 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
July 2007 | Main | September 2007
By the time you read this, Newmont Mining chairman Wayne Murdy will probably have put his award from the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Affairs on a shelf — the presentation was set for last night — and dissenting faculty members will be off in search of other targets on which to vent their well-honed sense of moral outrage.
By the time you read this, Newmont Mining chairman Wayne Murdy will probably have put his award from the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Affairs on a shelf — the presentation was set for last night — and dissenting faculty members will be off in search of other targets on which to vent their well-honed sense of moral outrage.
But let’s not move on with them just yet. Professors who object to their school’s decision to give Murdy its International Bridge Builders Award are obliged to make at least a nod in the direction of a balanced appraisal, however difficult it might be to judge accusations hurled at Newmont from such remote locales as Indonesia, Peru and Ghana, as well as the state of Nevada.
Perhaps some exhibit this fairness. But associate professor Tom Rowe failed that test in sorry fashion Thursday in a column in The Denver Post, which read more like an activist’s indictment than a fair-minded assessment.
Several paragraphs into Rowe’s column, for example, we learned that “In Indonesia, controversy continues to swirl around the environmental damage to Buyat Bay and the health consequences for local villagers.” No hint, if you can believe it, that an Indonesian court acquitted a Newmont executive and the company on all charges at the heart of the “controversy” five months ago.
If the “controversy continues to swirl,” it is because local activists and close-minded fellow-travelers such as Rowe refuse to admit that the charges were based upon what largely turned out to be fabrications, which had begun to unravel long before the verdict.
Villagers at Buyat Bay were not afflicted with terrible skin conditions unique to the site. Baby Andini, the alleged poster child of chemical poisoning, apparently died of a condition related to malnutrition. The bay was not dangerously contaminated with mercury, international experts concluded in 2004.
Yet, as the court itself pointed out, with each setback the activists shifted the focus of their complaints against Newmont. The goal was to discredit the company somehow; the means became immaterial.
Does Rowe play similarly fast-and- loose with his other regurgitated allegations? I can’t tell in all cases, not having examined, for example, the claims and counterclaims involving Ghana and Peru. But consider Rowe’s curious treatment of the situation in Nevada.
“In North America,” Rowe writes, “Newmont operates on Western Shoshone lands without their permission, damaging the environment and paying no royalties to the tribe for taking their resources.”
Wouldn’t a scholar interested in fairness have mentioned that this mining land, while claimed by the Western Shoshones under a 19th century treaty, is in fact among holdings of the federal Bureau of Land Management, as Newmont has repeatedly pointed out? Isn’t it more than a tiny bit inflammatory to suggest to readers that Newmont is simply occupying tribal lands as a rogue multinational?
If Rowe sympathizes with the Western Shoshone and considers Newmont’s behavior atrocious, so be it. Make the case. But at least acknowledge that the mining property is, say, within “ancestral Western Shoshone lands,” as less biased activists do.
Even Oxfam America, which is solidly in the Western Shoshone camp, acknowledges that “Newmont is mining on disputed lands” that the U.S. government also claims.
Is Rowe contemptuous of all government title to public lands, or only when it suits his purpose of bashing a large corporation?
I’ve never met Murdy, let alone followed his career, and have no idea whether he deserves a bridge builder award. But if we’re going to dispense awards, let’s not neglect professor Tom Rowe, who surely deserves a nomination in whatever contest honors the Best Hit Jobs of 2007.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
In the future, no American community is likely to be as nakedly unprepared for a hurricane as New Orleans was two years ago. No government agency is likely to be as flat-footed as the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But damage from big storms very likely will increase in the coming decades just the same, as Al Gore and other fearmongers warn.
What the Paul Reveres of global crisis don’t always acknowledge, however, is that the main reason for the probable devastation won’t be the severity of the storms so much as the proliferation of targets.
In the future, no American community is likely to be as nakedly unprepared for a hurricane as New Orleans was two years ago. No government agency is likely to be as flat-footed as the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But damage from big storms very likely will increase in the coming decades just the same, as Al Gore and other fearmongers warn.
What the Paul Reveres of global crisis don’t always acknowledge, however, is that the main reason for the probable devastation won’t be the severity of the storms so much as the proliferation of targets.
