Thinking Globally, Acting Locally

Here's a problem that originated with the climate catastrophe bearing down on us:




(Note: this shows all the fires, but they didn't all burn simultaneously)

Here's how it looks from the ground:





....Not exactly something a garden hose could handle.

I'd also add these fires were the result of a long drought in Australia, like the one in California now, and there's no reason to believe California can't experience something like this. The citizens of Paradise (ironic name, no?) would testify that is true.

Why drought? Climate catastrophe, and the CO2 that causes it is an obvious culprit.

So what do we do? The Green New Deal is a start. The money is not in short supply, either. To prosecute  World War II, the government took over 50% of the U.S. economy. Economists calculate the Green New deal would only take about 5% of the current economy.

Meanwhile (from Huffingtonpost): "Disasters have reached a scale and frequency never before seen in U.S. history. The number of state and local disaster declarations has roughly tripled since the late 1990s. Between 1980 and 2018, disasters costing more than $1 billion have risen from six per year to 13 per year. Most of these are natural disasters like storms, floods, fires. 

"....preparing for hurricanes, earthquakes and pandemics is one of the best investments cities can make. According to a 2017 study, every dollar spent preparing for catastrophe saves roughly $6 in relief. Up to 80% of the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, for example, could have been prevented with stricter building codes.

"But America still spends orders of magnitude more on post-disaster relief than pre-disaster preparedness. Between 2011 and 2014, the federal government spent $3.2 billion fixing damage from disasters and just $222 million preparing for them. In 2016, FEMA had just $100 million set aside for major disasters — less than one-tenth the cost of just the first month of Hurricane Sandy relief."

I'll add that part of this inadequacy is the consequence of the attack on government and "collectivism" (the Koch's word). It's taken as an article of faith that collective action is bound to be inept and feckless. So...the governments of Vietnam, Germany and South Korea can respond to systemic problems like climate and COVID-19, but U.S. public infrastructure is too busy dealing with the deep sabotage that has been going on for generations now to deal with such problems effectively.

From the NY Times:

"The good news is that the pandemic shows “science works.” The bad news? Global warming may be far more dangerous than a pandemic.

"The virus, Dr. de Menocal said, has shown us how vulnerable we are as a society....'The laws of nature don’t care whether we believe in them or not,' he said. 'The tragedy and inconvenience we’ve seen from this pandemic pale in comparison to what’s in store from climate change. There is a much bigger crisis knocking on our door and we have to remember the big lesson from this pandemic: Science saves lives.'”

Local Solutions

(From Arstechnica): "The average American household footprint is a little below 50 tons of CO2 per year (actually "tons of CO2-equivalent" to include other greenhouse gases), but that number can drop to around 30 in city centers—closer to the average of a country like Germany. American cities are surrounded by sprawling suburbs, though, which swing very much in the opposite direction, going as high as 80 tons."

As the big carbon footprints of sprawl indicate, the solutions to such problems are not just national. There are local solutions available to us--primarily designing our cities so they don't require us to emit lots of CO2. This solution actually has market acceptance too. People prefer to live in pedestrian-friendly, mixed use (offices and commerce with residences), and pay premiums to do that. The most valuable real estate in the Sacramento region is such an area: McKinley Park. 

Such neighborhoods not only provide destinations other than neighbors' homes within a walk, they have streets designed to support pedestrians. That means set-back sidewalks, shorter street lamp poles (10' - 14' rather than 20+'), vertical curbs and a smaller curb radius at the corner. 

Unsurprisingly, this pedestrian-friendly configuration reduces vehicle miles traveled and CO2 emitted by roughly half compared to sprawl. It also makes viable, un-subsidized transit possible since potential patrons can walk to the stops.

Sprawl, on the other hand, forecloses the possibility of viable transit by making it nearly impossible to take a dignified walk to a transit stop. Sprawl is what most outlying, edge city development looks like. It's not mixed use, it's single use, and the only connections between the residences, offices, commerce, etc. is a trip in an automobile. This is true enough that almost every driving age adult must purchase and maintain a car--something that is, incidentally, the most regressive "tax" we have. 

Driving everywhere is not healthy, either. Our society is suffering an epidemic of the diseases of chronic inactivity--obesity, diabetes, heart attack and stroke, never mind the bad mental health (AKA "road rage") induced by losing contact with nature and fresh air. 

Heck, a kid in suburbia has to be driven to every activity--music or dance lessons, athletic activity, etc. And mom has to do most of the driving. That's right, sprawl is sexist. And the kids are unable to walk to the store to get a loaf of bread, so their training in social responsibility is limited to trips to the mall, where the very walls shout "Buy me!" Gee, I wonder why they're such materialists...

Meanwhile, Sacramento is land speculators' paradise. The speculators can buy outlying ag land for a few thousand dollars an acre, persuade (or suborn) local government to approve development, then sell that same land to builders for 50 to 100 times what they paid for it. With financial incentives like that, outlying development that lengthens commutes, and makes infrastructure more expensive to maintain is inevitable.

I'm not alone in this observation. The late Sacramento County Supervisor, Grantland Johnson, said it was widely acknowledged throughout the state that the region's governments were the most in the hip pocket of the developers.

The planning process itself is equally bad. To paraphrase planning authority Jane Jacobs (author of The Life and Death of the Great American City), modern planning is no help. It's positively neurotic in embracing what doesn't work and ignoring what does. It's a form of advanced superstition, like 19th century medicine that believed bleeding patients would cure them.

So, to think locally about this problem, one has to elect local officials not in the hip pocket of the developers, like Greg Fishman (a candidate for Sacramento County Supervisor), and stop buying the "bread and circuses" arguments that we need more professional sports and more outlying develpment in floodplain surrounded by weak levees (North Natomas).

Just FYI, the region has 20 years' worth of unbuilt infill. Building more "edge cities" is just a favor to the tiny plutocracy of land speculators, nothing else.

Here's James Howard Kunstler elaborating on that last statement: