Category Archives: Activism

Truth and Consequences and January 6

Posted on by
Reply

Reused with permission from Wikipedia

Like most people, I learned of the insurrection that resulted in five deaths and considerably more than 100 injuries to Capitol police from television news. Don’t ask me which channel; it was probably either CNN or MSNBC, but honestly, I don’t remember. I only remember what I saw—the searing image of American citizens attacking the seat of their own government on behalf of a President who lied to them because his twisted psyche did not allow him to admit that he had lost an election, fair and square. If he believes that the election was stolen, it is not because he has ever had any evidence to that effect. It is because he has repeated the lie to himself so often that he has internalized it completely. Such men are very dangerous.

There are plenty of good, well-written commentaries on the events of January 6, and it is not my aim to add another broad assessment of the day. The testimony before, and the final report of, the House Select Committee will add immensely to our knowledge, but it remains to be seen whether it can change minds. Even in 1974, as Richard Nixon was about to resign the presidency after a visit by a delegation of distinguished Republican Senators convinced him the gig was up, about one-quarter of the American public still sided with him, either disregarding or disbelieving the criminality on display from the Watergate affair. Even the most venal and corrupt politicians have always had their supporters, often until the bitter end. It is not as if the larger public is composed entirely of angels, after all. When the support fades, it is usually because the politician in question is no longer useful.

Corrupt and authoritarian politicians are almost always bullies who are highly skilled at making offers that their followers, and often others, cannot refuse. There is nothing new about this phenomenon. It is as old as civilization itself. The Bible is replete with evidence of such venality, dating back thousands of years.

So, what do I have to offer?

On the afternoon of the insurrection, I was preparing for a pair of sequential consulting meetings when the news caught my attention. That led to a mercifully brief text exchange with someone I will leave unidentified. I will paraphrase for clarity while sharing its essence. The point is not who it is, but his perceptions in the face of what effectively was a coup attempt. I understood his politics for many years beforehand; sometimes, he would needle me about it, and sometimes in recent years I was forced to terminate a conversation that, in my view, had departed earth’s orbit and no longer made sense.

But at that moment, I had to believe even this riot, insurrection, coup attempt, call if what you will, would be too much even for him. I was wrong.

I asked if he was still happy with Trump after Trump had incited an insurrection at the Capitol.

I was told that, after years of corruption that no one had challenged, except for Trump in the previous four years, “people are fed up.”

I want to step back here and make two points about this expression of frustration.

First, regarding corruption, this is a vague term that, without specifics, can be used as a broad brush against almost anything one disagrees with, and I believe that was happening here. There is, in my view, little question that corruption has at times affected both political parties. Personally, I have been perfectly willing to cross party lines to vote against candidates and office holders with documented records of corruption of any kind. I intensely dislike politicians who put self-interest ahead of the public interest. I am also aware that my disagreement with their policies does not constitute evidence of their corruption. Those are two different things, and we need to respect that difference if democracy is going to involve any kind of principled debate about what is best for our society. There are times when those lines are blurred, and times when it is clear. For instance, I was pleased last year when Democrats in the Illinois House of Representatives voted to replace long-time Speaker Michael Madigan, who had become entangled in a corruption scandal involving Commonwealth Edison Co. and its parent Exelon, with Chris Welch, who became the first Black Speaker in Illinois history. Welch may not be perfect either, but it was time for Madigan to leave. He has retired into obscurity, but he may yet face federal charges. I could name dozens of such situations in either party.

But to suggest that no one had addressed such corruption until Trump did so is ludicrous. It also demonstrates a willful blindness to facts. The litany of evidence of Trump’s shady transactions in both business and politics is overwhelming, from the $25 million fraud settlement in the lawsuit against Trump University, to the tax and insurance fraud charges now being brought against the Trump Organization by the Manhattan District Attorney, to the investigation of Trump’s demand of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to allow Trump to claim victory in that state in the 2020 election—the details have filled multiple books over many years. No matter the depth of evidence that Trump not only does not fight corruption, but personifies it, followers will insist on dismissing such evidence, almost surely without ever reviewing it. Nonetheless, it is absolutely clear to anyone reading all this, as I have, that Trump has never been the weapon against this corruption that this complaint suggests.

For those who may think otherwise, or want to better arm themselves to discuss this topic, I include a short, incomplete bibliography of Trump-related investigative literature at the end of this blog post. Beware: It may keep you occupied for weeks.

But there is also the claim that “people are fed up.” This deserves closer analysis. One could ask, Fed up with what, exactly? My correspondent cited Biden “bringing back old retreads that Obama had in his cabinet.” That is hardly a crime, of course, and may well have indicated a preference by a new president facing a crisis of confidence in government for choosing experienced people who know how to make government work. That is hardly cause for a riot, let alone a coup attempt, and I said as much, though admittedly I may have sparked further anger in referring to the corruption claims as a “bullshit excuse” for an insurrection—especially since the express purpose was to prevent certification of the election. He also noted the need for better trade agreements, for someone to “actually help the working person,” and the loss of manufacturing jobs. I would readily agree that these are all legitimate political issues, subject to debate both on the streets and in the media, and in Congress and state legislatures, but justification for an insurrection?

Reused with permission from Wikipedia

That was the red line I could not cross, nor could I accept that anyone else should be allowed to do so.

The idea that all this frustration, not all of it based on accurate perceptions, justified an attempt to overthrow an election underlines a sense of civic privilege that I find appalling. If your preferred candidate failed to make his case to the American people—and that is precisely what happened to Trump—it does not follow that the only path forward is insurrection. The presumption behind this logic is deeply rooted in white privilege, even if its advocates do not wish to consciously own that brutal truth.

After all, if anyone is entitled to a sense that they are pushing back against persistent injustice, it would be African Americans, who can cite centuries of brutal suppression and slavery prior to the Civil War, the use of home-grown terrorism through organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to suppress Black voting rights and citizenship and economic opportunity, Jim Crow laws that enforced inequality well into the 20th century, vicious housing discrimination, and violent police actions, such as those of the Alabama state troopers who assaulted peaceful demonstrators in Selma in 1965, all of which make pro-Trump protesters’ allegations of unfairness pale in comparison. Yet, most African American citizens have persisted across centuries to use what levers they have within the democratic system to achieve a more equitable society. Admittedly, there are times when tensions have boiled over, but who could reasonably have expected otherwise? I am not justifying violence, but asking reasonable people to consider the disappointments to which Black Americans have been subjected for generations before making comparisons to the complaints of the MAGA crowd.

Moreover, such issues of delayed justice have affected other minorities, such as Chinese, the subject of an immigration exclusion law for decades, the Japanese internment during World War II, and widespread prejudice and discrimination against Latino immigrants over the past century. One could go on, but the point is clear. All have sought doggedly to work through the existing system to resolve injustice.

That leads to the next element of the exchange, in which I insisted that any Democrat instigating such an attack would be accused of treason, and that to react otherwise to Trump’s insurrection is “blatant hypocrisy.” I wanted to draw direct attention to the double standard that was being applied by many Republicans in this instance. In fact, I added, “Coup attempt is crime.” Democrats made similar allegations, of course, in the second impeachment trial.