In his new book, Cool It, Danish scholar Bjorn Lomborg explains: “The global costs of climate-related disasters have indeed increased relentlessly over the past half-century. Yet just comparing costs over long periods of time does not make sense without taking into account changes in population patterns and demography as well as economic growth. There are 2 1/2 times as many people in the world as there were in 1950; each of us is more than three times as rich; and we have used our wealth to move to scenic coastal areas . . . . In Florida, Dade and Broward counties are today home to more people than lived in 1930 in all 109 coastal counties from Texas to Virginia, along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.”
More people plus more infrastructure equals ever-more costly damage when storms strike. Bank on it.
Lomborg points out that there is no scientific consensus — except in some alarmists’ minds — as to whether the strength of storms has been getting worse with global warming. The U.N. World Meteorogical Organization this year found evidence, he says, “both for and against the existence of of a detectable anthropogenic [human-caused] signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date.”
So if we want to reduce future devastation, Lomborg concludes, the wisest course is to choose the sort of strategies that would have helped New Orleans: better planning, warning systems and evacuation procedures, as well as upgraded infrastructure and building codes.
And then brace ourselves.
Outright hooey
“As long as natural gas is expensive, clean energy will be much, much cheaper for consumers. Drilling in the Roan Plateau will not save consumers money — it will, however, add to the bottom line for oil and gas company profits.”
— Rep. John Salazar,Rocky Mountain News Speakout, Aug. 29
If Rep. Salazar believes drilling atop the energy rich Roan in western Colorado is a bad idea because of the environmental risk, so be it. It’s a defensible position although one I might dispute.
What is less defensible, though — in fact, is mostly outright hooey — is the claim that boosting natural gas production will have no effect on prices (drilling “will not save consumers money”), and that high-cost natural gas equals cheaper clean alternatives.
If increased natural gas production doesn’t temper prices and save consumers money, why favor any new production anywhere? Why support old production, for that matter, if natural gas is the single commodity on Earth immune to price signals related to supply and demand?
It is true, of course, that when the prices of fossil fuels rise, nonpolluting alternatives become more competitive and attractive. But that is hardly the same as saying they are “much, much cheaper.” They’re the same price as they were but more likely to be used.
They may become cheaper as more investment flows their way and technology improves, but that’s a long, complex process. It hardly justifies the seemingly bald assertion that the high price of natural gas is wonderful news for homeowners paying the bills.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
“I want to apologize to all the young kids out there for my immature acts . . . I offer my deepest apologies to everyone. I will redeem myself.”
— Michael Vick, at Monday’s press conference
You can bet we won’t ever hear Broncos running back Travis Henry make a similarly chastened apology. Yet who has done the most damage “to all the young kids out there”? Is it Vick, who funded an illegal dogfighting ring and helped kill a few of the animals? Or Henry, who fathered nine children by nine different women in various states and, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has been ordered by courts to provide for them?
“I want to apologize to all the young kids out there for my immature acts . . . I offer my deepest apologies to everyone. I will redeem myself.”
— Michael Vick, at Monday’s press conference
You can bet we won’t ever hear Broncos running back Travis Henry make a similarly chastened apology. Yet who has done the most damage “to all the young kids out there”? Is it Vick, who funded an illegal dogfighting ring and helped kill a few of the animals? Or Henry, who fathered nine children by nine different women in various states and, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has been ordered by courts to provide for them?
Dogfighting is illegal. Only a few foot-in-mouth geniuses such as the New York Knicks’ Stephon Marbury has dared to defend it publicly.
Even if organized dogfighting thrives in a few cultural backwaters, Vick’s humiliating saga has hardly added to its allure. No young man who once looked up to Vick can be remotely confused about what lessons to take from his downfall.
On the other hand, fathering children out of wedlock is very much legal and very much socially accepted. Indeed, it is accepted to the point that 37 percent of all babies — nearly a quarter among whites, 45 percent among Hispanics and nearly 70 percent among blacks — are born to single moms. Meanwhile, this epidemic of missing-in-action fathers is a social calamity, especially for lower-income America where the pattern is so much more common and the need for stable male role models so much more acute.
