Turning your town into a weapon

This is the kind of thing that makes you question the value of local government:

The grant would come from state economic development funds, not from transportation dollars, said road commission managing director Orrin Gregg.

“It’s based on bringing jobs into Michigan, and that’s very important to the governor. The more jobs you bring in, the better chance you have in the competition,” he added.

We know what competition he is talking about, the competition to outgrow the other guy. Here is something, though -- competition is violence. Taken to its ultimate conclusion, competition means the extinction of one thing at the hands of the other. Bringing a thing of economic development to a community strictly because it'll help out in "the competition" means turning your community into a weapon. You bring in a factory, which creates economic activity and helps to draw people. Tax coffers are filled, and then you can point to the resulting numbers as proof positive that you've won. If you do your job well enough, at the end of 10 years they'll adjust the size of your Congressional delegation upwards at the expense of somewhere else, an achievement that will be noted in media reports and even perhaps considered a official "trend."

This is unadulterated success only if you don't live in the community, or if your chief aim is to get people who don't live there to say good things about it. If you find your summer evenings ruined by stench or if your road is made less safe by an increased number of trucks, then whatever success a new project like this would bring is tainted. The reason for this is obvious -- those others (least of all the governor, for usually aren't required to deal with the problems caused by your success, which is probably why the concept of unmitigated growth has become something of a object of worship, or at least an ends unto itself.

Meanwhile, from the same article:

“How is this any different from a Toyota plant coming in?” asked Cecilia Conway of Vreba-Hoff Development. “It’s not that it’s a free ride. This farm is making a significant investment.”

The farm is making a significant investment ultimately in its own future. If anyone else gets anything out of it, it's as a side benefit. The community certainly doesn't get a free ride any more than does the industrial farm. It is expected to put up a big, massive new farm that will pollute local streams and creeks, create stench problems, damage local roads, potentially introduce drug-resistant bacteria into the area, and change the local community in subtle and significant ways (the question has been posed -- what is the difference between a massive dairy operation, and a Toyota plant? The answer is that there is no difference.). And, it is expected to do this in pursuit of something called growth, and so people can point to numbers and talk about how well things are going.

Economy of excess

Well, I guess this is supposed to frighten us.

Analysts said the bigger-than-expected drop in housing construction could be signaling that the housing downturn, already the worst in 16 years, may be headed for bigger troubles. Housing activity is now 30.8 percent below the level of a year ago.

This isn't an economy blog, but it is symptomatic of our bigger problem -- the drive to endlessly expand.

Building new homes is predicated on the notion that someone will want to buy them. This is obvious. As long as you have people willing to buy the homes, either because you simply have more people or because people are buying more than one property or because you've convinced people that they need to buy ever-larger homes as their incomes rise, then you can continue to build homes without exhausting demand.

There are problems with this, as is evidenced by the things I see around me in my own neighborhood. Right now, I could walk around the block and see as many as six homes for sale. If I were to walk down the street, I'd find a number of homes for sale, and a number of homes that have simply been abandoned. Some of these have had "For Sale" signs in front of them for as much as a year. Yet, they're talking about taking one of the last undeveloped properties in the city and ... building a big, new housing development.

The problem is that the city doesn't need more housing. It has plenty of housing, and the fact that developers are playing what amounts to a shell game with students at the local university tells me they've exhausted the market and are simply looking for ways to undercut each other.

If I thought this was an isolated case, I'd leave it as simply a local issue. But, it's not. A red hot housing market that isn't tied to a red hot increase in population, or the kind of red hot increase in incomes that would allow people to buy multiple dwellings, will eventually go over the cliff. It's what prompted banks to start giving high-risk mortgages to people who couldn't afford them (unfortunately, because those most likely to default on mortgages are the ones who can least afford them and can benefit the most by low interest, the only incentive banks have to loan them money is to give them a higher rate). With home construction outpacing population, lenders found a new customer base ... people who couldn't afford what they had to offer. Naturally -- especially in Michigan, which is laboring through a recession -- this has ended badly, with the number of foreclosures increasing to where it has become a political issue and banks tightening lending standards to stay in business.

That this would lead to a drop in new home construction is about as surprising as it was that the sun rose this morning. You cannot create an artificial customer base to buy a product that it cannot afford and expect to last long. But, it is more than that. It is part of our economy built on a foundation of shifting papers. Right around the same time that this came out, GMAC -- GM used to primarily build cars -- announced that it was hacking deeply into its mortgage department, by as much as 25 percent. GMAC is part of our finance economy, which manifests itself in the shuffling of paper from one place to another. This means a long-term downturn of the housing market, as they're predicting, is an indictment of the assumptions upon which our economy has come to be built.

Update, 3:37 p.m.--I see sales of existing homes themselves fell last month, as well.

Additions to the blogroll

The intentions in starting this thing was not to make the story of this blog about this blog, but about something bigger picture. But, I've got a couple additions to the blogroll today worth pointing out while I continue plotting to destroy Industry! Commerce! Progress!

*--First up is Shelley Batts' Retrospectacle. Scienceblogs has, over the last few years, been my favorite blogging project/community. I regularly read Chris Mooney's The Intersection, P.Z. Myers' Pharyngula, and Tim Lambert's Deltoid because they bring science and politics so closely together. Retrospectacle has the distinction of being the source of some damned fine writing, but it's also Michigan-based.

While we're on the topic, Shelley is currently running second in the 2007 Blogging Scholarship contest, about 1,500 votes behind a law blog written by a woman with breast cancer. Please, by all means, go give a vote for a blog on my blogroll.

*--Second is Greenflight EV. Andrew Angelloti is a 16 year old whose takes green transportation seriously. Unlike me, he's not giving up the car. He's converting it from a gas car to electric. Couple of them, in fact, including a truck. Money quote, as they say:

“I’m frustrated about the state of our economy,” said Andrew. “It’s oil-based, and the oil industry is huge. It has a lot of control over the economy. People need to know that technology is available to get away from oil.”

Most people will live their entire lives ignorant of this.

A convocation of the guilty

I remember watching Al Gore’s testimony before Congress earlier this year with mixed emotions. There was the hope that the kind of media attention about his return to Congress might raise awareness about the issue. There was also a kind of glum cynicism that ultimately Gore’s visit would be meaningless, just a piece of political theater.

Gore managed to land a few choice zingers, perhaps the best reported of which was when he told a Texas Republican that when your baby gets a fever, you take it to the doctor, not read a science fiction novel. The barb was aimed at skepticism over global warming, which is based largely on personal prejudice and which found a voice in a novel written by Michael Crichton (old news to old hands, indeed).

The question not asked (of course), is what to make of a baby’s fever. Fever, itself, is a symptom of something deeper that is wrong with a body. It is a sign that there of unhealth. Treating a fever does not itself address the underlying issue.

True with the human body, true with the environment. If global warming is a fever, what is the ailment?

The ailment, of course, is this: too much. We eat too much. We drive too much. There are too many people. The first step towards establishing health is undo the source of unhealth. We much accept less.

From Wendell Berry:

But the environmental crisis rises closer to home. Every time we draw a breath, every time we drink a glass of water, every time we eat a bite of food we are suffering from it. And more important, every time we indulge in, or depend on, the wastefulness of our economy – and our economy’s first principle is waste – we are causing the crisis. Nearly every one of us, nearly every day of his life, is contributing directly to the ruin of this planet. A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. That realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has almost conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done.

A “convocation of the guilty” … a strong, powerful indictment that is also true. The environmental crisis is as real today as it was in 1970, when Berry wrote “Think Small.” It is that way because we have spent the last 37 years alternating between treating symptoms and ignoring the sickness. We have gotten to the point, where today the body is wracked by high fever, because we didn’t seek the proper cure, taking a couple of aspirin with the thought to call the doctor in the morning. After 37 years, that phone call has yet to be made.

I see, in fact, that there are some who propose to continue to treat the symptoms. The desire to pursue a purely technological solution while ignoring the underlying malady is to propose curing influenza by pursuing a designer drug for headaches.

