CO2 capture and storage, we can't afford to wait for them. So we have to commit to an aggressive emissions reduction program soon, even though it is clear that such a program with current technologies will not be up to the full solution. The near term emissions reductions buy time to develop the needed breakthroughs, and/or to create the political climate which would allow the needed sacrifices to be made.

   Regardless of whether the end solution is obtained primarily via sacrifices or breakthroughs the near term strategy can be the same: Begin short term emissions reductions, and aggressively pursue the hoped for breakthroughs.

Thank you, Jon, for explaining your reservations about Kristof's column, which you mentioned less fully in an earlier thread.

Another distinction, which pops up in Kristof's article, turns on how quickly in any conversation about energy reform "China and India" gets spoken.  Republicans tend to do that much more quickly than Democrats: which makes the Republicans look like jingoistic xenophobes, and the Democrats look unrealistic and wimpy.

Your third paragraph from the end, beginning "There is one more argument to be made," sort of touches on those global issues.  But possibly you would like to say more on the subject.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

No human life, well-lived and flourishing, is complete without Art, Religion, Philosophy and Science.

Whether those things require tools, or props, or gadgets, or trappings, depends on the culture on the floor of which the naked child, exvulvated, lands.

As an aficionado of monasticism, I love the principle of simplicity.  But I hate the inhumane crystallization of certain Jewish and Christian pious disciplines that one sees imposed on everyone in classic Islam.

We need to make some decision on the line separating "luxuries" from material objects that are reasonably good to have.

It is wonderful that durable laptop computers are now being made which are inexpensive and easy to power up.  Why are they not "luxuries," though?  Once we say that they are a characteristic part of a good life for human beings, we may have to start adding a bunch of other goo-gaws too.

What about Game Boy, and other video games, which apparently are the birthright of Americans born after 1980?  Much of the education and cultural identity of young Americans are based on them.  And yet, they are quite unknown to many of us dinosaurs.  So, are they "luxuries"?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Hi Pangolin,

I'm impressed by your wisdom above!

Could you please describe the materials by which your home is constructed, and which upon, your recommendations are based?

Do you (and/or your partner) enjoy cooking your meals by the methods you advocate?

Oh, Truly, I don't know where to stop in comprehending your infinitely revealing guidence on the true meaning of our human existense!

Do you burn animal dung in-house when cooking, and do you feel that wearing a face mask is beneficial or not?

Remember the Enron energy crisis in California?  Energy "traders" shut down power plants to boost prices, consumers paid for the whole mess.

Now imagine carbon emission permits sold by the government.  Who would aquire those permits?  Who would trade those permits?  Would electricity prices double or triple suddenly, soaring as gas prices have soared?  Pushed by speculators manipulating markets with insider information?

No recovery of the funds stolen in the mortgage/credit crisis will ever happen.  That money is safely stashed in Switzerland or Dubai.  Investment "banks" go under, are bought out, or are bailed out with public funds.  

The hedge fund operators who stole the cash will never be punsihed.  In fact Bernanke (Bushs' financial advisor, great choice for fed chatrman, the one who advised the worst president in history.  Who got US into this financial disaster) turned to these very hedge fund managers, who created the crisis, to explain it to him.

A hedge fund bubble in corn and corn farm land is building right now.  Chemical fertilizer is following along in the bubble mode.

Is it wise to turn over GHG climate disaster cure to these "free" market operators?  When they sell carbon emission permits back to your local utility at 500% profit, and your electric bill suddenly triples.  Will it still seem like a good idea then?

Please realize exactly why many corporate CEOs support cap and trade.  They can raise caps with lobbying pressure.  And they think that trading carbon permits can actually add to their bottomline profits.  they know that cap and trade will effectively stop any additional environmental legislation.

Politicians can point to it as their green responsibility fullfilled.  And say, "Let market forces provide the cure".  While they take the lobbyist "contributions", bundled to get around campaign finance laws.

Industry will keep it's 100 billion per year in subsidies.  The agribizz corn subsidy amounts to over 30 dollars per acre.  For instance.

In an illuminating film, "King Corn", two city dwellers moved back to Iowa and grew an acre of corn.  They lost 9 bucks on their acre.  But the subsidies gave them a 20 dollar profit.  Farmers in the area told them that no one makes money growing corn, the money is made from the subsidies.

