Transit supporters have a new explanation for transit’s decline: the Koch brothers are killing new transit projects. At least, that’s what the New York Times says, and since that is the nation’s newspaper of record, it must be true.
According to the article published yesterday, Americans for Prosperity have combined with the Cato Institute to fight light rail all over the country. Since both of these groups were initially funded by the Koch brothers, it must be some sort of conspiracy.
Speaking for myself, I don’t mind being associated with the Koch brothers. After all, they support gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and ending Middle East military interventions. They oppose tax-increment financing, the use of eminent domain to take private property to give to other private developers, and NSA surveillance of American citizens. What’s not to love?
Leftists agree with most of these views, yet they demonize the Koch brothers for one thing: their opinions on climate change. So it is no surprise that the Times article wasn’t written by the paper’s transportation writer, but by its “climate reporter,” Hiroko Tabuchi. Yet climate change was never mentioned in the article.
That may be because Tabuchi interviewed the Antiplanner, and I sent her irrefutable evidence that light rail actually increases greenhouse gas emissions. On average, the power generated to run light rail emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than the average car, and while it emits a little less than the average SUV (or average transit bus), this small savings never makes up for the huge emissions during rail construction. Rather than imply that the Koch brothers might actually oppose something that increases greenhouse gas emissions, Tabuchi remained silent on the subject, possibly expecting her readers to assume that light rail equal green.
She did accurately report that I called Nashville’s proposed light rail project “the diamond-encrusted Rolex watch of transit. It’s something that doesn’t do as much as a real watch can do. It costs a lot more. And it serves solely to serve the ego of the people who are buying it.”
It is not the something that possess any hidden see this pharmacy shop now levitra 30mg side effects like other conventional medications. Prescription djpaulkom.tv cheap sildenafil drugs – There are drugs that are prescribed for hair loss. This ingredient is present in Super P Force tablets Super P Force tablets should be taken according to the American Urological Association, as men age, the level of circulating testosterone decreases, which djpaulkom.tv viagra properien may interfere with normal erection. On the online cialis soft Read Full Article off chance that you need to encounter amazing impact amid the sexual movement, then you ought to consider taking this drug. However, she then added that I argued that light rail is a “conduit for crime [and] gentrification, forcing people to move further away to find affordable housing.” I said nothing about either of these subjects in my Nashville presentation, and if they came up during the question-and-answer period, I would have said that light rail is associated with an increase in property crime but that it does not generate gentrification or any other kind of economic development unless it is accompanied by further subsidies to property developers.
In any case, while I appreciate the New York Times associating me with the Koch brothers, whose political positions I find admirable, they’ve never told me how they feel about light rail or any other transit project. In fact, I’ve never met them or been given instructions from them or anyone at Cato who may have met them. Nor has Americans for Prosperity consistently opposed light rail: I understand they were involved in the Nashville campaign, but I don’t remember them playing a significant role in anti-light-rail campaigns in Austin, San Antonio, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Virginia Beach, or other cities I’ve worked in. (They did lead the anti-light-rail campaign in Phoenix, but they started too late to make a difference.)
It’s also curious that the Times article didn’t say a thing about all of the corporate money used to promote Nashville’s light-rail ballot measure. After all, if the $5- to $9-billion measure had passed, many construction and engineering firms would have earned millions of dollars in profits. Supporters outspent opponets by at least three to one. The Times does mention an anonymous, $750,000 donation to the anti-campaign, but I think I know who made that contribution and it wasn’t the Koch brothers. Why would they? They wouldn’t have earned a dime whether it passed or not.
The truth that the New York Times never addressed is that light rail is an economic, environmental, and transportation disaster. It spends a lot of money doing something that can be done for a lot less with buses. It requires enormous amounts of energy to build and operate, with roughly proportional greenhouse gas emissions. And it almost always makes congestion worse, not better, which also adds to greenhouse gas emissions.
Given that transit ridership is declining almost everywhere, including Nashville, any transit investments are questionable. But Nashville’s plan to spend more than $5 billion on less than 30 miles of light rail was particularly ludicrous; as I pointed out in my presentation, that same amount of money could have been used to add two new lanes to every freeway in the Nashville area, buy enough electric buses to double service on every route in Nashville and operate that service, fare-free, for twenty years, and still have enough money left over to buy every student in Nashville public schools a new laptop computer every three years for the next twenty years.
