The NRDC must not feel much like defending natural resources anymore if they support cellulosic.

On the surface, the idea to create more realistic (like in physics!) and pragmatic economical models looks very appealing. However, in reality it will not work because of very simple reason – physics deals with still nature while economics deals with relationships between us, humans. Thus to create any working economical model, we have to understand ourselves on the first place. The history of medicine (psychiatry, for example) clearly shows that we really don’t know ourselves well enough to build any “realistic and pragmatic models”.

However, there is a solution to many if not all of our economical and other problems. I’d suggest reading what Michael Laitman has to say about it. Just check this link http://www.laitman.com/2008/11/economics-needs-a-scientific-revolution/
to learn more about alternative solutions.

Mike

If that doesn’t work we can always hope for some king of virulent epidemic to kill off a couple of billion people so the planet won’t be so over-populated.

The approach outlined by the Big Look is nothing more than business-as-usual with a tint of greenwashing. The free market fundamentalism and anti-regulatory bias shines brightly through. There’s no sense of the urgency of the climate crisis we face, and the obliviousness to peak oil is nothing less than shocking. It’s the religion of economic growth that got us into this predicament, and more of the same no matter how it’s described (“increased trade-sectors, green industries, and high-tech clusters”)will only worsen the problem. What’s needed is a fundamental re-thinking of our place within ecological systems – or as Nietzsche would say, a revaluation of values (Jason’s teaching Nietzsche this year).
I’m thinking about writing a more thorough response to the Big Look’s conclusions and recommendations, but am wondering if it’s worth the effort or if anybody’s paying attention.

Energy Watchdog Warns Of Oil-Production Crunch
IEA Official Says Supplies May Plateau Below Expected Demand

By NEIL KING JR. and PETER FRITSCH
Wall Street Journal
May 22, 2008; Page A1

The world’s premier energy monitor is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of its first attempt to comprehensively assess the condition of the world’s top 400 oil fields. Its findings won’t be released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future crude supplies could be far tighter than previously thought. …

You are, of course, correct. But Rome wasn’t built in a day. My purpose in posting this analysis was to highlight the magnitude of the changes in behavior we will have to see, even assuming fairly ambitious improvements in technology. I will have to wait until another day to take the next step, as you are already suggesting, of figuring out how to facilitate the needed changes in behavior. For now, the reality is that many in state government who are discussing what Oregon needs to do have not yet fully appreciated just how much behavior will need to change, hence our transportation and land use systems will need to change to facilitate that.

This is a really thoughtful post, and the analytical framework you suggest is clear and useful.

One point that I would make is that our built environment poses serious constraint to changes in behavior. We have a tremendous investment in “hard” infrastructure with long life cycles – our houses, neighborhoods, transportation systems (meaning mostly roads and other auto-supportive infrastructure). Changing behavior wouldn’t be so difficult were we not so locked in to our current land use patterns.

Ever-rising transportation fuel prices as we head down from peak oil should lend momentum to the effort to change behaviors. We need to be thinking about how to change our legal infrastructure – our systems of land use laws and building codes – so as to encourage and enable people to change behaviors as the incentive to do so (i.e., higher and higher fuel prices) compels then to do so.

What you suggest is exactly what we are proposing in Lane County.

We are working on updating our website to include a Goal One Institute page, on which we plan to provide links to the draft documents for projects we are working on. This will offer the opportunity for anyone who is interested to review and comment on drafts as they are being developed. It would also provide samples for people to apply and modify for other jurisdictions.

This is very much a work in progress. For now, I’ll email you the draft.

Full disclosure: I am a part-time hearings officer, on contract to a county and a couple cities. I also represent clients before elected and appointed boards and agencies, and before hearings officers, in cities and counties throughout the state.

I wonder how the idea translates to rural development; do you favor making smaller lot sizes and mixed uses available there, as well?

I’m all for some mixed uses out in my neighborhood. Not so sure about smaller lots, though.

Spatial measurements are regionalized variables only meaningful in the local context at the time they are taken. Relax the planet is fine.

Dunes City on the Coast is an example. While the community adopted the first non-key-facility moratorium, the first septic inspection ord., and the first low-phosphorus ord., it has experienced massive resistance in adopting simple concepts like updated erosion-control ords, or new storm-water ords.

These are relatively simple matters. So imagine the large “push-back” concerning more extensive regulatory measures. (Need I reference Measure 37 and the decision (failure?) of the Legislature to attempt an actual repeal? I imagine this was, in part, based on the “anti-regulatory” rural vote/mentality.)

And “local” media will be sorely tested to clearly explain issues presented at a local level.

So, my personal impression is that state-wide regulatory measures are more viable, with local groups working hard to provide “cover” for innovate state legislative forces willing to lead.

rand dawson
Siltcoos Lake

This is being treated as “pie in the sky” by most media, and most transportation “experts”.