When Henry — or New England quarterback Tom Brady, for that matter, whose former girlfriend just had a baby — becomes a father with apparently little thought to helping to raise the child himself, he is a much more potent, pernicious role model than the discredited Vick.
“I know these are a lot of kids, and there might be some questions about it, but he’s a really committed father,” Henry’s lawyer breezily told the Atlanta paper. So committed, it seems, that one day he might even decide to act like one.
Competition busters
In their never-ending quest to locate threats to our peace and prosperity, Colorado legislators this year passed a law to prevent “the improper design of public domain landscape infrastructure by unauthorized, unqualified and incompetent persons.”
Its short title: the “Landscape Architects Professional Licensing Act.”
Perhaps you’re wondering how this state survived for so long without raising its drawbridge against rogue landscape architects. Maybe you can’t wait to see which occupations will be the next regulatory targets. Some of us, however, have a different reaction: Are states that require a license for many occupations really better places to live than those that require relatively few?
Last week the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation issued a report ranking states on occupational licensing, and California topped the list with 177 such jobs. Colorado came in 41st with 69.
In scanning the list — which includes states such as Arkansas among the top five to require licenses and states like Washington among the least restrictive — you can’t help but conclude that the compulsion to mandate occupational licenses has no bearing whatever on quality of life or consumer protection with a few obvious exceptions such as medicine.
As Reason’s Adam B. Summers explains, what such laws actually do is to help “existing businesses keep out competition” while “restricting consumer choice.”
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Who speaks at the legislature for the Colorado consumer? No one, sadly, and the proof is that some of the most obnoxious anti-consumer laws survive with little or no vocal pressure to batter them down.
Who speaks at the legislature for the Colorado consumer? No one, sadly, and the proof is that some of the most obnoxious anti-consumer laws survive with little or no vocal pressure to batter them down.
Take Colorado’s strange rules governing the sale of alcoholic beverages — the topic of a lively Rocky editorial earlier this week. Now, editorials by their nature employ can-do logic, so this one appealed to lawmakers to let supermaket chains sell a full line of booze in each of their stores, as you’ll find in a number of other states. Liquor stores, naturally, would be liberated to sell a range of food items, too (pretzels, anyone?)
But rest assured, we weren’t born last Saturday here in the Commentary section. We realize that lawmakers are about as likely to let you buy snacks with your beer, or enjoy one-stop shopping, as they are to rename Pikes Peak after Benedict Arnold.
Never mind the high-minded notion of fostering convenience, competition and lower prices on consumers’ behalf. Lawmakers won’t act because there’s no value in it for either political party.
Too many Democrats would find it awkward to do anything that might benefit big companies such as Safeway, Target or Costco given the corporate bashing that laces their rhetoric. Too many Republicans would be reluctant to take on a vested economic interest such as the independent liquor-store lobby.
Meanwhile, the big chains don’t care enough to make an issue of liquor sales, and consumers themselves are unorganized and voiceless. Finally, most so-called consumer groups drifted long ago into the political left, where they spend their time pushing for more regulation and less competition.
Up at the Capitol, the only time consumers count is when their interests happen to align with that of a powerful political or economic lobby. And that does happen sometimes. When it doesn’t, though, consumers might as well be ghosts for all they get noticed.
No simple matter
Most of us go through life without ever having our courage tested under truly high stakes. How would we have behaved as ordinary Germans or Russians under the Nazis or communists, for example?
We might imagine our own heroism — surely we would have rescued our persecuted neighbors, we suppose — but how do we know if this is merely an exalted self-conceit?
It was with such a backdrop in mind that I read the fascinating tale in Tuesday’s Rocky of a 29-year-old Romanian woman who discovered that the grandfather she adored was also a communist-era informant — one of the lowest forms of life, in her eyes. How to reconcile her image of him as a principled teacher with the fact that he was a stoolie, too?
“I was more radical before I read his file,” Cora Motoc said. “I was ready to point fingers . . . I can’t really judge him because I don’t know what I would have done.” Wise words. After all, she reasoned, he may have taken on this tawdry task in order to secure his freedom after his own run-in with authorities.
There are times, of course, when we can confidently predict that we’d rise to the occasion when faced with a moral obligation. If we stumbled into a backyard arena in which a savage dogfight was being held — to cite one example much in the current news — most of us would retreat in horror and call the police.
But such decisions usually entail none of the risk involved in taking on a police state.
Too often today, history is recounted by writers who seem to lack the imagination to put themselves in their predecessors’ places. If someone cut a deal with the devil, these moralists suggest, he must be evil himself.
Motoc knows better after reading the secret police file on her grandfather. Reality is usually more complex — and more chastening.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Colorado higher education is in desperate straits, everyone keeps telling us, but the claim apparently failed to persuade U.S. News & World Report.
Colorado higher education is in desperate straits, everyone keeps telling us, but the claim apparently failed to persuade U.S. News & World Report.
To be sure, Colorado public colleges do not appear among the elite in the magazine’s 2008 edition of America’s Best Colleges. Our local schools’ rankings may not even qualify as “high,” despite what a Rocky headline optimistically proclaimed last week.
But with the Colorado School of Mines garnering 75th among “Best National Universities” and the University of Colorado at Boulder close behind at 79, the results were somewhat heartening given the doomsday rhetoric that so often surrounds Colorado schools.
Not everyone is reassured, naturally. Over at HeadFirst, a Web site devoted to Colorado education edited by the knowledgeable Alan Gottlieb, a regular contributor groused that “There are only 50 states, each of which offers at least one ‘flagship’ university, plus a dozen or more elite private universities. But, [Colorado] is barely cracking the top 75, and that with a small niche institution focused upon mining! . . . . if the state flagship is really only No. 79, that should get a headline more like ‘Under- funded Colorado higher education still not close to national elite.’ "
Not so fast.
The list of top 20 national universities is dominated by private schools — most of the Ivies and the likes of Stanford, Chicago, Northwestern, Emory, Rice and Notre Dame. CU-Boulder actually ranks 35th among the top public national universities. And if that doesn’t sound particularly high — there are “only 50 states,” we must not forget — consider this: No fewer than 29 other states do not have a single public institution that ranks as high. And Colorado, with Mines, has two.
In short, although several states (California, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia, for example) place more than one college among the top national schools, a majority of states cannot boast of a single institution in that tier.
Do all of these states “underfund” their schools? Hardly.
Would CU-Boulder soar into the upper ranks if state funding doubled overnight? Who knows?
Most of the truly elite schools, private and public, are indeed lavishly funded by any standard. But the rankings by U.S. News & World Report — and if you don’t like its system, pick another because the lesson will be the same — do not support the thesis that greater funding is always associated with higher quality. Nor does it support the idea that you can’t offer a good college education under budgetary constraints.
Because Colorado already does.
Reading ’tween the lines
Ah, Pat Schroeder, how have we managed without your charming daily assessments of public affairs?
The former Denver congresswoman, now the president of the American Association of Publishers, was back to her old-time form the other day in responding to a poll that claims liberals read more books than conservatives.
(Liberals not only are more likely to read at least one book a year, the survey said; those with this reading habit read nine books on average as opposed to eight for conservatives.)
“The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: ‘No, don’t raise my taxes, no new taxes,’ ” the thoughtful Schroeder opined. “It’s pretty hard to write a book saying, ‘No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes’ on every page.”
Liberals, she continued with this subtle theme, “really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion.”
In this case, as it happens, the onion includes the finding that political moderates who read books wade through only five a year, substantially fewer than either liberals or conservatives. Has Rove corrupted them as well, or are moderates naturally even more simple-minded than conservatives, in Schroeder’s view?
Here’s my take on the poll: The average number of books allegedly read by more than three-fourths of liberals and two-thirds of conservatives is suspiciously high, and seems at odds — to cite entirely anecdotal evidence — with the astonishing percentage of people in airport lounges and on planes who would rather stare off into space for hours or watch the tube than crack a book.
Maybe the only lesson from this poll is that moderates tend to be more truthful.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Leading backers of Health Care for All Coloradans deny that their single-payer plan will ration medicine. And since their proposal is one of only four chosen for refinement by Colorado’s Blue Ribbon Commission for Health Care Reform, it’s worth examining the credibility of this claim.
