Our household is very happy that the U.S. House has approved the health care bill. Now we hope it’s finalized and that the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t overturn it some day.

Historian Joseph J. Ellis recently wrote an excellent opinion piece for the L.A. Times stating the need for government to address some of our most significant problems. In doing so, he captured thoughts I’ve had over the last several years.

Ellis traces anti-government rhetoric back to Thomas Jefferson and pro-government rhetoric to Alexander Hamilton. He eventually makes the following vital points:

For much of our history, the Jeffersonian hostility to an energetic federal government served us well. But with the end of the frontier and the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the expanding role of government in protecting and assuring our “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” has become utterly essential. All the major problems now befuddling us — the destructive excesses of finance capitalism, a profit-based healthcare system, an increasingly contaminated atmosphere — are only soluble if we regard government as the chosen representative of our collective interests as a people and a nation.

I recommend reading Ellis’s piece in its entirety to get a better sense of his argument.

Minnesotans are heaving a sigh of relief that the election is finally over and we now have two U.S. senators. Thank goodness Coleman did not push his case further.

Who would have thought that the wild-haired young comedian on Saturday Night Live would one day become a senator? Only as Al Franken began to write books responding to the dominance of the political right did he emerge as a potential politician. Now I pray that he governs wisely.

On Friday I eagerly waited to hear news on whether the U.S. House of Representatives had passed the climate change bill, called the American Clean Energy and Security Act. When I finally heard the news that it had done so, I gave my wife a high-five.

The legislation is far from perfect, but it’s clear that given the way our political system works, this is the best we could get from the House right now. Finally as a nation we have begun to take responsibility for the changes that we are making in the climate. Too often in the past, our actions on this issue have been shameful. Still, advocacy group emails are saying that the fight over the bill in the Senate will be even tougher, as Republicans deride the bill as simply an “energy tax” and many Democrats succumb to coal and oil interests in their states.

I have a family connection to this legislation as well. My brother-in-law is an economist working on the legislation for the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, chaired by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).

Here are some of the key provisions of the bill, as reported in a press release from that committee: Read the rest of this entry »

Two recent actions by Republicans have made me think that I should write an opinion piece on why conservatives and libertarians should support nonmotorized transportation. Here are those two Republican actions:

1. Yesterday in his news conference presenting the cuts he is making to the state budget, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty made a comment about unnecessary or wasteful spending by cities. He cited as an example a director of nonmotorized transportation for the city of Minneapolis, though in the following breath he noted that the position is federally funded. He was apparently referring to a position funded by the city’s role in the federal Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program.

2. Earlier this month the Republican leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives called for eliminating several federal nonmotorized transportation programs. In a list of cuts (pdf) that they would make to reduce the budget deficit, the Republicans included the following programs: Safe Routes to Schools, the Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program, and Transportation Enhancements. This is an extreme step, indeed, and not likely to win the hearts of all those walkers, wheelchair users, and cyclists out there.

I learned about the latter action at the League of American Bicyclists web site. See the June 5 post on their advocacy page, which has these good comments from League President Andy Clarke: Read the rest of this entry »

[Note: The following appears also as a post at Locally Grown Northfield. Comments can be made there; I've turned them off here. Be sure to note their rules for comment.]

Last August the Rice County Board of Commissioners made a change in their transportation policy that goes against the interests of people who walk, bike, or use wheelchairs in our community. It’s a change that’s detrimental to many of the most vulnerable users of our transportation system, including children, seniors, the poor, and the handicapped.

I’m talking about a change in a fairly arcane and complex policy: the Cost Participation Policy for Cooperative Roadway Construction Projects, which governs the share that the county pays on joint road projects with cities and townships. The policy applies to projects that are part of the county Capital Improvement Plan.

Why should we care about some complex policy? Because it governs the funding for county road projects – which we might also call the public right-of-way – in many of our communities, and because it shapes the way we think about transportation.

The changes made last summer involved the provisions for sidewalks and “bituminous bike paths,” or shared-use paths, along county roads in cities and towns. Previously, the county paid a share of the costs for replacement sidewalks and new and replacement paths – specifically, 55 percent of the cost for municipalities over 5,000 in population, and 100 percent of the cost for those under 5,000. With the change, the county moved these facilities into the “not eligible” category for county funding. In effect, they cut funding of these facilities in their Capital Improvement Plan by 100 percent. The commissioners voted 4-1 for this change last August, with the only exception being Galen Malecha of Northfield at that time. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m overdue to provide an update on what is happening with the Rice County Highway Cost Participation Policy and its funding of sidewalks and paths. At the April 7 County Board meeting, the commissioners decided that their transportation committee, consisting of Commissioners Plaisance and Docken and county highway engineer Dennis Luebbe, would consider the matter at an April 15 meeting.

Prior to that meeting, I mailed a letter (see below) and copies of the old and current cost participation policy to the commissioners. In the letter I asked them to consider  a simple compromise position: moving the sidewalks and bike paths from the “not eligible” for county participation category to the “potential County participation” category. This is essentially the “case-by-case” funding option that has been discussed as an option.

The transportation committee meetings are not open to the public, but last Friday I called my commissioner, Jeff Docken, to ask what action the committee took. He said that they decided to ask the County Board to consider two options at an upcoming meeting: keeping the current policy or changing it to the “case-by-case” or “potential funding” option that I presented in my letter. I believe he said it would be at a work session, probably May 5, but we should keep an eye on the Board’s agenda for its upcoming meetings.

It remains important for members of the public to let their county commissioner know their views on this subject. Please consider contacting them or writing a letter to the local paper. See below for more information, as well as the text of the letter I submitted. Read the rest of this entry »

My wife and I attended the 21st Annual Nobel Peace Prize Forum at St. Olaf College last Friday and Saturday, March 13 and 14. In an arrangement with the Norwegian body that grants the prize, the forums are held at a group of Minnesota and Iowa colleges founded by Norwegian settlers. Since the 2007 Peace Prize was given to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the topic was, of course, climate change. Fortunately for me, the location for this year was St. Olaf.

It was a wonderful and inpsiring conference, and I wanted to share with you the two sessions that stood out the most for me:

The first was the opening keynote address by Dr. Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University. He gave an excellent and entertaining lecture about the scientific understanding of climate change. He also explained the process that the IPCC uses in making its reports, and in the question-and-answer session he made some informative comments about climate change skeptics, among other things (the questioner had asked about George Will and his views on climate change). I recommend watching the video of his talk. It’s worth the investment of time. (Alley starts at around 32 minutes into the video.)

The other particularly inspiring session was a presentation by college and high school students about their work on climate change. This gave me great hope for the future. The youth are taking action: forming groups, lobbying politicians, organizing their fellow youth, getting people to do energy audits, and more. Many of the students had just attended PowerShift, the big climate change student conference in Washington, D.C. the week before. Timoth Den Herder-Thomas of Macalester College was especially impressive in his comments, and he told about the upcoming Summer of Solutions event, in which youth will work on grassroots project related to climate change and also potentially lay the groundwork for careers in this burgeoning field. There is so much to do, and we need their leadership. Now the older folks just need to get out of the way.

Today is the Capitol Climate Action, a rally that will feature mass civil disobedience and protest at the Capitol Power Plant, the coal-fired power plant that provides electricity to the U.S. Capitol. One thousand college students are expected to participate. Among those who will risk being arrested are Bill McKibben, the climate change activist and author; James Hansen, noted climate scientist; Gus Speth, a Yale University professor and environmental advocate; and Wendell Berry, the author.

Could this possibly be a watershed moment in the climate change movement? It will be interesting to see how many will be there and how the media handle it.

Below is an excerpt from an email about the protest. It was signed by McKibben and sent by 350.org, the climate change action organization that he helped found:

Read the rest of this entry »

I recommend Thomas L. Friedman’s recent book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America. Friedman has done his homework for this book, talking with dozens of scientists, business leaders, policy analysts, and environmentalists. He argues that we face five major problems that have reached a crisis point today. As he writes, “The convergence of global warming, global flattening, and global crowding is driving those five big problems – energy supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, energy poverty, and biodiversity loss – well past their tipping points into new realms we’ve never seen before, as a planet or as a species” (p. 37).

Friedman deserves special praise for highlighting the problems of biodiversity loss, or the extinction of species. Based on my reading of science sources over my years of doing test development work, this is a problem that our leaders have not dealt with effectively, and it is being accelerated by climate change.

The strengths of this book are its detail and its wide-ranging inquiry. It does have some weaknesses: Friedman’s tendency to personalize his analysis, as when we learn about his many visits with the global elite at posh spots throughout the world; occasional overly specific detail, as in the section on the future “Energy Internet” or “smart grid”; and his nearly exclusive focus on technological and business-oriented solutions, a focus that many environmentalists criticize.

I did appreciate the fact that he calls for the development of an “ethic of conservation,” even if he has doubts about whether major lifestyle changes are required in the new “energy-climate era.” Here is an excerpt related to this issue:

To become good stewards and good trustees, [according to MIchael J. Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard], “we will need to rein in our tendency to regard the earth and its natural resources as wholly at our disposal for present needs, wants, and desires. We have to develop new habits and attitudes towards consumption.”

Otherwise, whatever technologies we devise will simply be used to extend our current habits of profligate consumption to the huge, burgeoning middle classes of a hot, flat, and crowded world…. Does [this] mean that we, as individuals, have to edit our lifestyles down to a bare minimum, or get by with much less than the average American upper- or middle-class family consumes today? There is an anticapitalist, anticonsumerist, back-to-nature wing of the environmental movement that believes we should and almost delights in advocating that. By the way, that may be right, and should not be dismissed. My point is that we don’t know yet, because we have not tried even the obvious stuff that we do know would have real effects and would not involve fundamental changes in our lifestyle.

Telling every individual on the planet who wants or can afford a car that they cannot have one would be changing our lifestyle. But banning cars over a certain weight or engine size, or bringing maximum speed limits back down to 55 miles per hour, or banning taxis that are not hybrids – such efforts do not strike me as fundamentally cramping anyone’s lifestyle…. Forcing everyone to ride a bike to work would involve changing our lifestyle. But requiring municipalities to set aside bike lanes running from suburbs to inner cities doesn’t strike me as cramping anyone’s lifestyle (and might make our whole society healthier). [And Friedman goes through a list of many other examples] (pp. 192-193)