The idea that global warming can be addressed purely through new technologies and clean energies isn’t just hopelessly optimistic. It also ignores a whole list of things that are other symptoms of our disease. The world’s fisheries are collapsing. Rain forests are disappearing. Arable land is being chewed up. Our open spaces are disappearing. Plant and animal species are dying out. These things all have their roots in the same place -- too much.

It ultimately makes zero difference if, as Nordhous and Shellenberger suggest, neither the Chinese nor the Americans will accept a lifestyle of less. They will come to lifestyles of less either by choice or by sheer force of fact. We already know that we would require five Planet Earths to sustain one Planet Earth’s worth of people living an American lifestyle. Beyond the fact that we are altering our climate in ways that significantly alter the ability of this Planet Earth to provide for the people who live on it, the numbers simply don’t add up. Eventually, whether a designer drug is discovered that reduces our fever, the underlying malady will remain.

Stuff

This is kind of old news, but it's now public so I suppose I should disclose here as well.

Last week sometime (maybe it was a couple of weeks ago), I completed a transaction that left me with a majority ownership in Michigan Liberal. I don't want to spend a great deal of time dwelling on it, and mention it here because it seems like the thing to do.

That site is a combination of news/commentary and community. It represents a professional investment, which is actually a first for me. This blog continues to be my personal blog, dedicated to the issues of environment and lifestyle. As such, I consider this my personal turf on these-here intertubes and one of these days, when money becomes regular enough, the plan in fact is to stake out my own domain name. But, before and after that time, this remains the place where I kick back and think about the things that most interest me. In fact, I've got a couple of hours this afternoon...

Yikes! Individualism, pt. 1

From Kunstler:

The people I know complain endlessly about how stupid President George W. Bush is, and how badly he has lied to the public about this or that. But a casual observer from Mars would have to conclude that President Bush perfectly represents a nation that shows such a thoroughgoing incapacity for thought, and such an aversion to the truth about its own behavior. A people so hopelessly unwilling to get its act together deserves to suffer.

It's been a hectic couple of weeks, especially the last couple of days. The state's economy will probably continue to tank, and I don't know that we've seen the end of it. We'll eventually have to deal with the looming problem of permanently high oil prices. When that happens, the automakers and UAW (not to mention Michigan's pundit class) can talk glowingly about how their new deal will re-energize the auto industry, but there are some problems that can't be solved by sheer optimism.

The real challenge facing the auto industry today isn't that the auto industry needs to necessary be re-energized, or even that the automakers in the 90s turned themselves into finance companies first and manufacturers second, but by stark reality. Those are medicines to soothe the symptoms, but they don't strike at the real malignancy, which is a lifestyle that is more than badly ordered, but ordered not at all.

Kunstler's beef is presumably mostly with liberals, and he's got a point. Although a lot of them talk a good game, in the end you get the impression that they're more interested in action if it means someone else pays for it. But, at least there is recognition there that a problem exists, and that someone will need to pay for its solution.

This is why free market Libertarians do so poorly at addressing environmental issues, which are running counterarguments to a free and unfettered market. The reason we have regulation today, is because a freer and less fettered market gave us serious pollution problems, so it's easier to simply pretend that environmental problems don't exist than acknowledge the need for some government, some regulation, and some concerted effort in one direction (this is less fun than yelling, "Freeeeeeeedom!" and pretending that there no consequences to everyone their own thing).

At its heart, this what has given us the Individual Rights movement, the insistence that problems don't exist so no one has to acknowledge responsibility for their actions. It's telling that many of these same people, when pushed, profess a sincere disinterest to see the true cost of their actions reflected in the sticker price for things like meat and automobiles. If someone wants to buy a full-sized Ford pickup, I say let them, as long as the price they pay reflects the externalities -- health and pollution problems today covered largely through government. These people talk a good game, but in the end aren't as interested in personal responsibility as they'd like you to think. It's as if they are permanently stuck on "spoiled adolescent," a people who don't like being told what to do and always expects someone else to clean up after them.