Failing the 21st Century
The Riverside Press-Enterprise wants you to believe that somehow Water trumps rail – that California can only afford to do so much in order to meet our challenges here in the 21st century, and that new water conveyance is necessary whereas rail is not:
Gov. Jerry Brown has the state’s top infrastructure priorities half right. California badly needs to shore up the state’s primary water system. But a bullet train project threatens to become a costly boondoggle. The governor should push ahead with water plans, and sidetrack the high-speed rail proposal before it rolls over taxpayers….
A bullet train, by contrast, represents no essential public need, and Brown should rethink his advocacy of the project. The California High-Speed Rail Authority envisions a system that will whisk passengers between Southern California and the Bay Area at speeds of up to 220 mph.
Beginning a decade or two from now, people will look back on editorials like this the way people mock things like Dewey Defeats Truman, Irving Fisher’s October 1929 pronouncement that “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” and other similarly wrong predictions.
The notion that a bullet train “represents no essential public need” is a shockingly ignorant statement that requires one believe there is no such thing as rising oil prices, no such thing as high unemployment amidst the worst recession in 60 years caused in no small part by high oil prices (as anyone from the Inland Empire ought to know well), no traffic problems (ever try commuting on Interstate 10 or State Routes 60 and 91?).
It also requires one not believe that global warming is a serious problem. And that’s the most patently absurd assumption in the editorial, because of its argument that rail and water aren’t related. If the goal is to ensure reliable water supplies to California’s farmers and households, then reducing carbon emissions is essential to water delivery. California’s own climate studies have found that global warming produces a significant risk that the state will face water scarcity in the coming decades. While high speed rail alone won’t stop global warming, the state has found that by removing 12 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, HSR is an essential piece of implementing the AB 32 climate target reductions. HSR and water, then, don’t trump each other – investing in the first helps protect the second.
The Press-Enterprise closed their editorial by saying “The state can survive just fine without the needless expense of a bullet train.” If it were up to them, we’d still be in the Great Depression. The bay bridges, Boulder Dam, and the Central Valley canals were all claimed in the 1920s to be too expensive to build or were simply unnecessary. But the state built each during the Depression, and they played a crucial role in providing the basis of long-term prosperity, just as HSR will (including for the Inland Empire).
California isn’t going to climb out of this economic crisis and thrive in the 21st century if it remains locked in obsolete 20th century thinking as embodied in the Press-Enterprise article. California needs both water and rail and has no choice but to find a way to fund them both – along with the other priorities facing the state. Rejecting the false belief that we can’t fund those priorities is the first step to actually getting those important projects built and helping put California on the path to recovery.
There’s no credit line to this. Who wrote it, and how old is he or she? Does the generational pattern hold, or is this someone outside the pattern?
Jerry Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 12:11 am
Regarding, “generational pattern”:
“Firms change gears as cell phone replaces car as rite of passage”, is a headline in Monday’s SF Chronicle article titled, “Millennials shift marketing”.
Ford Motor Co. futurist Sheryl Connelly stated, “For millennials, if you were to think about the thing that enables freedom and independence, it’s your first cell phone.” Not an automobile.
Social networking and smart phones are replacing the need to go drive somewhere to connect with friends. For a variety of reasons, younger people are delaying getting their licenses and are driving less than older generations.
For full article go to:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/22/BUVF1KPK2G.DTL
Twelve billion pounds (not tons) of CO2 annually is about as effective with regards to global warming as taking a piss on a forest fire. Claiming that HSR helps secure water, well, that certainly takes some award for chutzpah.
morris brown Reply:
August 22nd, 2011 at 10:04 pm
Amen!
