Regrets, Mr. President?

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Take it from Dear Leader: “Our energy policy has not been very wise… we, frankly, have got policies that make it harder for us to become less dependent on oil.”

Well, five years ago (even six years ago), when the Dear Leader was obsessing with illegally invading a sovereign nation that posed no threat to our security, some of us were arguing that a better strategy, on many levels, would be an energy policy that released the United States’ dependence on oil. But no. Now the Dear Leader looks back and sees that “our energy policy has not been very wise.”

Higher oil prices will cost the U.S. economy approximately $200 billion in 2008. The war in Iraq has had direct costs approaching $1 trillion over five years, and ultimately may cost upwards of $3 trillion (including indirect costs, primarily borne by Iraqis). Now, suppose that an energy tax — equal, or nearly equal, to today’s energy prices, which appear to be at the limit in terms of the economy’s ability to readily handle — had been imposed in 2002, phased out if oil prices soared. Easily $1 trillion could have been raised over five years to support high-ROI investments in energy efficiency and renewables — and trillions of dollars could have been saved on an unnecessary endless war.

Thou shalt have no historic sites before me

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And I thought the Japanese had a curious philosophical approach to historic preservation. Zvika Krieger in the New Republic reports on the shockingly nihilist attitude of Saudi authorities toward maintaining countless historic sites, including many directly connected to Mohammed:

“It is not permitted to glorify buildings and historical sites,” proclaimed Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz, then the kingdom’s highest religious authority, in a much-publicized fatwa in 1994. “Such action would lead to polytheism.” […] The clerics’ stance permits the Saudi government to play it both ways, in a perfect marriage of the secular and spiritual. It can destroy ancient sites and still maintain doctrinal credibility; the massive, capitalistic accumulation of wealth becomes a religious necessity, not an evil. “The government has finally woken up to the commercial value of religious tourism,” Sfakianakis says, “and they are really the ones driving this construction boom in Mecca.”

Super hotel!

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An NY Times article about urban hotels incorporating green construction technologies mentioned the first in what could be a chain of ALT Hotels, now under construction in Brossard, as part of a lifestyle center on Montréal’s South Shore. Several features — the building’s straightforwardly boxy look and uniform, $129-per-room pricing — raised my suspicions, confirmed by this:

In order to offer a quality hotel at the lowest possible prices, Groupe Germain and its Quebec partners have developed a totally new construction concept: the prefabricated room. Prefabricated rooms are currently being built at Rénova in Plessisville, one of the Group’s long-standing partners.

Finally! A modular hotel! A “Super Hotel” saved me late one night in Matsumoto: a tidy and super-efficient (bunk beds!) room for $67. All rooms were exactly identical, and the hotel appeared to have been built, Lego-like, from modular blocks; only the ground floor differed, and it housed a walk-through lobby, a continental-breakfast bar with lunchroom style seats, a business center, a little onsen and locker room, and the ubiquitous vending machines. The bathrooms, in particular, were definitely prefab, but still incorporated the latest in Japanese integrated bidet technology.

Super Hotel modular bath

Not only the prefab construction cut costs, but the relative lack of unnecessary frills: the front desk staff doles out towels and toiletries upon check-in; a keycode printed on your receipt replaces actual keys; and everyone’s forced out of the hotel for cleaning during midday. (This being Japan, robots were undoubtedly involved.) I’ve always been an undemanding but cheap traveler, and this no-frills approach matches that pretty well.

Wait and see (updated)

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The bids for privatizing about 36,000 parking meters citywide were due yesterday. I talked with someone who feels that a private operator might be more flexible and open to working with neighborhoods, but personally I suspect that a private operator will be even more willing to jack rates and run with the money. There was a brief moment when neighborhoods realized the upside potential of underpriced street parking, but now the city’s caught on and wants to keep the money for itself (well, split with its private-sector partner).

Public assets, like streets and even street parking, should be managed for the public good, not solely for private financial gain.

18 March: Lorene Yue in Crain’s reports that ten bidders responded, ranging from locals like CPS Parking to the usual Cintra and Macquarie (on separate teams). Chicago CFO Paul Volpe called it a “strong response.”

