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Put the blame where it belongs. Public policy is being held back by powerful interests who profit from the status quo.

closeparen 8y ago
“Powerful interests” in this case is grassroots community organizers protecting their homes from unwanted change by pushing back against global capital.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  While there's definitely a status-quo bias among myopic community folks, there's also totally deserved distrust of global capital. Global capital does not have the public interest as top priority and certainly isn't focused on sustainability and decades-long time-scales. Global capital is overall profit-prioritizing, externalizes tons of costs, invests massively in lobbying governments for their interests, and focuses on relatively short-term growth figures. It sounds like you are suggesting that if only grassroots push-back would go away, global capital is generally solving ecological problems. I hope that completely backwards view isn't what you're actually suggesting. Maybe you are talking about knee-jerk anti-density, anti-development stuff? While that NIMBYism is a real problem, and there are real developers working in the right direction, we still have far more global capital and power behind fossil-fuel companies and pesticide manufacturers etc. than behind sustainable-development tech. Despite all the push for electric vehicles, car companies are pushing way-oversized usually-single-occupant vehicles (SUV's and pickup-trucks-that-people-use-just-for-commuting and such) as much as ever, and lobby for all the unsustainable public infrastructure for them… At any rate, the org doing the best at combating both the unsustainable and corrupt capital growth-focused nonsense and the counter-productive NIMBYism is https://www.strongtowns.org https://www.strongtowns.org (not sure what the best equivalent is for issues around pesticides and healthy biodiversity).
  - closeparen 8y ago
    >global capital is generally solving ecological problems Global capital is generally responding to consumer preferences, which in the context of housing means high-density structures in walkable and transit-connected areas, which are specifically good. Consumers also have lots of un-ecological preferences, like large vehicles, cheap meat, etc. which are not. >unsustainable public infrastructure Car infrastructure is problematic in many ways, but "unsustainable" is the wrong word. We're sustaining it just fine, unlike its alternatives. Empirically, our most important transit systems are incapable of maintaining previously-achieved levels of service for any amount of money, and the costs of implementing new service are escalating for reasons we don't understand such that even minor subway buildout is becoming an existential challenge to the resources of our richest and fastest-growing cities. Give it 30 years, and it's not clear that the collective productivity of all humanity will exceed the cost of a mile of New York City subway track. That's unsustainable. The environmental-friendliness axis is orthogonal.

“Powerful interests” in this case is grassroots community organizers protecting their homes from unwanted change by pushing back against global capital.

quadrangle 8y ago
While there's definitely a status-quo bias among myopic community folks, there's also totally deserved distrust of global capital. Global capital does not have the public interest as top priority and certainly isn't focused on sustainability and decades-long time-scales. Global capital is overall profit-prioritizing, externalizes tons of costs, invests massively in lobbying governments for their interests, and focuses on relatively short-term growth figures. It sounds like you are suggesting that if only grassroots push-back would go away, global capital is generally solving ecological problems. I hope that completely backwards view isn't what you're actually suggesting. Maybe you are talking about knee-jerk anti-density, anti-development stuff? While that NIMBYism is a real problem, and there are real developers working in the right direction, we still have far more global capital and power behind fossil-fuel companies and pesticide manufacturers etc. than behind sustainable-development tech. Despite all the push for electric vehicles, car companies are pushing way-oversized usually-single-occupant vehicles (SUV's and pickup-trucks-that-people-use-just-for-commuting and such) as much as ever, and lobby for all the unsustainable public infrastructure for them… At any rate, the org doing the best at combating both the unsustainable and corrupt capital growth-focused nonsense and the counter-productive NIMBYism is https://www.strongtowns.org https://www.strongtowns.org (not sure what the best equivalent is for issues around pesticides and healthy biodiversity).
- closeparen 8y ago
  >global capital is generally solving ecological problems Global capital is generally responding to consumer preferences, which in the context of housing means high-density structures in walkable and transit-connected areas, which are specifically good. Consumers also have lots of un-ecological preferences, like large vehicles, cheap meat, etc. which are not. >unsustainable public infrastructure Car infrastructure is problematic in many ways, but "unsustainable" is the wrong word. We're sustaining it just fine, unlike its alternatives. Empirically, our most important transit systems are incapable of maintaining previously-achieved levels of service for any amount of money, and the costs of implementing new service are escalating for reasons we don't understand such that even minor subway buildout is becoming an existential challenge to the resources of our richest and fastest-growing cities. Give it 30 years, and it's not clear that the collective productivity of all humanity will exceed the cost of a mile of New York City subway track. That's unsustainable. The environmental-friendliness axis is orthogonal.