Leading backers of Health Care for All Coloradans deny that their single-payer plan will ration medicine. And since their proposal is one of only four chosen for refinement by Colorado’s Blue Ribbon Commission for Health Care Reform, it’s worth examining the credibility of this claim.
“How about rationing?” Health Care for All’s Fran Ricker and Kristen Hannum asked in a column published in Saturday’s Rocky. “American insurance companies ration care. Prior authorizations, limiting benefits and denials are examples of rationing under our current system. Europeans don’t have to worry about this. In fact, Europeans don’t worry about health care in general. A Belgian woman recently admitted to us that she had not realized that her country had public, universal health coverage. She just knew that if she ever got sick she’d be cared for.”
A woman who never wondered who paid for her health care is hardly the most reliable witness on rationing. Especially when her threshold for satisfaction appears to be so low.
After all, you can be “cared for” when sick and still be the victim of rationing if your doctors are barred from exploiting the latest technological and pharmaceutical breakthroughs.
Ironically, Health Care for All Coloradans seems to anticipate rationing in its own answers to questions posed by the Blue Ribbon Commission, which appear on the commission’s Web site.
“Does your proposal decrease or contain costs? How?” the commission asked. The answer (in part): “As new technology and treatment modalities are introduced, they must come under the scrutiny of the [Colorado Health Services] Board to determine future cost savings or health benefits. Patients and providers are free to pursue new treatment modalities that are not yet covered, but do so at their own expense.”
So some “treatment modalities” will not be covered, huh? Sure sounds like rationing to me.
Facing reality
Ricker and Hannum are correct, no doubt, that some health-care rationing already occurs today in Colorado. But under a public single-payer system, the rationing is likely to be both more systematic and severe, whatever some might like to believe.
“To date, other Western countries have been more successful in covering all citizens at a lower per capita cost, but they have done so only by limiting the availability of high-technology medicine.”
That’s an excerpt from former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm’s latest book, Condition Critical, A New Moral Vision for Health Care, which he co-authored with Robert Blank.
Lamm is not criticizing government health-care mandates or the rationing of high technology medicine. He is a longtime advocate of both. He simply has no patience with those who do not understand that the two are linked, given the inexhaustible demand for medical treatment and the inevitable pressure to contain costs.
“Interestingly,” Lamm and Blank write, “many of the proponents of a single-payer system are the strongest opponents of rationing. In fact, they argue that only moves to such a system will allow us to escape rationing. This is unrealistic because universal coverage is workable only when restraints on breadth of coverage are imposed . . . . Every single-payer health system has at its core some form of health-care rationing, including strict limits on expensive care, such as organ transplants, chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants, and long waiting lines for elective surgeries, such as joint replacements.”
No health-care system is ideal, and that certainly goes for the one we’ve got. But we’ll never be able to rationally debate whether we want to replace it — and with what — if we can’t come to terms with a few sticky facts.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
They say cops develop a dark view of human nature given all the predators, creeps and failures they encounter.
But maybe some attorneys develop a similar affliction: They spend so much time around people portraying themselves as victims of injustice that they begin to doubt that anyone is treated fairly in the normal course of events.
They say cops develop a dark view of human nature given all the predators, creeps and failures they encounter.
But maybe some attorneys develop a similar affliction: They spend so much time around people portraying themselves as victims of injustice that they begin to doubt that anyone is treated fairly in the normal course of events.
Take David Lane, an attorney best known for his defense of Ward Churchill but who has championed real civil liberties cases, too.
In a recent rebuttal of a Rocky editorial that opposed sealing the records of arrests that fail to result in convictions, as well as old convictions of certain crimes, Lane declared that he’d “represented countless individuals who were wrongfully arrested . . . The average employer or landlord rarely bothers to distinguish between an arrest and a conviction. These people simply don’t hire or rent to someone who has a ‘record’ as opposed to someone who is ‘clean.’ ”
Meanwhile, in USA Today, the co-chairs of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Effective Criminal Sanctions argued that “the unfair use of convictions to limit opportunities needs to be controlled in a genuinely effective way.”
By sealing certain criminal records, you see.
As successful lawyers, these three individuals have probably done a bit of hiring in their day. Would they have disqualified someone solely because of, say, a pot conviction from long ago, or an arrest for disturbing the peace with no conviction?
Very unlikely.
So why do they assume that their ability to discount such blemishes is rare? Are activist attorneys really that much more virtuous than the average landlord or employer?
If they gave their fellow Americans any credit, they’d recognize that many of us bring to bear a judgment no less nuanced than their own.
If we reject an applicant with an arrest record but no convictions, or with a minor conviction from years ago, maybe it’s for complex reasons that have to do with other aspects of the person’s résumé or demeanor, too.
Meanwhile, what should we make of Lane’s contention that “if the government can’t come up with a conviction, there is no justification whatsoever for an innocent citizen to have his or her name smeared with the baggage that a mere arrest carries. The Rocky is completely off-base in arguing that somehow it is in the public’s interest to pillory innocent people and not automatically have their arrest record sealed . . . .”
Needless to say, this newspaper never advocated pillorying someone for an arrest. But it is astonishing that Lane, having ransacked his busy brain, can’t imagine a single good reason why someone might reasonably argue on behalf of open records.
Police are, after all, public employees engaged in activity that radically affects personal liberty. Surely those of us curious about how officers exercise that power — with names, dates and details of arrests — are not merely meddlesome voyeurs.
And as difficult as the following concept might be for Lane to concede, it’s just possible that a record involving several arrests — with or without convictions — might rationally disqualify someone for consideration, say, as the lone cashier in Uncle Joe’s bagel shop.
Now I’ve gone and done it: confirmed Lane’s suspicions that people pay attention to arrest records. And of course they do — if not necessarily in the simple-minded fashion he imagines.
Would this work, too, Mr. Hooper?
You can always count on Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the radical Council on American-Islamic Relations.
After a numbskull Catholic bishop in the Netherlands suggested this week that “we all say that from now on we will name God Allah,” Hooper predictably weighed in to endorse this appeasement.
“It reinforces the fact that Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the same God,” Hooper told FoxNews.com.
They do, do they? Well, if that’s the case, then here’s an idea: Why doesn’t Hooper start referring to Allah as Jesus?
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
It’s true that metro Denver’s proposal for traffic relief along the U.S. 36 corridor isn’t as bold as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to charge motorists a fee to enter busy parts of Manhattan from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. No doubt that difference has something to do with New York making the cut this week for federal funding and metro Denver receiving a meaningless pat on the head.
It’s true that metro Denver’s proposal for traffic relief along the U.S. 36 corridor isn’t as bold as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to charge motorists a fee to enter busy parts of Manhattan from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. No doubt that difference has something to do with New York making the cut this week for federal funding and metro Denver receiving a meaningless pat on the head.
But if federal officials had been truly interested in enhancing mobility as opposed to merely charging for it, they’d have found a way to grant this region its request for up to $235 million to extend the car-pool- and-bus-lane system up 36, with an option for solo drivers to use it by paying a toll.
After all, the northwest metro project would create badly needed highway capacity even as it benefited mass transit.
The New York plan, meanwhile, would do nothing to enhance traffic capacity, since tolls would be diverted to transit. It would mainly fleece residents of other boroughs, as well as commuters from farther afield, in the name of easing congestion.
Don’t get me wrong. Congestion pricing is an attractive option for unclogging some central cities, with New York high on that list.
But as Robert Poole, the director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation and an MIT-trained engineer, told me recently, any such system should be designed to ensure that there are more winners than losers. And he doesn’t think New York’s plan qualifies on that ground.
Poole, by the way, is a longtime advocate of congestion pricing, tolls and other market-based answers to transportation problems.
In order to salvage the New York plan, he recommends it be revised to conform more to the model in place in Stockholm, Sweden. There, funds generated from congestion pricing (which has reduced traffic by more than 20 percent downtown) benefit both urban and suburban residents and are used for both mass transit and highway improvements.
Not surprisingly, the Stockholm system has wide public support — which is far from the case with the Bloomberg scheme for New York.
