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1. Sacrifice is for suckers (an occasional series)
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2. Bike valet at the Ritz
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3. Truckers rally to demand...something
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4. Election update: McCain on climate
Sacrifice is for suckers (an occasional series)
I see the pundits are still lobbing up chinstrokers about how addressing climate change is going to require huge, painful sacrifice from all Americans. This all sounds very serious, and the only quibble I have is that it's probably not true. "Going green" in a carbon-constrained economy won't feel like sacrifice to most people. It will feel like shopping.
Meaning, it will feel like all the consumption decisions we make every day, but tilted imperceptibly by the price ramifications of a carbon cap. Studies just keep piling up suggesting that the overall economic effect of climate change legislation will be fairly small. The most recent one was from the environmental radicals at the IMF.
So why all the sacrifice talk? Maybe because it's just plain hard to imagine what a decades-long economic transformation will look like. We tend to extrapolate crudely from where we are now. If you want to cut your individual carbon footprint 80% today, you might have to sell your car, give up flying, move into a smaller house, and start foraging for food.
But that's not how this will go down. Fully decarbonizing will take decades at least. The process will be unpredictable, creating winners, losers, opportunities, and benefits. Come with me now to Strained Analogy Land. Imagine going back in time to meet your hippie forebear...
Future you: I need you to do me a favor.
Retro you: Lay it on me.
FY: I need you to build a worldwide network of devices that subsumes what you presently think of as the postal service, the telephone network, television, and a large chunk of the U.S. retail economy. I'm envisioning a gadget-y thing that will, for example, let you listen to any song ever recorded, search the text of any book or newspaper, talk to anyone in the world, file your taxes, buy stuff, look up recipes, what have you.
RY: Sounds complicated.
FY: You'll have a few decades.
RY: The book thing alone will take that long.
FY: You'd be surprised.
RY: Ask NASA to do it. They just put a man on the moon!
FY: The government will lend a hand with R&D and a congenial policy environment. More importantly, you can count on assistance from several billion technologically clueless consumers and a large number of rapacious, profit-minded corporations.
RY: We're doomed. Even if this were technically possible, which it's not, it sounds insanely expensive.
FY: We'll all chip in. I did some rough math. Counting all the computers and bandwidth I've ever consumed, I'd guess I've personally contributed about $25,000 over the years to developing the infrastructure of the "new economy."
RY: That covers a lot of cookbooks! This gadget is for the super-rich!
FY: Hardly. I don't even own a Mac. My employers paid most of the 25 grand. Actually, wait, I think I left out a few things. I bought a ton of stuff on Amazon. And I've got a data plan for my cell phone. Does that count? I'm not sure. It's hard to disentangle exactly what should be apportioned to the "new economy."
RY: You keep using that term. Forget it. The old economy suits me fine.
FY: No problem. You can opt out. I should warn you, though. I'm going to tax your time.
RY: You're going to what?
FY: Tax your time. Every year, I'm going to remove three minutes from your day.
RY: Take five. I'm not busy.
FY: You'll see. Right now you don't even know what a spreadsheet is. In a few years, you'll go nuts if a web page takes ten seconds to load. You'll be bereft if your cell phone hits a dead spot. You'll feverishly refresh your favorite environmental blogs.
RY: I don't want any part of this.
FY: Wait 'til you see the iPhone. It's awesome! Really, though, you can opt out. You just won't want to. Your time is valuable to you, and it will become ever more so. To maximize its value, you'll start making choices. And bit by bit, the Electromofied Librariphone will be built.
The point is that fairly dramatic infrastructural changes don't feel very bad to most people while they're happening. While the changes can confer lumpy costs and benefits to society, the notion that we're all going to suffer just totally misunderstands how this sort of thing goes down. Obviously my dumb little parable is oversimplified and glib, but certainly not any more so than calls for "wartime sacrifice."
Bike valet at the Ritz
As I biked towards the front driveway of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco last week, I saw a line of fancy cars (BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, etc.) waiting for valet parking. I zipped past the queue and handed my bicycle to one of the valets. He gave me a claim check. Assured that my bike would be safe in a locked room, I walked to my business meeting at the hotel. And when I returned an hour later, it took only a minute to get my bike ready to roll.
My experience at the Ritz gave a new boost to my passion for bike commuting. Small but important bike-friendly services can make a huge difference in one’s quest to cut down on driving a car. In the Bay Area, our public transit systems are well-equipped with features that support cyclists. BART, Muni, and Caltrain all have programs to accommodate bikes. In fact, 7% of Caltrain riders bring bikes on board — the highest percentage of any U.S. public transit system.
Caltrain has entire train cars designated for bikes (capacity: 32) and a pedal-power camaraderie among the riders. Passengers on these special cars love to chat about the route they take to and from the train, and what prompted them to become bike commuters. One guy told me recently that he hated driving his car in rush-hour traffic. Another fellow said his car required too many repairs, so he decided to leave it at home in favor of the bike. Another cyclist — notably middle-aged and dressed for the office — said the best thing about biking to work is that “I feel like I’m 12 years old!”
I know that feeling. Along with the environmental benefits and the regular exercise, it’s what has kept me biking to TerraPass (Berkeley to San Francisco and return) every workday for almost an entire year now. Rain or shine. I don’t expect to visit the Ritz very often, but I’m glad to know that the hotel has a place to store my bike.
Truckers rally to demand...something
I can’t even really count the ways this doesn’t make any sense:
A caravan of horn-honking truck drivers rolled their rigs through Washington yesterday, protesting rising gasoline costs and demanding that Congress impose caps on prices at the pump…
Demonstrators held signs, some of which read “Higher Fuel Means Higher Everything” and “No Gas, No Soccer: What Comes First? Kids or Gas?” When their leaders demanded governmental intervention, the truckers chanted “Now! Now!”
Silly season is well under way, with politicians of all stripes promising meaningless action on gas prices. It’s depressing. It’s also why passing climate change legislation remains so damned hard. Remember: low gas prices or the environment. Choose one.
There are, of course, distributive effects to higher gas prices. In this case, those effects are hitting one particular group of people hard, and naturally we should be sympathetic to their plight. But that sympathy doesn’t extend to supporting disastrous energy policies.
Election update: McCain on climate
Climate change hasn’t made much of an appearance in the recent election coverage, because…Americans don’t care about climate change. Nevertheless, top McCain advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin had a nice long chat recently with David Roberts regarding carbon policy.
Read the whole thing. McCain hasn’t yet put forth a climate change proposal (which is, itself, disappointing), but he has outlined elements of a climate change “philosophy.”
A couple of quick thoughts on the interview:
- The climate philosophy Douglas Holtz-Eakin (henceforth DHE) outlines is sane and coherent. This is different than saying I agree with all of it. But it passes the basic sniff test: it acknowledges the reality and the gravity of the climate change problem, and seemingly embraces solutions commensurate with the scale of the issue. This still leaves plenty of room for disagreement over policy particulars, but it’s miles ahead of where, say, our government is now. So that’s good news.
- The stuff on nuclear energy, on the other hand, isn’t particularly coherent. McCain is pandering here, much as his presidential rivals are pandering on ethanol. You can decide for yourself how big a deal this is, but a fair amount of it is to be expected in an election year.
- I’d be remiss if I concluded a discussion of McCain’s position on climate change without mentioning that his environmental record has been just terrible lately. His proposed summer gas-tax holiday is only the latest affront. Unfortunately, Clinton has decided to pile onto this particular piece of demagoguery, leaving Obama currently looking cleanest on the climate change front.
And that’s your election climate change update. Look forward to another installment in late October, when this topic next crops us as an election issue…
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