If all those subsidies from business as usual were diverted to subsidize GHG free energy and ag, then industry would provide the devices for consumers to invest in.  Consumers would use subsidies to pay for the devices.

No new taxes.  Just a leveled market deciding which GHG-free technologies to invest in.

This adds cost to GHG intensive energy and ag by withdrawing subsidies.  And lowers cost for GHG free energy and ag.  Simple.  Not easily scammed by traders.  They will be left with trading the booming renewable energy and conservation manufacturing stocks.  And shorting GHG intensive energy and ag company stocks, and commodities like coal.

As far as government intervention in suburban and urban planning, well that's a whole other area of speculation.  It has huge local, state, and national political resistance.  It might be overcome here and there, with bike lanes, mass transit, and more centralized living.  

But it's tough.  Urban landscapes are dangerous and getting worse as economic disaster hits the poorest people the hardest.  The drug war "justice" system has created a revolving door for violent crime.  No room left to protect the public with all the drug "criminals" incarcerted.

It's "Clockwork Orange" for real out there in most urban areas and it's spreading to suburbs.  The cops have portable taser torture devices along with their clubs and guns.  The US already has the largest percentage of its population in jail of any other nation on earth.

And you are asking us to crowd into high crime areas and take our chances?  Not likely.  In fact anyone who fights back against crime is more likely to be a victim of police corruption.

This climate crisis demands action now, no time to reform our whole culture.  Direct subsidies diverted to cure the GHG crisis is the only solution that will work, barely in time.  Many believe the tipping point already happend in '06.

Methane from melting tundra and methane hydrate sea floor ice and fertilzer and manure run off in an exponential feedback loop has done it.

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Nice post, Jon.

In all the discussion about breakthroughs, I don't know that anyone has actually talked about how breakthroughs happen.  My father spent most of his professional life researching fusion, starting in the early 1960s.  If there is a "silver bullet", fusion (hot) would be it.

The important lesson of the history of fusion is that we can't predict the speed of progress.  There are some things that you can fairly safely predict, and the technologies that Bill Hanahan mentioned seem amenable to slow and steady progress, definitely, R&D could be very profitably directed in those areas.  R&D money should also be spent on 'breakthrough' technologies, like fusion, and it's a disgrace that the history of fusion funding is so stop-and-start-and-stop.

But that doesn't avoid the fact that we have no idea when fusion would be practical -- indeed, the dirtier, more expensive kind of fusion, based on tritium, might be developed before a deuterium-based fusion, which would be very clean and cheap.  But the ITER facility in southern France, being built at the cost of at least $30 billion, I believe, is based on the tritium process.

Which leads to another point, "breakthroughs" don't just come jumping out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus's skull.  They involve plenty of choices, like tritium vs. deuterium, and most critically, even when a "breakthrough" is developed, it can take decades to make it usable on a large scale -- which is what happened in the initial roll-out of electricity.

It's not the idea of funding "breakthrough" R&D that's the problem; it's deciding to wait on it, and not deploying our less-than-perfect technologies now that's the problem.  I don't think we can afford to play dice with global warming.

I thought the post was too long already, but China/India seem to be the basis of Pielke's argument.  And I think the main point is that what applies to the US applies to China and India.  They are perfectly capable of rolling out concentrated solar power, wind farms, retrofitting, geothermal, trains -- did you know that India has the largest train system in the world?

Again, the question becomes ohe of capital -- although even here, the Chinese have built up about a trillion dollars in dollar reserves.  But certainly, the various ecoequity proposals envision some sort of help from the developed countries to the developing.  And again, they could be very low-interest loans, or better yet, provided as help in building these facilities in India and China, which would also give a boost to the manufacturing sectors of the developed world (and the US in particular).

In fact, by building renewable systems in the developing world, the developed world could create a boom in their own countries.  But such systems would not be just prebuilt ones shipped and maintained by rich countries -- they would be built with the help of rich countries, but built mostly by Indian and Chinese (and let's not forget the rest of the world), so that those countries could fairly easily move to create their own renewable systems.  That's the history of development.