Which lawbreakers are at fault (updated)

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The ordinance whose introduction by Daley inspired “Hello, Criminal” made its way through the legislative apparatus. The Tribune apparently thought it wise to celebrate by splashing my photo on the front page of its website yesterday. John Greenfield has the full story of the ordinance’s passage in Gapers Block. How this became controversial is beyond me; all that the ordinance does is codify penalties for rudely, dangerously, stupidly, and (already) illegally cutting people off in traffic. Anyone who speaks in favor of that deserves to be, well, cut off.

What motorists probably don’t know (but which astute readers here do) is that several detailed multiyear crash studies (Portland, NYC) have found that most bicycle crashes are caused by drivers breaking the law — not cyclists. The entire point of traffic regulations, historically, has been to defend against the deadly and reckless use of automobiles, and particularly against the shocking brutality of hit-and-runs. Even today, three generations after the first requirements that drivers and cars carry licenses, four Americans die every day in hit-and-run crashes.

Perry Duis’ Encyclopedia of Chicago article on “Street Life” notes that for the first half of their history, the parade of varied workaday activities — few of them related to speedy transportation — on Chicago’s streets even proved a tourist attraction:

In 1900, Scottish author William Archer proclaimed that “New York for a moment does not compare with Chicago in the roar and bustle and bewilderment of its street life.” Similarly, many of Chicago’s greatest writers—especially those of rural origin—wove their fascination with the energy and variety of the public spaces, especially downtown, into their works.

It all ends sadly.

[T]he automobile age… dramatically changed the relationship between Chicagoans and their streets. The auto not only benefited from the growing disdain for the street by providing the kind of isolation from street life that had once been enjoyed by only the wealthy… Drivers also demanded speed and the elimination of peddlers, plodding wagons, playing children, or any other street use that interfered with getting from here to there. By the 1920s the growing volume of fast-paced traffic produced intersection hazards that encouraged the introduction of mechanical traffic signals… The idea of the street as a place for getting from here to there was about to triumph… During the 1950s the press began to note a loss of neighborhood social life that had traditionally grown out of public places. The front porch or stoop, which had fostered neighboring on warm evenings, had begun to give way to air conditioning and television.

Assorted collected

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Recent quotables. No common theme.

Bill McKibbenin Yes! Magazine:

The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel—the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all—can’t last. Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society.

From the Baffler, “The flight of the creative class: a bohemian rhapsody” (satire), Paul Maliszewski and Thomas Frank:

“Creative people do have certain needs, however, They require hip entertainment, organic street-level culture, and artistic environments—from restaurants serving mind-boggling fusions of world cuisines, like Thai and Tex-Mex or Indian and Australian, to experimental theaters, avant-garde galleries, and authentic coffee shops with mismatched cups and saucers and deteriorating couches. Creative people crave lively street scenes and late-night music venues serving up pricey energy drinks in test tubes. In short, creative people insist they lead the sort of lives that feed their creativity, inspiring them.”

Thomas Geoghegan, “The Law in Shambles” (Prickly Paradigm, 2005), excerpted in same Baffler:

“In a plutocracy, we don’t trust the government. Why should we? It does nothing for us, it is underfunded, and it’s unreliable. This attitude, in turn, makes the problem worse. The more arbitrary and unfair we think things are, the more we drop out. We don’t simply stop voting. We stop reading the paper. Stop following it at all…

“Remember the teaching of the great law professor Clyde Summers: ‘It costs a lot of money for people to have “rights.”‘ […]

“Where I live, in Chicago, I’m in a ring of nuclear power plants. I’d be in terrible danger if we ever successfully muzzled the trial lawyers. It’s only the tort system that saves us from another Three Mile Island. Yes, I agree, it might be nice if we had more nuclear plants. We could cut down on Mideast oil. We could slow down global warming. And if I lived in France, with all its nuclear energy, I might think it was a good thing. So why do I oppose it here?

“Because France has a real administrative state, a real civil service, and the best and brightest do the regulating. In America, we can’t even keep the trains on the tracks. And so, sure, as a citizen, Id like to curb the trial lawyers.

“But I also want to live.”

Some bits from the January 2007 SMARTRAQ report, about the market demand for sprawl vs. walkable neighborhoods, for my future reference:

page 9. Residents of the least walkable neighborhoods generated 20% more CO2 from travel then residents of the most walkable neighborhoods, about 2 kg more CO2 per person per weekday.