Tom McNamara Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 11:01 am
But keep in mind:
a) The railroads were the driving force behind using irrigation on such a large scale. It was the need to serve communities along the rail line that triggered the support to underwrite big water infrastructure projects and keeps these places on the map.
b) Less snow on the Sierras does equal less water. Global warming does reduce snowpack. Sure, the operation of HSR might be a drop in the bucket of CO2 emissions…but if it spurs more density and less auto use as a result…then it’s a different story.
c) You wonder why people don’t want to run the LA- SD portion through Orange County instead of the Inland Empire? It’s because the development community has convinced the powers that be that someday there will be another ten million people living east of Pomona. And what do they use as their justification…oh yeah the Canal…
Alon Levy Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 11:34 am
Does it ever? The way to spur more density and less auto use is to not build additional freeway capacity, a task at which Fresno, LA, and the Bay Area are all massively failing right now, on the local level.
BruceMcF Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 11:59 am
Not until it is in operation. That is why the Road-Empire and Big Oil are investing a bit of propaganda pocket chain in opposing HSR ~ because of the risk that once in operation the “expand this freeway or else!” starts to feel like a benign threat on the “or else” side.
Paulus Magnus Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 12:06 pm
One wonders why TEH EVUL CONSPIRACY fights so hard against HSR, which has minimal effect upon them, but not against the higher CAFE standards.
BruceMcF Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 12:19 pm
I don’t know that its an evil conspiracy ~ in the context of the cash flows of Big Oil, the money that Exxon and such put into Cato, Reason, and Heritage is rounding error on their petty cash.
CAFE standards don’t impose any direct challenge to the Roadbuilding lobby, and the gas tax financing is under threat in any event, so their efforts seem to be focused more on getting a different assured flow of income. For Big Oil, given global Peak Oil, not having demand in a decade’s time for a volume of gasoline they would not have available for sale in any event is not threat at all.
Given that roughly 70% of our petroleum consumption goes into the transport sector, oil-independent transport is the primary threat within the US of destroying demand on the oil consumption per task side rather than via the income-destruction that gives the oil companies windfall profits in a declining production volumes industry.
Stephen Smith Reply:
August 27th, 2011 at 9:14 pm
How much of Cato, Reason, and Heritage’s budgets comes from oil companies? I know Reason magazine – reason.com as opposed to reason.org – gets most of its funding from stock/bond/commodities traders in New York and Chicago, but I’m not sure about the rest. (reason.com also gets little to no money from the Kochs. Not sure about reason.org.)
Tom McNamara Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 12:53 pm
Keep in mind that road construction has expanded because cities are annexing land. (It’s one of the few ways they can still make money these days…)
Once Proposition 13 hollowed out local sources of revenue, cities had to marry themselves to sales tax revenue and “inspection fees”. That meant zoning more housing, more retail, and as a result, funding roads to serve those areas.
HSR passengers are a captive audience, and by placing them strategically you can increase the value of the land surrounding the station and the city’s revenue potential. It might not be perfect, but it’s a start….
Derek Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 1:13 pm
“Global warming does reduce snowpack.”
Except when it creates more precipitation. Warm air holds more moisture than cold air!
Tom McNamara Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Part of it too is that the snowpack is a natural reservoir that slowly delimits itself over time, thus allowing us to build artificial reservoirs that take the runoff and use it at a controlled pace. Conversely, I want to know what mountain range would have heavier snowpack if global warming continues?
joe Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 6:19 pm
How about few to none of them will experience more snowpack?
I have yet to digest this article fully but “A cordillera is an extensive chain of mountains or mountain ranges, that runs along a coastline”
The Unusual Nature of Recent Snowpack Declines in the North American Cordillera.
scienceexpress june 11 2011
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.opb.org%2Fmedia%2Fuploads%2Fpdf%2F2011%2Fsnowpackpaper%255B1%255D.pdf&rct=j&q=dan%20cyan%20snowpack&ei=sk9UTvjNO8HhiAKVw735DA&usg=AFQjCNFL9RqI4toLKHKyNrIcleJmF9-NdA&cad=rja
In western North America snowpack has declined in recent decades, and further losses are projected through the 21st century. Here we evaluate the uniqueness of recent declines using snowpack reconstructions from 66 tree-ring chronologies in key runoff generating areas of the Colorado, Columbia and Missouri River drainages. Over the past millennium, late-20th century snowpack reductions are almost unprecedented in magnitude across the northern Rocky Mountains, and in their north-south synchrony across the cordillera. Both the snowpack declines and their synchrony result from unparalleled springtime warming due to positive reinforcement of the anthropogenic warming by decadal variability. The increasing role of warming on large-scale snowpack variability and trends foreshadows fundamental impacts on streamflow and water supplies across the western USA.