For the New York Times, apparently, what counts is not whether policies make sense but who supports and opposes them. If the “wrong” people oppose them, then they must be good ideas no matter how stupid they really are. Such guilt-by-association tactics are a disappointment because the Times was once a great paper.
The problem with the New York Times and the Koch brothers is that each is seeing problems only from their viewpoint. The Times reporter is probably from New York and uses heavily subsidized transit and somehow thinks this is a solution for other cities, without concentrating on any cost benefit analysis. The problem with the Koch brothers is as major oil producers they do not want to acknowledge peer reviewed science that would reduce oil sales and might cost them a great deal of money. For example here is an article on the Koch brothers position on climate change where Charles Koch makes many incorrect statements about the peer reviewed science:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/06/06/what-charles-koch-really-thinks-about-climate-change/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bec338ce9e83
Both the Koch brothers and the New York Times reporter should be looking at rigorous cost benefit analysis. Any claimed reduction in greenhouse gas production is meaningless without a cost per tonne of CO2 reduction. Realistically we have to produce the same standard of living we now have at very low cost per tonne of CO2 reduction. This requires rigorous cost benefit analysis.
For those who deny human induced climate change:
If one goes into a planning meeting and claim there is no climate change, peer reviewed science is biased etc everything you say will be dismissed. I have seen this numerous times at planning meetings in the San Francisco Bay area. Go in and ask where the cost benefit analysis is, cost per tonne of CO2 reduction, cost per passenger mile, etc and you will have a winning argument in shutting down cost ineffective rail projects, etc.
I don’t know but the Coke Brothazz make it unbearable to be on………
The problem with the Koch brothers is as major oil producers they do not want to acknowledge peer reviewed science that would reduce oil sales and might cost them a great deal of money.
Similarly, the problem with global warming scientists is that the more hysterical their predictions, the more grant money they get. $20 billion in federal expenditures alone is quite an incentive. This famous old guy had something to say about how federal money can pervert science:
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
President Dwight Eisenhower, 1960
The problem with CO2 removing solutions is there is no middle man.
They’re either too expensive or too cheap to matter. Anything that costs thousands of dollars per ton is a waste of time.
What’s the ideal price per ton of CO2 removal? Various methods do lead to CO2 reductions at a cost per ton that is significant but it’s not the over all picture. For example traffic signal coordination the overall cost is 35 dollars per ton, while cheap even if we coordinated every signal nationwide the CO2 would be a fraction of a fraction of a percent. I tried formulating CO2 reduction costs per ton. The fact is US CO2 emissions have gone down, despite the proliferation of racking and drilling, emissions have declined. The US continues to lead where Europe has failed, because natural gas extracted domestically produces half the CO2 than coal. We did by accident what Europe has failed to do with taxation and regulation.
Nuclear is a good option. Environmentalists since the 70’s have made nuclear construction vastly more expensive. Instead of costs declining as typical in technological progress, the costs have risen even though nuclear has the potential for massive CO2 reductions.
cost estimates for new nuclear plant construction rose from between $2 billion and $4 billion per unit to $9 billion per unit, according to a 2009 UCS report, while experience with new construction in Europe has seen costs continue to soar. The costs are bureaucratic in nature.
But suppose it cost 8 billion dollars for an ESBWR (Economic simplified Boiling water reactor) 1,600 MW unit. With an capacity factor of over 95% it could generate 13.3 Terawatt-hours of electricity per year carbon free. Typically a coal plant produces 2.07 lbs of CO2 per kilowatt-hour. So a same sized coal plant at 1600 MW would produce 13.79 million tons per year. So the nuclear plant avoids those tons. Doing so at the cost of 580 dollars per ton. Below the thousand dollar per ton threshold that cripples most green projects. Plus these reactors have a 60 year life expectancy. These are just base calculations. But again most of the overhead cost of nuclear now is nightmare bureaucracy.
In my opinion, the larger issue is that you now have large media outlets openly indulging in cheap conspiracy theories, and the related fact that nobody at the outlets seem to be doing their due editorial diligence. They seem to prize advocacy and narrative propagation over rigor and objectivity. And nobody is calling them on it, least of all their readers.