Residents of the most walkable areas are 2.4X more likely to get the level of daily activity necessary to maintain health (30 minutes): 37% vs. 18% in the least walkable neighborhoods.

page 10. About a third of metro Atlantans living in conventional suburban development would have preferred a more walkable environment, but apparently traded it off for other reasons such as affordability, school quality, or perception of crime in addition to lack of supply. It is likely that this mismatch between community preference and choice is due to an undersupply of walkable environments.

page 32. 55% of survey respondents preferred a shorter commute, even if residential densities were higher and lot sizes smaller. 33% of respondents preferred such an option, but did not currently live in this type of neighborhood.

56% of respondents would prefer a neighborhood where they had easy travel choices, even if it meant a smaller house, over a house in a neighborhood where they had to drive for everything. 37% would prefer such an area, but did not currently.

Smash society

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From Michael Tomasky’s review in The New Republic of Jonah Goldberg’s latest waste of a tree carcass:

Here is where Liberal Fascism gets simply ridiculous. For Goldberg, the fact that Progressivism and totalitarianism shared certain traits–a belief in the possibility of collective action through the state, basically–tells him all he needs to know about both creeds. Ipso facto, any totalitarian impulse must therefore have leftish origins. Never mind that there actually was a totalitarianism for which the left was responsible–the one called communism… [O]nce you start implementing public pension systems, well, how far away can the execution of political opponents really be? Government, planning, centralized administration, social engineering, fascism, totalitarianism: for Goldberg they are all finally the same. Why isn’t he an anarchist? And when you get to this point, what isn’t fascist?

So, for a leading scribe of today’s neo-nihilist (dare I say “libertarian”?) Right, the mere acknowledgment that there is such a thing as “the public” (much less “public interest”) amounts to totalitarianism, a term he thinks equivalent to Fascism. Forget “smash the state,” today’s right really does agree with Maggie Thatcher: “there is no such thing” as society, except perhaps when it comes time when “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Now, that sort of talk (from one of Goldberg’s former esteemed colleagues), through is use of that most totalitarian of pronouns (beginning with W) pronoun, seems to suggest belief in some kind of common project. Hmm.

Transit in brief (updated)

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A bunch of bike/transportation related briefs.

* Bike sharing is moving forward, according to news items posted to the Bike Sharing Blog. Fran Spielman reports in the Sun-Times that JCDecaux has offered to trade ad panels for 1,000 downtown bikes here. (Any chance they’d offer a similar deal to neighborhoods?) Back East, Clear Channel still intends to be first in the USA by placing bike stations in DC this month [via DC Business Journal], with Arlington and Bethesda studying proposals for launch later this year.

* Bill Fulton in CP&DR notes that California officials, when pressed at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference on how they plan on cutting transportation-related carbon emissions (as part of their broader, likely unattainable CO2 goals), really didn’t know yet. Transportation claims an outsized share of California’s CO2 emissions, as is typical of the West Coast.

* A bit further north, British Columbia’s government has advanced a budget that includes a carbon tax of surprising magnitude. Marc Lee from the Progressive Economics Forum notes: “The government chose to stick to a narrow definition of revenue neutrality, with all carbon tax revenues recycled through low-income tax credits and tax cuts… a low-income carbon tax credit that will piggyback on the GST credit. The credit is worth $100 for adults and $30 for children with a phase-out period.”

(GST credit — hear that? Sales tax rate in Vancouver = 12%, includes free health care, spotless trains, and a $300 annual credit. Sales tax rate in Chicago = 10.25%, includes, well, what?)

* Greg Hinz in Crain’s notes that CMAP, fresh off its reorganization, intends for its 2040 plan to actually include real capital planning, not just the “grab bag” of projects that typified CATS capital plans in the past. (“Every agency submitted their plans to us, and we stapled them together.”) Hinz: “Of particular importance is how Mr. Blankenhorn says the new group will approach giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to requests for billions of dollars in federal aid for [infrastructure]… Mr. Blankenhorn says the region actually will use metrics — yardsticks to value each proposed project against an absolute standard — to allow the region to set its own priorities.” Of course, whether there will be capital funding to make such plans around hinges on the state’s willingness to back such an effort — now, we have the odd spectacle of suburban Republicans blasting the governor (and Daley joining in separately, on behalf of CTA, and apparently suggesting a bunch of pie-in-the-sky customer-facing ideas) for severely underfunding transit capital (albeit their pet appears to be Metra’s STAR Line).