That led to the countercharge that Democrats were hypocritical in allowing “looting, burning, shooting and harassing of innocent people” in the demonstrations and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in the summer of 2020. He then referred to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “part of the elitist liberal problem in this country.” As with the corruption issue, we were back to the broad-brush approach to asserting problems without specifics.

At that point, I decided to end the conversation because it seemed clear that the discussion was going to veer off track. I made clear that “I have never endorsed violence and I never will.” But I added that in Trump’s case, “This is an official condoning this,” which separated it from mayors who did not like the violence in their cities, but were faced with challenges in deciding the best approach to handling it. His comments also ignored the fact that 93 percent of Black Lives Matter protests were completely peaceful. I contrasted such practical policy decisions to “federal crimes encouraged by a US president who should know better.” And with that, the exchange ended.

I realize, of course, that this is just one such conversation among millions of exchanges among friends and relatives with contrasting views across the country. I did not completely disagree with all of his concerns, but I also was deeply puzzled as to how those of us worried about the future of democracy when it is under attack by followers of a demagogue like Trump can wrestle with jello or shadow-box with phantoms, given the vague and disingenuous statements with which we are confronted, including some of his.

In the meantime, speaking of stealing elections, we are watching some amazing voting rights shenanigans, to say nothing of phony “audits,” at the state level. What will we say when the second insurrection anniversary rolls around? Will anything have changed?

 

Partial Bibliography: Recent Books on President Donald Trump and/or the Insurrection

 

Johnston, David Cay. The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Karl, Jonathan. Betrayal. Dutton, 2021.

Leonnig, Carol, and Philip Rucker. A Very Stable Genius. Penguin Press, 2020.

Leonnig & Rucker. I Alone Can Fix It. Penguin Press, 2021.

Raskin, Jamie. Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Harper, 2022.

Schiff, Adam. Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. Random House, 2021.

Woodward, Bob, and Robert Costa. Peril. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Woolf, Michael. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Little Brown, 2018.

Jim Schwab

Fighting Lunacy with Lunacy

Posted on by
Reply

Thanks to the New York Times, I learned over the weekend that birds are not real. Oh, the information has been out there, and I don’t know how I missed it. Perhaps I am just not tuned into the metaverse, being over thirty[1] and all . . . . but I just did not catch on. Now I know. I understand.

You see, the birds have long since been replaced with drones that are surveilling our every movement. It is important that all right-thinking Americans be aware of their real purpose. Join the Birds Aren’t Real movement and find out. I personally intend to alter my disguise daily when I go outside so that the bird-drones can never identify me as the same person twice. Tweet the warning. Tweet it wide.

Okay. Let me keep this blog post shorter than my usual ruminations and just point you to the Times article by Taylor Lorenz that brings attention to what I think is one of the most effective satires on disinformation that I can recall in a long time. As the article reports, “Birds Aren’t Real” is the increasingly popular fabrication of Peter McIndoe, a college dropout who moved to Memphis, but grew up home-schooled in a conservative Christian family outside Cincinnati and later in Arkansas. It began as McIndoe’s spontaneous joke against pro-Trump counterprotesters at a women’s march in early 2017, after Trump had been inaugurated. It grew on social media to the point where 20 million people have viewed a TikTok video in which an actor portraying a CIA agent confesses to having worked on bird drone surveillance. “Birds Aren’t Real” paraphernalia, such as t-shirts, are available. Why do birds sit on power lines? That’s how the drones are recharged. The whole “conspiracy” has grown its own subculture, in which followers are in on the joke and those who take it seriously, well—they’re seen as

Another instance of massive drone surveillance of a fishing community in the Louisiana bayou.

having bigger problems than just bird drones.

Some supporters apparently refer to their brand of conspiracy satire as “fighting lunacy with lunacy.” Yes, there is still a need for the House Select Committee to continue its investigation into the January 6 pro-Trump riot in the nation’s Capitol. Numerous people were killed and injured, and it is serious business. It is important for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to pursue the Trump Organization for tax fraud, for the New York Attorney General to continue her investigation, for charges of election tampering to be pursued against Trump in Georgia.

But we can also laugh because, if there is one thing the true believers in disinformation cannot abide, it is not being taken seriously. Trump himself, who suffered a secret humorectomy[2] by alien doctors at some unidentified point in his adolescence, especially cannot handle being an object of satire or ridicule. So, join the joke: Birds Aren’t Real. Your belly laugh at the absurdism involved will make your day and help keep you healthy.

And remember, if some bird poop lands on your head, save it for evidence. It’s all part of the plan to make you believe. Just make sure you can trust the people who do the lab test. 😊

Jim Schwab

[1] Unfortunately, I passed that age in 1980, before PCs and the Internet even existed on any large scale, but I’ve struggled to overcome this limitation. I live in fear of the solution revealed in the 1960s hippie movie, Wild in the Streets. I mean, since the 2016 election, you just never know what might become possible.

[2] This is the surgical removal of one’s sense of humor, including the ability to laugh at yourself. You won’t find the term in medical dictionaries because the coverup of such surgeries is all part of the conspiracy. If you must ask which conspiracy, you are clearly gullible and have bigger problems than the rest of us can solve. You may even have been an involuntary and unwitting victim of such surgery at a young age.

Consider Your Victims

Posted on by
Reply

We are probably all born with a certain focus on our own needs. The first job of a baby is to survive, but ideally, we learn from parents, especially, but also from others around us that somebody else cares and takes care of us when we most need the help. With any luck, we learn to extend that same concern from ourselves to others, and as we grow, we learn how we can support and cooperate with our fellow human beings. Empathy must be taught, and not everyone learns, or learns well.

I would like to believe that this article will reach someone and cause them to think about any potential victims of their actions. Maybe it will, but I also doubt that the most violent among us are reading my blog. I have good reason to suspect that my content over the past eight years, while apparently attracting more than 31,000 subscribers, has not provided much raw meat for those who feel the need to attack others to get what they want. They may not read much at all. But I can hope.

But I must wonder sometimes whether perpetrators of violent crimes, especially those involving theft, give much consideration to their victims. The overwhelming majority of victims of violence mean something to someone. In some cases, they may have networks of friends upon whom they are positive influences. They may be positive assets for local communities, whether those be neighborhoods, religious congregations, schools, or extended families. They mean something to other people, and the community will be weaker without them.

Or do their attackers just see them as vulnerable prey, much as a bobcat might view a rodent when the cat is hungry?

I keep wondering about one such recent victim in Chicago. We have plenty of victims in Chicago, often of gun violence, though in this case no gun was involved. His car was the object of desire, and a 73-year-old man, moving slowly, became the target of an attempted carjacking. The two youths hit him in the head, then pushed him in the chest, and he died of a heart attack. Two young men, 18 and 17, now face serious charges and may end up sacrificing many years of their lives in prison. Their future looks bleak.

Keith Cooper at a 5K “Ditch the Weight & Guns” walk & run in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. Photo provided by Keinika Carlton.

Keith Cooper, the victim, was a member of Augustana Lutheran Church, to which I belong, and a vital, active part of the Hyde Park neighborhood that surrounds it. He was a proud Marine Corps veteran, having joined in 1968 at age 21 and served in Vietnam. When you needed a volunteer, he was likely to be there.

Keith with daughter Keinika, her husband Curtis Carlton, and granddaughters Alyna and Mikayla. Photo provided by Keinika Carlton.

“He just loved to help,” his daughter, Keinika, says. “He was a community-based individual.” When she was growing up, she recalls, he taught his children that “you can’t complain if you don’t do anything.” Ever seeking to mentor those he loved, he brought granddaughter Mikayla, now 11, to Sunday school when he came to church. Keinika said he joined Augustana about ten years ago. He was, however, already familiar with the church from growing up in the neighborhood near 54th and Kimbark on Chicago’s South Side.

But it was more than growing up near the church. Keith told the current pastor, the Rev. Nancy Goede, that he had been baptized there as a child. Keinika had Sunday school attendance slips from 1959, when he was 12. Later, as a teen, he served as an acolyte. He drifted away in his teens, but returned as a mature adult. In recent years, I often served with him as an usher.

Keith Cooper with daughter Keinika. Photo provided by Keinika Carlton.

He joined the church shortly after two heart surgeries that were necessitated by a torn aorta and involved heart valve replacement. Keinika describes her time in the waiting room as “nerve wracking.” Her father underwent rehab to rebuild his body. For this very reason, she says, when she learned of the nature of the attack the day it occurred, she knew why his heart failed. She knew, she says, that he would not survive.

That is, however, part of the problem with random victimization of an old man the attackers never knew. It probably never occurred to them that their physical assault could result in death. They knew nothing of this personal history, or why he seemed to be moving slowly, if that was their perception, but now they own the consequences. As Judge Charles S. Beach II said in addressing Frank Harris, the 18-year-old, as they were charged in court with murder, “To say that it’s painful for me is an understatement—because anytime that I see a young man such as you before me with such a terrible thing on their shoulders, it’s painful for us and society and just about everyone.”

As Keinika asked during an interview with me last week, “Did you all even think this through?”

Kimbark Plaza at E. 53rd St. and Kimbark in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.

What is stunning about the entire incident is that it occurred in broad daylight in a busy commercial strip, Kimbark Plaza. It occurred roughly between 12:30 and 12:40 p.m. in a crowded parking lot, with numerous surveillance cameras. There were reportedly dozens of witnesses in nearby stores, many of whom came out, including an off-duty paramedic who tried to revive him as he lay on the ground, unresponsive, until police arrived. Sadly, he was already dead when an ambulance brought him to nearby University of Chicago Hospital. He had been at Kimbark Plaza to run errands. He often shopped for groceries at Hyde Park Produce.

Meanwhile, having failed to open the car, a Hyundai Santa Fe SUV, the two young men fled but were identified and arrested by police about a half-mile away, trying to change clothes in a synagogue courtyard. Harris was about to become a senior in high school, but the two had some prior arrests, including other carjackings in May and last December.

Keith will be sorely missed by those who knew him—and there were plenty who did. As the Hyde Park Jazz Festival grew as an area attraction each summer, it was Keith who helped arrange for some artists to perform at Augustana. When volunteers were needed to park cars for events like the Jazz Fest or the 57th St. Arts Fair, earning parking fees to support the church, it was most often Keith who could be found collecting the fees and directing people to available spaces. For his 74th birthday, which would have occurred July 22, his Facebook request was to raise $500 for his beloved church. My wife attended one of his AARP-sponsored driver skills refresher courses at the church for seniors who could then get small discounts on their car insurance. Keith was the host. Keinika says he was involved in a recent Juneteenth festival. I could go on, but you get the idea. Church, school, neighborhood, the city of Chicago, he loved them all and supported them all.

From years of passing conversations with him, I gathered the impression that part of his motivation may have come from his own struggles. At one point earlier in his life, he was briefly homeless. He knew what that felt like and gladly assisted with a monthly community breakfast for disadvantaged people. Bill Tompsett, a retired attorney and long-time member of Augustana, says he helped by greeting people as they arrived, but when he was missing for a few weeks, Keith asked him why. Bill explained that he had hurt his back and could not stand for two hours to greet people. Keith assured him that he could still greet people sitting down, and he resumed his duties. Little things like that mattered. Keith did several jobs in his life, including driving trucks and selling jewelry and books. His daughter told reporters he had “tons of books,” among which he particularly liked black history and science fiction. In retirement, he was driving a Lyft car to earn extra money. Keith knew from personal experience that there are many people struggling to survive in our community, and he sought to help where he could.

It is noteworthy that more than 100 people gathered at Kimbark Plaza on Friday evening, July 16, two days after Keith died, to honor his life and offer prayers, holding candles while West African drums were played.

“Talking drums” performing at the visitation for Keith Cooper, July 24, 2021.

Those “talking drums” were also present a week later, on Saturday, July 24, for a visitation in the Augustana fellowship hall, at which members of the U.S. Marine Corps also presented a flag to honor his service. Dozens of participants in the event responded to Keinika by offering one-word descriptions of Keith such as “kindness” and “commitment.” Two days later, following a moving funeral service, his ashes were interred in the memorial garden outside the fellowship hall, where he joined other saints who preceded him.

Augustana’s memorial garden

The city of Chicago and Hyde Park lost a valuable, generous, and committed citizen because, once again and too often, some people, too often too young, chose a path in which they failed to consider who their victim might be, what he meant to those around him, and what they took from their community as a result. It was all very sad, and I kept thinking during the funeral, all very unnecessary.

Jim Schwab

Like Water Flowing Downhill

Posted on by
Reply

The Major League Baseball team long known as the Cleveland Indians will rename itself at the end of this season as the Cleveland Guardians. The change will surely draw criticism from traditionalists, but it is long overdue. The logo is outrageously racist and derogatory. The name could conceivably be neutral in intent if it honored Native Americans, but the logo has always belied any supposed good intentions. Conservative fans in Ohio long defended the name and the logo, but time is up, and it is just as well. The image has worn out its welcome.

In my college days at Cleveland State University, I recall the American Indian Movement challenging reenactments of Cleveland founder Moses Cleaveland landing on the shores of the Cuyahoga River in 1796. A few years later, a friend of mine, Legal Aid lawyer Joseph Meissner, was suing on behalf of American Indian clients who claimed the name and logo were racist in intent. The lawsuit was undoubtedly ahead of its time, but Joe had a way of making a point. One day, he had a variety of posterboards in his office, done by a local artist, depicting various minorities in the same manner as Chief Wahoo, with names like the “Cleveland Negroes” and “Cleveland Italians,” among others I no longer recall. His point was that, if these other logos seemed offensive (and believe me, they were), then why was it any more tolerable to accept the Chief Wahoo logo for the Cleveland Indians? To this day, there has never been a good answer for that question.

But I know many Cleveland fans will be annoyed or angry. For years, relatives of mine argued with me in defense of the team when I said it was a matter of time before they would have to confront the reality of what the name and logo represented and accept change. I am not picking on them by saying that. Their reactions were quite typical, and part of that was a natural defensiveness about a city that had suffered depopulation, industrial decline, job losses, and the embarrassments of past mayors Ralph Perk and Dennis Kucinich in the 1970s. For my part, I moved to Iowa in January 1979, so I guess I was a turncoat in the eyes of some, but lots of people find new paths in life. It’s just that in Cleveland, every departure felt like another blow to the city’s pride.

Progressive Field in 2019

Gradually, the city adjusted to its setbacks of that era, grew a large medical services industry, bult a new stadium for its baseball team, replacing the cavernous Municipal Stadium (where a new Cleveland Browns stadium now sits on the lakefront), and cleaned up its once badly polluted river. Cleveland State and other universities grew to serve the city and the region. The Cuyahoga Valley became the site of a national park. As an urban planner, I might add that there is some good planning happening in the region. Although the Cleveland Indians lost the World Series in the tenth inning of the seventh game in 2016 to the Chicago Cubs, the Cleveland Cavaliers, with the incredible efforts of LeBron James, won the NBA title over the Golden State Warriors. So, there’s all that.

Cleveland’s Rock n Roll Museum on the Lake Erie waterfront, one of the city’s huge tourism attractions

In a brilliant way, the new name, Guardians, is a perfect fit for this mindset. It allows this defensive posture regarding a historically great American city to become a positive virtue, as protectors of its civic virtue and community reputation. Clinging to the moniker of Indians, especially with Chief Wahoo as a mascot, could never do that. It would merely ensure the need to defend a highly questionable tradition. Instead, fans can shift their attention to protecting and promoting the city’s future.

But back to the name change. Long ago, when I was in Iowa City as a graduate student, Pastor Roy Wingate of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church once commented in a small group conversation over lunch that, “Much prophecy is little more than knowing that water flows downhill,” which is to say that prophets often are simply observing what others refuse to see. (In a more literal sense, this point was not lost on me later as a planner involved in disaster recovery and hazard mitigation talking to people about floods.)

My occasional debates with Cleveland friends and relatives about the eventual demise of the Cleveland Indians logo was little more than Rev. Wingate’s observation about prophecy. Water flows downhill. Changing a racist logo was just a matter of time, and finally, the ownership of the team has recognized that the waters of justice have overflown the utility of calling a team the “Cleveland Indians.”

It was never if, but when. The time has come.

Jim Schwab

Outthink Wildfire—a Podcast Conversation

Posted on by
Reply

It is evident with each increasingly serious and increasingly long wildfire season in the West and South that American still has serious public policy work to do in confronting this hazard. Recently, the National Fire Protection Association unveiled its new policy initiative, Outthink Wildfire, aimed at highlighting the need to move beyond current reactive strategies to widespread adoption and enforcement of building codes, adoption of wiser land-use regulations, and building substantial public pressure to make changes happen quickly.

The American Planning Association has released a new episode in the Resilience Roundtable series of podcasts, sponsored by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, in which I interview Michele Steinberg, Wildfire Division Manager at NFPA, about this initiative and what results it may produce in reducing wildfire hazards.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Jim Schwab

In Harm’s Way or Dodging Disaster?

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill aims to fix much that is ailing in America, and its sheer size is drawing predictable—and short-sighted—fire from Republicans in Congress. The nation has a great deal of aging infrastructure, which will eventually pose a massive challenge to economic development. But the American Jobs Plan also takes aim at a growing, urgent, and critical need for infrastructure to cope with the impacts of climate change. These affect many kinds of infrastructure, including transportation, water, wastewater, and energy and communications systems. There is nothing patriotic, it seems to me, in being so oppositional as to allow our nation to deteriorate, Texas-style, in the face of changing climate conditions. There is also nothing about what happened in Texas with frozen energy systems that contradicts “global warming.” The research clearly shows that climate instability, including seemingly less predictable winter storms, is part of the overall impact of a generally warming climate. Nobody but a charlatan ever promised that climate change would be a simple topic.

Earlier this year, I reviewed a book by a former Toronto mayor about what cities are doing about climate change. Later, I reviewed Doug Farr’s elaborate tome on how the design professions are providing solutions to climate challenges in new forms of housing and urban development. In addition, a year ago, I reviewed a new Planning Advisory Service Report by the American Planning Association on planning for infrastructure resilience. I remain committed to highlighting resources for planners, public officials, and interested citizens on issues of climate resilience.

In this post, I feature a new book on community solutions to climate resilience. In Harm’s Way, by John Cleveland and Peter Plastrik, provides a set of detailed ideas for building climate resilience in our communities. In my view, its dominant values in contributing to the discussion of climate change and community adaptation center on two crucial issues: first, how to finance investments in climate resilience, and second, how to build the policy foundations for managing retreat from the most vulnerable coastal areas as a means of avoiding major “natural” disasters. The two co-authors bring interesting backgrounds for such discussion. Cleveland is executive director of the Innovation Network for Communities (INC) and a member of the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, a group of business and civic leaders supporting the Boston Climate Action Plan. Plastrik is vice-president of INC and co-author of an Island Press book on networking for social change.

The Biden plan faces a challenging uphill climb toward passage in Congress. The money it promises for what it offers to do is heavily dependent on changes in corporate taxation that may face daunting opposition in Congress. In any case, even passage of the plan does not necessarily mean that every valuable potential investment at the local level in more resilient infrastructure will be assured of adequate funding, nor does it mean that local leaders will always agree with federal priorities for their own communities. The struggle to implement the plan will face years of challenges. In short, this is an important time for the vital discussion by Cleveland and Plastrik on how we can best find the money for essential investments in climate resilience.

Financing climate resilience is essentially an exercise in risk management. The first ingredient in successful risk management is recognition of the problem, which at a national scale has been a political football because of right-wing denial that a problem exists. For four years, this denial was centered in the White House, but the nation clearly chose a sea change on climate policy in the 2020 election. But that does not mean that nothing was happening outside the Trump administration—far from it. Local financial innovations were afoot in numerous American communities, including large cities like Boston, Miami, and San Francisco. Indeed, networks of such cities have been exploring avenues for fostering climate-related investments. The issue in many cases, because local governments seldom have large stores of cash awaiting brilliant ideas, is hunting for money in the financial markets. In many ways, the hunt for climate-resilient investments is a race against time for cities that may face climate-related disasters that may cost far more in damages than the investments they are contemplating to prevent such outcomes. Misalignments between resources and needs are commonplace, the environmental burdens of climate change, particularly on low-income and minority neighborhoods, are often enormous, and public revenue is often insufficient to address the problem. The authors thus focus on the need for innovations in climate resilience finance to meet this challenge. Given the likelihood that at least some of the Biden plan will require some level of local and state matching funds, this issue will remain potent. The authors outline a range of tools for creating these new financial structures. This task is far from impossible, however. Bond-rating firms and others are already recognizing the inherent risks involved in ignoring climate change. Why not invest on the positive side through mitigation and adaptation?

