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Most economists agree that spending stimulates the economy. But that’s not the same as thinking that any stimulus spending is a good idea. Clearly that’s not the case. It is possible to spend ourselves into an even worse pickle than we’re already in.
Most people would agree that spending stimulus dollars to create poppy plantations to support the domestic heroin trade would be unwise, no matter how many jobs it created. And yet, a significant portion of federal stimulus spending is slated to support a different kind of hazardous addiction: our addiction to oil. For instance, Texans are planning to use some of their stimulus money to build a new 15-mile, 4-lane toll road beyond Houston’s suburbs, paving over a rare native prairie in the process.
Planners there don’t worry about the risk of creating more car-dependent sprawl. In fact, that’s precisely the point of the project: to build a new “master planned” community of 21,000 houses on more than 11,000 acres. At an average density of roughly one house per half-acre, and located on the fringe of the Houston orbit, the project could scarcely be better designed to lock locals into a car-dependent lifestyle built on long-distance commutes for work and errands.
Texas’ stimulus spending is the opposite of what Northwest policymakers profess: energy efficiency, growth management, and combating climate change. But in a surprise move in early March, Gov. Chris Gregoire signed into law a package of spending commitments for the state’s federal stimulus dollars for transportation. Among the roughly $340 million in spending was about $81 million for freeway-widening projects.
Of that money, $71 million will be used to add general-purpose lanes along I-405 near Bothell and on I-82 in Yakima. Neither of these areas currently has high accident rates nor do the expansions have obvious safety implications. More puzzling still, both projects were already funded by state gas tax money. Strictly speaking these freeway expansion projects should have been ineligible for stimulus money, which is intended only for new projects. Additionally, the package set aside $10 million for general-capacity expansion near Ridgefield, north of Vancouver, Washington.
Adding single-occupancy and general-capacity lanes is inimical to reduction of vehicle miles traveled, growth management, and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You don't need a fancy traffic model to guess that adding freeway lanes will increase climate emissions and deepen our dependence on fossil fuels — while providing no more convenience or transportation choices to local residents.
Using stimulus money to add lanes is irresponsible from a fiscal perspective as well. Even in rosier economic times, states struggle to keep up with maintenance backlogs. Why spend stimulus money on road expansion which increases ongoing operational and maintenance costs and leaves the backlog to grow?
The problem of road-heavy stimulus spending appears widespread. The stimulus spending will almost certainly create jobs in the near term and boost consumer spending, precisely what it is intended to do. The real danger is that this kind of spending will land us in a worse long-term position because we will have effectively walled off the escape routes from a serious energy-addiction problem. Our energy problems are also closely linked to the defining challenge of our time: reducing global warming emissions before climate change creates too much havoc. We should not use stimulus money to build Oil Age infrastructure. It’s 2009 not 1909.
The economist John Maynard Keynes noted wryly that simply burying bottles full of money and letting private enterprise pay a workforce to dig them up would stimulate the economy. Odd as it sounds, Keynes' proposal might be good deal smarter than spending our money to tighten our economy’s bonds to climate-changing emissions and to the roller coaster of fossil fuel prices.
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Comments:
Posted Wed, May 6, 7:55 a.m. Inappropriate
Good thoughts, Eric.
Rather than exclusively building asphalt highways, we could also build information highways - high speed broadband networks of fiber optic cable, which would allow two way, high-definition video conferencing, telemedicine, tele-education and tele-work. This way, maybe we wouldn't have to take many of those car or bus trips, burning the gas or using the asphalt. More here: http://bit.ly/WFqg8 .
Posted Wed, May 6, 9:21 a.m. Inappropriate
Unfortunately the requirement for spending was "shovel ready", not "positive ROI", however that return is defined.
Posted Wed, May 6, 12:57 p.m. Inappropriate
a new “master planned” community of 21,000 houses on more than 11,000 acres. At an average density of roughly one house per acre
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Uhem...much of the "green" community is a little weak on math! This is probably why most of this community didn't understand that replacing the center span of I-90 with the rail equivalent of one bus per mile (in capacity terms) and tens of billions of dollars (in opportunity costs terms) doesn't pencil out.
If we transition to plug-in hybrids with the liquid fuel provided by bio-engineered algae, which is likely (a lot more likely than most people living within a half mile of a rail station), then most the the argument in the article becomes obsolete.
Yes, there are good reasons for favoring "new urbanist" built space. But they are mostly different than the implications of such articles.