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I really don’t think it’s that simple. I doubt that the NYT in general — and this reporter in particular — or their readers are interested in rigorous benefit-cost analysis. Many of them probably don’t have the technical chops to understand and appreciate its role, nor would they be willing to entertain, let alone promote, results that might counter the preferred narrative.
Besides, how many state and/or local governments do you think are currently making transportation planning or climate change policy-related decisions on the basis of rigorous benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, or peer-reviewed science in general. Where I live, the local transit provider and its allies in local government have succeeded in advancing a light rail project with an estimated cost of $2 billion. It’s own planning documents indicate that the project will have no net impact on GHG emissions and will scarcely increase transit ridership. And this project has advanced without ever being subjected to a serious benefit-cost analysis.
In short, that is where we are in terms of policy. Climate change is a pervasive and scary enough issue that it makes people embrace projects and programs, many of which are not objectively rational, in order to be seen doing the “right” things. Bjorn Lomborg covered this well in his book Cool It. We don’t have angels or omniscient technocrats making decisions about how to spend money. The people we to have are too often insufficiently technically competent and/or swayed by other interests (ideology, electoral considerations) to consistently get these decisions right.
CO2 is plant food. The more you have, the more efficiently plants can grow, the more efficiently they use water, the more resistant they become to adverse conditions. This is why greenhouses use natural gas and propane heaters that exaust into the greenhouse, to increase the humidity and increase the concentration of CO2.
CO2 gets too low, as it has in the past distant past, agriculture becomes impossible due to low yields.
The planet is getting greener thanks in large part to all this CO2. (Which is still a trace gas in the atmosphere.)
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
Such transit boondoggles always include buses and commuter rail in one measure. But the OVERWHELMING majority of such spending (ignoring the other trendy boondoggles such as hiking trails, beautification and congestive bike lanes) is for rail — NOT buses. Buses are FAR cheaper and relatively much more efficient than rail. But central planners LOVE choo-choos.
Rail is NOT desired by most commuters. From 1985 to 2015 the Los Angeles region spent $9 billion on transit improvements — almost all on rail. At the end of these 30 years and with a bigger population, public transit in the region has fewer riders in 2015 than they had in 1985. Not just a lower PERCENTAGE of travelers — fewer actual RIDERS.
http://riderrants.blogspot.com/2016/02/billions-spent-but-fewer-people-are.html
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Given that transit ridership is declining almost everywhere, including Nashville, any transit investments are questionable. But Nashville’s plan to spend more than $5 billion on less than 30 miles of light rail was particularly ludicrous; as I pointed out in my presentation, that same amount of money could have been used to add two new lanes to every freeway in the Nashville area, buy enough electric buses to double service on every route in Nashville and operate that service, fare-free, for twenty years, and still have enough money left over to buy every student in Nashville public schools a new laptop computer every three years for the next twenty years.
” ~anti-planner
What bothers me about Nashville is that many on the left and especially liberals run away from the reality, a big part of the loss was Mayor Barry. She was the public face advocating for this tax. And anything like this has an element of “trust me, this is good for us” to it.
And then, well, she got quite publicly outed as someone who can’t be trusted. I still suspect that took a fair amount of steam out of the vote yes sales and quite a few folks didn’t show up to vote that were planning to.
Yet you get your funding through tax breaks while complaining about others getting tax breaks :$
“The Cato Institute is a 501(c)(3) educational institute. Contributions are tax deductible.”
“Thoreau Institute is a tax exempt organization located in Camp Sherman, Oregon. Donations to Thoreau Institute are tax deductible.”
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Given that transit ridership is declining almost everywhere, including Nashville, any transit investments are questionable. But Nashville’s plan to spend more than $5 billion on less than 30 miles of light rail was particularly ludicrous; as I pointed out in my presentation, that same amount of money could have been used to add two new lanes to every freeway in the Nashville area, buy enough electric buses to double service on every route in Nashville and operate that service, fare-free, for twenty years, and still have enough money left over to buy every student in Nashville public schools a new laptop computer every three years for the next twenty years.
” ~anti-planner
What bothers me about Nashville is that many on the left and especially liberals run away from the reality, a big part of the loss was Mayor Barry. She was the public face advocating for this tax. And anything like this has an element of “trust me, this is good for us” to it.
And then, well, she got quite publicly outed as someone who can’t be trusted. I still suspect that took a fair amount of steam out of the vote yes sales and quite a few folks didn’t show up to vote that were planning to.