Case studies are always helpful in making clear that some community, somewhere, is at least testing solutions, many of them proving successful. The authors outline a playbook for paying for climate resilience, using eight examples in which communities have generated local revenue, imposed land-use costs on unwise development, leveraged development opportunities to achieve climate resilience, and pursued equity, among other options. Local governments in fact have a range of regulatory tools and incentives they use to leverage many other decisions by businesses and residents, many of the options, such as floodplain management rules, are already common. What is needed is the imagination for new ideas on how to use those tools, as well as accessible guidance on how well those ideas are working and under what circumstances. One city highlighted in this chapter is Norfolk, Virginia, a low-lying city on the Atlantic coast that faces a future laden with nuisance flooding due to sea level rise. Its system of four color-coded zones indicates relative levels of safety or vulnerability as a means of directing redevelopment to safer areas while demarcating those in need of protection. Zoning may not seem like a financial issue, but it is a quintessential financial tool in dictating what sort of development is permissible in what location, thus channeling investment to those areas the city deems acceptable for certain purposes. The problem is that the power of zoning has not always been used with a vivid awareness of the environmental hazards that are tied to urban geography.

In the U.S. system, municipalities are creations of the states, which establish the rules under which cities operate. Notwithstanding the magnitude of federal largesse, it is thus also fitting that the book contains a chapter on how states can help communities invest in climate resilience. States can serve as both barriers to and intentional supporters of local innovations in financing climate resilience.

Collapsed houses after Hurricane Sandy on the Jersey shore. The results of climate-driven disasters are seldom pretty.

In the end, however, all of this depends to some degree on political will, a subject addressed in a final chapter on managed retreat under the caption, “Can it happen here?” Communities have long shied away from open discussion of retreat from the shoreline or highly volatile riverfronts. Seashore land has historically been some of the most valuable real estate in the nation, and not only because it can become a haven for rich owners of second homes, but because beaches attract tourism and harbors attract economic development and transportation infrastructure. What public official wants to say no to new shoreline development, let alone talk of managing retreat from existing settlements? Yet the sheer long-term cost of such reluctance to lead with courage is something I discussed in another book review early last year. The Geography of Risk was a book that detailed wave after wave of catastrophic destruction on the New Jersey barrier islands as a result of investments by entrenched real estate interests that resisted risk-based land-use reforms.

But Cleveland and Plastrik insist that retreat will happen, and the question is not if, but when, and under what circumstances. Basically, they say, in coastal areas threatened by climate change and sea level rise, retreat will be driven either by disasters, or by the market, or by plans. In the first instance, nature itself will make decisions that force painful choices that we cannot control. In the second, recognizing the inherent dangers of such stubborn persistence, market forces will withdraw investment from areas that are no longer viable as a result of climate change, with major losses for those who either lack the means to move or who fail to read the tea leaves. The final choice, plan-driven retreat, is the only one that allows the community some degree of sovereignty in the matter, deliberating about the direction of retreat, the means of financing it, and ways of mitigating financial consequences for those involved. The problem is finding articulate, visionary leadership that can lead the community to its moment of truth.

Jim Schwab

Climate Solutions, Off the Shelf

Posted on by
Reply

About six weeks ago, as the Biden administration was first asserting its priorities regarding climate change and the environment, I reviewed a book about the positive actions already being taken by cities around the world in addressing the climate crisis. The important takeaway was that, while climate policy languished or moved backwards under the Trump administration, cities and their mayors had not waited for national governments to act. They had instead taken the initiative.

But city governments are not alone. Architects, planners, engineers, and even developers have innovated in their own ways. In late 2019, Chicago architect Douglas Farr provided me with a copy of his book, Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future, and I promised to review it. It is a sizeable, oversize, 400-page tome, but don’t let that intimidate you, even if I got sidetracked for numerous reasons and only a year later decided to devour the book from cover to cover. That is not necessary for everyone. The book functions much like an encyclopedia, reference work, or anthology. Farr solicited specialized contributions from numerous practitioners and experts. Pick a chapter, pick your favorite subtopic, or dive in randomly. You won’t fail to learn something, as I did, despite my general familiarity with Farr’s subject matter.

My timing in finally reviewing the book has proven fortuitous, in a way. It allows me to expand the message of the review of David Miller’s Solved, a much shorter book by a single author. Miller essentially is a success storyteller; Farr is a documenter. Both serve a purpose.

For 650,000 years, global carbon dioxide emissions have never been above the read line. They are now. All graphics courtesy of Farr Associates

Farr starts his book with a “Where We Are” section that includes color-coded maps documenting the huge disparities around the world in longevity (50-59 years in much of Africa, 70-79 in the U.S., above 80 in Japan, Australia, Canada, and Europe, in poverty, gender inequality, and so forth. A simple chart of global CO2 levels demonstrates that, within our lifetimes, we have nearly doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to levels not seen in the last 650,000 years. A parade of such graphics makes clear that ours is a planet on a collision course with natural reality.

The Bullitt Center. Copyright Nic Lenoux for the Bullitt Center.

But such searing images also clarify the importance of examples of what can be done. Farr leads us to the specific example in Seattle of the Bullitt Center, which he terms the “most sustainable office building in the world.” Composting toilets use an average of two tablespoons of water per use. There are no parking spaces, but there is 243 square meters of rooftop green space. The Bullitt Center earned designation as one of the first eight buildings to achieve full certification under the Living Building Challenge, and the first office building.

But no one in Seattle wants it to retain such titles. They would rather see new buildings and new developments claim new titles and surpass the Bullitt Center’s achievements as we move toward an entire new sustainable society. Farr takes us from “our default world” to “our preferred future,” with a procession of examples of how this can be done, then leads readers to a theory of change that discusses how we make change happen, over what timelines, and how we can step on the gas with “acceleration strategies” to make practical impacts on climate change happen more quickly.

But it is in the final section, “The Practice of Change,” which dominates more than half the book, where Farr enlists a variety of expert contributors to share the methods and designs that will carry us forward to reduce climate impacts and ultimately create a more livable society. This is not just about innovative building design but about human relationships. Mary Nelson, president and CEO emeritus of Chicago’s Bethel New Life Inc., and one of the pioneers of Chicago neighborhood change whom I most admire, discusses how we build strong relationships between people and place (spoiler alert: it involves hard work). Others describe the value of participatory art in communities or the need to transform public spaces into welcoming places (Fred Kent, president, Project for Public Spaces). Get the point? Architectural or planning solutions that have no human connection of involvement beyond an elite are dead letters in promoting real social change that will have any impact on our climate crisis. It’s all about us, whether the subject is local food culture, local planning checkups, ore re-envisioning underutilized space to promote equitable prosperity. Every single example has its champion in this book, someone who has worked on solutions and involved people in finding answers.

For a moment, I’d like to focus on contributions by two colleagues with whom I have worked, David Fields and Tom Price, to make the point. Fields is a veteran transportation planner now working in Houston as the city’s chief transportation planner, who discusses how elements of the urban setting such as residential density and mixed land uses that put homes within walking distance of retail, or put homes above ground-floor retail, can reduce vehicle trips by up to 90 percent, thus helping to reverse the tremendous negative impact of the automobile on the world’s climate, to say nothing of air quality. Price, on the other hand, is a civil engineer, instructs us on how to use “every project as an opportunity to process rainwater and stormwater,” while demanding beauty through improved design. His articles remind me of a lesson I learned years ago, after Hurricane Katrina, through a project in New Orleans called the Dutch Dialogues, in which the American Planning Association and others engaged with Dutch planners and engineers to promulgate the idea of seeing water not as the enemy but as a resource for enhancing urban quality of life. We need to find ways to help move water elegantly through the city instead of constantly finding ways to bury it, hide it, or divert it.

Whether the subject is community theater, transportation, or architectural styles that build housing affordability and reduced heating and cooling demands to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the overall point is not only repetitive but cumulative: For many of the challenges that climate change poses to our communities, we already know the answers if we are willing to explore the most innovative, effective, and creative approaches that others have already used. Yes, we have a new administration willing to rejoin the Paris climate accord and invest in solutions to climate change. That is important, as we need to push envelopes constantly and with urgency. But we dare not ignore the answers that are all around us in the innovations that are already helping our communities adapt to a carbon-neutral, democratic, more equitable future. They embody the lessons that, through replication, will accelerate our shift to a green future that eases the existential climate crisis of our planet.

The sweet-spot scale in action in Oslo, Norway. Copyright Jason F. McLennan.

Perhaps two points in Farr’s book, side by side, will help illuminate the point. One is a segment by Jason F. McLennan, founder of the Living Building Challenge. He defines something he calls the “sweet spot” in the sustainable urban fabric, buildings between four and eight stories high. These are buildings not so high as to isolate people on upper floors from fellow human beings at ground level. The building is also not so tall that reliance on energy-consuming elevators drives high energy demand for the building merely to function. There is a place for taller buildings, but the combination of density and manageable energy demand with the potential to minimize demands on the environment exists in that “sweet spot.” Subsequent examples in the same section

The sweet spot defined. Modified by Farr with permission from Jason F. McLennan.

proceed to elaborate on ways we already know to produce affordable, carbon-neutral housing. At the end of the book, in contrast, Farr makes his plea, in large part to fellow architects, to “end the race to build the world’s tallest building,” detailing the negative effects of such edifices on public health, safety, and welfare, and ending with a quote from Sherrilyn Kenyon, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Indeed. That is the fundamental point of stranded carbon, that is, leaving fossil fuels unburned, in the ground, and shifting to a renewable energy economy.

Much of the secret of achieving this goal lies in knowing when to stop doing the wrong things and how to enable our society to do more of the green things. This being merely a blog post, I cannot attempt to share all the specific points Farr and his contributors make concerning street design, building envelopes, solar power, social equity, and commitment to environmental health. But I can urge you to seek out his book, in a library, online, or in a bookstore, to find the examples you need for the situation your own community faces in crafting a more sustainable future. This is the activist’s and practitioner’s manual to help get you started. Let’s all engage in some creative thinking and problem solving.

Jim Schwab

When Narcissism Trumps All

Posted on by
Reply

Within the last week, I finished reading a nearly 800-page biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, which may raise the question of why I took the trouble. I started only after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election but refused to concede and persisted in disseminating the fiction that the election had somehow been stolen. It struck me that there might be some noteworthy parallels in personality traits, or psychology, with one of the great monsters of European history. There are. Not that I am a psychologist or even play one on television. But as voters, we all judge presidential character to one degree or another. It is often a significant factor in the public debate in election years.

In his detailed but highly readable 1998 biography, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alan Schom notes that, in the end, after numerous avoidable wars, Bonaparte, aka Emperor Napoleon, left behind nearly three million dead Europeans. Most were soldiers, but hundreds of thousands of civilians were also killed. Equally large numbers were displaced as hundreds of towns and villages were burned to the ground, amid other rapine and destruction.

I want to note here that, for comparison, I have read several volumes of recent vintage exploring the Trump psyche, family background, and political behavior, including:

In addition, in comparing Trump with previous U.S. presidents, I am aided by the serendipitous circumstance that, in 1997, I undertook what became a 15-year quest to read at least one biography of every U.S. president, starting sequentially with George Washington. (The sequential aspect ceased as I read second and even third biographies of some presidents, such as Lincoln, Madison, Wilson, and others.) Thus, I do not speak loosely in saying that Trump is decidedly unique in certain respects.

But back to Napoleon.

The destruction I noted above is bad enough, but what became supremely clear to me was how little Napoleon seemed to care. I was reminded of a scene early in Leo Tolstoy’s classic, War and Peace, in which Napoleon, dressed in a Polish peasant soldier’s uniform to escape notice from the Russians, surveys the landscape on the other side of the Niemen River as he prepares for his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. As he does so, some cavalry soldiers plunge into the river to demonstrate their courage to the great leader but end up drowning. Tolstoy drily observes that their demise attracted little notice from the emperor.

Not like he really cared, Tolstoy seems to be telling us. Somewhat like Donald Trump slipping away to the White House to view the mayhem on television while his followers, incited by his outlandish rhetoric, ransack the Capitol and some people are killed. Zealots can pay an extraordinarily high price for failing to realize that their self-centered messiah in fact has a heart of stone.

But Napoleon was far worse than that, I learned from Schom. Throughout a decade and a half of senseless wars, in which hundreds of thousands of young French men were conscripted into his army, Napoleon never bothered to authorize a fully operational military medical service to take care of the sick and wounded. Tens of thousands died from appalling field hospital conditions, if they were in any hospital at all. It was just not one of the emperor’s priorities. As Schom notes, “With the same cold, calculating ruthlessness, Napoleon ignored the dead and wounded, and despite the pleas of the army’s chief surgeon, Dr. Dominique Larrey, year after year refused to create a permanent army medical corps.”

Medical supplies tended to be skimpy or nonexistent, and at the Battle of Wagram, Schom notes, “9,000 or so casualties were all but abandoned by Napoleon.” By the time he fled from Russia, having started with an army of more than 600,000, he left behind 400,000 dead soldiers and perhaps 100,000 prisoners in the hands of the Russian empire. Little more than a rump force made it back to Paris with him. His downfall came little more than a year later, leading to his exile in Elba, followed by his return, final defeat, and exile to St. Helena, where he died of arsenic poisoning, most likely at the hands of a trusted associate.

Beware how you choose your champions.

Americans, until recently, have seldom had to confront the consequences of such narcissistic leadership devoid of any capacity for empathy. Presidents of both parties have typically been humbled by the responsibilities they have assumed, and despite mistakes and bad judgment in many cases, have been aware at some level of the cost their decisions have imposed on American soldiers and civilians alike. Remorse has often driven them to seek to remedy the situation. But we have just outlived the experience of a president capable of separating children from their parents at the border without even the most fundamental understanding of the causes of migration from poor nations in Latin America, nor any plan for how someday to reunite them. We have witnessed a presidency in which, as I write, almost 440,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 (exceeding American deaths in World War II) while the nation’s leader ridiculed people for wearing masks and suggested drinking cleaning fluids, all while suppressing the input of capable scientists, but has yet to express any serious regrets for the sorrowful outcome. After all, someone else caused the problem—Obama, the Chinese, Democratic governors, whoever. Yes, Napoleon Bonaparte, from start to finish, is replete with examples of the French leader blaming everyone around him for every catastrophe while failing to accept responsibility. The routine is drearily familiar.

Both men have also exhibited an outsized capacity for surrounding themselves with sycophants and turning at least part of the state apparatus into a family enterprise. We are familiar these days with the coterie of Ivanka Trump, Eric, Donald Jr., and Jared Kushner all playing prominent roles in the White House for which they were profoundly unqualified. Napoleon made kings and princes of his family members, but unlike Trump, often found them incompetent after having installed them. He was also infamous not only for looting the treasure of conquered nations but also of France itself. In his quest to blockade British commerce, he virtually impoverished an entire continent with the “Continental System,” while forcing subordinate states to support the costs of his wars.

The key difference between the two men in this respect is not their cupidity, but their timing. Napoleon rose to power within a nascent French republic that was struggling to establish stable institutions following the insanity of the French Revolution and its wild swings of the political pendulum. He was able to install himself as First Consul through a coup d’etat. He then installed his brother Lucien as Minister of the Interior, a post that put him in charge of the election machinery for a plebiscite to affirm Napoleon’s reorganization of the government. Schom reports that some five million French citizens voted, only 1.5 million for the new constitution, but Lucien remedied the problem by simply stealing the election, reporting more than 3 million positive votes and only 1,562 opposed. Napoleon made this possible by shutting down critical press outlets. He repeated this feat in a later plebiscite that established him as emperor in 1804.

Storming of the Capitol. Image from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol.

If Trump had any serious knowledge of history, he might have envied this Napoleonic sleight of hand, but it is certainly clear that he kept his followers on a short leash of credulity by ranting endlessly about “fake news.” The dangers of this credulity, including the impact of the Q Anon conspiracy phenomenon, became perilously apparent on January 6. Fortunately, the inherent stability of the federal government of the United States after nearly two and a half centuries of tradition and loyalty to democratic principles made the American state far less vulnerable than the French state at the end of the eighteenth century. We were able to move Donald Trump out of the White House, but a cost we have never before experienced with the singular exception of the Civil War.

The single huge difference between the two men is the one that is probably most significant. Napoleon was especially dangerous because, unlike Trump, who was born in the lap of luxury and escaped military service during the Vietnam war because of deferments, he rose from obscurity in Corsica when his father procured a royal scholarship for his education at the Royal Military School, followed by strict military training at the Ecole Militaire in Paris. Napoleon was nothing if not a military leader, sometimes a reckless one, with artillery training and a solid knowledge of mathematics. Trump was largely an indifferent student and one who later lacked an understanding of military culture and operations. Pentagon professionals, aware that their oath prohibited them from following unlawful orders, often took umbrage at Trump’s attempts to override their judgment and concerns. Many retired and former officers spoke out, their numbers growing as time wore on. This standoff between authoritarianism and patriotic tradition may have spared us much further tragedy.

I would prefer not to have found a need to produce this short essay. Trump is at least out of office, though what further mischief he may foment remains to be seen. The critical lesson is for the American people to think much harder about the nature of democratic leadership. We need to become much more discerning of the character traits of the people we elevate as leaders. With many Republicans still clinging to a virulent defense of Trump, and Senators and others clearly prepared to assume his mantle and claim his base for their own, this issue remains volatile. The fate of the world’s most powerful democratic republic hangs in the balance.

Jim Schwab

Practical Approaches to Climate Change

Posted on by
2

One of the more remarkable facets of the political debate over climate change is the almost knee-jerk rejection among conservative skeptics of the science is that they abandon the same can-do spirit of capitalism that they would otherwise adopt when defending the ability of the private sector to solve other problems. Confronted with the necessity of worldwide action to reduce the global disturbances that are driving increased weather volatility and more powerful disasters, they suddenly are filled with doubt about the ability of either public or private sectors, or both together, to successfully shift our energy consumption to less carbon-intensive solutions. They become, in short, the “cannot-do” crowd. Suddenly, there are massive technological and economic obstacles to converting the world economy to solar energy, wind power, geothermal, and just about any energy solution that does not involve fossil fuels.

They suddenly cease to be the advocates of practical problem solving. They must then cover this logical inconsistency by insisting that there is no problem to solve. When science demonstrates otherwise, massive volumes of science such as reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Climate Assessment, and numerous other sources, walls of doubt are constructed that soon take on dimensions of absurdity. I even had one relative tell me that scientists find evidence of climate change because that is what funders want, and if we only stopped funding the research, perhaps the truth would emerge. He was not joking.

With a spate of executive orders on climate having been issued by President Joseph Biden’s White House since taking office, this seems like an ideal time to highlight a book I recently completed that focuses on practical solutions. I had intended to read and review Solved: How the World’s Great Cities Are Fixing the Climate Crisis (University of Toronto Press, 2020) before the holidays, but perhaps now, with the Biden inauguration behind us, is the best time to introduce this work by David Miller, former mayor of Toronto, the largest city in Canada.

Biden’s executive orders focus, of course, on federal actions he can take immediately without Congress, such as rejoining the Paris Climate Accord and reinstating EO 13690, an Obama executive order that established the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which President Trump had rescinded in 2017. I am glad to see this guidance reestablished.

David Miller, former mayor of Toronto. Photo borrowed from Wikipedia.

But there is a much larger point that I wish to make by highlighting Miller’s book. It is that many of the solutions this nation and world so badly need as a means of reversing the deleterious impacts of climate change not only already exist but are actively being pursued or implemented by cities throughout the world. Municipal governments have in many cases become the can-do laboratories, often with the help of private-sector partners who are also committed to creating a sustainable economy, without necessarily waiting for more sluggish national governments to act. We do, of course, want the U.S. and other national governments to act because what they do matters. But the blueprint for solving many climate challenges with infrastructure initiatives is readily available.

Miller’s book follows a standard formula of briefly introducing us to what various cities, including Toronto, have been doing over the past two decades to reduce their carbon footprints while making urban areas more appealing and convenient places to live. In separate chapters describing creative local initiatives around energy and electricity; existing and new buildings; public transportation; personal and other transportation; and waste management, Miller walks us through major projects undertaken in a variety of cities around the world.

But he starts with a chapter about the importance of plans and why they matter, for which the answer in part is that they demonstrate commitment on the part of city leadership to articulate climate challenges and then outline solutions with target dates for meaningful accomplishments. He notes that, in a two-week period in April 2019, Los Angeles, New York, and Vancouver all launched climate plans “whose ambitions matched the requirements of science” but also, in the first two cases, recognized that climate change is “inherently unjust” and that “issues of equity and inclusion must be addressed by the plan if it is to succeed.” The importance of cities is that planning is integral to the role of city governments, which manage numerous functions that are both close to the ground and require integrated strategies to ensure that the work moves forward in a cohesive fashion. As an example, he cities the need in Toronto at one point to alter a particular bylaw to ensure the issuance of permits for solar thermal heating installations. Attention to details of a highly practical nature is the essence of success. They are what cities do, or should, anyway.

