Before discussing Jane Jacobs, let’s look at the problem. Consider Raleigh, North Carolina.
Like many cities, Raleigh has been planning, subsidizing, and revising its downtown for decades. In 1977 it turned a downtown thoroughfare, Fayetteville Street, into a pedestrian mall. That didn’t work out—in 2006 Fayetteville became a street again. Raleigh supported a gourmet restaurant (the Mint) with $1 million. It failed. In 2008 taxpayers paid for a downtown convention center and wooed a name-brand hotel with $21 million.
This wasn’t good, either. “The only way the RCC [the convention center] attracts users is by offering deep discounts on rooms and services and even paying large subsidies to attract conventions and meetings,” wrote two policy analysts in 2008.[1] Now the government is planning another convention center at an estimated price of $387 million.
I could go on . . . but if you live in an American city, you probably have seen (and paid for) something similar—public efforts to bring people downtown. Continue reading “Let’s Not Blame Jane Jacobs”
It makes a good story. In the late 1800s demand for wood was insatiable—for houses, for ships, for fuel, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving ugly cutover land behind them. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.”[1]
George Vanderbilt (grandson of the “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt) came to the rescue.
Vanderbilt’s mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, was built on land that included about 125,000 acres of forest, much of it already logged. Vanderbilt hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage the lands around the Biltmore estate, with the goals of making money while restoring and protecting the forest. Pinchot hired a German forester, Carl Schenck, to work for him. Pinchot went on to be the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, and Schenck started the first forestry school in the nation.
“Pinchot implemented a management plan that improved the forest while returning a profit to the landowner, the first of its kind in America and served as a national model,” states the National Forestry Foundation on its website. [2]
Each year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has a dinner in Washington, D.C., honoring the economist Julian Simon, who died in 1998. Simon was a rare optimist in the fields of population and natural resources. He disagreed with most environmentalists of his day (especially in the 1980s through 1990s). They feared passionately that growing population would overwhelm agriculture and industry and that the world would run out of natural resources such as oil and minerals.
Instead, Simon thought that more births are a good thing and was sure that resources would not disappear. His upbeat views were widely disparaged.
Ecologist Garrett Hardin called him “Dr. Pangloss,” compared him to a “fast change artist at a county fair,” and said he persuaded people with “sleight of hand.” [1] Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, and a leading alarmist wrote (along with his wife, Anne), that Simon was “the leader of a space-age age cargo cult” of economists and a “fringe character.” [2] They also called his qualifications those of a “specialist in mail-order marketing.”[3]
Can history help us understand today’s panic over global warming? I believe so.
I do think we are experiencing panic. While the Earth is warming and human activity is probably contributing to it, the overheated efforts to make people fear the long-term future suggest that this is more of a crusade than a rationally considered enterprise. Extreme fear of global warming is negatively affecting politics, the economy, the media, international relations, and education.
I will look at two disastrous periods that have some resemblance to today’s craze: witchcraft fears in the Middle Ages and the eugenics movement of the 1930s. I am not alone in making these comparisons to climate change alarm , as you will see. [1]
But first, bear with me as I report on some of the efforts to ignore or squelch criticism of the prevailing apocalyptic approach. These efforts are inappropriate, even unethical. Then I will discuss the two previous outsized eras. Continue reading “Climate Change and the “Madness of Crowds””
I recently became acquainted with an arcane language containing symbols like RFS, RINs, eRINs, RVOs, WTE, RNG, even HBIIP. It is spoken by groups with their own esoteric names, such as RFA and ABFA and WTEA.
There is a reason for this obscurity: This is the language of lobbying for the multi-billion-dollar “renewable fuel industry (RFI).” These speakers don’t want you to know much about them except when they make public announcements like: “lower-cost, lower-carbon ethanol fuel blends are better for the environment and the family budget.”
I’m going to share some of the 50 years of history of this renewable fuels lobbying. My purpose is to explain two ideas that help me understand political history. One is the economist’s notion of concentrated benefits vs. dispersed costs. Another is the “bootleggers and Baptists” coalition identified many years ago by economist Bruce Yandle. [1]
While I am singling out one big (and burgeoning) industry, that is because I have been examining it for my environmental blog, and I have more details there (including definitions of most of the terms identified above). But there are plenty of other similar stories (start with sugar and cotton) .