* Not everyone is quite as blind to transportation finance woes as Springfield. I’ll try to follow the upcoming federal reauthorization fight as best I can; the first shot across the bow was recently issued by the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission‘s Report to Congress.

* I’m always suspicious of AAA’s motives, but I do appreciate their hiring of Cambridge Systematics to look at the cost of car crashes to society each year — and the attendant call to focus on safety (and a little less on congestion) in the next transportation reauthorization bill. Note that Chicago’s tab for crashes is well below the national average, perhaps because of a more balanced transportation system?

The societal cost of crashes is a staggering $164.2 billion annually, nearly two and a half times greater than the $67.6 billion price tag for congestion, according to a new report released today by AAA. Furthermore, the cost in Chicagoland, is $8.378 billion for crashes, which amounts to an annual per person cost of $887. The total cost per person for congestion in Chicagoland was $487… the $164.2 billion cost for crashes [nationally] equates to an annual per person cost of $1,051, compared to $430 per person annually for congestion…

If there were two jumbo jets crashing every week, the government would ground all planes until we fixed the problem. Yet, we’ve come to accept this sort of death toll with car crashes.”

* Hadn’t seen these before: Steve Breese’s greenway maps include a GIS viewer to see trail corridors that cross jurisdictions (like the Valley Line) and their progress to date.

* A recent Jon Hilkevitch column gives this astonishing example of car dependency:

in Aurora, where city building inspector Allen LaFan says he can stand at the bus stop near his house and watch his child get on and off the school bus, because the entire trip amounts to crossing a busy intersection that is not pedestrian-friendly.

“I can wave to the school,” LaFan said.

The situation represents an unending cycle. More children are being transported to school on buses or in private cars because the streets are not safe. But that leads to more vehicles and more traffic, increasing the potential danger to all pedestrians.

* Streetsblog gives a cite for the “the corn that could feed an SUV for a week could feed a human for a year” tidbit recently published in an Economist survey of food prices: Lester Brown from EPI.

* Civia Cycles, the new upper-end commuter bike brand from QBP (TPTB behind Surly) strives to make the morning commute easier with clothing recommendations, matched to your local weather forecast. Every winter, I think that I’ll scribble down notes on this topic (using dewpoint and wind speed, though, rather than temperature), but never do — and, as a result, end up having to guess again each fall what I will need to wear. At first glance, this guy’s internal thermometer appears to be 10 degrees cooler than mine; I guess I overheat easily. It’s also all “bikey” clothing, unleavened by “real” clothes.

* And, okay, not transportation related, but Vince Michael notes the irony of redeveloping [Alby Gallun in Crain’s covering the unveiling of the proposal] that paragon of “towers in the park” urban renewal, Lake Meadows. Now that the railyards and industrial lofts and public housing projects are gone, the only big privately held parcels left — and with deteriorating physical plants to boot — are the private housing projects. I’ll write more later on historic preservation and urban renewal.

Stretching the truth about walking

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A disturbing junk-science meme circulating out there on the internets — apparently propagated by misguided animal-rights campaigners who are trying to hitch a ride on the climate train — makes the specious (yet how alluringly contrarian!) claim that driving is somehow ecologically superior to omnivore walking. This claim ignores all kinds of inputs, some of which are deconstructed by Clark Williams-Derry and others by the commenters. (In particular, the calculation focuses on the “upstream” impact of producing food, but not of extracting oil and refining it into gasoline; ignores the substantial ecological costs of manufacturing cars; and appears to assume that cars are robots that drive around dead [or at least non-respirating, non-calorie consuming] people [zombies?], rather than living, breathing, likely meat-eating people.)

My first reaction, upon first seeing this claim last October, was thus: ” ‘We need to get rid of these “or” arguments, that we can either do this or do that. “Or” has got to become “and” because we need to do everything.’ [Lawrence Frank] I really wish that… animal-rights groups wouldn’t use this either/or angle. If they really cared about global warming [and are not just using it as convenient political cover for other agendas], they’d understand that our society needs very broad, systemic changes to address this monstrous challenge, and that mouthing little platitudes that further confuse the public does NOT help.” Yet another case of blindered, single-issue people who see a single tree, not an entire forest.