That attention to detail, however, can help create a roadmap for federal and state or provincial initiatives, which is one reason that presidents like Biden often recruit mayors for cabinet and other programmatic positions where such practical experience can help shape success at a larger scale. They are not the only people who can provide a practical perspective, and not all do, but those who have experimented in addressing practical climate-related problems can be valuable problem solvers.

In the arena of energy, Miller cites the example of Austin, Texas, which plans by 2022 to end the use of coal for electric power production, but needs energy that is “flexible, reliable, and predictable,” which has meant expanding renewable sources but also looking at storage mechanisms ranging from batteries to thermal storage to compressed air. Subsidies and incentives for residential homeowners support installation of rooftop solar energy, but Austin Energy is also helping the city meet its goal of 65 percent generation from renewables by 2025 with industrial-scale solar installations and wind energy. Municipal utilities such as that in Los Angeles have additional latitude to help cities meet such commitments.

Cities vary, as does the mixture of their greenhouse gas emissions. In a city as dense as New York, for example, transportation becomes a smaller proportional contributor because so many people rely on mass transit or simply walk. Buildings, on the other hand, which are often massive consumers of electricity and natural gas, contribute 73 percent of New York’s greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 21 percent for transportation and 5 percent for waste. But building upgrades such as more efficient water heaters, heating systems, and insulation make a huge difference. Miller details how New York, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, tapped market forces, including disclosure and training to make inefficiencies more visible, and mandates through permitting systems, to drive positive change. The goal, he says, is net zero emissions by 2050 and a 40 percent emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.

One could go on with numerous examples from the transportation and waste management sectors, and Miller does, but the point is that, despite the need to reverse much of the negative policy direction of the Trump years and set bold climate goals for the future, many of the solutions already exist. In many cases, national governments, including the U.S. federal government, can closely study what their cities are already accomplishing, or have accomplished, and adapt those solutions to a larger scale, making the results and their feasibility clearer and more visible.

Still, this is not subject matter for Pollyanna types, but for pragmatists willing to roll up their sleeves. As Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, home of the Paris Climate Accord, notes in her afterword, “We have shown the world the potential for city-based action to dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions and get the world on track to halve emissions by 2030. However, we must be realistic: our goals will take significant time and effort to achieve.”

No better time to start than now. That part, at least, seems perfectly clear to the new Biden administration. Little more than a week into his term, they seem to be moving quickly.

Jim Schwab

Digital Coast Act Becomes Real

Posted on by
Reply

Last Wednesday, December 2, the U.S. Senate passed the Digital Coast Act in a final vote that sent the legislation to President Trump for his signature. If that happens, it may provide a very useful gift to thousands of coastal communities wrestling with a wide variety of coastal zone management challenges.

For more than a decade, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has sponsored through its Office of Coastal Management a program that has racked up stellar achievements while awaiting congressional blessing of its existence. Digital Coast began as an effort, in collaboration with five nongovernmental partners, to share federal geospatial data and tools with communities in ways that did not require a Ph.D. scientist to interpret them for local government uses.

Geospatial technology, not a familiar term for the average American, refers to “modern tools contributing to the geographic mapping and analysis of the Earth and human societies,” according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In a coastal context, that includes tools for measuring, projecting, and visualizing sea level rise, as well as monitoring land uses and land cover in coastal areas, and mapping offshore areas as well. The mission of Digital Coast was to make these tools ever more useful for local government planners, resource managers, economic development agencies, and others with some sort of meaningful engagement with coastal issues and data.

Why is that important? For starters, because more than half of the U.S. population now lives in counties along either an oceanic or Great Lakes coast, and that percentage is growing. It matters greatly where these counties, and their cities, allow new development, how they court economic growth, and how they manage coastal resources, including marine life, tidal wetlands, and offshore resources, as well as ports and near-shore transportation. These coastal areas are huge drivers of the overall U.S. economy, and better data, and better access to data, will deeply affect the American future.

Digital Coast partners and staff at a 2015 meeting. I am at front row, right. 

Improving that access and making tools easier to use, and data more understandable, has been the mission of the Digital Coast Partnership that was assembled from 2008 on, initially with five organizations: Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM); The Nature Conservancy (TNC); National Association of Counties (NACo); National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC); and Coastal States Organization (CSO). In the summer of 2010, the American Planning Association joined the partnership, an initiative I led as manager of APA’s Hazards Planning Center. Allison Hardin, a planner for the city of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and immediate past chair of APA’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division (which I now chair), reports that in 2009, she vigorously advocated for the addition of APA. At the time, Allison, a certified floodplain manager, was helping to represent ASFPM in the partnership. Today, there are eight nongovernmental partners, all of which serve as links to professional user communities to ensure widespread uptake of the data, tools, and resources available from Digital Coast. The two additions have been the Urban Land Institute and National Estuarine Research Reserve Association.

Allison Hardin speaking at Capitol briefing. 

So, what difference does statutory authorization of Digital Coast make? According to John Palatiello, president of John M. Palatiello & Associates, Inc., a government relations and association management firm representing the surveying, mapping, GIS, and geospatial community, which helped lead the effort to get the act passed: “The Digital Coast Act will enable NOAA to partner with other government entities and the private sector to help protect and promote America’s coasts and shorelines. This legislation creates a program to utilize the extensive capabilities, competence, and qualifications of private sector geospatial professionals to provide the surveying, charting, remote sensing, and geospatial data of America’s coasts, harbors, ports, shorelines and ocean resources for economic growth, recreational activities, conservation, and resilience of our fragile coastal environment.” Put more simply, the new law stabilizes the authorization and budgetary support for Digital Coast within NOAA. There were times in the past when this was less than a sure thing. Now, its codification makes its program status official.

Digital Coast Act briefing, with NOAA Digital Coast staff Miki Schmidt (left) and Josh Murphy (right), standing near door.

But Digital Coast, I can attest from personal experience, has a remarkably astute and dedicated professional staff in love with public service. The Act itself begins with this finding: “The Digital Coast is a model approach for effective Federal partnership with State and local government, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector.” It goes on to note, a few paragraphs later, some of the needs that Digital Coast can help address, including flood and coastal storm surge prediction, hazard risk and vulnerability assessment, and community resilience, as well as ecosystem health. I applauded the program more than six years ago on this blog.

Briefing at the Capitol: APA Policy Director Jason Jordan at the mike; ASFPM Executive Director Chad Berginnis to his right.

It is important to note that this legislation is not the product of some recent brainstorm, but of a slow, steady process of building support, starting with a handful of legislators from both parties who saw its value. Perhaps most notable was Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), accompanied in the House by Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), who noted in a press release that he had been advocating such action for nearly a decade. But Republican support came from Rep. Don Young (R-AK) and Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both of Alaska, the state with by far the longest coastline. All of them, along with the Digital Coast partners, plus the indefatigable John Byrd of MAPPS, pushed relentlessly, year after year, to find the support necessary to move the bill across the legislative goal line. They have at last succeeded.

Jim Schwab