Posted Wed, May 6, 2:29 p.m. Inappropriate
Needless to say, that line should have read "...an average density of roughly one house per HALF acre..." I'm not sure how the error slipped into the piece, but the larger point still stands: an average density of 1 house per half acre is still an extremely energy-intensive pattern of development.
I'm less sanguine about the prospects for second generation biofuels that are both climate-benign and inexpensive. I hope I'm mistaken about that.
Posted Wed, May 6, 2:52 p.m. Inappropriate
Shouldn't it read : Eric de Place is a political agendist at Sightline Institute - a Seattle green propaganda machine.
MYTH 1
THE WORLD IS WARMING
Wrong. It is true the world did warm between 1975 and 1998, but even Professor David Karoly, one of our leading alarmists, admitted this week "temperatures have dropped" since - "both in surface temperatures and in atmospheric temperatures measured from satellites". In fact, the fall in temperatures from just 2002 has already wiped out half the warming our planet experienced last century. (Check data from Britain's Hadley Centre, NASA's Aqua satellite and the US National Climatic Data Centre.)
Some experts, such as Karoly, claim this proves nothing and the world will soon start warming again. Others, such as Professor Ian Plimer of Adelaide University, point out that so many years of cooling already contradict the theory that man's rapidly increasing gases must drive up temperatures ever faster.
But that's all theory. The question I've asked is: What signs can you actually see of the man-made warming that the alarmists predicted?
MYTH 2
THE POLAR CAPS ARE MELTING
Wrong. The British Antarctic Survey, working with NASA, last week confirmed ice around Antarctica has grown 100,000 sq km each decade for the past 30 years.
Long-term monitoring by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports the same: southern hemisphere ice has been expanding for decades.
As for the Arctic, wrong again.
The Arctic ice cap shrank badly two summers ago after years of steady decline, but has since largely recovered. Satellite data from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre this week shows the Arctic hasn't had this much April ice for at least seven years.
Norway's Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre says the ice is now within the standard deviation range for 1979 to 2007.
MYTH 3
WE'VE NEVER HAD SUCH A BAD DROUGHT
Wrong. A study released this month by the University of NSW Climate Change Research Centre confirms not only that we've had worse droughts, but this Big Dry is not caused by "global warming", whether man-made or not.
As the university's press release says: "The causes of southeastern Australia's longest, most severe and damaging droughts have been discovered, with the surprise finding that they originate far away in the Indian Ocean.
"A team of Australian scientists has detailed for the first time how a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole - a variable and irregular cycle of warming and cooling of ocean water - dictates whether moisture-bearing winds are carried across the southern half of Australia."
MYTH 4
OUR CITIES HAVE NEVER BEEN HOTTER
Wrong. The alleged "record" temperature Melbourne set in January - 46.4 degrees - was in fact topped by the 47.2 degrees the city recorded in 1851. (See the Argus newspaper of February 8, 1851.)
And here's another curious thing: Despite all this warming we're alleged to have caused, Victoria's highest temperature on record remains the 50.7 degrees that hit Mildura 103 years ago.
South Australia's hottest day is still the 50.7 degrees Oodnadatta suffered 37 years ago. NSW's high is still the 50 degrees recorded 70 years ago.
What's more, not one of the world's seven continents has set a record high temperature since 1974. Europe's high remains the 50 degrees measured in Spain 128 years ago, before the invention of the first true car.
MYTH 5
THE SEAS ARE GETTING HOTTER
Wrong. If anything, the seas are getting colder. For five years, a network of 3175 automated bathythermographs has been deployed in the oceans by the Argo program, a collaboration between 50 agencies from 26 countries.
Warming believer Josh Willis, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reluctantly concluded: "There has been a very slight cooling . . ."
MYTH 6
THE SEAS ARE RISING
Wrong. For almost three years, the seas have stopped rising, according to the Jason-1 satellite mission monitored by the University of Colorado.
That said, the seas have risen steadily and slowly for the past 10,000 years through natural warming, and will almost certainly resume soon.
But there is little sign of any accelerated rises, even off Tuvalu or the Maldives, islands often said to be most threatened with drowning.
Professor Nils-Axel Moerner, one of the world's most famous experts on sea levels, has studied the Maldives in particular and concluded there has been no net rise there for 1250 years.
Venice is still above water.
MYTH 7
CYCLONES ARE GETTING WORSE
Wrong. Ryan Maue of Florida State University recently measured the frequency, intensity and duration of all hurricanes and cyclones to compile an Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index.
His findings? The energy index is at its lowest level for more than 30 years.