Of course, that warning was not heeded. Such a seductively specious claim will inevitably find its way into the lying, scorched-earth right-wing echo chamber (what Mother Jones helpfully terms “the cold earth society“), which will stretch and simplify what was already a tenuous claim, then shout it from the rooftops until it drowns out any reasoned debate. And guess what? It’s happening. No less a light than John Tierney, the original “Skeptical Environmentalist” (whose “exposé” on landfilled recyclables still gets spat out at me on occasion, a good twenty years later) brought it into his blog — ahem, Science Lab. He even issued some sort of reader challenge: can someone else pull numbers out of their ass to claim that a car taxi is superior to a bicycle taxi? Reader Julian Lamb responds:

If selected as the winner, instead of rewarding me with a book, I’d prefer you push me from my home to my office (8 miles and over the Brooklyn Bridge) in a TAXI cab without assistance from the engine. That ought to cure you of any skepticism. If you make it over the bridge I’ll even buy you breakfast.

Regardless of how efficient a car’s engine might be, it still has to move a huge vessel in addition to its payload — as evidenced by the ethanol claim below. And even the original, highly suspect “calculations” that Tierney references regard walking and driving alone — yet bicycling is far more efficient than walking, and being hauled around in a cab (in city traffic, no less!) is less efficient than even driving alone (since cabs’ time spent cruising for fares pulls their occupancy rates down below 1).

That license can wait (updated)

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Last month, we heard Tom Lane, a Nissan executive, publicly lamenting that “people are losing interest in automobiles.” He ascribes the “ennui” about cars that surrounds him in Japan to irrevocable social factors: an aging society, the escalating cost of car ownership, newer and ever more pocketable gizmos. From a WSJ article by John Murphy:

Nissan designers interviewed 16-to-20-year-olds four years ago in Japan, the U.S., Europe and China to grasp how cars fit into their lives. They were surprised to find that many youths world-wide felt cars were unnecessary and even uncool because they pollute and cause congestion, Mr. Bancon says. The feeling was particularly strong in Tokyo, where computers and Internet access are widely available and where mass transit is inexpensive and reliable — making the car makers’ predicament worse here than in many other parts of the world.

A poll for Nihon Keizai Shimbun found only 25% of men in their 20s wanting cars, down from 48% in 2000 — and it shows in sales, which have slumped 30% since 1990, and actually began falling faster as Japan’s economy began growing again in recent years.

It appears that Lane could be on to something even bigger. I vaguely remember an L.A. Times article long ago about teens delaying their licenses, with a surprising number of California teens simply forgoing licenses, but Mary Chapman and Micheline Maynard report on the national trend in the Times:

In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration. Reasons vary, including tighter state laws governing when teenagers can drive, higher insurance costs and a shift… to expensive private driving academies… experts also add parents who are willing to chauffeur their children to activities, and pastimes like surfing the Web that keep them indoors and glued to computers…

“Oh, I guess I just haven’t done it yet, you know?” said Jaclyn [Frederick, 17], a senior at Ferndale High School, in Ferndale, Mich.

Hmm, eleven years later, I still just haven’t gotten around to it. And some parents evidently agree with the trend of further tightening licensing requirements for safety’s sake:

“This [delaying her daughter’s full license] is in hope of instilling an element of fear,” [Teresa Sheffer, a pediatric nurse in Bethlehem, Ga.] said. “Cars are lethal weapons, and I want to make sure she has the experience she needs, and knows what can happen when you don’t pay attention.”

Outfitted for the road

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Outfitters Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Steven listed out his winter kit, so I thought I’d share as well what I wore today, with riding temperatures around 15-20° F (-5° to -10° C). Two rules: first, block the wind with lots of windproof fuzzy stuff, especially around your toes, fingers, and ears. Second, hit up spring clearances: they’ve already started, people! Get moving!

Clockwise from upper left, into the spiral:
– Neos Overshoes, $29.95, Sierra Trading Post (online, clearance; Hanig’s sells them locally)
– MEC Urbane Composite windproof fleece jacket (Polartec Power Shield High Loft fabric), C$140, MEC
– Rudy Project Fobos prescription sunglasses, approximately $150 with lenses ($80 without)
– Patagonia fleece earflap hat, $12?, Patagonia clearance bin
– Kenneth Cole boots; the fey salesman on Michigan Ave probably remembers the price but I don’t
– Acorn fleece socks. $4, EMS clearance bin
– Orange Pryme BMX helmet. I wear a smaller, better vented, more expensive helmet in the summer. $25, Boulevard Bike Shop
– MEC fleece-lined gauntlet over-mitts, C$29, MEC
– Red fleece liner gloves, $3, Gap clearance bin
Hint: if you have ever gone skiing, chances are very good that you already own equipment comparable to anything in the right half of this photo.