Which brings me to Pangolin's comment -- and Pangolin, could you please put that one on your web site too, it's much easier than bookmarking them and trying to find them later -- you bring up things like solar heaters, which Lester R. Brown thinks could be a critical technology in order to improve the living standards of the world's poor and reduce deforestation (see his "Plan B" book).  You're talking about what used to be called "appropriate technology".  These are fairly cheap ways to cover the developing world in renewable technologies, while increasing their standard of living, while providing an export market for the rich countries.  Seems like a no-brainer to me.

I used the term "carbon pricing" because I'm not sure how this will work out.  Al Gore, in his latest "TED" lecture, used the term as "the" solution.  My understanding of cap-and-auction is that trading is not part of the program, or not a big part, and of course carbon taxes wouldn't be either -- and actually, I think you brought up the idea of using cap-and-auction monies for renewable technologies, didn't you?

You also bring up a good point about the whole justice system, with a prison-industrial complex and a huge fraction of the prison population there for drug infractions, it's another huge "efficiency" loss for the society as a whole.

But as far as urban areas being inherently crime-ridden, crime thrives either where political authority has broken down, or more important in the US, where there is poverty.

If cities were part of a renewable technology boom, and their infrastructure was rebuilt, and everybody had jobs, and the education system was attractive -- OK,  now you'll say I'm utopian -- the point is, cities can be made very comfortable and safe.

In fact, the suburbs are going to be crime-ridden if half the houses are abandoned because gas prices make it impractical to live there -- either through carbon pricing, or, frankly more likely, peak oil leads to outrageous prices.  As an added note, government-financed construction is a good idea for peak oil and peak coal, which could lead to a greater call for biofuels, tar sands, etc.

As for trying to change the culture, that was to some extent the point of the post.  If some kind of large cultural change is needed, it's much more difficult than just changing the motor or generating plant.  And by building attractive cities and rail-based transportation systems, you make it much easier to make those cultural changes.  After all, governments at all levels made the current car-and-surburbia system possible, they can make a train-and-city system possible too.

I think that's the first step Jon.  Green legislators are trying.  They got within a vote or two in the senate.  Lieberman no doubt sided with the GOP.  To make the difference.

That would provide the 50 billion or so needed without raising taxes.

I agree that carbon permit sales could work.  If trading was eliminated.  If an industry had a extra permit, no scalping.  Sell it back to regulators.

That's a good analogy.  When you buy a ticket from ticketmaster, the hedge fund traders of live entertainment, you pay a hefty premium.  Hedge funds are like ticketmaster for carbon permits and everything else they can get their greedy fingers on.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

and I've been very wait-and-see, personally, in my opinion about any form of carbon pricing, but I've been unnerved to see the debate focus on carbon pricing vs. breakthrough R&D, with maybe car efficiency standards or general efficiency standards thrown into the carbon pricing mix, with no role for government-directed financing of construction.  But certainly, ending subsidies would be a good source -- does anyone have a good compilation of all the subsidies, annually?  I've generally looked at the military, higher taxes for the superrich and higher taxes for corporations as the big three of revenue generation, but diverting subsidies could be the big number four!

There's a big one Jon.  I wonder what these agrichem bizz subsidies amount to, total?  Aimee Whitman probably knows.

Wouldn't it be great to see this cash going to wind farms on the farm and farm biogas electric power/organic farming?  With 10 cents per GHG free kwh in subsidy direct to farmers.

And maybe it's equivalent paid for switching to organic fertilizer.  For each kwh's worth of GHG (use coal as a benchmark?) saved by using organic fertilizer, give the farmer 10 cents.

It's a huge savings over ammonia and mined fertilizer, with their huge multi-path sources of GHG.  And recycling farm waste and manure prevents another huge amount of GHG.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

...that needs to be addressed, along with carbon pricing.  Again, using government-provided finance to convert farms to organic, setting up municipal permaculture farms, would be attractive, on the one hand, because it would lead to cheaper and better tasting food, and on the other hand, it would rid us of so much of the GHGs that our agricultural system currently produces.

Energy policy needs to be farm, home, and small business based.

With subsidies direct to get the change done.

I keep sending Grist discussions to my legislators, links and excerpts.

How about a resolution?  All Grist readers, send something you find here to a legislator in an email, once a week.

We might beat out the lobbyists if they start reading this stuff.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

A one click default email opener, addresser for your (very own, depending on locale in your web packet info) legislators.  Just click, copy and paste some links and excerpts.  Add a few of your own words.  Zzzappp!

Can this be added to Grist?  Or any website?  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog