Category Archives: News commentary

Those who believe in human-caused climate change often point out that skeptics are most likely to be economic conservatives who don’t like the idea of problems that can’t be solved by the free market. But the accusation goes the other way as well: believers are most likely to be self-described progressives who love big government and are thrilled by the idea of a problem that can only be solved by making government bigger.

This was recently pointed out by Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute (and co-authors of “The Death of Environmentalism“). One of their main exhibits is a 2011 article from The Nation by Naomi Klein.

“Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action,” says Klein. “Climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.” Those “progressive demands” include “publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as ‘people’ under the law”; “ending the cult of shopping” along with all economic growth except “for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty”; and of course “subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone [and] energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines.”

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Young people have been told so often that they are especially virtuous for living in inner cities and riding transit instead of driving that they have developed a serious epidemic of smugness. For example, one writes that “my generation is car-sharing, using transit, walking, biking and generally using any number of forms of transportation that are far more energy-efficient and less carbon-dependent. We support high-speed rail, view climate change as a real threat and are eschewing suburban sprawl that has consumed precious land and energy.”

There are lots of things wrong with these claims, but the biggest is the idea that young people today are somehow different. In reality, every demographic group is growing faster in the suburbs than the cities. Reports of rapid inner city growth are often based on very tiny numbers: a couple of decades ago, hardly anyone lived in downtown, thanks mainly to urban planners who used federal urban renewal money to clear minorities, single men, and others out of downtown areas. When you start at near zero, any growth at all will be a large percentage, but it doesn’t indicate a major trend.

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Here’s a toughie. Assume you support free-markets. That means you probably oppose government limits on what foods people can buy, such as New York Mayor Bloomberg’s so-called Big Gulp ban. A major reason for opposing such bans is that the government isn’t really capable of deciding what is healthy or unhealthy. If we ban sugary drinks, shouldn’t we also ban cholesterol-filled red meat? Vegan diets don’t have enough vitamin B-12, so maybe we should ban tofu. On the other hand, maybe Coca-Cola can escape the ban if it adds B-12 to its drinks.

The point is that free-market advocates oppose government control of what people eat because what gets labeled “healthy” or “unhealthy” will depend more on political power, fads, and urban folklore than on science and reason. Moreover, just as it is hard to end the corn ethanol program, once government labels something healthy or unhealthy, it will become very hard to change that label even if research proves it wrong.

On the other hand, the federal government gives out $75 billion a year in food stamps (technically the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” or SNAP). The National Center for Public Policy Research considers itself a free-market advocate, yet it argues that food stamps should be dedicated only to healthy foods–and that the corporations that sell unhealthy foods shouldn’t lobby to keep their products in the program.

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Despite claims of a downtown population boom, the reality is that every demographic group is growing faster in the suburbs than the cities–and that includes poor people. According to an L.A. Times report on a new book from Brookings, between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor people living in suburbs grew by 67 percent and now outnumber poor people living in cities.

This is supposed to be a problem because antipoverty agencies are “unprepared to meet the need in suburban areas.” This being Brookings, one of the remedies is supposed to be “more (and better) transportation options” (meaning public transit) in the suburbs. But this begs the question: if antipoverty agencies and public transit are so critical to poor people, why did so many poor people move to the suburbs in the first place? The answer, of course, is that they aren’t that helpful.

Meanwhile, a report from Australia suggests that one reason why low-income populations are growing in the suburbs is that wealthy and upper-middle-class people are crowding poor people out of the inner cities. This is certainly the situation in many American urban areas, such as San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. This, of course, is what the cities wanted: to lure the high-taxpaying people away from the suburbs. In many cases, however, the way they are doing it is not by making the cities attractive to the rich but by making them unaffordable for the poor.

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Police cars today have cameras that can scan the license places on every car they see. Plate numbers are transmitted to a central computer and if a number is flagged as wanted in any way, the police in the cruiser get an alert and they can pull the car over. That sounds reassuring but it also represents a potentially serious invasion of privacy.

Compared with this, privacy concerns over such things as self-driving cars or VMT pricing seem tame. Yet conservatives manage to freak out over potential invasions of privacy by Google’s self-driving car as well as by proposals for VMT pricing.

Let’s get this straight. There is nothing about self-driving cars that are potentially an invasion of people’s privacy. Unlike police cars, the cars do not report to nor are they monitored by some central computer, Instead, all the electronics is on board the car. While some car systems being designed today could invade people’s privacy, the systems used to enable cars to drive themselves are not among them.

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