The World Meteorological Organization, in its latest statement on cyclones, said it was impossible to say if they were affected by man's gases: "Though there is evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date, no firm conclusion can be made on this point."
MYTH 8
THE GREAT BARRIER REEF IS DYING
Wrong. Yes, in 1999, Professor Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, our leading reef alarmist and administrator of more than $30 million in warming grants, did claim the reef was threatened by warming, and much had turned white.
But he then had to admit it had made a "surprising" recovery.
Yes, in 2006 he again warned high temperatures meant "between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland's Great Barrier Reef could die within a month".
But he later admitted this bleaching had "minimal impact". Yes, in 2007 he again warned that temperature changes of the kind caused by global warming were bleaching the reef.
But this month fellow Queensland University researchers admitted in a study that reef coral had once more made a "spectacular recovery", with "abundant corals re-established in a single year". The reef is blooming.
MYTH 9
OUR SNOW SEASONS ARE SHORTER
Wrong. Poor snow falls in 2003 set off a rash of headlines predicting warming doom. The ...
Posted Wed, May 6, 2:55 p.m. Inappropriate
Why don't you try using current science FACTS re C02 to justify the crap your spewing about emissions ?
Posted Wed, May 6, 3:45 p.m. Inappropriate
So, in a couple years (and I mean two) I move on solar power on my house, and an electric car (thanks Nissan) how will that change the argument, if at all.
The assumption of oil, pro and con, is the length and use of the buggy whip debate and what to do about all the dung in the street. I predict that driving on oil becomes a strange and exotic sport like horse racing, and less of a common component of transportation.
Posted Wed, May 6, 3:51 p.m. Inappropriate
Just two years ago, Mike Hulme would have been about the last person you’d expect to hear criticising conventional climate change wisdom. Back then, he was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement. Since leaving Tyndall - and as we found out in a telephone interview - he has come out of the climate change closet as an outspoken critic of such sacred cows as the UN’s IPCC, the “consensus”, the over-emphasis on scientific evidence in political debates about climate change, and to defend the rights of so-called “deniers” to contribute to those debates.
As Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, Hulme remains one of the UK’s most distinguished and high-profile climate scientists.
He treats climate change not as a problem that we need to solve – indeed, he believes that the complexity of the issue means that it cannot be solved, only lived with – and instead considers it as much of a cultural idea as a physical phenomenon.”
…
When we spoke to him on the phone, Hulme cited as evidence the 2007 protests against Heathrow’s third runway, where marchers made their case by waving a research paper at the TV cameras under a banner bearing the slogan “We are armed only with peer reviewed science”.
Posted Wed, May 6, 3:52 p.m. Inappropriate
lets see if eric finds his way back here to offer up current science re C02, we're waiting, eric .....
Posted Wed, May 6, 3:54 p.m. Inappropriate
to the extent Crosscut offers up white space for organizations to spew their baseless political agenda THAT IS DIRECTLY REFUTED BY CURRENT SCIENCE, it is guilty of journalistic fraud !
Crosscut, make your true motives public on this association !
Posted Wed, May 6, 4:28 p.m. Inappropriate
gee, where did all the greenies go ?
Posted Wed, May 6, 6:03 p.m. Inappropriate
What Eric is saying makes sense regardless of whether or not climate change is human caused. The case against fossil fueled private cars is good even if climate change is
an illusion.
Posted Wed, May 6, 7:35 p.m. Inappropriate
Change the fuel.
Posted Wed, May 6, 8:06 p.m. Inappropriate
I agree with Eric. However, I would use the $ to expand our "direct access" ramps and other infrastructure improvements for transit (e.g., transit signal priority, HOV and HOT lanes, etc.) to improve its speed and reliability.
Posted Wed, May 6, 9:22 p.m. Inappropriate
steptoe.fan just copied and pasted this from a blog.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25401759-5000117,00.html
But hey, if it's on the Internets, it must be true.
Posted Wed, May 6, 10:53 p.m. Inappropriate
and Sean can only substitute as a decoy when he lacks ANY credible science to refute content !
Posted Thu, May 7, 12:29 p.m. Inappropriate
steptoe.fan - the content you and the rest of the right wing are cutting and pasting everywhere you can is not science. it's journalism, and crappy journalism at that.
But hey, if enough people say it enough times, it must be true.
Posted Thu, May 7, 7:36 p.m. Inappropriate
Sean - your stuck on stupid - that's all you can do - deny !!!!!
Norway's Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre data - Sean calls this crappy journalism.
How stupid is Sean ?