But maybe that’s because Bloomberg doesn’t seem all that interested in enhancing mobility for all; rather, he seems mainly eager to squeeze people out of their cars.
Along with a growing number of planners and environmentalists, he would exploit government’s monopoly of highway ownership to impose the equivalent of a tax on mobility in the pursuit of goals that go far beyond curbing congestion.
Delusional about rail
If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a hundred times from local political and civic leaders: We’re going to use rail transit stations to shape development and living patterns in our communities for generations to come.
Any bets on whether their confidence is justified?
Here’s my bet: They’re deluding themselves. Some transit hubs will indeed thrive but the overall effect on land use and housing in the metro area will be small or even negligible.
For evidence, let’s turn the narrative over to Eric Beaton, author of a study published last September by the Rappaport Institute at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He carefully examined all areas “within five- and 10-minute drives of all current or former commuter rail stations in greater Boston” to see “how these areas changed between 1970 and 2000.”
The verdict: “The data show that development patterns are governed by the dominant forces of the day. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, commuter rail service played a major role in shaping the land uses in the communities it served. But that does not seem to be the case today. Rather, the large investments in commuter rail have had, at best, modest positive impacts on ridership and land uses. . . . .
“Looking to the future, this means that providing new commuter rail facilities is not likely to produce significant changes in travel and land-use patterns.”
Of course, by the time a similar study 20 years from now reaches similar conclusions for Denver, most of those who sold us the myth regarding transit’s allegedly miraculous effects on land use will have long since moved on.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
The director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Dale Hall, is concerned about the scientific integrity of the process for listing endangered species. He’s right to be concerned, too, but he’ll miss the real scandal if he doesn’t broaden his focus.
The director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Dale Hall, is concerned about the scientific integrity of the process for listing endangered species. He’s right to be concerned, too, but he’ll miss the real scandal if he doesn’t broaden his focus.
Hall has ordered a review of eight decisions influenced by a former high-level Interior official who resigned in May after an internal probe concluded she’d pressured scientists.
Fine. Review her work. But at the end of the day, don’t try to tell us that defenseless agency scientists are cowering before political intimidation. Because some of them appear quite adept at hard ball themselves.
The history of the Preble’s jumping mouse, whose habitat includes the Front Range, is a case in point.
Incredibly, one of the decisions Hall has ordered reviewed is the 2005 proposal to “delist” Preble’s as a threatened subspecies.
Why doesn’t he review the entire history of how the agency has handled the Preble’s listing? It qualifies as a travesty.
When federal officials declared the mouse threatened in 1998, they relied upon a shoddy, cursory analysis of the mouse’s range and population.
The lawsuit demanding the listing actually claimed only a few hundred Preble’s mice survived — an implausible judgment since refuted by a growing body of evidence.
Meanwhile, the agency took as gospel the definition of Preble’s as a separate subspecies that emerged in the early 1950s after the study of three specimens by a scientist who has since disavowed his conclusion. And it discounted contrary analysis.
The agency did have a genetic analysis on its side; trouble is, its data have not been released for independent review.
The capper, however, was the treatment of Rob Roy Ramey, former chairman of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s zoology department, after his research questioned whether Preble’s is a distinct subspecies at all. Ramey announced his findings in December 2003, and he’s been a marked man ever since.
A year ago, I documented the pressure put on Ramey and his employer based upon correspondence and e-mails I reviewed. It was clear that attempts to gag Ramey included angry complaints from a Fish and Wildlife official to museum leaders that apparently included a threat to suspend funding related to Preble’s research.
This same official, Ramey says, denounced him in inflammatory phone messages.
Fish and Wildlife took public action, too. Seemingly determined to neutralize Ramey’s research with a contrary study, it tapped a federal scientist whose previous work defining subspecies practically guaranteed he’d “refute” Ramey — which in due course he did. (Incredibly, there are no generally accepted criteria defining subspecies in such cases, and the agency resists pleas by scientists such as Ramey to establish them.)
Sen. Wayne Allard’s office has since obtained copies of other correspondence shining a light on Fish and Wildlife’s behind-the-scenes efforts to undermine Ramey’s work, which Allard laid out in a letter sent this week to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.