Alon Levy Reply:
August 24th, 2011 at 1:34 am
East Antarctica is reported to gain snow mass coming from increased precipitation. It roughly balances out mass loss in West Antarctica. Unfortunately, warming is also creating a lubricating layer underneath West Antarctica, making it in danger of slipping into the sea.
joe Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 6:07 pm
Snowpack duration is important for western forests. If more snow falls but melts sooner then the forests soil will dry out sooner and forests experience greater water stress and forest fuels dry sooner – and extend the fire season.
Also Scripps research on CA’s water is showing that CA’s snowpack dynamics are changing, more melt sooner, but the Sierra reservoirs are built for a slower, more gradual melt. We’re not designed for the changing snowpack dynamics – it’s inefficient.
Neville Snark Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 11:12 am
“Twelve billion pounds (not tons) of CO2 annually is about as effective with regards to global warming as taking a piss on a forest fire.”
— so is voting, with respect to affecting the outcome. But the difference is that doing nothing to prevent climate change is an unmitigated evil. With voting, it depends on how you vote.
The Press Enterprise endorsed McCain in 2008 and Bush in 2004. Apart from introducing “water” into the discussion, this editorial is a basic, run-of-the-mill Republican hit piece. Yawn.
Do you really think there’s some naive newspaper reader left who is influenced by this? I think this is preaching to the choir! They know who their readers are – their readers know what the paper is going to say because it’s why they buy the paper. I expect it’s views are as “fair and balanced” as Fox News.
There’s no demonstrable need to “shore up the state’s primary water system.” If there’s a shortage of water, it’s only because the price of water “is set below the going rate determined by supply and demand”[1]. So the quick and easy solution to any water shortage should be obvious.
A lot of people seem to think demand for water is perfectly inelastic, but how many people can take shorter showers, or fill the toilet tank with the laundry water, or cut down on watering the lawn?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_shortage
BruceMcF Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 10:51 am
A water efficient toilet and having a lawn that does not require watering are two substantial ways to reduce water consumption.
And many industrial users don’t make serious headway by appeal to their conscience, because many are corporations with no conscience to appeal to. If it shows up in the bean counters spreadsheets, though, that’s a different matter entirely.
the paper has it completely backwards. the HSR is of the essence for CA’s future, but the peripheral canal actively harms the state’s future in many ways, and is a costly way to avoid changing the broken way the state deals with water. it’s the complete opposite of HSR, in the long run.
Tom McNamara Reply:
August 23rd, 2011 at 10:49 am
Brown (and Schwarzengger before him) thought they had an air tight strategy packaging the water bond and the train bond together in 2008. But then the former Governor got cold feet and decided it wasn’t worth it (not like the guy was on the ballot this time). Now there’s a full-blown catastrophe because the Central Valley is opposing HSR while praying for the Canal. Editorials like this one are going to ensure the bond flat out fails.
Northern California always hates the fact that Southern Californians use their superior population numbers to get stuff voted in, especially on water. If the Chronicle wants to derail the measure, just run this thing a week before the election. And if that weren’t bad enough, the “mandate” from voters against “infrastructure” likely means a longer delay (and perhaps elimination) of Phase 2 for HSR which serve, among other places….wait for it….
Riverside….
Cities Where Americans Can’t Get To Work
2nd worse is Riverside
Alon Levy Reply:
August 22nd, 2011 at 10:57 pm
More pearls of wisdom from Brookings? Sigh.
The RPE article is a good example of what happens when someone without much to say has to write in order to make a living.
This turned up on Railway Preservation News–it might be a way to reduce the cost of rolling stock, and it is certainly very light weight:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81HgzHSwpcQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vns-9sqxmCw
Be prepared to smile.