Not shown, because I’m still wearing them (in addition to the usual trousers + shirt office garb):
– Long johns, $8, Target
– Grey sweater, $30, Club Monaco

Also not shown, since they’re on the bicycle, but which stay there year-round anyways:
– Zefal plastic fenders, C$9, MEC
– Planet Bike Blaze head light, C$20, MEC
– Filzer i-Beam LED tail light, C$7, MEC

Yesterday, when it hit single digits (-15° C), I kind of overdid it and ended up sweaty. In addition to the above, I wore:
– Anon kids’ ski goggles (REI clearance bin, $19.93) in place of the glasses
– Fleece mittens (MEC, C$6) over the gloves, as a hand midlayer
– Midweight fleece long johns instead of the basic ones
– Brooks Brothers wool sweater
– A fine wool scarf

I can’t say it’s any faster to bike to work in the winter: although traffic is thinner, it takes a good 10-15 minutes to suit up/down — doubling what’s usually a 25-minute ride that’s already time-competitive with my nearly door-to-door train service. I don’t have set rules about what weather I’ll rule out, but winds above 25 MPH (40 km/h), temperatures below 0° F (-20° C), or a 40%+ chance of precipitation will usually do it — even though I own a raincoat, rain pants, and a balaclava (face mask), I do have my limits.

The road up and ahead

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Last week, Kirk Johnson reported in the Times about the I-70 corridor that rises up into the mountains west of Denver — a four-lane rural road which now faces many of the same congestion issues as any urban commute corridor: crushing traffic loads for a few hours a week, with sort of capacity enhancement proving to be frightfully expensive. Much of this results from settlement patterns that resemble nothing so much as the old “pearls on a string” commuter rail towns: dense, pedestrian-friendly nodes clustered along a single corridor, although unfortunately a freeway rather than a railroad in this case.

Appropriately, many of the solutions that have been implemented to date are similarly incongruous urban fixtures dropped into stunning mountain wilderness: HOV lanes along Hwy 82 into Aspen, all-day transit equipped with advanced ITS, and even several proposals for rail service. (The principal difficulty: I-70 follows an available rail alignment west of Vail, but the section through Summit County and east to Denver is too steep for conventional rail service — and would likely require an additional tunnel at the continental divide.) Now, the ultimate in urban congestion solutions is on the table:

[Colorado State Senator Chris] Romer’s suggestion — congestion pricing using financial incentives to encourage people to drive or not drive at peak times on I-70 — drew 500 e-mail messages in the first 24 hours after it was reported in The Rocky Mountain News. About 70 percent opposed the plan, he said, and many of those called him exuberantly bad names… “But we’re not going to solve this problem by being cautious, which is what government does best,” he said, explaining that reliance on gasoline taxes and highway construction will not work… “We have to get creative,” Mr. Romer said. “And if we fail, we adjust and we try again.”

The long shadow haunting the Sunbelt’s growth (and any future long-term infrastructure investments), is the potentially disastrous changes in precipitation that will accompany global warming. Some climate models predict that snowpack in much of the Rockies could become un-skiable during my lifetime. (I’ll be 70 years old in 2050.) The result would destabilize existing ecosystems in an area where human settlements closely abut wilderness; increasingly catastrophic floods, mudslides, and wildfires would further threaten . Economically, the resulting economic losses could be monumental, similar to a hurricane wiping away another beach city.

Meanwhile, cities across the nation’s southern tier, like Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Raleigh are all already sinking deeper straws to suck up even the pond scum from their drought-ravaged reservoirs. Georgia has resorted to desperate new lows, some of which actually date from the 18th century — not just praying for rain (perhaps more of a strong-arm tactic to embarrass Florida to reduce its claim to downriver flow), but recently seeking to move its Tennessee border. Yet these areas continue to grow; as with electricity, the expectation is just that water will be provided regardless of cost or future prospects — and reporting on the crisis continues to focus on such short-term thinking. Sure, conservation pricing has resulted in higher water bills for many (Mayor Franklin in Atlanta pays about $100 a month for water) — but how high would water bills have to go in order to dissuade new arrivals, or to convince non-water-intensive industries (e.g., not manufacturers) to begin looking elsewhere? My guess is that prices would have to go very high indeed.