Meanwhile, Fish and Wildlife has yet to seriously tackle the main argument made in the 2003 petitions requesting that Preble’s be taken off the threatened list — not Ramey’s work, but the fact that officials grossly underestimated the prevalence of the mouse. If Hall is interested in polishing the agency’s image, he might begin by demanding an end to such foot-dragging.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Posted by denver-admin at 12:31 AM | Comments (76)Anti-sprawl crusaders so dominate public debate on metro Denver’s future that they are free to say almost anything without fear of challenge.
Anti-sprawl crusaders so dominate public debate on metro Denver’s future that they are free to say almost anything without fear of challenge.
They sometimes claim, for example, that we face a choice between growing outward or growing vertically, when in fact we are doing both.
They blame sprawl on the automobile or distinctly American attitudes toward mobility, when a transition to lower densities was well under way in cities around the world decades before cars were widely embraced.
They regularly cite Los Angeles as the sum of all sprawl, when its full urban area, at 7,000 residents per square mile, is more dense than any other city in America — and vastly more dense than Denver.
I explored these myths of sprawl in my most recent column (“A new look at sprawl,” July 31) while quoting extensively from Professor Robert Bruegmann’s superb book, Sprawl, a compact history. Today we’ll continue hacking our way through misinformation. Such as: higher densities equal “less congestion.”
Boulder County Commissioner Will Toor made such a claim in a Rocky Mountain News article (“Metro area studies expansion scenarios,” July 28), but he’s only one voice in an army that regularly takes up this chant.
When you stop to think about it, equating higher densities with unsnarled traffic is, well, strange. Don’t these people visit other cities?
“In general, and quite logically,” writes Bruegmann, “congestion and commuting times tend to rise, not fall, with density. Certainly all the evidence suggests that residents of very low density Kansas City, Mo., or Oklahoma City can get around their metropolitan areas much more easily and quickly than those of relatively high density New York or Los Angeles or Tokyo.”
When anti-sprawl advocates link density with an easing of congestion, they seem to be describing an imagined day when greater density allows us to break free of “auto-dependence.” But cities with far greater densities than Denver have not shaken auto dependence. As a percentage of total trips, auto use has grown in nearly every major metropolis in the world in recent decades. Why would anyone suppose Denver will buck that trend? Even people moving into new developments near light-rail stations expect parking for their cars — because, of course, they are frequent motorists, too.
What galls me most about the anti-sprawl agenda is its elitism, its insistence that others know best how you should live. Bruegmann repeats an amusing quotation by the Duke of Wellington, who opposed the construction of railroads in the 19th century because they would “only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” Today’s elites are equally begrudging when it comes to other people’s dreams of privacy and space at an affordable price.
“The history of sprawl suggests that the two factors that seem to track most closely with sprawl have been increasing affluence and political democratization,” Bruegmann writes. “In places where citizens have become more affluent and have enjoyed basic political and economic rights, more people have been able to gain for themselves the benefits once reserved for wealthier citizens . . . ..”
Heavy-handed anti-growth regulation pushes up prices and punishes, in particular, the lower middle class — a fact now recognized, Bruegmann tells me, even by Britain’s Labor Party. Indeed, he said, anti-sprawl platitudes are much more likely to be challenged by the political left in Britain, Canada and Australia than in the United States.
As I noted here Tuesday, the emptying of America’s cities has actually halted in many cases and even reversed, with densities rising while the total urban footprint continues to grow. That describes Denver, too, which is why current fears over whether we break an arbitrary “urban growth boundary” are misplaced. We don’t need planners to force-feed us density. We’re choosing it, but at our own pace.
“It is quite possible that sprawl could recede everywhere as more citizens become affluent enough to live like the residents of the Upper East Side or the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris . . .. ,” notes Bruegmann. “It is also possible that this increase in density in the city might be counterbalanced by a growth in housing elsewhere as a larger number of citizens decide they would like two or three dwellings, for example, a condominium in a high-rise in the city, a house in the mountains, and a time-share unit at the beach.”
An attractive image, except for one thing: It will give critics of American housing patterns yet more reasons to badger us.
Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
Posted by denver-admin at 12:36 AM | Comments (9)