Darn shame, because it holds a lot of promise, as it could help ameliorate the major fight we’re going to have trying to stop sprawl.

The state’s energy planning, as shown in this document, is a joke, but it’s not very funny.

this isnt an issue about rational allocation of public transportation dollars…its a squeeze play…how the public transportation dollar is hijacked to serve mega-corp interests…

or the corollary…how the planning structure is dysfuctional…to the extent there is a structure…(the state has given a grant to these people….my gawd)

rr–

In any discussion of land use laws it can be helpful to examine the origin of the concept of property rights.
As I indicated in an earlier comment on banking and the Federal Reserve System, the concept of property rights goes back in time to pre-history, a time when all lands were open and free, a time when people could hunt or graze their animals anywhere.
Then other humans, probably riding horses and carrying weapons, claimed the once-open lands as their territory, telling the herders that the land where they were grazing their animals belonged to them and that from that time on, they’d have to pay rent to the armed rider to use the land under his “protection.”.
Those early land grabbers gradually evolved into the rulers of city-states and then nation-states, what we now call kings and emperors. But the concept was the same as in earlier times. Their self-assumed rights to land and land ownership were based on deeds of war, hence, “deed” is still the term used to describe a land ownership document. And to give their land claims the aura of divine authority, warlord-kings’ deeds of war were often blessed by a priest.
But is this ancient, protection-racket concept of property rights really valid? Consider the huge land grab on this continent once known as the Louisiana Territory.
When the Louisiana Territory was claimed for France in 1682, explorer Lord Robert LaSalle merely stood by a cross erected at the mouth of the Mississippi River. As puzzled Native Americans looked on, LaSalle claimed 830,000 square miles in the name of “the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by Grace of God king of France and Navarre, 14th of that name.” The French king did not pay natives, trappers or anyone else a cent for the vast lands, yet in 1803 the U.S. had to pay Napoleon $15 million to gain “title” to the Territory.
Why? Did the Louisiana Territory really belong to the French? As Chief Seattle said, “The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky, the land?”
Even in 21st Century America, living in modest subdivision home or grandiose estate, the concept of land ownership often seems alien. First of all, families today are extremely mobile and change homes often. I’m probably atypical, yet I’ve “owned” four different homes over 40 years. But did I really own those homes and the land on which they stood?
For most of the 40 years in those four homes there was a mortgage on the properties. Didn’t my monthly payments to a bank or finance company make me a renter — not an owner — of those properties?
Then there’s the issue of eminent domain, a concept based on the old idea that property rights are derived from the warlord-king, or in today’s world, the government. By allowing the local, state or federal government to condemn someone’s property to build a new highway, library or maybe even a new shopping center, what does eminent domain say about the rigidity of property rights?
And finally, there’s war. Again, consider the property rights of Native Americans. They were not only erased by claims from far-away monarchs. They were systematically destroyed by deeds of war carried out by the military of the fledgling United States. Also, what happened to the property rights of Jews in Europe during World War II, as well as Japanese-Americans here in the US?
My point here is that no one’s individual property rights are worth anything without the protection of a government’s police and armed forces. And just as a government’s armies can defend one party’s property rights, they can dissolve someone else’s. A good example is the invasion of Iraq, a plan largely designed to shift ownership of Iraqi oil from the Iraqis to multinational oil companies.
Yet individuals and corporations act as if their rights of “private property” are absolute, that the government, whether local, state or national, is there only to provide services and to protect that property but not restrict its use in any way. That’s an underlying issue in the Measure 37/Measure 49 debate, as well as almost all other land-use controversies.
But given that the entire concept of property rights is based on the historic-but-invalid concept of divine right, perhaps we should be questioning the concept of land ownership itself. For example, how can you own something that is there long after (perhaps a billion years after) you’re dead — “How can you buy or sell the sky, the land?”
Buckminster Fuller used geometry to debunk the property rights concept, primarily because it is based on invalid flat-earth thinking. We now know, for example, that a two-dimensional plane exists only in concept, not in reality. So, when you say that you own a plot of land, where does that ownership end — at the center of the earth? Does it also extend out into space to infinity? If so, should air traffic and satellites pay a fee each time they enter your property? It sounds ridiculous. And it is.
Still, the concept of private property rights is so thoroughly entrenched in our legal and political system, it isn’t likely to disappear any time soon. But a deep understanding and recognition that private property can’t possibly exist without public protection, transportation and other services can be very effective in all property rights arguments.
Zoning attorneys and property owners are quick to make the “takings” argument whenever regulations affect their property. But they seldom acknowledge the “givings” of government that ultimately make their property rights possible.